Player Types in Virtual Worlds

It has been studied in a number of studies what kind of people play video games and how they usually like to play. One of the researcher’s is Richard Bartle, who presents the four player types in MUD-games (Multi-User Dungeons) (1996). Later on, Bartle has extended the types to include modern MMO-games as well (2003). The player types are Achiever, Explorer, Killer and Socializer.

Achievers are usually satisfied by game mechanics such as gaining levels, learning new skills, and getting new equipment, i.e. when they achieve something. Achievers are also somewhat competitive.

Adventurers enjoy finding new or hidden places and discovering new things. They enjoy the game’s plot and like to examine it via detail.

Killers are all about competition and action, as they like to fight or compete with other players. They usually feel comfortable knowing that they are better players than others and that their characters are stronger.

Socializers like to interact with other players, non-player characters and the game world. Socializers could be seen as people who just like to hang around, they don’t necessarily want to compete or make progress in the game.

Bartle’s player types are also interesting, because he presents that no player type discloses the others, i.e. every player is more or less of every type, but the magnitude varies. Usually one type is clearly dominant. Bartle’s player test can be done through http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology/.

Other player type studies include Bateman & Boon (2005) and Schuurman et al. (2008), but looking at their results, they seem to be really close to Bartle’s player types.

This conveniently brings us to my first blog post, where I wondered whether or not games themselves were groupware or whether the individual elements in a game could be groupware, and I think the answer would be yes. Take a situation where a group of players set out in a dungeon to kill a dragon or whatever, which is so hard to kill that the group really needs to work together and come up with a tactic. There is most likely a party chat, a map and many elements in the game, and they certainly help the players to communicate and achieve the goal of killing the dragon.

References

Player Test: http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology/

[Bartle, 1996] Richard Bartle. Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs. The Journal of Virtual Environments. 1, 1996.

[Bartle, 2003] Richard Bartle. Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Publishing, 2003.

[Bateman and Boon, 2005] Chris Bateman and Richard Boon. 21st Century Game Design. Charles River Media, 2005.

[Schuurman et al., 2008] Dimitri Schuurman, Katrien De Moor, Lieven De Marez, Jan Van Looy. Fanboys, competers, escapists and time-killers: a typology based on gamers' motivations for playing video games. Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, ACM Press, 2008, 46-50.

IRC channels as virtual communities

The previous blog post made me think about my own experiences in virtual communities. I tried to decide which one of the communities has been the most important one for me. My choice isn't any particular site on the web, but one specific IRC channel.

I had never actually thought that IRC channels can be thought as virtual communities also, but after all IRC channel is a bunch of people with common interests communicating through common medium online. IRC channels often have their own communicational protocols and rules and people have different roles in the community, e.g. web forums may have admins, IRC channel has its operators. Web forums have pests called lurkers, in IRC we just call them idlers. Some of the channels die just because its members can't keep up active conversation, so traditional online communities and IRC channels also face the same problems.

I have used IRC for about 10 years now although I have not been that active all the time. I've had many long breaks in my IRC use. The users on channels have changed over the years and some of them have quit IRCing for good, but it always good to come back and 'see' the familiar people and catch up with them. When I moved away from home in 2003, I already had dozens of friends in the city I moved into and I think my life could be different in so many ways without them (whether in good or in bad). IRC has proved that people can really develop strong bonds with each other online and IRC can really alter the way people act in real life - the company makes one alike in IRC also.

Virtual communities

I want to share my experience in virtual community. Once there was this MMORPG massive multiplayer online role playing game. It had only few but quite popular servers in my country. Biggest one had around 1500 people playing at the same time. It also had web forum which many of payers visited.

This server ran for couple of years but now it's almost 5 years after that game server closed but the forum is still active to this day. Around 200 people log in this forum and write few hundred posts every day. Most of them could be called spam, some users use forum just as chatting board, some post the news or game screenshots or discuss sports or political events or share funny pictures or jokes. Almost every day there are few new topics asking for suggestions for something. Last one was about electronic shavers.

Personally forum helped me to choose best laptop to buy, explained few package mailing laws, helped to fix my car, several times helped me to fix my computer problems and lot more. I also repay by suggesting to other users problems and posting funniest pictures or jokes I found on the internet. Many people make choices depending of these comments rather than for example consultants in shops.

Most of the users had never met each other in real life, only see their avatars and nicknames and can only briefly know what their professions are only by reading many posts. And still some members got a well deserved reputation over the other members. I personally could maybe tell their professions only for couple people but i respect them for their posts but I don't have any need to met them in real life. Very rarely a new member appears, and most of the times if he wants just jump in into the conversations is being just bulldozed down.

There is only one great risk in it. I don't know if it could be called addiction or just really hard habit but how do you call it when people check several times a day for few weeks when the forum server is down and they cannot reach the forum. You tell me because I was also refreshing forum tab many times each day. Every time I turn on computer first thing is to check whether there are new messages or replies to my comments.

Users of this forum have very different jobs, vide range of age, very different hobbies and the only thing that linked them together in the first place was just a computer game. And still I think it could be called rock solid (virtual) community.

Using XML to Share Data

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a powerful markup language providing functionality for data exchange and sharing. By using XML, we separate data from representation. It means that data in XML format can be displayed in many forms. Each software developer can decide how display this data, related to his own requirements.

For example European Central Bank (ECB) is publishing exchange rates on their website in XML format (http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml), these rates are updated on daily base. Developers are free to access these rates and implement them into websites or applications. Developers can also select only currencies which are important for their countries. One example from my country using these ECB XML exchange rates is http://www.zoz.sk. You can see exchange rates of important currencies in my country on the right side. Developer of this site chooses his own graphical representation of data provided by ECB.

The next example of service provided by XML is weather forecast. You can get current weather in RSS format (RSS is written in XML language). For example, here is the forecast for Bratislava (city in Slovakia) http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?w=818717&u=c. You can transform this XML information to required graphical format. The example is on bottom of http://www.zoz.sk. Related to weather code provided by http://weather.yahooapis.com the icon of actual weather is changing.

Last example is related to government taxes in my country. There is a lot of different accountant software, but each of them is able to export required documents to XML format. These documents can be sent to tax authorities of my country, and they can process them automatically.


http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

Project Chanology

Occasionally collaborative tools such as internet forums have been used to organize activities on voluntary basis. One such voluntary-based movement is the Project Chanology, a protest movement by activists, labeling themselves "Anonymous", against the Church of Scientology.

The Church of Scientology is an organization promoting the belief system of Scientology. It was founded by a pulp fiction author Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, and has - despite the author's obvious fiction background, addiction to painkillers and his critics' common characterization of him as "a liar, a charlatan and a madman" - has gathered numerous members and become financially very successful over the years. [Urban]

The Project Chanology began after the Church of Scientology attempted to censor a rambling and chaotic monologue by actor Tom Cruise about his faith in Scientology, starting with a video published in YouTube named "Message to Scientology" where the Anonymous group state their opinion of Scientology's actions as a form of Internet censorship and assert the groups goal to "expel the church from the internet".

Project Chanology originally began with distributed denial-of-service attacks and various pranks on the Church of Scientology operations, but later moved to more legal methods, such as public protests and complaints to IRS about the church's tax exempt status. Besides its use of YouTube the project has been organized through internet forums, imageboards, wiki pages and internet relay chat channels.

The group behind Project Chanology, called Anonymous, is estimated to number in thousands of members. However, due to the group members generally staying - as the name implies - anonymous and interacting with it's members through collaborative tools that easily enable hiding or disguising one's identity, there is no way to know or even define the membership accurately. Anyone can view, partake and/or orchestrate the group's activities, or simply act under the name of the group on their own, thus making 'membership' definitions blurry at best.



Sources:
Urban, Hugh B. "Fair Game: Secrecy, Security, and the Church of Scientology in Cold War America." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74.2 (2006)

Tom Cruise on Scientology

A Wikipedia overview on Project Chanology

Anonymity in Groupware

Future Multitouch Meeting Room

I was interested to see if some kinds of “meeting rooms of the future” already existed, so I searched around the internet for a few. I came across Oli Mival’s Interactive Collaborative Environment, located at Edinburgh Napier University. Mival demonstrates the features of the room in a video.

The first thing you will notice in the video is an interactive table in which photos and documents can be moved and resized. Using documents in this way is no doubt very intuitive, as it resembles a traditional way of looking at pictures or whatever at a table. However, one could ask if that is precisely the problem – does the interactive table really offer something to make meetings and working more efficient? We could make a few points here: interactive table saves physical space and prevents obstruction of view for other people, as there are no real documents lying around everywhere. Also, digital documents won’t get lost or drop on the floor. Furthermore, resizing and zooming can be done easily, allowing everyone to see what is being talked about without the need to pass the document around by hand.

Also, there are touch screens scattered across the walls in the room, all of which have the same display, i.e. when someone does something to one screen, all the others will follow. The benefits I could think of would be that people wouldn’t have to gather around the same display and they could make changes for everyone to see more easily.

Now, a bit more than one and a half minutes into the video, things really start to get more interesting. Mival demonstrates how the interactive table can be used to spin around 3D objects, play games and scan maps. The table seems to be capable of many things, and I believe it would really help in making meetings more interactive and fluent.

There is almost no doubt in that these kinds of futuristic meeting rooms would make working more efficient. However, it is certain that the rooms will require lots of money, so the only real question would be if these improvements are enough to make these kinds of meeting rooms a beneficial investment.

References

http://vimeo.com/8238997

http://www.futureinteractions.net/

Indaba Music

Last week I wrote about online collaboration of musicians and how it would be nice if there was some kind of a internet database for hobbyist musicians where songwriters could search and ask musicians to play for their projects.

This week I actually found out that there is a service called Indaba Music (Indaba being a Zulu word for community and collaboration). Inbada Music does pretty much everything I wrote about earlier. It basically allows musicians from different geological places to find each other and create music online. Musicians can create their own profiles like in every other social networking community, in addition they can hire each other and create jam sessions. Indaba Music has its own Java-based digital audio workstation called Mantis, which is ideal for those who don't have their own recording software. To record a track user just has to sign in, plug in microphone and push the record button.

Members of a jam session can then upload their own tracks and download the tracks of other players, as well as mix and edit the tracks online with Mantis. Indaba also supports feedthrough: The music player displays a song or a track in waveform and people can comment along the waveform in order to refer to specific moments in time. The jam session owners can decide which type of players they want in their session, e.g. which instruments they want to use in their sessions, what kind of a players do they need and do they want to use paid musicians only. Indaba members can communicate through messages, chat, discussion lists and Indaba hosted conference calls.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indaba_Music

http://www.indabamusic.com/