dmitri-williams
Latest
15 Minutes of Fame: Joi Ito on player relationships and connecting
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Last week, we set the stage with internet superman Joichi Ito in a conversation that meandered through the old days of gaming, from getting his feet wet in MUDs to why he misses 40-man raiding in WoW. This week, we're back to discuss why some people with MBAs make crappy raid leaders, how WoW builds stronger bonds between people who work together, and his plans to bring WoW along for the ride at the MIT Media Lab. Catch up on last week's part 1 of our interview with Joi first. 15 Minutes of Fame: So what's your own guild focused on now? Joi Ito: The Horde side had kind of wound down a little bit. It still exists, but it's mostly the Alliance side now. When we were both going strong, it was really fun because we did a lot of joint stuff. [laughs] What we would do is do sort of sister guild PVP -- but it would always get messy because you'd find people from other guilds noticing and then jumping in. Right now, we're definitely not first in the realm, but we just hit level 25. I'm pretty delinquent; I need to level myself up, so as not to embarrass everyone too badly. [laughs] Every expansion, we go through several iterations of discussing the governance and stuff like that, and a lot of the old-time guild leadership aren't active. I got grandfathered in because it's hard not to have someone in the background, I guess, being the custodian of things to do when no one else can decide. There was a really interesting paper written by Dmitri Williams, who's an academic, and they did a study on the relationship between guild rules and stability of the guild. It said that in guilds that called themselves "casual" but didn't have any rules, the players tended to have more anxiety than those guilds where there were rules, and that "casual" didn't mean no rules, that rules help people feel comfortable. Our guild rules are pretty anal, a pretty extensive set of rules, and there's a lot of participation by the guild members in working on these rules. I don't know how formal rules are in other guilds -- I haven't been in too many other guilds -- but discussing the rules and the governance of the guild seems to be a thing that a lot of our guild likes to spend time on. That's primarily where my focus is these days, making sure that the leadership and the guild rules aren't too out of sync with what's going on in the game.
Game census concludes that minorities under-represented in games
Even though you've seen CJ gangbanging in GTA: San Andreas and Faith gallivanting across a vast urban landscape in Mirror's Edge, it doesn't mean minorities and women are finally getting a fair shake in gaming. According to a census of video game characters conducted by SoCal researcher Dmitri Williams (via NewScientist), it's still an area largely dominated by white men. Gasp! Of course, with an undertaking as huge as checking every character in every game ever, this data of Williams and company comes with a few caveats. First of all, the census went down in February of 2006 and has only surfaced recently thanks to NewScientist. Second, the only systems and games combed include the top 150 titles sold on Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation, PS2, PSP, GameCube, GBA, DS and PC. Still, it's a lot to sift through and -- when the dust settled -- Williams and the gang came up with a couple of charts and some data to back up their claim. [Via Game Politics]
Research profiles the typical fantasy MMO player
Researcher Dmitri Williams and his team have been doing some very hardcore MMO-related research. Thanks to Raph Koster, they were given free reign with the whole of SOE's EverQuest II-related user statistics. They've produced the first of many papers, this one called "Who plays, how much, and why? Debunking the stereotypical gamer profile," which is completely and freely available online.There are a bunch of interesting things about EverQuest II player demographics in there, some of which is surprising. For example, older players play more than younger players, and EQ2 players in general are physically healthier than the general population. There's a shocker! Of course, EQ2 arguably has a different sort of playerbase than something like EVE Online, or even other dikus like World of Warcraft. It's too bad we can't see the differences.More studies are coming, though (but all of them from EQ2 data). Williams and his international team of researchers are planning to uncover information about gender differences and more in future papers.[Via Raph Koster]
For game addicts, bad games are more addictive
Prof. Dmitri Williams, one of the leading academics in the gaming space, who was an expert witness at the U.S. Senate on the constitutionality of game banning laws, held a roundtable on game addiction at GDC. Williams referenced Carnegie Mellon University A. Fleming Seay's research on addiction in an MMO context.The addiction, defined as "problematic use" by Seay, is when an entertainment product dominates and displaces other behavior,causes conflict and not playing causes anxiety. Seay found that self regulation (self monitoring, self evaluation and self consequence) was difficult for certain people. This seems obvious, but like anything in academia, if somebody hasn't done the research it isn't legitimate. The other thing Seay found was people's affinity for a game caused their problematic use -- but the interesting part was that those with "problematic use" were those who didn't like the game they were playing. They would do the same actions over and over again, didn't find pleasure in their actions and got stuck in a rut.Williams thinks now is a the time to start looking into the ideas of "gaming addiction" and "problematic use" before it gains traction. He says, "Coming up with a solution to that, is better than sitting in front of Congress in ten years."
