Evans Information Dynamics in Virtual Worlds

Gaming and Beyond
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-78063-274-2
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten

Reihe: Chandos Information Professional Series

Presents a broad examination of the nature of virtual worlds and the potential they provide in managing and expressing information practices through that medium, grounding information professionals and students of new media in the fundamental elements of virtual worlds and online gaming. The book details the practical issues in finding and using information in virtual environments and presents a general theory of librarianship as it relates to virtual gaming worlds. It is encompassed by a set of best practice methods that libraries can effectively execute in their own environments, meeting the needs of this new generation of library user, and explores ways in which information literacy can be approached in virtual worlds. Final chapters examine how conventional information evaluation skills work falls short in virtual worlds online. - Maps out areas of good practice and technique for information professionals and librarians serving in virtual communities - Provides a clear foundation with appropriate theory for understanding information in virtual worlds - Treats virtual worlds as 'real environments' and observes the behaviour of actors within them

Woody Evans is a librarian at Zayed University, United Arab Emirates. As a librarian and private researcher, he has worked for military, corporate, and academic organizations. He has written for American Libraries, Library Journal, Searcher, ONLINE, Information Today, and others. His current research interests include the cultural aspects of information seeking and evaluation. Contact him through woodyevans.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Evans, Woody

Leseproben

2 Types of virtual worlds
Abstract
Virtual worlds can be game spaces, experimental modeling spaces, and other types of spaces. Games come in many genres, and also can be divided by types of aesthetic and interface qualities. Understanding the particularities of virtual worlds is important for information professionals. Key words games perspective aesthetics genre models simulation Games
Games are the most common kind of virtual worlds, and for many good reasons. Games make money. Games have drama. Games are a way to gain cred, reputation, and to improve social standing amongst other gamers. Games are fun. But as David Parlett puts it in his excellent Oxford History of Games: ‘Play validates itself. Its purpose and value are intrinsic. True games serve no conscious practical purpose beyond that of sastisfying an urge to play which is sometimes regarded as an instinct.’ Parlett quotes James Carse: ‘he who must play cannot truly play.’ If games are played for money, for reputation, for any of the rest, then all of those things are secondary to fun. And, in that case, maybe they aren’t even games any more. Information professionals who want to serve in game worlds have to meet the players ‘where they’re at’ as they say: Are your inworld patrons there to make money in a virtual economy? To do sociology research? Or just to have fun? Whatever their reasons for being inworld, an understanding of their motivations can improve relations between those of us offering services and those we are trying to serve. We don’t want to go around killing buzzes, and we definitely don’t want inworld patrons to run when they see our approach. On the other hand, if we’re nothing but flip and glib and witty toward patrons trying to turn a virtual dollar or develop virtual real estate, we will soon be seen as light-weight dilettantes flitting around for fun … when we could be very valuably doing real work for serious-minded people. Knowing your community, again and again, is vital. Edward Castronova spends some time working to equate games to virtual worlds. Citing numbers of players of games and numbers of subscribers to virtual worlds, Castronova soon tallies a number upwards of 30 million of active online gamers (figuring, as he was, with 2006–2007 data). But the numbers of players of world-like (immense, immersive) digital games (whether or not those games are in fact virtual worlds) is much, much larger; upwards of 20 + million copies of Grand Theft Auto games have been sold, 20 + million copies of the Lego Star Wars, etc. The success of the Halo series has suggested to some that video game development studios could become more financially successful and culturally influential than film studios. In any case, Castronova goes on to suggest the term ‘synthetic worlds’ for a rough conflation of both digital games and virtual worlds. ‘Synthetic worlds are the most dynamic and energetic part of the entire digital games sector. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 19 percent of frequent gamers said they played online games in 2000; by 2006, the percentage had risen to 44 percent. Single-player gaming remains as fun as always, but it is not being treated as the future of the industry. Rather, recent developments suggest that all games are going to go online within a very few years. And when they do, they will all acquire a social dimension’ (2007: 35). So, even if games and worlds aren’t the same now, he suggests, they shortly will be. I bring up Castronova’s point neither to agree with it, nor to critique it on any particular front; but one must wonder if the conflation of all immersive digital game-like or world-like media into a single treatment (synthetic worlds) is useful. Clearly Castronova is right in his observations about the movement of console games into social dimensions. XBox and Wii have made what was once a private home daliance into a massively multi-player online experience – your console is another gateway into synthetic worlds. But the dilineation of game types, and of different qualities of experiences in virtual worlds demands new words, new categories, new ontological schema. To push all of this together into one lump, as if it were all always destined to become the same kind of thing, seems unfair to the real subtleties of the experiences of gamers and those who take up time in non-game virtual worlds. Jesper Juul, on the other hand, sees games and virtual worlds in quite a different light. Juul discusses the tension between fiction and games, and criticizes too strong or strident a demarcation between one and the other (contesting, by the way, his own previous positions on the subject). In video game studies, the denial of fiction is an alluring position … based on a simple recurring argument that tends to follow this pattern: 1. Rules are what make a game a game. 2. Fiction is incidental to whether something is a game. 3. A game can be interesting without fiction. 4. A game with an interesting fictional world can be a terrible game. 5. Therefore, fiction in games is unimportant. Though the conclusion is tempting, it is also false (2005: 13). He goes on to show how a disregard for the fictional elements of a game brings an incomplete understanding of games. A disregard for narratology in favor of ludology, in the game studies lingo, unfairly denies the importance of story in game worlds. Story is tied tightly to games, whether in the rigid parameters of a progression game or in the sometimes playful (and sometimes absurd) unfolding of an emergence game (195). The two (rules on one hand, fiction on the other) cannot really be pulled apart in games, unless we’re talking about the grayest sorts of games imaginable. Even board games – such as chess – that are very rule-based, imply story: chess has characters with roles (queens, rooks, pawns), positions, and levels of power. The hierarchy so absolute in the rules are toyed with, flipped off, joked about in the actual drama of the game – in the story of this particular checkmate, see, a lowly pawn took down a knight so that a bishop could hem in the king. I quote from Juul again: While all games have rules, most video games also project a fictional world: The player controls the character; the game takes place in a city, in a jungle, or anywhere else. Such fictional game worlds, obviously, do not actually exist; they are worlds that the game presents and the player imagines. This is the tension Juul highlights between the real-ness of game rules and the fictional worlds that those rules help to build; it is perhaps a more interesting tension than that between the definitions of games and worlds. It’s too easy to conflate and confuse various game types already. There is a temptation to boil a world down to ‘just one thing’ in order to simplify our language about virtual worlds and immersive games. To peg Civilization as a ‘Sim Game’ is to leave out discussion of its genre and its gameplay. That is, if we were to shorthand Civilization as a simulationtype game without further discussion, we miss the other dimensions that matter so much in player experience: it’s an alternative history simulation with elements of fantasy and science fiction that has very complex controls in a mainly bird’s eye view (third-person) map-board world. It’s useful, then, to see games in terms of a matrix that works in at least three basic dimensions: genre, gametype, and gameplay. Genres may be loose and multiple; that is, a game’s story could borrow tropes and aesthetic cues from many genres and overlap them into a single experience. A science fiction world may borrow elements of a western (as Jos Whedon’s Firefly series and the film Serenity did), a western may borrow science fiction elements to make a type of steampunk, or a romance can borrow from the fantasy genre (as do countless manga series). When we talk about genre, we’re talking about these rough but recognizable categories that allow players to know what kind of world and what kind of story they will participate in (‘I like detective stories’ or ‘I want to play a zombie game’). ‘Gametype’ has to do with the overall structure of the game experience, and it, too, is technically a genre (a type of type); gametype, for our purposes, is distinct from how we use genre, because gametype is aesthetic or trope neutral. The overall structure may be a pure abstract strategy game, a simulation type of game, a level-based action game, a first-person fighting game, a tactical tower-defense, a ‘sandbox’ world with player- organized goals and adventures, a puzzle, or a role-playing game (etc.). ‘Gameplay’ is best understood as the moment-by-moment experience of playing the game – from what...