Abstract Trouble in River City: The Social Life of video games by

1 A version of this work is presented in Williams (in press, 2003).

1 Interoperability means that different systems are compatible. For example, DVDs made by Sony will work on DVD players made by another firm. Game consoles do not feature such compatibility.

2 All sales figures for the game industry as reported by the media, trade groups, and individual firms are for home console and computer games sales only. Arcade revenues are always excluded for political reasons, a theme to be taken up in Chapter 4. The data reported here were created by combining home game sales with arcade sales collected from the vending machine industry’s journal of record (Lavay, 1978, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996; Montano, 2001). A breakdown of home vs. arcade sales is presented in Chapter 4.

3 This is a pattern similar to that of the telegraph, which inventor Samuel Morse pleaded the government to buy out but which was rejected (see Czitrom, 1982, p. 21-22 for a discussion). Like the telegraph, games would flourish in the private sector.

4 Bushnell invented Computer Space, a rip-off of Spacewar, while working for a technical engineering firm. He took the concept to a coin-op game manufacturing firm, which made 1,500 units. By all accounts, the game was far too confusing for people who didn’t understand why this new pinball machine didn’t have flippers and why it needed an instruction set (Scott Cohen, 1984; Sellers, 2001).

5 The plot of the movie Tron (Lisberger, 1982) can be taken as a commentary on the tension between the hacker and corporate ethics in the video game industry, and one directly modeled on events at Atari. In the plot, a young, unorthodox programmer is kicked out of his company by a sinister corporate figure who can run an empire, but cannot create games. Unlike the real-world Atari version of the story, the young hacker turns the tables and reclaims his fortune, restoring everything to a simultaneously profitable and creative industry. Tron represents a romanticized version of the hacker ethic that never happened.

6 One designer, Warren Robinette, planted his name in a game without telling his supervisors. It was discovered by a boy in Salt Lake City several months after the game’s release. This act of defiance is acknowledged as the first instance of an “Easter egg” in programming (Herman, 1997).

7 Atari changed hands several times over the ensuing 20 years, but has always retained value as a brand. The French game producer Infogrammes acquired the name, and in 2003, changed its name to Atari to avoid a Francophobic backlash after political disagreements with the United States revolving around the invasion of Iraq.

8 For example, the first home game machine, the Magnavox Odyssey, had trouble with consumers in part because many incorrectly assumed it would only work on a Magnavox television set (Herman, 1997).

9 Cell phone-based games have a similar appeal, and may drive phone use (J. Schwartz, 1999).

10 Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P20-515.

11 An extended version of this analysis is given in Williams (2003). (Williams, 2003).

12 As a validity check on the method, articles from the New York Times and newscasts from the major three networks stored at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive were checked against the results here. The patterns found in those articles and newscasts match the ones found here for news magazines.

13 Note: There were no game-related entries for Dreamcast, Intellivision, Odyssey or Fairchild. Coverage did not begin to approach the more detailed level of specific companies and products until the late 70s/early 80s. Up until then the articles were usually all under “electronic games.” Stories about electronic games that were not played on some kind of screen were omitted.

14 This was recently confirmed in a study (Hafner, 2003).

15 Sources: “hooked” (“The Asteroids Are Coming,” 1981), “addicts” (Langway, 1982), “junkies” (“Invasion of the Video Creatures, 1981), “mania,” (Meyers, 1982), “pathological preoccupation” (Garver, 1990); and “madness” (Adler et al, 1989).

16 Baca’s HR 669 would restrict the sale of violent or sexual games to persons under 17 and provide fines of up to $5,000 for offending retailers.

1 Roper data.

1 Digest of Education Statistics, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, collected from Roper, 2001.

2 Data are from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates Summary report, 1999.

3 A recent study of implicit attitudes found that both women and men see science as a male domain (O'Connell, 2003).

1 According to Jenkins it may well have been the result of corporate-level problems (Jenkins, 2001).

2 Also included were data from a 1999 Kaiser Family Foundation/Harris Interactive survey.

1 Data posted on the industry trade organization website, http://www.theesa.com/, 9/11/03.

1 MUD was written by two undergraduates at Essex University in England. Mainframe time was donated by the university, but only at night-time. Eventually, the university suspended the service due to costs and the social undesirability of being associated with a computer game (Bartle, 1987).

2 These data were graciously supplied to the author by Senior Research Scientist John Horrigan of the Pew Internet and American Life Project in an email.

1 Players of online action games are well-known for creating modifications of the title that become popular and profitable (J. E. Katz & Rice, 2002).

2 For example, when a player fights a monster, it is general practice that that player should get credit for killing it. However, in the antisocial practice known as a “kill steal,” a player can swoop in at the last moment and inflict the final blow on the creature and claim the reward for it.

3 The average number of hours per week for an EverQuest player is 22 (N. Yee, 2002).

1 AC2 was selected because its producer, Microsoft, graciously donated 400 copies of the game to this study (each copy was valued at $50, making the donation a $20,000 one). Microsoft otherwise had no input or connection to the study. Indeed, for reasons of legal liability, Microsoft did not want to be associated with the study in case it might reveal potentially negative effects. Knowledge of such effects in an internal document could later prove legally damaging should a player sue, claiming harm from the product.

2 The game’s many servers have since been consolidated, raising the population in most areas.

3 Thanks to Marko Skoric for this point.

4 Newbies is a common video game slang term for a first-time player. While it carries some mild stigma, players who self-identify as newbies also attract advice and attention from long-term players. The more derogatory “noob” is used by less tolerant and less helpful players.

5 A handful of subjects in the control group reported having played on the time two survey, and were moved to the treatment group for analysis.

6 The few subjects in the remote states of Hawaii and Alaska had randomly been assigned to the control condition.

7 General game sites: www.boardgamegeek.com (Ikonboard), Gamespot.com (forum board), Games.speakeasy.net discussion board, Acmegamer.com discussion board, Gamepro.com forum, Gamespy.com forum, Gamecritics.com forum, Justadventure.com forum and press release on front page, Bluesnews.com press release on front page, ac2hq.com forum and news item on front page, ac2warcry.com forum and news item on front page.

Women’s game sites: womengamers.com news blurb on front page, gamegal.com forum, gamegirlz.com lounge area, grrlgamer.com message board, gamegurl.com message board.

Women’s sites: Bellaonline.com message boards, iVillage.com message boards (freebies board, over-50s friends board, stay-at-home mom board, and beginning web page help board).

8 After the initial posts, I monitored the conversational traffic on the boards to see if potential subjects had any concerns. Many of these boards have built-in email functions to alert posters when someone has posted a reply to the original post. Several questions were raised, often about the study’s purpose or the likelihood of receiving a free game. As with a face-to-face or telephone sample, I answered mechanical, but not substantive questions about the study. One site suspected the associated giveaway was too good to be true, and contacted the IRB (the number was given on the survey instrument’s introductory page) for verification that this was an actual University-approved study. After that confirmation, word traveled quickly.

9 Note on the Appendix data: The sign of the mean differences reported in the Appendix signals the direction of the change in the treatment group. Negative mean differences indicate an increase in the variable’s value due to game play, and positive mean differences indicate a decrease due to game play.

10 Note on the Appendix data: Unlike the first test, the t-tests here examine the difference over time in one group, not by comparing change scores. Positive mean differences indicate a decrease in the variable value, and negative mean differences indicate an increase in the variable value.

11 “Please indicate how many days in the past week you felt this way: I was happy; I enjoyed life.”

12 Kraut’s questionnaire and codebook were generously supplied to the author via email. Putnam’s questions were taken directly from “Bowling Alone,” and were replications of items used on the GSS or from the DDB Needham Lifestyles surveys or from Putnam’s Saguaro Seminars social capital benchmarking study. See http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/

1 I am indebted to Marko Skoric for this line of thinking.

2 This explanation was suggested by an audience member at the Association of Internet Researchers 4.0 Conference in Toronto in October, 2003.

3 For example, the online battery is introduced with “When some people are online, they interact with others by exchanging emails, reading message boards and participating in chat rooms. Now we’d like to ask you some questions about how you interact with other people online.”

1 As expected, the questions involving mobilization of a wide group (e.g. “I could organize a broad group of people to take part in a protest”) did not load with bonding, and were dropped. One measure of out-group antagonism involving people from a different country was dropped because it did not scale well with the others and had a low inter-item correlation.