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



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Abstract

Trouble in River City: The Social Life of VIDEO Games

by

Dmitri C. Williams



Co-Chairs: Susan J. Douglas, W. Russell Neuman

New media technologies tap into fears about what they do to us individually and collectively. One example of this is the “River City” reaction that draws on conservative fears about media’s harmful effects on youth, centering on aggression and social isolation. Reactions to video games and the Internet are current examples of this phenomenon. This dissertation explores the issue on two levels: What issues are apparent in these fears? Are these fears justified? As background, a basic history of video gaming is presented. Next, the social concerns raised by video gaming are tracked through a content analysis of media framing, supporting an analysis of social issues. This analysis reveals how games have been contested sites for gender, age and place, and how reactions to them have helped maintain inequalities.

The second half of the dissertation turns to an empirical study of game uses and effects, focusing on both the “River City” issues and on the social networks created by games. The new era of networked, online gaming demands that this work be integrated with Internet studies. Using the concept of “social capital,” new scales are developed and validated to test for the social impacts of an Internet activity. The dissertation concludes with a large field-based panel study of an online game, Asheron’s Call 2, and its players. After a participant observation study, the game is used as a stimulus to test hypotheses about negative displacement, aggression and health issues, as well as social impacts on individuals, community and habits.

The results show that the game has few of the negative River City impacts associated with the common stereotypes of games, including the contentious issue of aggression. Socially, the results are more complex. The game is shown to lead to a degree of social withdrawal at the same time as it improves some measures of community spirit and activism. Lastly, an unexpected cultivation-like finding emerged in the analysis, suggesting that online worlds can affect real-world perceptions.



Trouble in River City: The Social Life of VIDEO Games


by
Dmitri C. Williams

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

(Communication Studies)

in the University of Michigan

2004
Doctoral Committee:

Professor Susan J. Douglas, Co-Chair

Professor W. Russell Neuman, Co-Chair

Assistant Professor Nojin Kwak

Associate Professor Paul Resnick

Associate Professor Nicholas Valentino



Dmitri Williams

All Rights Reserved

©

2004


Acknowledgments

I’ve been waiting to use the paraphrased quip, “If I have not seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of midgets.” Fortunately for all concerned, this is not the time. I have seen however far I have because of the love of family and friends and the support of an excellent dissertation committee.

My wife Cindy has put up with surliness, deadline pressure and words of doom. She has read more drafts than anyone should have to and has kept me going through tough periods. I am grateful for her support. My daughter Mia, despite being a wild and uncontrollable baby, has unknowingly provided a safe haven from my work by simply being herself. I would not have survived the process without these two people.

My committee has been patient with my drafts and my odd meanderings. They have helped me create a coherent work out of chaos, bridging theoretical and methodological paradigms. For the training, the encouragement, emails, phone calls and general support, I thank them sincerely. Susan, Russ, Nick, Nojin and Paul, I owe you all a drink.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments i

List of Tables iii

List of Figures iv

List of Appendices vi

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2. An Industry History 24

Chapter 3: Explaining the Discourse: Games as a Lightning Rod for Social Issues 53

Chapter 4: Playing With Power: Age, Gender and Place at Issue 84

Chapter 5: Life On the Screen and On the ‘Net 121

Chapter 6: Being Massive: Understanding Online Games 149

Chapter 7: New Methods for New Media 186

Chapter 8: What Are the Effects of an Online Game? 232

Chapter 9: Escape From River City 259

Appendices 271

References 334

List of Tables


Table


3-1 Decline of the Nuclear Family 58

4-1 Age Effects in Attitudes Towards Games, 1998 85

4-2 Comparing Coverage of Early Arcades With Current
Coverage of Internet Cafés 115

6-1 Game Genres 154

6-2 Online Gaming Demographics 159

7-1 Predictors for Getting More Bridging Social Capital Online


Than Off, OLS regression 185

7-2 Does Time Online Harm Offline Bonding? 189

7-3 Final Distribution of Prior Play Across Design Cells 216

7-4 Pre-Test Differences Between Newbie Control and


Experimental Groups, Selected Variables 217

App-1 Sample Statistics 266

App-2 Answers to the Question “Do you ever go online?” 267

App-3 MSCS Question Forms and Factor Loadings 271

App-4 Online Bridging Scale Construct Validity: Correlations 273

App-5 Online Bonding Scale Construct Validity: Correlations 274

App-6 Offline Bridging Scale Construct Validity: Correlations 275

App-7 Offline Bonding Scale Construct Validity: Correlations 276

List of Figures

Figure


1-A Ignoring tough issues three weeks after Columbine 11

2-A A timeline of the video game industry, 1951-2003 25

2-B The rise, fall and rise of the industry 26

2-C The increasing spending for entertainment as seen by percentage


of total expenditures 38

2-D Consoles and computers come to the home, 1977-2000


(% penetration) 41

2-E Mario Bros. invade the home 44

2-F A hedgehog becomes a star 45

3-A With home systems, nuclear families bond around the new


electronic hearth 61

3-B In coin-op spaces, games took on a more adult, sexualized tone 62

3-C Utopian frames 72

3-D Dystopian frames, wave I 74

3-E Dystopian frames, wave II 76

4-A Percentage of adults playing home video games, 1989-1998 83

4-B Parker Brothers’ Jedi Arena ad, 1982 86

4-C Who are games for? Age 88

4-D Effects reporting by Age 89

4-E “Booth Babe” at the E3 Trade Show, 2002 96

4-F Who are games “for?” Gender 99

4-G Web site ad, 1999 101

4-H Industry breakdown: Home game vs. arcade sales, in
millions of 1983 dollars 104

6-A Planning schematic for the original text-based MUD 157

6-B Screenshot from Meridian 59 158

6-C Players interact with Sandpeople in Star Wars Galaxies 160

6-D The wilderness setting of AC2 171

6-E Creation and customization of an avatar 172

6-F Combat 174

6-G Socializing through chat windows 176

7-A What happens to online bridging as time online increases? 187

7-B What happens to offline bonding as time online increases? 191

8-A Effect of game play on offline emotional support 227

8-B Effect of game play on offline community goodwill 228

8-C Negative effect of game play on everyday Internet activities 229

8-D Negative effect of game play on social Internet activities 230

8-E Effect of game play on selected civic activities 233

9-A Two dimensions of online games for future research 256

App-A Four-way social capital measures 265
List of Appendices


Appendix A: MSCS Scale Validation 271

Appendix B: Intercoder Reliability Scores 290

Appendix C: Subject Correspondence 291

Appendix D: Survey Instrument 301

Appendix E: IRB Approval 307

Appendix F: Models and Data 309





Chapter 1: Introduction
Video games are an important, profitable and widely diffused medium. After a false start, video games have become one of the largest media industries, recently surpassing motion pictures in annual revenues. They are now consumed by a majority of Americans (Pew, 2002; State of the Industry Report 2000-2001, 2001), and their most popular characters have become cultural icons. At the same time, games are held in low regard in most public discourse, and they remain relatively understudied by communications scholars. When they have been studied, several important questions about their content and impact have been ignored. How can we explain these disconnections?

The popular and academic conceptions of gaming have been shaped by media discourses that reproduce a “River City” frame, a set of conservative fears common to new media. This River City frame introduced fears that have had a dramatic influence on how games have been viewed by the public, regulated and analyzed by scholars. The two key elements of these fears involve antisocial behavior and isolation. These elements persist despite a lack of empirical support and despite games’ long history as a highly social medium. This is a case in which the public discourse does not match the actual uses and practices of game players. The little research done to date on gaming has generally tested for the effects of games for players playing alone. But as games merge with the Internet to create large, networked groups of gamers, the social contexts must be included. Online games and the interactions within them are a wholly new form of human communication that has gone unstudied. This dissertation will argue that such games are a more complex phenomenon than has been suspected previously. Its goals are to come to grips with this new phenomenon while also explaining the origins and nature of the River City discourse. A genuine disconnect remains between the popular image of gaming and actual practices that needs to be explored. Researchers, policy makers and parents have been concerned with the assumedly isolating and violence-inducing nature of video games for the past 20 years, and their concerns must come from somewhere. What have been the discourses surrounding games and how have they evolved over time? What are the actual effects of games? Why do the two not match? Answering these questions requires a range of approaches and analyses.

First, the dissertation provides an explanation for the social construction of video games. This involves a historical overview of the industry, a content and textual analysis of media coverage of games, and a study of game use and the issues around it. The key result of these analyses is that, despite the fears and conjecture surrounding them, games have been a highly social activity with few proven effects. This suggests that an empirical study of them needs to account for a socially interactive setting. The remainder of the dissertation provides such a study by using and extending the theory of “social capital,” the idea that social networks can be formed through activities and have positive consequences (Coleman, 1988). In order to proceed with such a study, original scales of social capital are created, validated and tested on general Internet users. Then, with these new measures in place, the central study is a large field experiment of online game players. This is foregrounded by an extensive participant observation study of an online game. The experiment itself is the first controlled longitudinal study of any video game, and is the first to account for the highly social nature of game play. Its results refute the River City approach while suggesting a range of other effects, both positive and negative, including an unsuspected cultivation effect. These results can help inform the rancorous public policy debates that continue around video games, and suggest several promising new areas for future research.
Studying a New Medium

The history of suspicion and ambivalence surrounding video games prompts several questions. How have games been portrayed and framed in the news media? What social issues are evident in those portrayals? What groups have been helped and what groups hindered in the framing process? This dissertation will show that games are simply the latest in a long series of new media technologies that have evoked ambivalence and suspicion. The particular manifestation for games has centered consistently around games’ potential for causing aggression, with the dramatic Columbine massacre of 1999 serving as a case in point. Two students in Littleton, Colorado rampaged through their high school with an arsenal of weapons, killing several before turning their guns on themselves. The press coverage of that event emphasized the potential role video games may have played while ignoring more substantive and crucial issues involving the boys’ backgrounds and the atmosphere of the school itself.

Because of when they appeared, video games also became a lightning rod for unrelated tensions surrounding families and the role of women in the workforce. Analyzing the media framing and the production of games also shows how they have been used to reinforce social norms, often at the expense of one group over another. In this sense, games have been used as mechanisms of social control for gender and age. They have also played a role in America’s move toward convenient home-based entertainment.

Separate from a social analysis of games is the empirical study of their effects. Yet understanding the actual effects of one of the new online games requires a new type of analysis. Because the world of online games necessarily crosses between game and Internet research, questions and approaches from both are brought to bear. In each case, innovations are required to move the study of online games forward. In the case of game research, the three largest gaps in existing scholarship have been ignoring the role of sociability in game play, the absence of longitudinal studies, and a tendency to gloss over generalizability issues. As Paik and Comstock (1994) have noted, it is inappropriate to generalize from one specific piece of media content to the entire medium without understanding how that content is similar or different than others. These gaps are addressed through a panel study focused on social effects, prefaced by an in-depth participant observation study of one particular title, Asheron’s Call 2.

This participant observation work makes it clear that the world of online games is a highly social one. Therefore, the analytical framework of “social capital” is appropriate for understanding the processes and effects taking place. The dissertation draws on Putnam’s (2000) conceptualizations of social capital as having two main elements—“bridging” and “bonding.” Because there are no adequate measures of social capital, new scales are constructed to measure it. In the process of validation, the measures are used to provide baseline scores for the Internet’s general level of social capital. With these results in hand and the scales ready to use, the centerpiece of the dissertation is a large panel study of Asheron’s Call 2 players. This one-month field study is the largest and longest of its kind to date. It measures both the conservative River-City fears and social capital issues.


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