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

Trouble in River City: The Social Life of VIDEO Games

by

Dmitri C. Williams

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.

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.