A Tennessee woman was arrested after poking another woman on FaceBook. What’s interesting to me about this story is that ABC News decided it was newsworthy. It just doesn’t seem like it is to me. The woman who was poked had a protective order against the poker. A protective order means no contact. Poking is a form of contact and so, yes, if the woman violated the protective order, she should be arrested. Her lawyer, of course, is questioning whether she actually was the perpetrator of the poke and if she wasn’t, then she should not go to jail. But if she did poke the woman in violation of the protective order, then she should face the same punishment as if she had called the woman or showed up at her house. I think ABC News thinks this story is newsworthy because it involves what ABC News considers an unusual medium for communication. I only wish they had made it clear that THAT was the reason the story was interesting to them. As the story reads now, it seems like they think it’s ridiculous that a poke would be considered contact. If it wasn’t contact, people wouldn’t poke their friends, right?
At 8:05 tonight, the AP announced that Patrick Swayze had died. By 8:25, my Aunt Ava had posted a FB status update that he had died of pancreatic cancer. Within minutes of that, several more of my FB friends had notified me that he had died. Information truly is instantaneous. How would I have found out about his death otherwise? Ah, social media.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m chairing a panel at NeMLA in April about using Web 2.0 technologies to play. Because of this panel, I’ve spent much of my summer playing and thinking about playing online. Yes, I recognize that I have a great job!
The game that has captured my online attention this summer is Scrabble on FaceBook. There are a few people (Liz, Scott, Ann) that I’m playing with regularly, multiple games at a time. There are also a couple of people (Sally, Carrie) with whom I seem to constantly have one game going. And then there are a few people (Gary, Cathrine, Kate) that I play with occasionally. I even sometimes play with strangers, although I find those games less engaging, probably because the social aspect of the game, which I’ve also written about before, is lacking.
One of the things I really like about Scrabble on FaceBook is that it will not let you play an invalid word. So the game is completely about pattern recognition. When I play the game in person, nothing stops me from playing an invalid word and so I am unlikely to take a chance on a word that I am unsure about. If my opponent challenges me in the real life game and I have played an invalid word, I lose a turn. In the online version of Scrabble, I can’t lose a turn for playing an invalid word. As a result, I’m likely to try letter combinations that I would never have tried in real life. I’ve learned lots of new words by just trying out letter combinations. What is “zax” for example? Or “tranqs”? And I’ve learned many, many two letter words whose meanings I’m sure I’ll never know. Anyone know what “za” is? Or “xu”? Or “ka”?
Lots of other FaceBook games have come to my attention and not captured it this summer. I’ve tried Farkle and Rummikub, both of which I love in the real world. Many of my friends have been playing Farmtown and so I’ve created my own farm but I haven’t visited it for days. And Mafia Wars. And Bejeweled. Well, to be honest, I won’t allow myself to really play Bejeweled because it is exactly the kind of game that I could become addicted to and I don’t really want to be addicted to a game right now.
But the kind of play I’ve been most interested in this summer has not been play that is associated with games. I’m really interested in play as a way of practicing and expressing parts of one’s identity that is difficult to practice or express in the real world.
My FaceBook friends seem to do a lot of quizzes. They want to find out which philosopher most closely represents them and how well they know their Princess Bride quote trivia. They want the rest of us to know five places they’ve lived and five jobs they’ve had and five cars they’ve owned. For some reason, I have resisted these quizzes although I’ve been thinking a lot about what people get out of taking them. And what I’ve come to realize is that these quizzes are a way to reveal one’s identity, either your real one or the one you wish you had. This came to me the other night as I was engaging in non-gaming online play of my own. I like to play with memes that come in the form of lists of questions that you answer in a note on your FaceBook profile. A meme is a cultural idea that is transmitted from one mind to another, in this case, via FaceBook. There are lots of memes running around FaceBook. Most of these memes allow users to reveal things about themselves (or not), helping to construct a kind of online identity that supplements (or perhaps alters) one’s identity in the real world.
A few weeks ago, for example, I revealed to my friends the fifteen books that I’ve read that have stuck with me. The idea is that you list these books without thinking too much about them, presumably so you can’t make yourself seem cooler than you actually are. My list contained books that I’d talked recently with Ann about (Disgrace and The Road) as well as books that I’d seen on other people’s lists (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple). The list also really did contain books that popped into my head because they were memorable and important to me in some way (A Separate Peace, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Sing, Gone to Soldiers and The Mists of Avalon). But I rejected a number of books from my list just because I didn’t think I’d want to reveal them (Valley of the Dolls, The Other and The Group). And I rejected some just because they didn’t send the message that I wanted to send (Heart of Darkness and Carrie). As I reflected afterward on the books that I put on my list, I started to think about identity management again, that is, how I present myself to the world, the FaceBook world in this case.
What does this have to do with play? The other night, the two concepts merged for me. I was playing with another of these memes, called My Life According to … . The note contains a series of questions that you are supposed to answer using the song titles from one artist or band. I chose the Indigo Girls so my note was called My Life According to the Indigo Girls. Here’s what I wrote:
Several people have tagged me with this–I won’t tag anyone. Play if you want to. Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like and include me (presuming I’m someone you like). You can’t use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. Repost as “my life according to (band name)
Are you a male or female:
“The Girl With The Weight Of The World In Her Hands”
Describe yourself:
“Trouble”
How do you feel:
“Closer To Fine”
Describe where you currently live:
“Get Out the Map”
If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
“Perfect World”
Your favorite form of transportation:
“Midnight Train to Georgia”
Your best friend?
“She’s Saving Me”
You and your best friends:
“Devotion”
What’s the weather like:
“Watershed”
Favorite time of day:
“I Don’t Wanna Know”
If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
“Lay My Head Down”
What is life to you:
“Pendulum”
Your relationship:
“Moment of Forgiveness”
Your fear:
“Kid Fears”
What is the best advice you have to give:
“Don’t Give that Girl a Gun”
Thought for the Day:
“I’ll Change”
How I would like to die:
“Joking”
My soul’s present condition:
“Cold Beer and Remote Control”
My motto:
“It’s Alright”
Robin forwarded an article called How Sticky Is Membership on FaceBook? Just Try Breaking Free from the New York Times. Of course, because I’m completely addicted to FaceBook, my first thought was “Why would anyone ever want to leave?” But I can see that there may be reasons that someone might want to leave. And even if you don’t want to leave, FaceBook’s approach to member information might raise some privacy concerns.
According to the New York Times article, members who want to leave FaceBook find it difficult to do so because FaceBook retains information on their servers after a member deactivates her account. As one disgruntled member says, “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.” FaceBook’s executives say that they retain this information in order to make it easy for a member to reactivate her account. That is, because the information doesn’t disappear when an account is deactivated, if the account is then reactivated, the information is available for the reactivated account. This is obviously a problematic answer to member concerns about information retention. If I decide to deactivate my account, I want my information to be removed from FaceBook’s servers. In response to the ensuing uproar, FaceBook’s executives provided another process for removing information from a deactivated account. The member must delete each piece of information and then once all the information has been manually deleted, the account can be deactivated. Clearly, this is a tedious process that has done little to stem the tide of criticism about FaceBook’s practices.
From a technical standpoint, it should be easy to provide a one-step process for deleting all of the information in an account and then deleting the account itself. So when I first read about the tedious process required for deleting the information associated with an account, I thought perhaps the technical folks at FaceBook had simply been overwhelmed by the success of the site and had not had time and resources to build in as much user-friendliness as the members demanded. After all, FaceBook was created as a hobby project by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and as of October, 2008, there were more than 140 million active members worldwide. That kind of growth is bound to result in some pain so I figured the lack of easy account deactivation was simply part of that growing pain.
But then I read this excellent post by Steven Mansour. Mansour points out that we voluntarily give our personal information to FaceBook which can then sell that information to the highest bidder. Perhaps this lucrative side business is the real reason that FaceBook doesn’t want to make it easy for users to delete their accounts. This particular privacy issue has been a concern for me for a long time. For example, I am one of the few people I know who has no rewards cards–the kind of cards that you get from grocery stores and book stores where you provide your personal information in return for savings on items that you buy. I have not found that the savings on my purchases has been worth the price of making my private information available to these large corporations. It had not occurred to me that FaceBook might be engaged in the same kind of information harvesting as Hannaford Brothers and Borders Books and Music. But I guess I was just being naive. And the sad thing is that knowing that FaceBook might be engaging in this behavior has not convinced me to leave FaceBook. In return for my information, I get easy-to-use tools that help me keep up with my friends’ lives. I guess everyone has her price.
I have recently been playing Mob Wars on FB. I started because Ann and Liz both invited me to be part of their mobs. I nearly stopped playing after Thanksgiving but Scott begged me not to uninstall the application because he wanted me to stay in the mob. As a result of these friends playing, I have continued. But I have to echo Liz when I say, “It’s no Parking Wars.” So why doesn’t Mob Wars stack up well against Parking Wars? To understand why Parking Wars is a better game, I think we have to understand a little bit about how to play each game.
Mob Wars is a game in which the player plays a mob boss. Each mob boss has a number of characteristics, represented by numbers. The characteristics include health (with a starting maximum value of 100), energy (starting maximum value of 20), stamina (starting maximum value of 3), attack (starting maximum value of 3) and defense (starting maximum value of 3). In addition, each mob boss has a stockpile of weapons and vehicles, an amount of cash and experience points. The goal of the game is to move up the levels (called leveling up) by gaining experience points. Experience points are gained in a number of ways.
The first way to gain experience points is to complete jobs. Every job requires some amount of energy as well as some tools (weapons, vehicles, mobsters, other items such as bottles of liquor) and, upon successful completion, pays cash within a certain range. Another way to gain experience points is to fight other mobs (and beat them). Once an appropriate number of experience points is gained, the player is alloted 3 skill points that she can distribute among her many characteristics (such as maximum health, maximum energy and so on).
These are just the beginning of the MANY decisions that need to be made while playing Mob Wars. As I’ve written before, decision-making is a very important factor in determining whether a game is engaging. In general, the more meaningful the decisions that need to be made in a game, the more engaging the game is. A meaningful decision is one that allows the player to delineate a strategy for winning the game. In other words, for a decision to be meaningful, there must be multiple choices, each of which may lead to a winning strategy, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. Mob Wars requires the player to make a series of meaningful decisions. For example, my stamina in Mob Wars is currently set to 9. Each time a player chooses to fight some other mob (hoping to gain experience points and take some of that mob’s money), the player’s stamina is reduced by 1. In other words, I can engage in 9 fights with other mobs in a row without waiting for my stamina to be replenished. For me, however, this value rarely comes into play because of other choices that I have made. In order to win a fight, I must spend my money on weapons and vehicles. Instead, I have chosen to spend my money on properties within the city which allows me to earn more money at a faster rate (without having to fight). Because I don’t have as many weapons and vehicles as other mobs, I lose a lot of fights which decreases my stamina without gaining me anything. Until I purchase more weapons and vehicles, it doesn’t make sense for me to add more stamina to my mobster. This is just one meaningful decision among many that I must make.
Parking Wars, on the other hand, has relatively few meaningful decisions. There are basically two. First, the player must decide on whose streets she is going to park her cars. She is allowed to park her cars on her friends’ streets as well as those of three anonymous strangers’ streets. Second, once she earns a certain amount of money, she must decide which specialized car she is going to purchase (if any). That’s it! There are no other meaningful decisions.
Therefore, according to Costikyan (one of the game theorists that I make my students read), because Mob Wars has more interesting meaningful decisions than Parking Wars, Mob Wars should be a more engaging game than Parking Wars. But it isn’t. And here’s why I think that’s the case.
Both games are played on FaceBook, a social networking tool that is all about connecting with people. Parking Wars involves more interesting social interaction than Mob Wars and since the context of playing the two games is a social interaction site, Parking Wars is more interesting. In Parking Wars, a player parks on her friends’ streets and has her friends park on her streets. She is able to ticket her friends when they park illegally and send them messages on those tickets. She begins to learn her friends’ patterns–when they check their streets, whether they give tickets at low values or wait until the tickets become more valuable, and so on. In addition, there is the possibility of creating alliance with certain friends, agreeing not to ticket that friend’s illegally parked cars. Noticing and commenting on these alliances is also engaging. In fact, Nick created a group called Parkaholics Anonymous in which he explicitly commented on my alliance with Ann. All of this is part of the engagement of Parking Wars.
On the surface, Mob Wars has similar social possibilities via the “mob” aspect of the game. That is, the members of a player’s mob are her friends. The fact that a player is in the same mob as one of her friends does not impact on her playing of the game, however. She cannot explicitly take advantage of the fact that she has friends with certain characteristics in her mob. This is a missed opportunity and, I think, the main reason Mob Wars is not as engaging as Parking Wars.
I believe this goes to show that there is not a single reason for playing a game. Game designers would be well advised to pay attention to the context of a game and why players might be interested in playing as they design the interactions and decisions involved in playing their games.
Earlier this month, I was out for drinks with colleagues. Most of us are friends on FaceBook as well as in real life. A new colleague, Marylena, mentioned that one of her favorite things to do on FaceBook is play Parking Wars. Her sheepish description of the game was not particularly intriguing but because I’m always interested in the games people play, I decide that I would check it out. And once I had played for a few days, I invited some other friends to play as well. Now I’m addicted.
The game is an advertisement for an A&E channel show, also called Parking Wars. I have never seen the show and playing the game doesn’t make me want to go watch the show. So although I think the game is successful as a game, I’m not so sure it’s successful as an advertisement.
Here’s how the game is played. The premise is that you are in charge of a street with five spaces on it. Some of the five spaces do not allow parking. Some allow parking for only cars of a certain color. And some might allow parking for cars of any color. The arrangement of these five spaces changes at random. In addition, you have some cars of your own that you need to park. You can’t park them on your own streets. Instead, you have to park them on the streets of your friends (of course, only those friends who have also installed the Parking Wars application) and two strangers. For every minute that your car is parked on a particular street, the car gains monetary value. When you move the car from one spot to another, you earn the value of that car at that moment. You also earn money if you catch someone parked illegally on your street–you ticket them and you earn the amount that the car is worth at the time of ticketing. Of course, if it is your car that is ticketed, you lose the amount that the car is worth at the time of ticketing.
When I first started playing Parking Wars, my only FaceBook friend who was playing was Marylena. So I could park on her street and on the streets of two strangers. I installed the application, parked my two cars and then promptly forgot about the application. A few days later, I received a FaceBook message from Marylena telling me that there were cars parked illegally on my street just waiting for me to ticket them. I’ve been hooked on the game ever since. I went to the game, ticketed Marylena, got the money from those tickets and became a Parking Pro (I had been a Parking Amateur up to that point). I also was able to purchase a third car, which allowed me to start earning more money. That act of altruism on Marylena’s part stuck with me because it hooked me on the game. After playing for a few days with only three streets to park on, I realized that the game would be much more fun if I had more streets to choose from. So I invited my closest FaceBook friends (who are my closest friends in real life–go figure) to play the game. Within hours, I had seven streets to park on and the game was even more fun.
As my friends became acquainted with Parking Wars, I watched them move from Parking Amateurs to Parking Pros. I explained how the game worked. And I engaged in the same sort of altruism with them that Marylena had shown toward me. I parked illegally on their streets, simply so they could earn some money and thus, become hooked on the game.
Today, I was explaining this game to Evelyn. I mentioned the altruism because I had been somewhat uncomfortable with the part of the game that tempts you to park illegally if you can get away with it. I thought the altruism redeemed this troubling aspect of the game somewhat. Evelyn pointed out to me that the altruism sounded like the kind of altruism that heroin dealers show to potential new clients. They give away a taste of the heroin for free, hoping to capture their new clients in addiction so that they become lifelong customers. She’s absolutely right in making this comparison. I was trying to get my friends addicted to the game by giving them a taste of what the game has to offer. Their long-term addiction was worth the short-term hit to my current cash level because in the long run, it’s good to have more people to play with.
So games really are like drugs! They both give us the same little jolt of pleasure in our brains.
As I suggested in a previous post I don’t understand why FaceBook calls each status update a story. I said that if we were to consider each update a plot point in a longer story, then I could understand the use of the word story. Clive Thompson, in a New York Times article, explains that part of the reason these status updates (no matter how banal they might seem individually) are compelling is precisely because taken together, they tell us a story of our friends’ daily lives that we wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s a fascinating article. Thanks to Liz for pointing it out to me.
I can now be found on Twitter. I look forward to reading 140-character installments of your life story there.
FaceBook is changing how we view and think about many aspects of our lives, including literature. As an example (from McSweeney’s), here is Sarah Schmelling’s version of Hamlet, written in the sound bite style of a FaceBook News Feed.
HAMLET
(FACEBOOK NEWS
FEED EDITION)BY SARAH SCHMELLING
- – - -
Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.
Hamlet thinks it’s annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.
The king thinks Hamlet’s annoying.
Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.
Hamlet’s father is now a zombie.
- – - -
The king poked the queen.
The queen poked the king back.
Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.
Marcellus is pretty sure something’s rotten around here.
Hamlet became a fan of daggers.
- – - -
Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!
Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.
Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.
Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.
Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.
Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family
The king commented on Hamlet’s play: “What is wrong with you?”
Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.
Polonius is no longer online.
- – - -
Hamlet added England to the Places I’ve Been application.
The queen is worried about Ophelia.
Ophelia loves flowers. Flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers. Oh, look, a river.
Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don’t Float.
Laertes wonders what the hell happened while he was gone.
- – - -
The king sent Hamlet a goblet of wine.
The queen likes wine!
The king likes … oh crap.
The queen, the king, Laertes, and Hamlet are now zombies.
Horatio says well that was tragic.
Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, says yes, tragic. We’ll take it from here.
Denmark is now Norwegian.
In honor of the recent release of the remake of Brideshead Revisited, I thought it might be interesting to revisit FaceBook. I’ve been using FaceBook for nearly a month now and my feelings about it have evolved just as Charles Ryder’s feelings about Brideshead evolved. (Don’t think too much about the analogy between Brideshead and FaceBook–it doesn’t really fit very well.)
You may recall that my initial reactions to FaceBook were all about freaking out. I was especially overwhelmed by the amount of information that FaceBook was sending me via email. I knew that I had the option to turn some of those emails off but as a new user, I was unsure about which ones it made sense to turn off. I ended up turning them all off. So I no longer receive any notifications about FaceBook in my email inbox. Instead, I just receive the notifications of various updates within FaceBook itself. I guess as a new user I had been worried about missing something but I realized that I wouldn’t miss anything if I got notified within FaceBook. Since I visit FaceBook less often than I check my email, my notification of FaceBook happenings is not as immediate as if I were getting email updates. But I don’t want immediate notification of what’s going on in FaceBook. Instead, I want to be able to control when I receive those notifications. In other words, I want to receive them when I’m interested in knowing what’s going on in FaceBook. That is, I want to know what’s happening in FaceBook when I visit FaceBook! Perfect.
Although I do visit FaceBook less often than I check my email, I have been visiting FaceBook several times per week. This surprises me because my initial reaction to the social environment was not a particularly positive one. But now that I am not being overwhelmed by information from FaceBook, I have mostly enjoyed using it. In fact, I find it to be somewhat addicting. I’ve been thinking a lot about why and although I don’t have any answers about that question, I do have some observations.
I currently have 43 “friends” on FaceBook. Of these, there are probably 20 who are quite active, posting something or interacting with me several times a week. I am most interested in the activities and communications of about 8 of these 20 active friends. I think it’s because of these 8 that I visit FaceBook as often as I do. What do these people have in common? These are all people that I actually am good friends with in real life or that I could imagine being good friends with if our real life circumstances were to change. Even though I still find the use of the word “friend” problematic in FaceBook, the way we understand the word in real life is similar to the way it actually plays out in my use of FaceBook.
One of the most interesting aspects of FaceBook so far has been the way in which I “communicate” with most of my friends. Very little of our interaction is directly targeted at each other. That is, most of my friends do not post communications that are meant for me in particular. Instead, they update some part of their FaceBook profile (such as their status) to tell all of their friends what they are currently doing. I then read that information and find it interesting because I then know a little bit more about their daily lives. It’s a way of touching base that would not happen without FaceBook and as a result, we get to know each other a little bit better. And because I already like them in real life, I want to get to know them a little bit better. In other words, the immediacy (the focus on “now”) of FaceBook, which felt so problematic when I first joined, is actually something I enjoy and look forward to. What’s different between when I first joined and now that makes me enjoy the immediacy? I think the main difference is that I have now gotten my FaceBook life “caught up” with my real life. What do I mean by “caught up”?
The rhetoric of FaceBook assumes that life begins when you join the social network. So you are “now” friends with someone you’ve known for a long time simply because FaceBook “now” knows about that relationship. Each time you add some detail about your life to FaceBook, the rhetoric reminds you that your life has “now” begun, that everything before either didn’t exist or was somehow not quite “real”. The feeling that your FaceBook life is more “real” than your BFB (Before FaceBook) life is disconcerting. But once you get the details in to your profile, FaceBook has “caught up” to your actual life and so the things that you do in FaceBook really are happening “now”. So for me, the rhetoric no longer feels like a mismatch with my “reality”. Now that my FaceBook life is more closely aligned with my real life, I appreciate the “nowness” of FaceBook. The “nowness” means I’m learning current tidbits about these friends of mine.
Although most of my friends and I interact in this indirect manner, reading each other’s general updates, there is one friend with whom I have had an ongoing direct conversation. This friend is an ex-partner of mine with whom I have maintained inconsistent email contact for the past 15+ years (since our break-up). Now that we are both on FaceBook, we have been using its messaging system to engage in a long, intimate conversation. The messaging system is similar to email but because it is embedded in FaceBook, I also get to see the frequent (or infrequent, depending on the friend) updates that my friends make to their profiles. And so when a friend posts a new photo or a link she finds interesting, I can see those things which contextualizes our FaceBook messages in a way that isn’t easily accomplished via email. So far, this long conversation with my ex has been the most surprising aspect of FaceBook for me. Until I experienced how different this kind of direct contextualized communication via FaceBook is compared to regular email, I wouldn’t have believed that it would matter so much. The other interesting thing about this aspect of FaceBook is that although I’ve enjoyed our online communication, I am not tempted to meet in real life for a face-to-face conversation about the break-up or about our current lives (both of which are topics in our online conversation). FaceBook provides a useful buffer, or maybe it’s a cover, without which I’m not sure I would be comfortable enough to keep the conversation going.
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about is why FaceBook has captured my attention in a way that the other social networking environments I’ve joined (MySpace and LinkedIn, for example) have not. My nephew is on MySpace and so I’ve spent some time communicating with him there. But I find these other environments far less compelling than FaceBook. One reason, I’m sure, is because most of my friends, the ones I’m interested in communicating with, are using FaceBook rather than these other environments. But I think the main reason is that FaceBook makes it extraordinarily easy to find and communicate with people you know. When I joined FaceBook, it immediately suggested some people that I might know. Once I was friends with some of those people, it used their friends to suggest other people I might know. In contrast, on MySpace, I had to think about who I might know there, coming up with their names out of the blue. In addition, when I tried to find my nephew on MySpace, I had to weed through several pages of people with the same name, despite the fact that his friends are mostly from Goffstown NH (where he lives) and the fact that I went to Goffstown High School. It seems like it would be a simple matter to do some sort of matching to determine which Kyle LeBlanc I might be interested in connecting with. This is actually somewhat of a problem in FaceBook as well although my nephew was at least on the first page of many pages of Kyle LeBlancs. He should, I think, have been the first Kyle LeBlanc shown to me in both MySpace and FaceBook.
I also think it’s easier to communicate with your friends in a way that feels most comfortable and appropriate on FaceBook than it is on the other social networks. For example, my nephew and I were both on MySpace at the same time last night. I wanted to chat with him but in order to do so, I had to install a separate application (MySpace IM with Skype). On the other hand, the chat facility is built into the basic FaceBook interface so there’s no extra installation required. I appreciate that extra ease of use in FaceBook.
I still think there are some interesting problems with FaceBook but overall, I have been happy with my experience there. Time will tell whether it’s the newness of the tool that keeps me going back or whether it will become something I will wonder how I could have ever lived without.
One of the aspects of game analysis that my students struggle with has to do with the dramatic elements of a game. According to the text that I use in my Creating Games class (Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton, Chris Swain and Steven Hoffman), dramatic elements are those elements of the game that help to keep the players engaged in the game. There are five dramatic elements but the ones that my students struggle with are premise and story.
The text says that premise sets the stage for the action that will propel the game forward while story has to do with actual plot points in a narrative being told by the game. For example, the premise in Monopoly is that the player is a real estate mogul. But there is no story in Monopoly because there is no action that moves from point to point as determined by the author of the game. Fullerton and her co-authors say, “Plays, movies, and television are all media that involve storytelling and linear narratives. When an audience participates in these media, they experience a story that progresses from one point to the next as determined by an author. The audience is not an interactive participant in these media and cannot change the outcome of the story.” They go on to say that games are different in that the audience (the game player) interacts with a game and can (in fact, must be able to) change the outcome of the game. So traditional storytelling methods will not work in a game system because the player will not have enough of a sense of control if she cannot change the outcome of the game. The game will feel “fixed” or “random” which will result in an unsatisfying game-playing experience. Because of this need to have the player feel that she is in control of the progress of the game, very few games incorporate story as a dramatic element. Instead, most games use some sort of premise. Of course, some premises are more elaborate than others. When a premise gets to be very elaborate, it is called a backstory. Confused yet? Obviously, the boundary between premise and story is blurry.
I’ve been thinking about the word story a lot lately because of FaceBook. Every change that is made to your profile is called a story. So, for example, every time I change my status, a story is posted to my mini-feed as well as to the newsfeed for each of my friends. And then I can look at all my status stories. In fact, here are my status stories:
Saying that each of these items is a story is confusing to me. If you were to say that together these items make a story, each item being a plot point developed by me, the author, then I would understand why the word story is used. But how is each of these items a story by itself? I think this is yet another example of FaceBook coopting a word and changing its meaning.
