Friendly Communication Via Xbox Live

Friendly Communication Via Xbox Live

By:
Mikael Buencamino
Catherine Cahill
Kevin Kim
Alyssa Mervyn
Jennifer Uken
Nicole Vargo

Professor Tom Boellstorff
Anthropology 128C
June 10th, 2010

Introduction
In the realm of cyberspace nothing compares to popularity and the universal appeal of videogames. An incredible sum of money is spent on videogame production, advertising, distribution, and an even more overwhelming amount is spent by the general public on these games. In 2008 the videogame industry was worth $22 billion and has continued to increase through present day. This incredibly lucrative market is not only responsible for incredible amounts of currency exchange but it also commands people’s attention for countless hours a day all over the globe. With advanced technology, like online gaming forums like Xbox Live which has over 20 million registered users, gamers can play against each other across the globe and communicate during contests. This element of communication is especially interesting to our group of anthropological researchers because it brings a new sense of human connection to the formerly isolating nature of videogame playing. As a group, we decided to examine the relationships of friends and their communication patterns via Xbox Live. To further narrow our scope of focus we chose the most popular game for the console Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which sold 4.7 million copies worldwide within 24 hours of release. With the popularity of Xbox Live and the game we chose we knew we’d be able to find plenty of subjects to help us answer our research question: is online gaming via Xbox Live an effective means of communication for friends? We expect our results to indicate that it is effective for some groups of friends. Our research will delve into the more humanistic side of gaming, the interactions and communication of gamers and the relationships they form in this competitive cyberspace.
Literature Review: Articles from Class
While the basis of our research is grounded in the Xbox Live networking platform, the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (from here on, known as COD) in of itself warrants enough influence through both its design and intent for a closer analysis. In “Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise,” an article composed by Reeves et. al., the authors breaks down the very elements that comprise the first person shooter (FPS) audience unique. While Reeves uses the game Counter-Strike as his research base, the same elements apply and extend to FPS online-play in general. A “core component of FPS experiences is the pleasure obtained from the player’s engagement and gradual mastering of the game mechanic” (Reeves 2009:206). As players surpass the initial skill level of synching their movements with the environment, they begin to develop a sense of the terrain and actually play tactically. Contrasting significantly with Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games and other consistent environments, FPS players display their skill through mastery of both the game mechanics and its environments rather than developing deep, meaningful social relationships that accompany questing or participating in a guild. Due to the incredibly technical nature of COD there will be a definite effect on the communication patterns of the gamers. Therefore, the general research question requires ascertaining if this technical atmosphere is still conducive to forging and maintaining friends.
In “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project,” Mimi Ito and her fellow researchers investigate a myriad of technologies that were found to be used frequently by today’s youth as a means of self-directed learning. She drew such conclusions through methods of peer-based responses. She discusses the way in which online spaces enable youth to extend their friendships through online spaces like “gaming sites [that] work as mediums for young people to extend, enhance, and hang out with people they already know” (Ito 2008:16). In our own research, we will explore this idea and see if Xbox Live allows us to see if there are similarities between the way people will come together and play a game of basketball and the interaction of players and friends during a game of COD.
We think that for some people, the gaming extension of a friendship allows the sharing of technical knowledge, as Ito noted “[a]mong boys, gaming has become a pervasive social activity and a context where they share technical and media-related knowledge” (Ito 2008:26). It is in this observation that boys that are using gaming as a social means and context to share this kind of knowledge, and that may make it difficult for us to locate girl gamers to interview for our own research.
Kristen Haring’s “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance,” analyzes the social implications of technologies long-outdated in their use, which provides insight into how technology has shaped certain social norms. The amateur radio hobbyists, or “hams,” of the Cold War era may very well be the equivalent of the male gamer on Xbox Live. According to Haring, “95 to 99 percent were male. On average the ham had completed more years of schooling...than the nonhobbyist, and he was far more likely to hold a job in a technical field” (Haring 2003:735). Additionally, Haring argues that the promotion of technical hobbies in young boys during this era effectively “grounded masculinity in technology” (Haring 2003:740). In society, there persists a consistency of male-dominance in electronic technologies in both their use and in technical employment such as networking, information technologies, and computer services. One of our goals by researching the communicational patterns of gamers is to also see if societal norms like this are reflected in the online gaming community.
Video games are still striving to gain mass appeal. Efforts made in providing more accessible products for those potential gamers outside of the usual gamer demographic, males in their twenties, have proven successful. For example, sales of gaming consoles, like Nintendo Wii, have increased dramatically, and online gaming environments, like Second life, have gained in popularity. . However, the content in the games themselves still caters largely to this stereotype, as Adrienne Shaw analyzes in her article “Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games.” The continued presence of the male majority in technological fields observed earlier in both our research and in the contributions of various researchers is supplemented by Shaw’s analysis of the audiences marketed to by the gaming industry. Shaw states, “… the video game industry greatly limits their market by only appealing to male gamers...annihilating girls and women gaming culture potentially circumscribes their participating in technology careers, because games are often a gateway to computing careers,” (Shaw, 2009:233). In this instance, we can perceive the way in which technological careers are perpetually filled by males as attributable to the way the end product is being produced and marketed.
Literature Review: Outside Sources
Our research question asks video game players about their communication with other players. This communication with other players can differ due to their relationship of varied significance: ties can be strong, they can be weak, or they can be somewhere in between. A strong tie is often considered a connection between close friends. A weak tie is a distant connection that is responsible for the general structure of social networks in society. In the article, The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust, Levin and Cross state that relationships and friendships are crucial to knowledge and creation transfer, and that trustworthiness is a mechanism by which strong ties enable learning. They conclude that the people in strong ties are more accessible and more willing to help. For our research project, we seek to explore the strength of ties between gamers and who they normally play with in attempts to better understand the role of communication in the Xbox online forum. While Levin and Cross do not deny the importance of strong ties, they note that that weak ties provide more useful knowledge than strong ones. Weak ties can be helpful for video game players like those who play Xbox Live, because different strategies and designs in the handling of certain gaming situations. This can be useful knowledge that can be transferred from one social network to another through these weak ties.
In the article, Joining the Video-Game Literacy Club, Norton-Meier discusses how her cohort group, parents with teenage children, feels technologically alienated from the younger generation because of video games on the Xbox. She discusses how this generation, also known as “digital natives,” thinks and processes information differently than her generation. Norton-Meier goes on to discuss how in her own home, the dinner conversation revolves around Xbox and how to handle certain gaming situations. She concludes that “games are a way of knowing – a place of informal learning where entertainment comes first and learning is embedded in the moment” (Norton-Meier 2005:428). This article relates to our research question regarding communication through video games because it shows how our generation uses technology as a major form of communication and learning. Digital natives who play these video games have drastically changed the way people communicate with each other in today’s ever-changing technologically-advanced society. This article is concentrated on effects games have on communication external to video games whereas our research is based on the internal communication of gamers during the game and if it is a feasible and worthwhile means of communication.
In another article, Video Games and the Future of Learning, the authors propose the idea that video games can transform education and learning. They describe how video games can create new and powerful ways to learn in school communities and workplaces. The authors further state that “schools largely sequester students from one another and from the outside world, games bring players together – competitively and cooperatively – in the virtual world of the game and in the social community of its players” (Shaffer et. al. 2005:107). This article relates to our research question because it shows that video games don’t just serve the purpose of playing a competitive game. Instead it allows the players to communicate with each other and share knowledge. Just as the authors describe video gaming as a social phenomenon, communication through this medium gives the players an opportunity to learn in a setting that is not purely academic, allowing the players to build not only their social skills, but their competitive communication skills as well.
Method and Data Collection
Our ethnographic research takes place both inside and outside of the online gaming world of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The methods used in our research, in addition to the literature explored above, were interviews and a mixture of participant and complete observation. Our goal was to obtain a sample representative of the common, mainstream gamer, and to interview them as well as observe how gaming over Xbox Live affected their communication patterns and relationships.
Interviews were conducted on a one-on-one basis through various means. These mediums were e-mail, telephone, in-person, and in-game. Various interviews were conducted and the age group typically fell between the age group of eighteen and thirty-six. Each member of our group conducted interviews with subjects of their choice along with our standardized set of interview questions. Each group member’s characteristics slightly influenced the process because they asked occasional follow-up questions to acquire additional information on something that particularly interested them and might pertain to their individual paper. Also, each group member chose people they knew were gamers, which as a result included mostly their friends. This could have had an adverse effect as some of the interviews, as the interviews might not have been taken seriously by those that took them.
The interviews themselves were fairly encompassing, with questions regarding the communication patterns of the online Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 users on the platform of Xbox Live. We asked numerous questions about the game’s potential to affect friendships in a positive or negative way as well as other various questions about gaming habits and the relationship between gaming and reality. Geography was also taken into account for both the interviewee and the location of those he played with on a regular basis. Interviews were also documented and coded for the determination of any particular trends.
Participant and complete observation required certain group members to actively play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 over Xbox Live and attempt to converse with other players with the goal of conducting an interview. Other group members would simply observe others playing the game to solely pay attention to how the gamers communicated with each other. We were limited by the amount of interviews we could obtain while in the game due to the nature of the game’s multiplayer format and the motivations of the gamers themselves. This is possibly due to the fact that each match is usually an intense ten minute round that warrants the most of one’s attention span. However, we were successful in conducting some very intriguing interviews and did gain valuable qualitative information through observing communication between other gamers.
After careful consideration of our methodology, we then turned our focus to remaining ethical in all our researching endeavors. We made sure to keep the identity of the respondents completely anonymous to ensure that they would not be wary of answering honestly. Also, we gave the same survey to everyone in order to retain consistency and equality among all our subjects. In our data section we included all of our findings to give a holistic and unbiased analysis. We took special care in our interviews to notify everyone, even the strangers online, that we were anthropological researchers and obtained permission to use any data we collected from them.
Data and Results
When embarking on this research, we hoped to find encompassing data representing if and how people use the Xbox Live and the COD gaming platform to maintain, make, and foster friendships. We found that people do communicate via Xbox Live, but also found that few treat communication through online gaming like the actions of calling, emailing, texting, or instant messaging. Most people considered the activity of the game their focus and communicating was simply an additional and less emphasized ability of Xbox Live. It is our belief that if the technology was not available, people would continue to rely on other ways to communicate with friends and new acquaintances.
One of the first questions in our surveys was, “Do you depend on this as a form of communication between you and your friend(s)?” The most common response to the question was a simple “no,” which accounted for 50% of our total respondents. An unexpected trend we discovered was that multiple respondents used or depended on Xbox Live to communicate with specific friends. Upon further questioning of the individuals, they indicated that Xbox Live was a way for them to keep in touch and stay connected with their friends who were more interested in gaming. This strongly suggests that some people do use the system to stay connected with friends. When we asked, “How frequently do you use online games as a form of communication (ex: choosing this over texting. phone calls, instant messaging)?” the trend for not using the system to communicate persisted as 42.9% responded that they never use online games to communicate. However, 23.1% said they only occasionally chose the communication option when they play online. Therefore, the gaming console to our subjects has become a device similar to a telephone that they can use and expect to converse with friends.
The interesting part of the first set of results is the fact that people do not traditionally acknowledge Xbox Live as a main form of communication, but after further questioning many people did report that Xbox Live was as an incredibly effective means of communication with some of their friends. When asked “Is it an effective means of communication between you and your friend?” Only 20% of people responded that it was not. The other 80% agreed that it was anywhere from somewhat to very effective and 9.8% of those agreed it was effective but they preferred another form of communication. To take it one step further, 72.2% respondents felt communicating in the game strengthened their friendship in some form. The number one reason for this, cited by 35.3% of respondents, was that the teamwork and communal aspects to the games played on Xbox Live, like Call of Duty, provided something for them to bond over and, therefore, brought them closer together. This may be due to the fact that an overwhelming 91.6% of respondents talked about things other than the game. So once again, even though people do not consider the gaming system as a device like a telephone meant for communicating, they are still using the opportunity to communicate with each other about various things. Respondents consistently recalled conversation topics revolving around school, life, current events, plans, jokes, and all other elements of casual to serious conversation.
In our ethnographic research we also found that many times groups of friends, or groups of strangers even, would communicate among themselves regarding similar topics to those discussed above. We furthered our research on these conversations by having some of our group members engage in a mixture of participant and observation study through playing Call of Duty with strangers and conversing with them. Between two researchers over six different occasions we logged a total of ten hours of complete observation and an additional six hours of mixed participant observation. This provided us with enlightening qualitative data and interesting examples.
During the most successful session of one of our mixed participation and observation studies, our researcher played through several rounds of Call of Duty with strangers, totaling approximately an hour, before addressing them as a researcher. Throughout the game the players had shared jokes with each other, helped each other out for the ranking boost, and had multiple conversations. As researchers we knew where they were from, about their family life, what they did that day, plans for the weekend, and even shared an emotional moment with one of the respondents as his dog of 15 years had just passed away. When we told them we were doing an anthropological communication project they were caught off guard but intrigued and answered many of our questions. We learned that many times people like playing with strangers because they learn a great deal of things from them inside and outside the game. For example, in the game they learn new places to hide and different strategies for the levels. Outside the game though, they learn about various people’s lives and they practice their debating skills.
Also, it was clear that there was a distinct vernacular and dependence on gamer jargon throughout the conversations. Phrases and slang have been coined specifically in the gaming forum and are now part of popular culture. This is indicative of the community that communication through gaming can produce, and the impact it can have on the surrounding popular culture.
Another question we asked interviewees if they have noticed any negative impacts online gaming has had on their friendships and if they have lost any friends due to the nature of the game. Some responded that it had the potential to if they were excessively mean during the game, but for the most part frustration in the game does not transfer to real life. One respondent disagreed and said that he refuses to play games with his friends online anymore because he is not nice when he plays. He plays to win and his friends do not appreciate his overzealous attitude. Although the environment of the online forum condones and encourages the typically inappropriate comments that sometimes upset people, many of the conversations we witnessed or partook in were incredibly interesting and made us feel connected to those we were playing with.
It is these positive conversations that have led our group to believe that the online gaming forum provided by Xbox Live is a useful tool for making and maintaining friends. Since videogames are wildly popular and people enjoy playing together, it is safe to assume that it could be quite an advantageous way to obtain new friends and socially network. Data from the interviews, however, suggests otherwise, with 55.6% answering “no” to the following question: “have you met and maintained friendships over the online forum?” One particular respondent took it to an extreme and stated that, “I play online games to have alone time. Video games are my escape from reality, I’m not looking for new and exciting ways to connect with people, and I’m especially disinterested in making new friends.” However, a significant 33.4% replied that they had forged and fostered various friendships of some degree. The responses have an extensive range in the level of acquaintanceship, as some only maintained the connection for no more than a few months. There are exceptions, however, because one particular respondent replied, “I’ve been friends with one person for over six years now and I’ve never actually met the guy. But we still talk regularly over gaming and whatever else” (Respondent #7 2010:6/3). Subsequently, even though some are deterred by the idea of making and maintaining friends online, many people do use the Xbox Live system for such purposes. All of our results imply that the vast majority of people using the Xbox Live system are communicating in the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. After completing our research, our group agrees that the interactions and communication patterns that are present on Xbox Live are valuable and can be effective in maintaining relationships if gaming is the central mode of communication.
Analysis
• Discussion and Potential Reasons for our Results
The data collected on the distance between friends communicating via Xbox Live indicated that people rarely played with others outside their region. It was previously thought that the gamers we interviewed would often play with their friends who were residing in different states and regions that were not easily able to physically meet with. At first we were surprised by the results, but then we were told in an interview that they intentionally do not play with people in distant locations because there is an unbearable lag in the game due to the distance and varying internet speeds. If the Internet on the Xbox Live system was improved, the data would probably show that the people would play more often with cross-country friends.
Also, due to our demographic of college students, it is important to take into consideration that many students have not made considerable moves to different locations in the country or further. This would mean that people are still in relative proximity to their friends and therefore are more likely to play with their friends when they are in each other’s physical presence as opposed to relying on an online forum.
Another reason people avoid consistently relying on online games, specifically Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, as a means of communication is because people tend to grow out of games through maturity and no longer exhibit the desire to play them. If certain friends cease to play games that are supported and widely played on the online forum and instead to turn to solo games, they will need to find a different means of communication between their friends.
Overwhelmingly, the data shows that friendships entering the realm of Xbox Live are affected positively. When friends were not online playing together, we found that they were oftentimes physically playing online games in same room.
The research was effective in obtaining results for our particular demographic, as it allowed for conclusions mostly contrary to initial hypotheses. For example, it was expected certain data would prove that many gamers play with strangers online. There was no overwhelming evidence in the research that proved this hypothesis either way. For the most part, the data shows that people prefer to play with their friends online. When a friend is not currently online to a play a game, the gamer will oftentimes contact such friend to see if he is available to go online. In this sense, friendships with an Xbox Live factor are strengthened. However, the data sufficiently show that without this factor, all of those friendships would still survive. Most of the interviewees’ surroundings were similar, and therefore they have similar attitudes surrounding use of the game. These people did not meet each other online. Rather, their friendships were already formed before finding out the other played Xbox Live. Since these people were already friends, it is easy to treat playing Call of Duty like playing a basketball game at the local park or a few rounds of bowling. Granted, in most instances, the time on Xbox Live did not replace any of those activities. Instead, most evenings with friends will be spent out doing normal activities people in their twenties do, and will later be bookended by all gathering at one house to play Call of Duty together.
• Problems and Direction for Future Research
The data collected shows it to be true that many friendships are positively affected by online gaming, and is possibly also accurate in describing many other relationships with an Xbox component. However, in the limited use of subjects to collect such information, these findings cannot be generalized to all players of Xbox Live. The sample of people interviewed for this project was small compared to approximately twenty million current active registered users (Grant 2010:1). The majority of the subjects for this project were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six, from a college-educated or college-bound lifestyle, and largely not considered to spend exorbitant amounts of time playing video games. Therefore, the results of our research are limited in their scope and if more data could be collected through more interviews and participant and complete observation, more encompassing answers could be produced.
The additional people that would be valuable to this research would be the inclusion of female gamers and interviewees that are not actively a part of the college setting. Female gamers could likely have different answers to the interview questions than the male gamers did due to the fact that females and males generally have different communication patterns. Interviewing a demographic of individuals who are not enrolled in college would have been beneficial to our research because in the college setting, most gamers who did or did not play previously are surrounded by many people and find each other to play with. It is not necessary for these subjects to find and add strangers to play with online. Instead, they play with their friends that they already know.
Conclusion
After methodical research of gamers and their communication patterns via Xbox Live we were definitely surprised by a lot of the data we compiled and learned a considerable amount about the gaming community. We were pleased that our results indicated that it was an effective means of communication for groups of friends that shared a passion for gaming. However, the results were not entirely conclusive and further research would be beneficial to thoroughly explore the humanistic side of gaming.

Works Cited

Grant, Christopher
2010 Xbox by the numbers: 20m Xbox Live users, 10m nongaming, 39m Xbox 360 consoles worldwide. Joystiq, http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/06/xbox-by-the-numbers-20m-xbox-live-users-10m-nongaming-39m-xbo/, accessed on May 26.

Haring, Kristen
2003 The “Freer Men” of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance, Technology and Culture, 44(4):734–61.

Ito, Mimi et al
2008 Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.

Levin, Daniel and Cross, Rob
2004 The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer, Management Science, 50(11):1477-1490.

Norton-Meier, Lori
2005 Joining the Video-Game Literacy Club: A Reluctant Mother Tries to Join the “Flow,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(5):428-432.

Reeves, Stuart et al.
2009 Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise, Games and Culture 4(3):205–27.

Respondent #7
2010 Interview by Jennifer Uken. June 3.

Shaffer, David et al.
2005 Video Games and the Future of Learning, The Phi Delta Kappan, 87(2):104-111.

Shaw, Adrienne
2009 Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games, Games and Culture 4(3):228–53.