SOCIOLOGY
Games and play are historically social activities. While some of the early video games were two-player games, developments in computer technology and network availability allowed designers to create more elaborate multiuser systems. Ever since the release of the first multiplayer online games during the 1970s and early 1980s, people have been gathering online to play, compete, and socialize in imaginary environments. By the end of the twentieth century, multiplayer video games had become an important dimension of online social life and gained the attention of scholars as prominent research venues and subjects.
Sociologists are interested in multiplayer, online video games as a medium for human interactions. Video games are intriguing venues to observe the structures, cultural norms, dynamics, and self-presentations of online social groupings. From the sociological perspective, the ludic and playful dimensions of games, and their storylines and narrative structures, provide a necessary backdrop to understand technology in use. Sociologists maintain that games are extensions of the society in which people reside. According to T. L. Taylor (2006), multiplayer online video games are “situational and reliant not simply on abstract rules but also on social networks, attitudes, or events in one’s non/game life, technological abilities or limits, structural affordances or limits, local cultures, and personal understanding of leisure” (p. 156). Games represent another social location from which people communicate and interact with one another on a global scale, yet they are also produced by and, at the same time, are reproducing various relations of ruling.
Several sociologists have studied video games, players, and fandom. Nevertheless, the willingness of the broader sociological community to take virtual gaming seriously is rather underwhelming (Crawford, 2011). Moreover, game scholars have adopted only bits and pieces of the sociological framework. Thus, our social scientific knowledge about games is dominated by an individual and cultural focus, rather than the organizational and group focus that sociologists provide (Henricks, 2006). If presented systematically, the sociological perspective can connect player biographies and localized gamer idiocultures with larger societal developments, existing structures of power and domination. Sociology, rather than being antithetical to the current debates within the field of game studies, can contribute to our existing scholarly knowledge about video games and multiplayer online play.
Methodological Approaches
Existing sociological studies approached video games from quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodological perspectives. The general techniques and conventions of conducting research remain unchanged in technologically-produced environments. At the same time, researchers are able to take advantage of the digital and networked nature of video game play to collect, process, archive, and analyze quantities of data unimaginable before. Data-mining techniques are capable of producing more data than is manageable or understandable for a fieldworker. Therefore, sociological reasoning in these data-rich environments is still predicated upon an imaginative, critical, and reflexive approach. Methodological choices are best not made a priori, but negotiated in the field with regard to their capacities and to the questions asked (Coavoux, 2010).
Quantitative approaches to video game play research utilize survey methods, client-side data-mining applications or, less frequently, rely on server-side data. Our understanding of basic player demographics and how various titles attract different publics and taste cultures is predominantly derived from surveys (for instance, see Williams, Yee, and Caplan, 2008). Because researchers often lack access to large player populations, industry publications further their understanding of player demographics. Data from the video game industry are invaluable and highlight certain biases that social scientists may have toward game genres. While research about persistent multiplayer games and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games represents a large portion of the social scientific literature of video games, the Entertainment Software Association reports that these games are the favorite online games of only 11 percent of the American consumer base (Entertainment Software Association, 2012).
Jonathan Corliss (2011) believes that the disparity is explained by three factors. First, MMO games are designed around large-scale social interaction, in essence legitimizing video game study as a social scientific enterprise. Second, virtual worlds create distinct cultural fields, and, as such, they warrant being studied in their own right. Third, the interfaces learned and mastered in the context of MMO gaming are increasingly used in the technologies of everyday life.
Many games are designed with an open client-side user interface to allow customizations and modifications by the user community. This enables researchers to develop and use various applications and tools to collect data within the game world. Besides collecting chat-logs and analyzing economic trends, researchers can administer in-game censuses of players. These longitudinal data sets are instrumental in studying the organizational affiliations of characters, changes in various game metrics, and establishing player preferences (favorite map, play mode, etc.). The networked information helps sociologists to move from individual-level analysis and reconstruct organizational level data about social groups (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, and Moore, 2006).
Because online interaction is almost always social-network oriented, social network analysis offers a powerful framework for examining and interpreting social relationships within gameworlds. Data visualization gives researchers an excellent tool for quick pattern recognition. Network density, clustering, and centrality allow comparative analysis between social groupings (most commonly guilds and clans). Community and cohesive subgroup detection is used to understand why certain player communities thrive while others quickly dissolve (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, and Moore, 2007).
Qualitative research methods are especially well-suited to gather in-depth data about the social dynamics and the processes through which players construct their gameworld. Participant observation, one-on-one interviews, group interviews, and focus groups are the most common techniques sociologists use to understand the negotiation of identities, social roles, and status. Qualitative methods allow researchers to look at the social dimensions of gameplay from the perspective of players. The aim is not to elucidate a totalizing understanding of social behavior, but to connect seemingly incidental occurrences of social exchanges (Boellstorff, 2008).
Theoretical Foundations
Sociology is less concerned with the narrative structures and rules of video games, and more interested in the emergence of social practices and idiocultures within and connected to gameworlds. Social structures frame the play experiences and expressive life of humans. The rich history of sociological theory provides powerful tools to understand the role of play and fantasy in everyday life. However, as Henricks (2006) reminds us, the sociological perspective is rarely presented in a systematic way in the game studies literature. Currently symbolic interactionism, an approach that places emphasis on communication and the ongoing presentation of social selves, is the most widely used sociological theory in video game studies. While it is tempting to bring in symbolic interactionism as the primary model of social theory to explain in-game behavior, other theoretical approaches are equally useful, yet often overlooked.
While having a broader scope than video games per se, Henricks’s theory of play is the most complex, but surprisingly overlooked sociological approach to games to date. Henricks does not claim superiority of the sociological approach over existing scholarship, but attempts to complement the individual and cultural orientations toward play with a sociological, structural viewpoint. For him, play is a mode of expressive behavior (as an action or performance of an individual) and a mode of social interaction at the same time. Influenced by the classical sociological thought of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Erving Goffman, Henricks’s perspective frames play as a complicated interaction between people and the social conditions of their lives. Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression (2006) argues that play can only be understood relationally to other, not necessarily dissimilar and unconnected social categories, namely work, ritual, and communitas. He proposes that the relationship between these classifications can be analyzed by looking at degrees of contestation and predictability. Play and work represent contestive social activities; communitas and ritual are cooperative and unifying. On the one hand, work and ritual signify a more or less predictable, scripted mode. Conversely, play and communitas are less ordained and more spontaneous.
This model helps us understand the complex geometry of relations within gamespaces. Modernity and the rational, bureaucratic organization of social life established the dichotomy where work is seen an instrumental, rational, economic activity, while play is perceived as frivolous and unproductive. Yet, this relationship is much more complex, and fetishized instrumentalism is a central part of modern video games. This work and play antinomy has received considerable attention in video game studies (for instance see Yee, 2006; or Silverman and Simon, 2009). Scholars have established that the metaphor of labor is, indeed, useful for understanding user experiences. Recent scholarship by T. L. Taylor (2012) documents how games morph into professional, competitive e-sports with cyberathletes, teams, leagues, sponsors, and fans.
Ritual and communitas refer to the integrative elements of play. While game architectures are based on a certain degree of randomness and unpredictability, gaming communities participate in rituals that have a predictable, orderly, and even scripted quality. To partake in a ritual is to be part of something that transports players through the minutiae of life. Rituals are part of video game play: rich ethnographies describe the significance and meaning of various role-playing rituals (weddings, funerals, clan gatherings, initiations, etc.) in virtual worlds (Pearce, 2009).
Finally, communitas expresses an integrative, unpredictable mode of relationship. In great moments of collective festivity, players feel themselves caught up and carried along in a surge of public energy. Collective effervescence, the experience of pure sociality can overwhelm any commitment to rationality and competitiveness. This pure sociability is the basis of burgeoning fan communities. Audience studies have focused mainly on the player as the primary audience of a video game, but with the proliferation of live-streamed gameplay, we have seen the player emerge as a performance artist and object of fandom.
Henricks’s typology is helpful to conceptualize relatively stable collective participation frames within games. Frames, as a sociological concept, is built upon the understanding that finite worlds of meaning constitute human experiences. Erving Goffman (1974) argues that frames—some fickle, others comparatively more stable—construct social boundaries and provide interaction cues to shape events and participants’ experiences of said events. The construction and interpretation of frames does not happen in a vacuum, even though virtual realms create imaginary worlds of fiction. Thus, as players switch from game to game, engross themselves in high fantasy or dystopian science fiction, hop from game server to game server, play on consoles, smartphones, or PCs, or change game modes, their ability to interpret these experiences remains the same. As Gary A. Fine (1983) demonstrates, tabletop role-players rely on a few stable frameworks to be guided throughout gameplay, despite the co-existence of other, simultaneously existing frames at the same time. These stable frames are part of video game play as well.
The frames of work, ritual, and communitas are advantageous to understand various social groups’ orientation toward gameplay and provide a sociologically-grounded approach complementing Richard Bartle’s individual player orientations established in 1996. Bartle categorized players according to their play style as achievers, socializers, explorers, and killers. While frame analysis is more focused on interaction and culture, rather than rules and structures, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of field is useful to understand how stable frames provide concrete social contexts to govern participation and constitute spaces with their own logics of functioning. A field is a certain distribution structure of valued social assets or capitals, but it is not a product of a “coherence-seeking intention or an objective consensus […] but the product and prize of permanent conflict” (1993, p. 34).
To adopt a frame or to enter a field, players are required to embrace the tacit participation rules of a game. Participants are required to possess the required habitus (a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and transposable dispositions generated by class, race, and gender positions), knowledge, and skills to be seen as a legitimate player. Participation also means investing one’s (cultural, symbolic, academic) capital to try to maximize profit from participation. The notions of field, habitus, and capital embrace the dialectics that while social structures have subjective consequences, the very structures are built by individual actors.
Of course, some of Bourdieu’s work has already been adopted by video game studies. Thomas Malaby advocates the use of cultural capital to understand how players move between various virtual settings and the physical world (2006). Lukacs documents how social class and gender dispositions shape interaction within virtual realms (2011). At the same time, field and habitus are undertheorized and underused, even though these concepts anchor players in their everyday social networks while maintaining the relative autonomy of gaming idiocultures.
Both Goffman and Bourdieu stress that frames or fields, whether in gaming or other cultural spheres, are not mirrors of dominant ideologies. They have their own transformation rules. External determinants can have an effect only through the transformation in the structure of the field itself. In this sense, frame analysis from a symbolic interactionist perspective, and the concept of field-habitus from a more structural approach, both help game researchers to contextualize play experiences and connect them to larger societal processes.
Game Worlds and Social Play
As Crawford (2011) noted, the contribution of sociology to video game studies is still a significantly underdeveloped area. At the same time, the “social element” of online games has received considerable attention from researchers of various disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives. These scholars borrowed freely, although not necessarily in a systematic manner, from the sociological tradition to examine the relationship between game design and the development of social institutions, grouping patterns, the presentation of virtual selves and most importantly, persistent social groups (guilds) that provide a stable enough social setting to most game activities.
The “social element” of games develops through an interaction between the structure of the game itself and the social, cultural practices that emerge in and around game titles, franchises, and genres. Off-the-shelf products rely on certain collaboration infrastructures (communication tools, networking tools, and persistent social groups) to encourage the development of in-game sociability. According to economist Edward Castronova (2005), the most important design choices affecting social institutions in MMO games are:
• character roles (division of labor);
• character advancement through various in-game capital accumulation;
• uneven distribution of social status;
• risk and danger as an incentive structure;
• scarcity of resources and forced cooperation;
• communication infrastructures; and
• personalized game content and artificial intelligence.
These design choices offer affordances and social interaction possibilities for users. In this sense, online games as engineered social spaces are fascinating laboratories to observe the intended and unintended consequences of certain design choices.
Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, and Moore (2006) offer quantitative insight into the grouping patterns of a popular MMO game, World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), indicating that despite all the design choices encouraging social play and interaction, grouping patterns are not uniform throughout various stages of the game. They conclude that while the complex endgame phase from a group-play perspective is social, the game as a whole may not be. At the same time, they highlight that solo players in massively multiplayer environments are still part of the social fabric: they are always surrounded by others even when not playing with them.
In fact, sociability is much more complex than grouping patterns may indicate. Beyond direct support and companionship, other players serve as an audience for various presentations of selves (often linked with status displays of gaming capital and competence), social presence, and spectacle. While the distinction between players and audiences are much clearer in first-person shooter (FPS) games, it is nonetheless part of MMO games as well. In FPS environments, there is a constant back-and-forth movement between the roles of player and audience, or performer and critic, allowing players to negotiate the appropriate forms of interaction (Ducheneaut, 2010).
These accepted modes of interactions are not only game title specific, but different playing modes, servers, factions, maps, clans, and guilds form their own local cultures, called idiocultures. Because games attract diverse audiences (when considered by geographic location, age, social class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc.) success is measured by a player’s ability to integrate into a local idioculture. To become part of a community of play (Pearce, 2009), players have to learn and master various gaming and technological skills while maintaining desirable social selves. Gaining visibility and reputation is an active, although not necessarily conscious, social process. Both individual and organizational (guild) success is predicated upon reputation and status management, and the development of a sense of trust and responsibility (Taylor, 2006).
Bonnie Nardi (2010) observed that performative mastery is fundamental in building reputational capital. Performance is often measured and reported through various gaming mods. Wright, Boria, and Breidenbach’s work (2002) demonstrates that status is further established through virtual talk and behavior during down-time, in between games, or when one is forced into the role of spectator. Mastering this local gamer language, which borrows freely from popular and youth culture representation, is an admission requirement into the broader social network.
The management of reputation is a key component in becoming known as a skilled or knowledgeable player or an amicable playmate. On the group level, reputation is a key component of the creation of social hierarchies. These hierarchies are often anchored in measurable game achievements and goals, such as player versus player rankings, kill ratios, or raid progression. At the same time, role-playing communities often disregard these official matrices and establish their own.
Trust and responsibility is the foundation of group play, although the reliance on others provides a constant challenge to find adequate playing partners and recruit new members to fill gaming groups. While ethnographic accounts of play communities often focus on the persistence of social groups, especially in MMO games, various social accounting metrics remind us that guilds are indeed extremely fragile and group cohesion and longevity is often overestimated.
Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, and Moore (2007) believe that this fragility is due to various social factors and design flaws: leadership style, burn-out due to the repetitive nature of games, guild drama, and social pressures to participate. Pearce believes that persistent social formations and guilds resemble complex, decentralized, emergent social institutions and their rise and fall cannot be predicted by their underlying structures or set of rules, nor by individual behavior of stakeholders (2009). At the same time, the data presented by Ducheneaut and his colleagues convincingly demonstrate that guilds are more likely to survive if they attract large number of players, maintain a balanced class composition, and are organized around a dense internal social network.
There has been an explosion of academic interest in video games and other virtual worlds during the last decade. Much of the social scientific work, with some notable exceptions, is focused on games as “cultures.” As long as video games and the social dynamics of virtual realms are bracketed off from the “real” world, video games will remain marginalized for the field of sociology. Yet, given the importance of video games in modern society and the connection between these worlds of make-believe and consumer capitalism, it is important to expand the sociological lines of inquiry.
This essay offered a brief introduction to a sociological, organizational, and group perspective on video games. The sociological reframing of video game play allows researchers to fully embrace and discover the dialectic of contemporary video game play. This dialectic centers on predominantly for-profit enterprises developing titles by borrowing, transplanting, and transforming dominant ideologies, representations, and stereotypes. Packaged products are marketed under the rules of the transnational capitalist system. Still, the end-user is never a passive consumer of media products and the ideologies contained within them. Agentic users form communities of meaning, create lively idiocultures, and take ownership of virtual realms by challenging operators and publishers.
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