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It reminds me of my personal memory not long ago. On Christmas Eve in 2019, I went to Changzhou, Jiangsu to attend the funeral of the younger cousin. He suffered a sudden brain tumor rupture. After suffering a month in the ICU, he unfortunately died young. Although our brothers often played together when they were young, they grew up and lost contact because of the different sides. It is nothing more than a text message greeting each other during the Chinese New Year.
It wasn’t until the New Year’s Eve dinner in the 2017 Chinese New Year that I said, “Let’s pull a group and have a black bar.” It was only when there was a small group of people outside the family group of parents and elders. In the next two or three years, we battled in the group every three and five, sharing the wonderful playback of the game, and the topic of chat was slowly derived from the game to work life, childbirth, etc., and became only children. We maintained the important bond of the family’s next generation of emotions until the unfortunate occurrence at the end of last year. The last time he chatted with me during his lifetime was the self-incrimination ridicule after being abused together in the brotherhood.
Now, after entering the game, his player user page is still there, the record is still there, the video playback of our wonderful group is still there, and even the avatar frame is still shiny. The old man is dead, but the King’s World has left us with digital memories and true memories of him.
From the perspective of “taking oneself as a method”, this painful personal memory undoubtedly has the field value of the player’s personal experience inside and outside the game, and it is precisely because of such emotional factors that we have constructed the true meaning of the “entertainment” content. The understanding is far beyond the scope of “play”.
Individual experiences like this must be pitched among all groups of gamers. It is also for this reason that I am willing to invest time and mind to enrich the content design and meaning interpretation of a media platform that is rich in real interpersonal emotions.
I often ridicule that I have been engaged in participatory observation research in the field of games for more than thirty years. I have been thinking about a question: how is the social concept of “game” constructed? How does this concept constrain our imagination of “game” and “play” behavior? How should we understand from the perspective of sociology or digital anthropology?
From the perspective of individual experience, the correct name for the interpretation of the meaning of “game” is actually the “correct name” for the true emotion of a generation of players: after all, for a long time in the past, the meaning of game players, behavior and text They have been oversimplified and abstracted from specific life scenarios. Nowadays, the design and content interpretation of cultural products are to break these “oversimplifications” and return to the real and rich social and historical scenarios.
I divide this “oversimplification” into three areas.
First of all, it simplifies the complexity of the player group too much, and there is a moral imagination mainly based on minors.
From the imagination of the audience/player group, the large entertainment industry, including the game industry, has been facing a morallegitimacy crisis in the protection of minors. And the government regulation of the entertainment industry often starts with the protection of minors. In fact, the development of the entertainment content industry is the result of the transformation of the middle-class lifestyle in mainland China since the reform and opening up.
As the middle class becomes a socially dominant group, the concept of “entertainment” has gained widespread social recognition and “unserious” social behavior has gained legitimacy. People no longer think that the purpose of mass entertainment is to escape, but a pursuit of their longing for life.
The audience in the gaming industry has long been able to cover all sociodemographic categories. Minor players are only a very small part of it, and there are a series of mechanical designs to protect minors from addiction. Under the ubiquitous characteristics of the overall user group, people of different social strata, age strata, and occupational characteristics are a rational, autonomous, and self-consistent consumption decision for the contact and use of games.
What are the characteristics of middle-aged game motivation and behavior? Who are the senior players of “Glory of the King”? How old are they fighting for? How do they play games for students in China or overseas Chinese? What are the behavioral habits and gaming experience with the characteristics of the crowd? Specific descriptions like this require us to collect and interpret.
It reminds me of participating in an offline two-dimensional anime fan group the previous year. To my surprise, sitting in the front row of me was an elderly couple with white hair. Their enthusiasm and professionalism were not weaker than any of the young people who were present and mastered this skillfully. A professional call technique and formula.
My other scholar friend told me that in her research, many pregnant women particularly like to play Love and Producer, which inspired her to do a female player research.
Such scenes constantly remind us to maintain our imagination in any field of sociology and anthropology. We need an anthropological investigation of user group contact motivation and behavior, not just a description at the data level, but from the perspective of meaning construction, try to understand the cultural practices of different groups in the game network; we must recognize the differences in the height of the player group Sexuality, the different motives of different groups of players for the game, and the highly complex social dynamics behind.
Second, it simplifies the complexity of “play” too much, and mistakenly believes that “play” is a repetitive action of a highly addicted mechanical system.
In fact, the “play” behavior is a systematic behavior including individual/team learning, social interaction, cooperation, content production (prosumer) and other action matrices.
As the “game” itself has changed from content to an important media platform, the “play” behavior has become more and more abundant. From the early game industry club to today’s more complex in-game cooperation mechanism, players can obtain experiences with multiple values including narrative, socializing, learning, creating, and sharing.
In several of my “Glory of the King” player teams, I also found that players will focus on the core behavioral event of “Kaihei”, expand information sharing outside the game and form a social relationship of quasi-acquaintances, etc. , Produced an emotional projection similar to “comrades”.
In my previous research on virtual reality games, I found that “game” has become an “immersive communication” behavior, and the “play” action can be refined into sensory experience, spatial practice, and identity The physical experience including five subcategories of experience, emotional experience, and fictional/non-fictional memory, thus affecting the “real/virtual” experience structure of the audience.
In the study of multiplayer online games, some researchers found that players are based on social clues provided by the game’s affordability, such as social clues, and trust each other through resource reciprocity, skill reciprocity and information reciprocity It highlights everyone’s experience and skills, coordinates the interests of community members, and facilitates the completion of cooperative behavior.
Gamers’ continuous investment in time and actions makes social interactions repeat. They attach great importance to the persistence of the game community. Observation of such cooperative behavior can see how the social form of the network society can be surpassed Individual/collective, online/offline traditional binary opposition.
Third, it simplifies the inter-textuality of the game text and the formal social situation, mistakenly thinking that the game is an “anti-social” text and is highly Personalized, housed, isolated, blockedStops the meaning of the player’s independent construction of real social life.
In fact, players construct the social meaning of games in specific social situations and personal situations, so game behavior should be “pro-social.”
Traditionally, most of the scenes of game addiction presuppose a premise that some young players are obsessed with in-game upgrades and nothing In the endless Daguai, in such a dystopian scene, the significance of the real physical world is second to him.
This kind of imagination has undergone qualitative changes in the new Internet ecology today.
Mobile online games make the scene of “playing games” no longer limited to an imaginary “abandoned corner of society”; more importantly, the integration of social genes has become a spatial structure hole that opens up the meaning of virtual/real social texts. (Structural hole) bridge.
From my personal experience, the game behavior enriches the real social scenes and themes.
For example, relatives and cousins who live in different places will have more topics because of grouping together and trigger more social behaviors. For the one-child generation, it may be more likely to narrow the psychological distance of family members;
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From another professional point of view, my students and I formed group together in our spare time to enrich the dimension of teacher-student relationship;
Another example is the weak link relationship with the old classmates who haven’t seen for many years, and the old friends who have drifted away. The social and cooperative relationships in the game have been strengthened.
All these indicate that the personal experience of the virtual/real narrative space is not only a zero-sum game, but is more likely to become a positive relationship that nourishes each other.