Arianna Boldi
ABSTRACT
The goal of this research is to study the organizational dynamics that are enacted by amateur players, streamers, and professionals in a multiplayer First-Person Shooter video game, namely Call of Duty: Warzone. These categories of players represent different “work-play” conditions, as they have different motives for playing. I assume that these players may enact different organizational behaviors to reach their objectives. To explore this hypothesis, I have been conducting a digital ethnography within an Italian gaming community since 2021, employing observations, semi-structured interviews and analysis of the communication exchanges occurring during the gaming sessions. In the literature, a cross-comparison between these players is currently missing. This work may then clarify how different “combinations of work and play” may affect players’ behaviors and organizational dynamics, as well as how they may be differently impacted by the design of the game.
- Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre and Isabel Colón de Carvajal. 2015. Is the avatar considered as a participant by the players? A conversational analysis of multi-player videogames interactions. PsychNology J. 13, 2 (2015), 127-148.Google Scholar
- Arianna Boldi, Amon Rapp, and Maurizio Tirassa. 2022. Playing during a crisis: The impact of commercial video games on the reconfiguration of people's life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Human-Computer Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2022.2050725Google Scholar
- Julia Ayumi Bopp, Elisa D. Mekler, and Klaus Opwis. 2016. Negative Emotion, Positive Experience? Emotionally Moving Moments in Digital Games. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2996–3006. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858227Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dmitri Botvich, Jimmy McGibney, Georgy Ostapenko, Stefano De Paoli, Aphra Kerr, and Max Keatinge. 2010. Integrating players, reputation and ranking to manage cheating in MMOGs. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 17–24. https://doi.org/10.1145/1822348.1822351Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nick Butler, Lena Olaison, Martyna Sliwa, Bent Meier Sørensen, and Sverre Spoelstra. 2011. Work, play and boredom. ephemera theory & politics in organization 11, 4, 329-335.Google Scholar
- Gerardine Desanctis and Peter Monge. 1999. Introduction to the Special Issue: Communication Processes for Virtual Organizations. Organization Science 10, 6 (June 1999), 693–703. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.10.6.693Google ScholarDigital Library
- Julian Dibbell. 2016. Invisible labor, invisible play: Online gold farming and the boundary between jobs and games. Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L., 18, 419, Article 2.Google Scholar
- Catherine D. Cramton. 2001. The Mutual Knowledge Problem and Its Consequences for Dispersed Collaboration. Organization Science 12, 3 (May 2001), 346–371. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.12.3.346.10098Google ScholarDigital Library
- Raul Ferrer-Conill. 2018. Playbour and the Gamification of Work: Empowerment, Exploitation and Fun as Labour Dynamics. In Technologies of Labour and the Politics of Contradiction, Dynamics of Virtual Work series, Paško Bilić, Jaka Primorac, Bjarki Valtýsson (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 193-210. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76279-1_11Google Scholar
- Mark R. Johnson and Jamie Woodcock. 2021. Work, play, and precariousness: An overview of the labour ecosystem of esports. Media, Culture & Society 43, 8, 1449-1465. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437211011555Google ScholarCross Ref
- Richard D. Johnson and Linda C. Isenhour. 2003. 6. Changing the rules? Human resources in the 21st century virtual organization. In Advances in Human Performance and Cognitive Engineering Research, Vol. 3, Dianna Stone (Ed.). Elsevier Science/JAI Press, pp. 119–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1479-3601(02)03006-0Google Scholar
- Charles Kiene, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2018. Managing Organizational Culture in Online Group Mergers. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW, Article 89 (Nov. 2018), 21 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274358Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Audrey Korsgaard, Arnold Picot, Rolf T. Wigand, Isabelle M. Welpe, and Jakob J. Assmann Cooperation, Coordination, and Trust in Virtual Teams: Insights from Virtual Games. In Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual, Human-Computer Interaction Series, William Sims Bainbridge (Ed.). Springer, Cham, 253-264. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-825-4_20Google Scholar
- Yubo Kou and Xinning Gui. 2014. Playing with strangers: understanding temporary teams in league of legends. In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play (CHI PLAY '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 161–169. https://doi.org/10.1145/2658537.2658538Google ScholarDigital Library
- Haewoon Kwak and Jeremy Blackburn. 2014. Linguistic analysis of toxic behavior in an online video game. In International conference on social informatics (SocInfo 2014). Springer, Cham, 209-217. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_26. arXiv:1410.5185v1Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andras Lukacs, David G. Embrick, and Talmadge Wright. 2010. The Managed Hearthstone: Labor and Emotional Work in the Online Community of World of Warcraft. In Facets of Virtual Environments (FaVE 2009). Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 33, Fritz Lehmann-Grube, Jan Sablatnig. (Eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11743-5_13Google Scholar
- Lorenza Mondada. 2012. Coordinating action and talk-in-interaction in and out of video games. In The appropriation of media in everyday life, Ruth Ayaß and Cornelia Gerhardt (Eds.), 231-270.Google Scholar
- Amon Rapp. 2017. Designing interactive systems through a game lens: An ethnographic approach. Computers in Human Behavior, 71, 455-468. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.048Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amon Rapp. 2018a. Autoethnography in Human-Computer Interaction: Theory and Practice. In New Directions in Third Wave Human-Computer Interaction: Volume 2 - Methodologies, Human–Computer Interaction Series, Michael Filimowicz and Veronika Tzankova (Eds.). Springer, Cham, 25-42. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-73374-6_3Google Scholar
- Amon Rapp. 2018b. Gamification for Self-Tracking: From World of Warcraft to the Design of Personal Informatics Systems. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 80, 15 pages. doi: 10.1145/3173574.3173654Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amon Rapp. 2018c. Social game elements in world of warcraft: Interpersonal relations, groups, and organizations for gamification design. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 34, 8, 759-773. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2018.1461760Google ScholarCross Ref
- Amon Rapp. 2020. An exploration of world of Warcraft for the gamification of virtual organizations. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 42, 100985Google ScholarCross Ref
- Amon Rapp. 2021a. A Gameful Organizational Assimilation Process: Insights from World of Warcraft for Gamification Design. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW3, Article 263 (December 2020), 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3434172Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amon Rapp. 2021b. In search for design elements: A new perspective for employing ethnography in human-computer interaction design research. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 37, 8, 783-802. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10447318.2020.1843296.Google Scholar
- Amon Rapp. 2022. Time, engagement and video games: How game design elements shape the temporalities of play in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Information Systems Journal 32, 1, 5-32. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12328Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nicholas Taylor, Kelly Bergstrom, Jennifer Jenson, and Suzanne de Castell. 2015. Alienated Playbour: Relations of Production in EVE Online. Games and Culture 10, 4, 365-388. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412014565507Google ScholarCross Ref
- T. L. Taylor. 2003. Power games just want to have fun?: instrumental play in a MMOG. In Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up (DGRA’03), Vol. 2.Google Scholar
- T. L. Taylor. 2012. Raising the stakes: E-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Maria Törhönen, Lobna Hassan, Max Sjöblom, and Juho Hamari. 2019. Play, playbour or labour? The relationships between perception of occupational activity and outcomes among streamers and YouTubers. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mikko Vesa, Juho Hamari, J. Tuomas Harviainen, and Harald Warmelink. 2017. Computer Games and Organization Studies. Organization Studies 38, 2 (2017), 273–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840616663242 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840616663242Google ScholarCross Ref
- Austin Walker. 2014. Watching us play: Postures and platforms of live streaming. Surveillance and Society 12, 3: 437-442.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nick Yee. 2006. The Labor of Fun How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play. Games and Culture 1, 1, 68-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412005281819Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- “Come on, Guys, Let's Stick Together!”: Organizational Dynamics Emerging among Players in a First-Person Shooter Video Game
Recommendations
About the Blurring of Work and Play: Organizational Dynamics Emerging in a First-Person Shooter Videogame
CSCW'22 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social ComputingThe aim of this study is to investigate the organizational dynamics occurring in a multiplayer video game. The research involves E-sports professionals, streamers, and amateur players, who have different motives for playing and represent different “work-...
First-Person Shooter Game for Virtual Reality Headset with Advanced Multi-Agent Intelligent System
MM '16: Proceedings of the 24th ACM international conference on MultimediaWe present a multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) game with advanced intelligent non-playable characters (NPC) under computer control. The game is specially adapted for playing in VR headset so the simulator sickness symptoms are significantly ...
The Effects of Auditory Latency on Experienced First-Person Shooter Players
MuC '22: Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2022Latency is inherently part of every interactive system and is particularly critical in video games. Previous work shows that visual latency above 25 ms reduces game experience and player performance. However, latency does not only affect visual ...
Comments