虚拟世界玩家互动中生活定位的社交动态研究

英文原文

Interactive online games for more than two players or multiplayer online games have become a popular object of investigation ever since social and cultural sciences began studying the Internet. Whilst initial studies on online games mainly focused on text-based virtual realities, over the course of the last few years there has been an increasing number of publications dedicated to games with a graphical user interface and several thousands of users playing simultaneously. This development has been accompanied by a series of related conferences and the establishment of specific publication platforms as well as research associations. In the US, game research, or game studies, has even become a topic covered by the general interest news media. However, in Germany apart from being covered as a business issue, this new field is only addressed by sporadic research, of which hardly any is based on rich empirical data. The specific genre of computer games called “massive multiplayer online games,” “persistent state worlds” or “massively multiplayer online roleplaying games” (MMORPG for short), which we address in this paper, can be understood as a subset of all online games for more than two players (including the purely text-based games). MMORPGs provide a graphic environment that resembles the real world in functionality (in the sense of possible actions) and appearance. The players control their online personae, which we will call characters, via a variety of modes of the human-computer-interface, confined by technical restrictions and more, or less, formalized and sanctioned rules. This thereby creates a parallel space of social interactions among the characters in the gameworld. From a research perspective such games are particularly interesting for at least two reasons. First of all, most of them are fully commercial games that do not require advanced computing skills like the older text-based games (for example, complicated computer commands to trigger actions). Therefore, in terms of socio-demographics they can be played by a much broader segment of Internet users, which is indeed the case. With about four percent of the German population frequently playing online computer games (regardless of genre) any effect of gaming on the offline life of the players is no longer confined to a minority of specialists. Hence the emphasis of some authors on the influence of economic activity inside the gameworld on real-world economies as a policy issue may not be exaggerated. Apart from the increasing scope of MMORPGs in terms of numbers of users, we can also expect qualitative differences compared to text-based games, as the graphical user interface and the variety of possible actions brings these games much closer to what we are familiar with from our offline experience. In this paper we present selected results from a study of such a game, called Ultima Online (1998) (Ultima Online for short). Ultima Online provides a medieval playing environment, in the virtual landscape “Britannia,” where the characters are among others miners, craftsmen, warriors, magicians, healers or bards. We chose Ultima Online in particular because it was already well established and it could therefore be assumed that the observed phenomena did not merely reflect the conditions just after the launch of the game but an established social space. Additionally, Ultima Online was at that time one of the largest games with respect to the number of possible simultaneous players. By June 1999 there were already approximately 130,000 active subscribers worldwide. About a year later, when we started our project, the number had doubled according to the game publisher. Currently, there are at least a dozen MMORPGs (for example Everquest, The Sims Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Asherons Call), some of which have a “history” of several years and some were launched even by corporate powerhouses such as Microsoft, Vivendi and Sony, a fact which underlines their increasing commercial relevance. At the time of our study, as Wellman and Giulia observed, there was a need for detailed observation and evidence in online research in order to replace anecdote. Accordingly, we launched our study on Ultima Online as an ethnographic fact-finding mission in an unknown region. First of all, we wanted to understand why people spend so many hours playing on the Internet. To learn more about this, we structured our analysis around several questions concerning the social dynamics of online games: Who are the players? When, how and why do they play? And finally, what are the social effects of the game in offline life? After giving a brief introduction into the world of Ultima Online, some methodological considerations and an outline of the study design, we will examine the questions above. We will conclude our paper with an outlook on the role that social studies of online games could play in future research.

中文翻译

自社会与文化科学开始研究互联网以来，两人以上参与的互动在线游戏或多人在线游戏已成为热门研究对象。虽然早期在线游戏研究主要关注文本虚拟现实，但过去几年中，致力于图形用户界面和数千用户同时游戏的出版物数量不断增加。这一发展伴随着一系列相关会议以及特定出版平台和研究协会的建立。在美国，游戏研究甚至已成为大众新闻媒体报道的话题。然而在德国，除了作为商业议题被报道外，这一新领域仅受到零星研究关注，且几乎没有基于丰富实证数据的研究。 本文探讨的计算机游戏特定类型，称为“大型多人在线游戏”、“持久状态世界”或“大型多人在线角色扮演游戏”（简称MMORPG），可理解为所有两人以上在线游戏（包括纯文本游戏）的一个子集。MMORPG提供图形环境，在功能（指可能的行动）和外观上模拟现实世界。玩家通过多种人机界面模式控制其在线角色，受技术限制和或多或少的正式规则约束，从而在游戏世界中创造角色间社交互动的平行空间。 从研究角度看，这类游戏特别有趣至少有两个原因。首先，大多数是完全商业化的游戏，不像旧式文本游戏需要高级计算技能（例如复杂的计算机命令触发行动）。因此，在社会人口统计学上，更广泛的互联网用户群体可以参与，实际情况正是如此。约4%的德国人口经常玩在线电脑游戏（无论类型），游戏对玩家线下生活的影响不再局限于少数专家。因此，一些作者强调游戏世界内部经济活动对现实世界经济的影响作为政策议题可能并不夸张。除了MMORPG用户数量的增加，与文本游戏相比，我们还可以预期质的不同，因为图形用户界面和多样化的可能行动使这些游戏更接近我们熟悉的线下体验。 本文展示了对一款名为《网络创世纪》（1998年，简称UO）游戏的研究结果。UO提供中世纪游戏环境，在虚拟景观“不列颠尼亚”中，角色包括矿工、工匠、战士、法师、治疗师或吟游诗人等。我们选择UO特别是因为它已成熟建立，因此可以假设观察到的现象不仅反映游戏发布初期的状况，而是一个已确立的社交空间。此外，UO在当时是可能同时玩家人数最多的游戏之一。截至1999年6月，全球已有约13万活跃订阅者。大约一年后我们启动项目时，据游戏发行商称数量已翻倍。目前至少有十几款MMORPG（例如《无尽的任务》《模拟人生在线》《卡米洛特的黑暗时代》《阿瑟龙的召唤》），其中一些已有数年“历史”，一些甚至由微软、维旺迪和索尼等企业巨头推出，这突显了其日益增长的商业相关性。 在我们研究时，正如Wellman和Giulia所观察到的，在线研究需要详细观察和证据以取代轶事。因此，我们将UO研究启动为未知领域的民族志事实调查任务。首先，我们想了解人们为什么花这么多时间在互联网上玩游戏。为了了解更多，我们围绕在线游戏社交动态的几个问题构建分析：玩家是谁？他们何时、如何以及为什么玩？最后，游戏对线下生活的社交影响是什么？ 在简要介绍UO世界、一些方法论考虑和研究设计概述后，我们将探讨上述问题。我们将以在线游戏社交研究在未来研究中的角色展望结束本文。

文章概要

本文基于《网络创世纪》（Ultima Online）的实证研究，探讨大型多人在线角色扮演游戏（MMORPG）中玩家互动的生活定位与社交动态。研究通过民族志方法、问卷调查和网络分析，揭示玩家在虚拟世界中的社交行为模式、动机及其对线下生活的影响。研究发现，玩家在游戏中形成稳定的社交网络，如公会和婚姻关系，且社交体验是主要游戏动机。玩家类型（如适度玩家、坚韧玩家、频繁玩家和重度玩家）在游戏强度、角色选择和社交互动上存在差异。研究强调，虚拟世界的社交动态与现实世界相似，为理解人类社交行为提供了新视角，并指出游戏设计应注重社交体验而非仅图形改进。整体上，游戏社交与线下生活交织，未导致社交孤立，反而可能增强社交技能和领导力。

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