Discussion

Addictions are substances or behaviors a person depends on to get through each day, and without these, they become irritable and miserable. Addictions are more commonly associated with dangerous substances or activities people engage in, but recently, video game addiction has become more broadly known and recognized. Video game addiction is the excessive or compulsive use of video games which causes an interference with daily life activities.

The direct biological cause of video game addiction is unknown. Unlike with drugs, it is unknown how exactly the use of video games affects the brain. Some believe video games elevate dopamine and cause players to prefer being in a virtual world. Being in a virtual world allows players to dominate in ways they may not be capable of doing in the real world. In role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, players assume the role of a fictional character and interact with other players through online servers. Guilds are created in the game and players are welcome to join or invite other friends. Players become familiarized with their guild members and other daily players, so friendships are often created. Players who are not well seen in school or who are bullied may prefer dealing with others in the virtual world as a monster to feel liked.



Living in the virtual world to engage with others with similar interests seems harmless when compared to substance abuse, but excessive gaming could destroy lives. Addictions create a dependency and often consume people’s thoughts at all times making it nearly impossible to maintain stable relationships and jobs. Fortunately, there are warning signs one can look for to identify when a loved one is struggling with video game addiction. Actions such as spending increasing amounts of time playing games, constantly thinking or talking about video games during other activities, escaping to a virtual world to avoid dealing with real life lying to hide their time spent playing video games, and irritability while trying to cut back are all warning signs of video game addiction.

To prevent video game addiction, it is recommended parents keep logs of a child’s play time and encourage the children to interact with peers. If someone is suffering from video game addiction the best solution is to talk to them and limit their interaction with computers and/or video gaming systems. Since computers are such a big part of a daily life, it is important to always be open about the dangers of this addiction and keep track of progress regularly.

Week 9

 
 

A rare overshoot by Nevares with the flag in OT

A member of Where's Nevares bringing the flag into base for the tournament winning cap.

The finals are here this week. The match of the century was between Tough Turtles and Where’s Nevares. Tough Turtles came into this one as a huge underdog seeing as how they came not to practice much during the week and just kind of show up to matches (and win). In a landslide victory, Tough Turtles take the first map which was very close quarters and highly paced. The second game ends in a similar manner only with Where’s Nevares on top as Nevares got to show off his awesome skiing skills that were stunning to watch (artful?). This brought the game to a third, and supposed final, map which ended in a tie of 1 to 1 (of course). The action peaked in the sudden death overtime round when Nevares leapt into a pile of enemy fire and came out with a flag that he masterfully took all the way back to his base for the win proving once and for all, that practice does make perfection. 

At the end of this incredible matchup, we are left wondering what will happen next for these teams and players. The casters discuss an upcoming one-day tournament set for late November in which the drafting and tournament play will all happen in a single day that will surely be action packed. It was also announced that drafting for the next tournament will begin in January of 2012 and 12 team captains have already been chosen. This news leaves us interested and excited and may even motivate us to participate or at least pay attention to what happens at these events.

This week’s casting was great with fantastic quality casters watching great players do what they do best. One of the casters was an employee of Hi-Rez Studios and was answering questions about Tribes: Ascend during the match as well as discussing the game in general and trying to generate support for the game which was a great idea for Hi-Rez. Getting support from biggest fans of an older game will be crucial for Tribes: Ascend to be successful.

This week’s casting also brings about the end of the tournament and our ethnography so we reflect upon the experience now. We found that we have become very entertained by watching Tribes 2 especially knowing what goes into it. We learned a lot about the people that play these games both professionally and recreationally including the irreverent love that all of them have for the game they play. Designing a product for them will not be an easy task but knowing more about the people that we are helping will, no doubt, make the process easier. We look forward to following this community after this project and may even take it a step farther and begin participating but the things we learned here could not have been found by any other means.

Week 4

Notice the caster boxes in the lower right corner

Tribescast is a website that was started just this year with the goal of “cataloging and documenting matches that occur in the Tribes series games.” This site features a streaming page and an archive page. The streaming page is where current matches are shoutcasted live every Sunday, when the tournament games take place. The archive page features videos from current and past seasons of competitive play. Craig, who founded the website, also operates it and casts on it. Shoutcasting is the process of streaming media to viewers over the internet. Radio is often shoutcasted through shoutcast radio stations. Tribescast is a testament to the dedication that many gamers feel towards Tribes and the people that play it. The casters should also be discussed here. Craig is the main caster and started playing Tribes in 2003. He serves as not only the main caster but the cameraman for every match as it his screen that the matches show. Another caster, Erin, is the secondary caster for most of the games and provides much insight into other games as well seeing as he has not played much Tribes and gives us an outsider’s perspective. The casts succeed in giving us a bird’s eye view of games and teaching us about the game and culture associated with it. We hope that through this site, we can shed much needed light on the subject of gaming as something more than a past time.

The tournament that started this week is one that will last for a couple of months and usually consists of 10-15 teams competing in a double elimination style competition. The game is Tribes 2 and the game mode is capture the flag which means that both teams have a base and a flag. The teams must protect their own flag while simultaneously attempting to steal the other team’s flag and bring it to their base where they will receive a point. After 30 minutes, the team with the most points wins the round with a match consisting of the best out of 3 rounds. If at the end of the 3 games, there is a tie meaning each team won one game and the last game was a tie or all 3 games were a tie, then an overtime round is begun with the first person to score winning. This tournament style and game mode is a standard in most games and is popular in the professional gaming circuit. We were fortunate enough to start watching this tournament as it, and the website, began this week. We look forward to following this tournament to the very end and learning about all of the people involve as it takes a lot of work to set these kinds of things up and consists of over a hundred players. Although, these players are not getting paid, we have found that they do consist of the same type of people that are professionals and put in a similar amount of time and effort into it. We found out about this tournament and website through Connor Taylor who is also in Dr. Hammond’s Human Computer Interaction class. 

Tribes is a science fiction series of games that began with the game, Starsiege: Tribes, in 1998 and has had several sequels made including the popular, Tribes 2, and the latest, Tribes: Vengeance, in 2004. It was announced last year that Hi-Rez Studios had purchased the rights to the series and was beginning work on a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game based on the series and also announced that it was releasing a game late in 2011, Tribes: Ascend, to test out features that will be in the MMO, Tribes: Universe, to come out later. This was met with mixed reactions by Tribes fans but either way, Tribes 2 continues to be the cult hit that it was when it released. Tribes 2 was described this week as “Tony Hawk meets Quake” due to the fast paced, futuristic, first person shooting aspect, found in Quake, and the crazy fast speeds of players and the acrobatics they perform using vehicles and jetpacks, similar to things that have been done in the Tony Hawk games. The fact that this tournament and website even exist is a sign of how devout followers of this game are. In 2008, the game’s developer, Vivendi, dropped support for online play of Tribes 2 but players developed their own patch and provided their own servers to play on which have been running ever since. We intend for this dedication and resolute attitude to factor into our ethnography and design letting us know that this fan base is comfortable in front of a keyboard but probably in more of a “hacky” role than anything that could be called HCI related.

The casters talked about how the old matches were just audio and they could only listen to what was going on. We also observed the type of humor exhibited by Tribes 2 players which consisted, this week, of making inside references to other “culty” games like StarCraft which was nicely explained by our casters affirming our confidence in them to help us through the weeks. Another trait we found was the shortening of phrases and words to fewer words or acronyms highlighting the penchant Tribes players have for quick information transfer that capitalizes on everybody’s familiarity with the concepts of the game. This is similar to phrases commonly found in text messaging like “lol”. This week’s casting gave a lot to think about as far as where our direction should go in this project. We decided that this is the route we would like to take from here on out and will be tuning in every week to watch the latest round. An interesting thing we learned was the “hacky” culture, described above, surrounding Tribes 2 causing us to think about what we could design for them. We decided whatever we suggest will have to be of use to them on an aesthetic level and do something that does not have a hacky solution for meaning they don’t have a need for it right now and have not done anything like it.

Week 5

Erin and Craig returned for this week’s matchup. Erin spoke in depth about what happens when a player takes time off to play another game or simply takes a break as he has experience with both of these concepts. He said your sensitivity and intuitiveness are hardest to get back which causes your confidence level to decrease which is crucial in competitive play such as that which can be found in this tournament. Confidence is important because when players are moving at light speed they need to be able to trust their ability and get their job done seamlessly or the other team will capitalize on their shortcomings. Getting these things back can take months and may never return to the level that a player had them at so it is crucial to continue practicing and tournaments help when they are often enough to keep people fresh and engaged. 

 An HOF dutifully stands on his team's flag

A capper skiing in the hills with the enemy flag

This week, we were introduced to the strategy that many teams use on a basic level. Tribes 2 is often called the “first person shooter for everyone” because there are so many positions one can play as. Capper’s are the players responsible for taking the enemy flag back to their base and are often the same people responsible for capturing the flag from the enemy in the first place. They have to be one of the faster classes with jetpacks and have to have good “skiing” skills. Skiing, similar to snow skiing, revolves around a player’s ability to pick and choose the best path to take to optimize speed given the layout of the land. Players can also be farmers who are responsible for creating and maintaining defensive structures placed to protect a team’s base. The HOF’s (heavy on flag) is a heavily armed, slow moving player that has the firepower to bring enemies down fast and the stamina to withstand small arms fire but cannot avoid enemy actions quickly so fast moving cappers stand a chance to get in and out of an enemy base if they plan their route correctly. There are many other positions relating to offense (capturing the enemy flag) and defense (guarding own flag) and present something for everyone to like. Just for example, some more positions are vehicle operator, sniper, and light defender (LD).

This week introduced us to more concepts of the game as we continue to learn about the game and players at the same time. The strategies that we learned about this week were particularly interesting as we now know this game is more than just shooting but really takes a team to be effective with everyone contributing their own unique part. Both offense and defense presented us with some exciting ideas such as the quick moving, but precise cappers or the, more than meets the eye, defenders that have to ration people (keep some protected to take the place of living players upon death) and make the most of what they do have. The organization of it all gave us something more to consider for our design as most of these teams probably don’t have dedicated systems to help with their team structures (probably just word or text documents). 

Week 7

This week, we continued to learn a bit more about the overall strategy of the game. In one of the maps played today, Blue Moon, vehicles were seen by the casters as highly prominent. The vehicle that was seen the most was called the Shrike, pictured below. My interpretation of the Shrike was that of a futuristic fighter jet armed with dual blast cannons. It can fly extremely high to avoid enemy fire and is many times used to assist the heavy offense. The Shrike is a one-manned vehicle driven by a “shriker” and is generated from the home base using some kind of device. The most skilled players can climb into one and never give it up or get shot down. However, in this match, it appeared as though the Shrikes were mainly used to go on kamikaze-like missions to intentionally crash into the enemy’s base, knocking out a good section of their defense.

This week was also very interesting due to the large amount of drama that ensued. The casters described this as a normal thing, stating that, “It wouldn’t be Tribes if there was no drama.” The main deal that the casters talked about was their minor qualms with some of the team captains. This ranged from their methods of playing to their general attitudes as a whole. For example, they talked a little bit about how one team liked to take too much time pre-game to strategize and get their team together. They also complained about someone else complaining about everything. One big complaint was over the actions of one particular team captain, who was told the casters that he didn’t know his particular match was being casted and that he didn’t authorize it and the casters were wrong for casting it. In general, there was just a lot of sarcasm and griping done by the casters, but it doesn’t seem like they ever have any intention on confronting anyone on the issues that they have, but prefer to just talk and make jokes behind their backs.

The biggest drama of the week came in the kicking issue. During the time before the last match, three more casters joined in to observe the game, and one of them got kicked (or removed from the server by another user so that they may neither play nor observe) by one of the team captains.

Several reasons were thrown out for this. One reason was that it was a revenge play for the caster kicking the captain during a scrimmage some time back. Another was that a lot of players were displeased that there being too many casters. (There are usually three, and at this point, there were six). This brought up a pretty good point, considering each user, rather it be a player or an observer, takes up bandwidth on the server, and too much bandwidth can cause a game to lag (which no one wants). This was brought up later after the game began when every caster except for Craig got kicked. Naturally, this caused the casters to get very upset and the ones that kicked them, but some of them decided that out of respect for the players, they would stay out of the cast.

Drama is never nice, but it may have been a good thing to see here because it’s so relatable. No matter what organization, job, hobby, etc. we are involved in, there is always going to be some kind of drama in our life. This just goes to show that while people may be different in a million different aspects of life, there are so many things that are just part of our human nature.

Week 8

This week on Tribescast, the semi-finals have begun and the moods of the players definitely reflected it as games ran harder and faster than usual. The casting has taken a leap forward as some of the captains that have been kicked out of the competition helped out and discussed more strategy. The viewer count was also noticeably higher as players that were no longer playing were watching to see what happens and possibly learn a thing or two.

Communication was also discussed this week as the casters were talking to other people in many different ways. Some of the most popular ways to communicate are in-game chat, voice over IP (VoIP), IRC, and forums. In-game chat is all text based and usually consists of trash talk before the match begins or complaints about the process taking too long. VoIP is used by the teams to communicate with each other in real-time during the game and facilitates the quick rate of information exchange required to win games. Internet relay chat (IRC) is another popular way for people to discuss things. IRC consists of, basically, instant messages exchanged among a group of people be it the casters when they don’t want to say something or a team’s bench players that want to talk to each other in privacy. IRC is usually one of the most secure methods of communication as well as VoIP. Forums offer a way for players to discuss results of matches during the week as they are optimal for big audience focused, slow moving general conversations. Tribescast, itself is another great example of communication and satisfies the goal of informing the audience of what is going on. Privacy is a big concern when communicating and, as noted before IRC and VoIP is often the most locked down to protect the teams’ strategies. It was also discussed this week that most teams have one or two people watching the Tribescast and reporting it to their teams in an attempt to tell them about things going on that they may not see. This would have to be done discretely as the ethics of these kinds of actions are questionable at best.

The topic of strategy came up heavily this week as the casting captains revealed how they would act on the maps being played out. We managed to get our hands on a 6 page strategy summary for a team in the middle of the tournament and it gave us a lot of insight into all the work and planning that goes into these kinds of events. We will not post this information as it is somewhat sensitive and states what players are on what positions and highlights how they play. Instead we will summarize the format found throughout the document. The strategy is split up by map in the most abstract layer. Next, the offense and defense is separated into separate areas followed by a table mapping each position to a specific player and their role during the game. Finally, an overview of the offensive and defensive strategies is given to get the players in the right mindset. This report is done in a very detailed manner and highlights the time and effort that these teams put into this. It continues to baffle us that this is all being done for no money and no real reward other than bragging rights and the love of the game.