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.