« August 2006 | Main | October 2006 »

September 13, 2006

On the internet everyone knows you're not actually an elf.

Lisa Nakamura has written extensively about race and identity tourism in virtual environments. She argues that in most cyber social spaces, the surface absence of race is an implicit assumption of default whiteness. The textual environment LambdaMOO, for instance, requires users to set a character gender (although "neuter" is available); although players may choose to include it in their character description, race "is not even on the menu" as far as the interface is concerned (Nakamura 1999). Today's MMOGs, however, make race explicit insofar as one cannot create a "colorless" virtual avatar--although most games offer some non-human options ranging from elves to cow, rat, and lizard people. As something that is visually available to all players and generally considered integral to personal identity in the mainstream culture, race, whether human or fantasy, seems to offer a particularly valuable resource for role-playing (RP) in game spaces.

Despite the possibility of non-white human avatars, however, their actuality seems rare. A Black character with an afro in City of Heroes draws comment from other players when a white character with spiky pink hair does not. A preliminary analysis of video data from several games yields several examples of players using non-human race as an RP resource, but only one instance in which a character roleplays non-white human race. In this latter instance, uptake from other characters is problematic, an issue that may be related to the character's heavy reliance on racial stereotypes. Non-white avatar options such as hairstyles are also in limited supply in most games, limiting available "looks" for such characters.

It is probably true that the available character options reflect the demographics and desires of the majority of the current players, but it is still possible that the addition of more identifiably non-white faces would lead to the creation of more non-white characters. Far more female characters exist than female players; while one can argue the realism of many female avatar options, there are still quite a variety of recognizably female options available. Whether the presence of more non-white characters would lead to more nuanced, less stereotypical RP, of course, is an open question. Certainly many male players' female characters are built upon stereotypical conceptions of gender, such as "healers are girly."
It seems possible, however, that the presence of non-white character options might attract more non-white players, if we assume that people have some interest in creating avatars with which they identify on racial lines--it does seem to be the case that women prefer to play female avatars, although a significant minority of men prefer female avatars as well. If a similar pattern in player/character racial identity exists, it would seem that adding more non-white options for character creation is likely to provide an added attraction for a cross-section of players in any game that does so, but perhaps particularly in game worlds like CoX where almost all characters are basically human.

For one thing, character race, although especially non-human race, yields one solution to the general problem of making RP distinct from OOC talk. While players use many strategies to do so, most commonly bracketing, even interactions that seem to fall fairly clearly into one category or the other may be explicitly identified by participants, suggesting that the possibility of confusion is always there.

In cases where non-human character race is used for RP, however, there is no question about its status as RP rather than RL talk, as in the gaming session excerpted below. Following the "arrest" of third character by Imperials, A and another character, LG, RP with each other using their character race (Twi'lek) without any OOC negotiation or discussion:

Excerpt (1) [RP styles and tell frame shifting SWG 02-22-04 RM-3 RAVE 001: 148-165, irrelevant talk omitted for clarity]

01 LG: [angrily] They already HATE us...
02 (0.7)
03 A: [angrily] oh my god
04 (3.4)
05 LG: [angrily] Twi'leks...
06 (7.8)
07 LG: [angrily] If your not HUMAN you aren't anything in their eyes!
08 (2.1)
09 A: [angrily] I know

The arrested character is also a Twi'lek, which LG references at 1 with her assertion that the Empire "already hate[s] us"; she then clarifies the category at 5 with the explicit identification of the hated people as those who belong to the race Twi'lek and further expands on this at 7 with an assertion that to the Empire, only humans are "anything," to which A agrees at 9. Some time later, the "sisters" A and Ci also use their shared Twi'lek race for RP about their childhood separation from each other following an Imperial raid, and LG asserts that Twi'leks are in particular danger of enslavement because of their oppressed status.

In this case, the source material of the game lends itself to racial RP; the original Star Wars trilogy depicted female Twi'lek characters as slaves kept by Jabba the Hut for his entertainment. Character race, in addition to being an obviously in-game quality, is also a resource about which most players may be presumed to have a shared knowledge base. Even in games that lack such an established and developed world, however, character race is still a resource for RP, as in this scene from the assembling of a pick-up group in EverQuest II:

Excerpt (2) [levels of RP EQ2 01-19-05 RM-1 A 001: 5-33, irrelevant talk omitted for clarity]

01 D: greetingsss
02 (24.8)
03 R: I smell an iksar!
04 (14.7)
05 D: rodentssss...
06 (39.1)
07 R: I prefere Ratonga, or even rat over rodent.
08 (8.5)
09 D snarls R.
10 (14.8)
11 R dies x.x

In excerpt #3, R is a male rat person (Ratonga) and D is a male lizard person (Iksar). D makes the lizard race of his character an explicit part of his speech with expanded s's and remarks on R's race at 5 with the word "rodents," to which R objects at 7. The antagonism between them is further elaborated through emotes at 9 and 11. The two characters, presumably previously unacquainted, collaboratively produce a racial conflict almost immediately upon encountering each other in the virtual physical space of the game. Even without the kind of world-established race relations available in SWG, players may use character race to color their in-character interaction, although in the EQ2 excerpt the conflict is done "playfully" in that it does not noticeably inhibit group cooperation in any way; a more "serious" RP of such conflict might preclude the characters grouping together. Such RP does, however, break up the otherwise somewhat monotonous routine of a pick-up group's hunting activities.

The open conflict between races role-played in these examples from SWG and EQ2 is particularly interesting when compared to an instance of more "realistic" human race role-playing taken from a social event in City of Heroes/City of Villains (CoX) involving an African-American female character named Afro-ditee (name has been changed while attempting to preserve original connotations). This character appeared in Pocket D, a designed social zone accessible to both City of Heroes and City of Villains characters, during a going-away party for the developer CuppaJoe. She joined a service line that formed when another developer, Manticore, offered to grant custom titles to characters:

Excerpt (3) [Afro-ditee welfare CoX 09-01-06 CG-6 title line 001: 1-54, irrelevant talk omitted for clarity]

01 PTM: Whats the line?
02 (20.0)
03 Ad: welfare
04 (18.8)
05 Ad: manticore is giving us food stamps and inf vouchers
06 (5.9)
07 DSM: LOL
08 (9.1)
09 DSM: Charity is so very heroic
10 (12.6)
11 AC: what is this line for?
12 (5.0)
13 K: I think I might change to a hero, he's inspired me so much. :D
14 (1.7)
15 DSM: A yellow title
16 (9.8)
17 Ad: it's good to know my little d'shawn will finally get a real costume
18 this year
19 (14.8)

PTM asks about the purpose of the line (which is very long and noticeable) in broadcast chat at 1; there is some non-serious discussion of the line's length that has been omitted, but at 3 Ad provides a second non-serious answer: "welfare". There is no response to thisr, and she elaborates at 5: "manticore is giving us food stamps and inf vouchers" ("inf" is short for "influence," the currency of CoH). DSM responds with laughter at 7 and then goes on to build on this candidate answer at 9, saying that "charity is so very heroic." Following this line of talk, at 13 K claims that he is so inspired he might become a hero himself (presumably K is a City of Villains character). Neither of these replies directly identifies the speaker as a recipient of the "charity."

At 17-18, Ad continues her talk about the welfare line with an utterance about being able to adequately--in terms of the game world--clothe her "little d'shawn," further tying welfare receipt to cultural stereotypes of African Americans. There is no further uptake on Ad's impromptu RP from the other characters present, but neither is any challenge issued concerning her joking talk about welfare or its connection to her portrayal of an African-American woman, either in an OOC frame or an RP one (one could imagine an anti-welfare reaction to such statements as well as a negative reaction to the character Ad portrays). Certainly there is no RP of open racial conflict, either serious or playful, such as occurred in the SWG and EQ2 examples above; players unsure of the connection between player and character race may be less willing to engage in such interaction.

Stereotypical performances like this one are also more noticeable in an environment where non-white avatars are relatively rare; part of the reason for that rarity may be the lack of non-white options in character creation. While players do exercise control over the skin color of their avatars, as noted above, almost all preset hairstyles and facial features seem geared towards the creation of white avatars. CoX does provide a few Asian faces among its presets, perhaps reflecting the large overlap between players interested in comics and players interested in Asian culture, including manga and anime; as a result, there does seem to be a visible minority of Asian characters in the game, although they are heavily tilted towards ninjas and cat-eared schoolgirls. Only one preset face, however, seems to have African American features, and the afro sported by Afro-ditee is the only identifiably African American style available except for perhaps the dreadlocks. Noticeably absent are the braids favored by many African American women.

Posted by cabell at 02:02 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 02, 2006

Hours of the Day (by Weekday / Weekend)

We the split our data by period of the week - weekdays versus weekends. Note that our census bot performs the snapshot independently for Alliance and Horde, so the "average server population" listed in the graphs below is roughly half of the true server population.

There are several things about the resulting graph that surprised us. First, we were expecting a higher peak on the weekends. The data showed, however, that peak server populations on weekends was the same as that on weekdays. Second, the time of the peak was also the same. Instead, the difference was that server populations ramped up earlier and tapered off slower on the weekends.

Most of the zone types followed the overall pattern as shown in the graph above. The interesting exception was the high-end instance zones. In the graph below, we see that peak populations in these zones is higher on weekends than weekdays. The ramp-up also start a few hours earlier, although the tapering off is relatively similar.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of January
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character in each hour of the day.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 179,003 characters

Posted by nickyee at 07:24 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack