Title: In Polite Company: Rules of Play in Five Facebook Games
1In Polite Company Rules of Play in Five
Facebook Games
- Elizabeth Losh
- University of California, Irvine
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3Patient Zero
4Why was the game rejected?
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- A failure with only at most 120 active users.
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- Yet there were already a number of viral games
that thematized infecting, attacking, and
transmitting traits about Vampires, Zombies, and
Werewolves. But these movie monster games were
perceived as more fun and did not seem to violate
the rules of politeness - Why?
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5Thinking about design in Facebook games
- 1) Representation of the social field
- (Dual player? Multi-player? NPCs?)
- 2) Kinds of game interaction
- (Attacking? Gifting?)
- 3) Nature of the communication channel
- (Automatic messages? Personalized
notes?) - 4) Role of surrounding discourses on Facebook
6Play With Less Identity PlayThe Example of
Alternate Reality Games
Your character looks exactly the same as you.
Your character will have all the same skills and
attributes as you, and even the same memories
and feelings
Play as yourself. Your character in this game
is 2019 You. You don't have to use your real
name, but please don't invent an entirely
fictional persona for the game. After all, in the
future, we'll all be some version of our real
selves. So try to imagine your real self in the
year 2019. And whenever possible, use your real
life knowledge and real life strengths to help
you contribute to Superstruct!
7The Face of FacebookRules for One-to-Many Print
Ephemera
- Private annotations and
- board game or playing card conversions
8On Face Work by Erving Goffman
Face is a mask that changes depending on
the audience and the social interaction.
an image of self delineated in terms of
approved social attributes
9Face Threatening Acts in Brown and Levinson
10Face vs. Trust in Tactical Iraqi
11Winning and Losing
12Reciprocity and Obligation
13Sociality as a Design Element
Pork Invaders
14Scrabulous and Scrabble
15Debates about etiquette
16How (and why) did fans revolt?
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19Zombies
20Other Blake Commagere Facebook Applications
21Parking Wars
22Brenda Brathwaiteon the virtues of temporality
andnetworked thinking
Turn-based gameplay, Repeat Visits,
Encouraging Competition, and Encouraging
Network Proliferation
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24PackRat
25How (and why) did fans revolt?
- What do you hate most?
- I hate it all Every ounce/ gram/chosen
system of measure. The rats are truly useless!
You can't trade between sets or raise the value
of the cards you have. They're only purpose in
this change was to make money! Greed is the root
of all evil!! And the disturbingly new Packrat
is evil. Im done, thats for sure!!
26Debates about etiquette
- Its not a gift if you ask for it
- What the heck is up with people asking for
tickets to be gifted to them for 25 tx items ??
Ever since this gifting of tickets came out
people have just been plain greedy. If you don't
like that word too bad because that's what it is.
Taking 200 tx for a card that is less than that
is greedy. I have seen some horrendous trades
lately and frankly Im appalled. - I'm with you Michael. For me, the joy of
gifting tickets has been in surprising my good
friends who would never ask for a thing and are
not expecting it in the slightest!I can't
believe the people posting threads asking for
tickets - most of them don't even do it in a nice
way 0\ -
27(Lil) Green Patch
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29Resistance to cause marketing
30Resistance to anti-spam regulation
31Resistance to the politics of representation
32Lessons for Developers
- Politeness matters
- But so does the possibility that users will
assert membership rights from the standpoint of
an ideology of participatory culture - Facebook games can reflect larger conflicts in
digital culture such as intellectual property
disputes or attempts to monetize the free labor
of others - So, rhetoric matters and so does civic action,
democratic expression, occasions for public
speech, and ceremonial observance of rules for
deliberation. - Does ending matter, as Chris Holt claims in
Inside Social Games? Are they casual games or
MMOs? -