With Friends Like These: Participation and Protest in Seven Facebook Games

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With Friends Like These Participation and
Protest in Seven Facebook Games

• Elizabeth Losh
• University of California, Irvine

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Dictator Wars
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Patient Zero

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Why was the game rejected?

• A failure with only at most 120 active users
  willing to devote time to multiple-choice tests.
• Yet multiple-choice tests sometimes appeal to
  large numbers of Facebook game players.
• And there were already a number of viral games
  about Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves that
  thematized infecting, attacking, and
  transmitting. But these movie monster games were
  perceived as more fun.
• Why did the Patient Zero game fail?

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Thinking about design in Facebook games

• 1) Representation of the social field
• (Dual player? Multi-player?
  Non-friends?
• NPCs?)
• 2) Kinds of game interaction to accrue points
• (Attacking? Gifting? Stealing?
  Swapping?)
• 3) Nature of the communication channel
• (Automatic messages? Personalized
  notes?)
• 4) Role of surrounding discourses on Facebook
• (Publicizing bugs? Resisting changes in
• the status quo?)

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Play 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!
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The Face of FacebookRules for One-to-Many Print
Ephemera

• Private annotations and
• board game or playing card conversions

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On 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
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Face Threatening Acts in Brown and Levinson
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Face vs. Trust in Tactical Iraqi
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Winning and Losing
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Reciprocity and Obligation
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Privacy and Security
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Sociality as a Design Element

Pork Invaders
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Scrabulous and Scrabble

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Debates about etiquette

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How (and why) did fans revolt?

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Albert-László Barabási on large hubs
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Zombies

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Other Blake Commagere Facebook Applications
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Parking Wars

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Brenda Brathwaiteon the virtues of temporality
andnetworked thinking
Turn-based gameplay, Repeat Visits,
Encouraging Competition, and Encouraging
Network Proliferation
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(Lil) Green Patch
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PackRat

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How (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!!

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Debates 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\

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(Lil) Green Patch

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Resistance to cause marketing
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Resistance to anti-spam regulation
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Resistance to the politics of representation
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Lessons 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, the defense of the social
  contract, occasions for public speech, and
  ceremonial observance of rules for deliberation.

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Does ending matter, as Chris Holt claims in
Inside Social Games? Are these games more like
casual games or MMOs?
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• In a culture of remix, games may actually meld
  multiple aspects of recognized affordances of
  play. The Facebook game Mafia Wars, for example,
  combines advancement oriented around tasks and
  virtual currency (like Mob Wars), fighting (like
  Zombies), gifting with the request to gift back
  (like Lil Green Path), and collecting sets of
  objects with an eye toward orderly completion
  (like Pack Rat).

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Mafia Wars
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Spymaster
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Questions? Comments?

• lizlosh_at_uci.edu
• http//www.virtualpolitik.org