Documenting Videogame Communities

166 Pages·2017·1.15 MB·English

by  Göran Wallby

Documenting Videogame Communities
Skrifter utgivna av Inst. för ABM vid Uppsala universitet. Volume 7.

Distribution:
Department of ALM
Uppsala University
Box 625
751 26 Uppsala
[email protected]
Documenting Videogame Communities
A Study of Community Production of Information in
Social-Media Environments and its Implications for
Videogame Preservation

Olle Sköld

Skrifter utgivna av Inst. för ABM vid Uppsala universitet. Volume 7.
Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Humanistiska
Teatern, Thunbergsvägen 3H, Uppsala, Friday, 2 March 2018 at 13:15 for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Faculty examiner:
Associate Professor Kiersten Latham (School of Information, Kent State University).
Abstract
Sköld, O. 2018. Documenting Videogame Communities. A Study of Community Production
of Information in Social-Media Environments and its Implications for Videogame
Preservation. Skrifter utgivna vid institutionen för ABM vid Uppsala universitet 7. 164 pp.
Uppsala: Department of ALM. ISBN 978-91-506-2676-6.
Drawing on the disciplines of library and information studies and archival studies, this study
seeks to explore the production of information in online videogame communities and to
elucidate how such insights can offer practical and conceptual support to the knotty issue of
how to preserve those sociocultural aspects of videogames that exist 'beyond' the code and
audiovisual data resources of the videogame itself. This is accomplished in two principal moves:
(i) by delving into the current state of socioculturally-focused videogame preservation and; (ii)
by inquiring into the production of information carried out by videogame communities in what
arguably is one of their most important interfaces of interaction—discussion forums, wikis,
and other social-media services. The study is based on four papers (I–IV). Paper I develops
the theoretical framework of the study on the basis of practice theory and document theory.
Papers II and III report on field-studies of videogame-community information production in
the context of two processes of importance in community social life: memory-making (II) and
knowledge production (III). Paper IV offers a qualitative systematic review of videogame-
archiving literature, allowing Papers I–III to be situated in an archival context. The study
employs multiple methods and encompasses several empirical sites of inquiry and was inspired
by the framework of exploratory research and of 'bricolage' research strategies.
The results of the study add to the present state of knowledge on how information in
the social-media environments of the large and influential present-day videogaming domain
emerges as a result of community practices of production, and how videogame-community
social life is entangled with information production in such spaces. The study also furthers
archival inquiry on the topic of videogame preservation by providing a description and analysis
of what information objects videogame-related social media plausibly hold, and by what
communal practices and processes they have been brought into existence. Furthermore, the
study examines the consequences of collecting community-produced social media and framing
it as documentation of the sociocultural aspects of videogames—a key issue in videogames
preservation.
Keywords: Videogames, Videogame preservation, Practice theory, Documents,
Documentation, Memory-making, Knowledge production, Social media, ALM
Olle Sköld, Department of ALM, Box 625, Uppsala University, SE-75126 Uppsala, Sweden.
© Olle Sköld 2018
ISSN 1652-5353
ISBN 978-91-506-2676-6
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-336748 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-336748)
List of Papers
This thesis is based on the following papers, which are referred to in the text
by their Roman numerals.

I Sköld, O., 2013. Tracing Traces: A Document-Centred Approach
to the Preservation of Virtual World Communities. Information
Research, 18(3), no pag. [online] Available at: http://www.infor-
mationr.net/ir/18-3/colis/paperC09.html [Accessed 5 January
2018].
II Sköld, O., 2015. Documenting Virtual World Cultures: Memory-
Making and Documentary Practices in the City of Heroes Com-
munity. Journal of Documentation, 71(2), pp.294–316.
III Sköld, O., 2017. Getting-to-Know: Inquiries, Sources, Methods,
and the Production of Knowledge on a Videogame Wiki. Journal
of Documentation, 73(6), pp.1299–1321.
IV Sköld, O., 2018. Understanding the ‘Expanded Notion’ of Vide-
ogames as Archival Objects: A Review of Priorities, Methods,
and Conceptions. Journal of the Association for Information Sci-
ence and Technology, 69(1), pp.134–145.
Reprints were made with permission from the respective publishers.
Contents
Acknowledgments ....................................................................................... 9
1. Introduction ........................................................................................... 13
1.1. Setting the stage I: videogames, videogame communities, and
social media .......................................................................................... 15
1.2. Setting the stage II: archival matters ............................................. 17
1.3. Problem statement ......................................................................... 19
1.4. Outline of the study ....................................................................... 23
1.5. A note on terminology ................................................................... 23
1.5.1. Information and documents ................................................... 23
1.5.2. Knowledge production and documents ................................. 24
1.5.3. Memory-making and documents ........................................... 24
1.5.4. Online community productivity ............................................. 25
1.5.5. Preservation ........................................................................... 25
1.5.6. Social media .......................................................................... 25
1.5.7. Sociocultural .......................................................................... 26
1.5.8. Videogame community .......................................................... 26
1.5.9. Videogames, videogame play, and the videogame domain ... 26
2. Videogames ........................................................................................... 28
2.1. A very brief history and present-day status of videogames .......... 29
2.2. Videogames in context .................................................................. 30
2.3. Videogames and videogame play defined ..................................... 32
3. Videogame preservation ....................................................................... 35
3.1. Motivations to preserve ................................................................. 35
3.2. Previous preservational initiatives ................................................ 37
3.3. The procedures and perspectives of videogame preservation ....... 39
3.3.1. Collection-building and metadata-creation ........................... 40
3.3.2. Migration and emulation ....................................................... 42
3.3.3. Collaboration and conceptual work ....................................... 45
3.3.4. Preservation of sociocultural aspects of videogames ............ 49
4. Online communities and online community productivity .................... 53
4.1. Online communities ...................................................................... 53
4.2. Online videogame communities .................................................... 56
4.2.1. Online videogame communities and social media ................ 57
4.3. Participatory cultures and collective intelligence .......................... 59
4.4. Productive videogame communities ............................................. 61
4.4.1. Media feedback and appropriation ........................................ 62
4.4.2. Knowledge production .......................................................... 63
5. Theory ................................................................................................... 67
5.1. Practices ........................................................................................ 69
5.1.1. What are practices? ................................................................ 70
5.1.2. The practice of studying practices ......................................... 75
5.2. Documents ..................................................................................... 76
5.2.1. The document perspective ..................................................... 77
5.2.2. What is a document? .............................................................. 79
5.3. Practices with documents .............................................................. 81
5.3.1. Practices with documents in videogame-community
social media ..................................................................................... 83
5.4. Archival work ................................................................................ 87
6. Methods and materials .......................................................................... 89
6.1. Methodological cornerstones ........................................................ 89
6.2. Choices of method ......................................................................... 91
6.2.1. On method multiplicity .......................................................... 93
6.3. Choices of field sites ..................................................................... 94
6.4. A trace-based approach to the study of online videogame
communities ......................................................................................... 95
6.4.1. Communities and practices .................................................... 96
6.4.2. The trace approach ................................................................. 97
6.5. Materials ...................................................................................... 102
6.6. Ethical considerations ................................................................. 104
6.7. Limitations .................................................................................. 105
7. Paper summaries ................................................................................. 108
7.1. Paper I. Tracing traces: a document-centred approach to the
preservation of virtual world communities ........................................ 108
7.2. Paper II. Documenting virtual world cultures: memory-making
and documentary practices in the City of Heroes community ........... 109
7.3. Paper III. Getting-to-know: inquiries, sources, methods, and
the production of knowledge on a videogame wiki ........................... 110
7.4. Paper IV. Understanding the ‘expanded notion’ of videogames as
archival objects: a review of priorities, methods, and conceptions .... 112
8. Discussion ........................................................................................... 114
8.1. The production of information in videogame-community
social media ........................................................................................ 115
8.1.1. The documentary-practices framework ............................... 115
8.1.2. Memory-making .................................................................. 118
8.1.3 Knowledge production. ........................................................ 120
8.2. Videogame-community social media and the socioculturally-
focused preservation of videogames .................................................. 121
8.2.1. Aspects that impacted the shape and form of videogame-
community social media ................................................................ 123
8.2.2. Implications for videogame preservation ............................ 127
8.3. Concluding remarks .................................................................... 130
9. Sammanfattning (Summary in Swedish) ............................................ 133
9.1. Syfte och frågeställningar ............................................................ 135
9.2. Delstudier .................................................................................... 137
9.2.1. Artikel I. Att spåra spår: ett dokument-centrerat
tillvägagångssätt för att bevara datorspelsgemenskaper ................ 137
9.2.2. Artikel II. Minnesskapande i datorspelsgemenskaper:
dokumentpraktiker i City of Heroes-gemenskapen ....................... 138
9.2.3. Artikel III. Kunskapsproduktion i en datorspelswiki:
undersökningar, källmaterial och metoder .................................... 139
9.2.4. Artikel IV. Sociokulturellt orienterat spelbevarande: en
litteraturöversikt av prioriteringar, metoder, och begrepp ............. 140
9.3. Diskussion och slutsats ................................................................ 140
10. References ......................................................................................... 144
Acknowledgments
Doctor Banner, I presume. (the Hulk, 1992)
David, P.(w), Pérez, G.(a), Smith, T.(c), Rosen, J.(l), and Chase, B.(ed.). 1992.
Future Imperfect. Incredible Hulk. Issue 1, December 1992, p. 48. New York,
NY: Marvel Comics.
On a pitch-black November night, we were in the car on our way home from
a 35-kilometer pizza-run deep into the Uppland countryside. My then three-
year old son Frej and I sat in the back seat, speaking about Bruce Banner and
the Hulk. I spoke of some detail, and Frej observed, after a moment of silence,
that he hadn't “learned to talk like that ... yet.” To Frej: don't worry son, you
will. To the reader, a reflection: on the level of personal process, this is kind
of what happens during the years from enrollment in the PhD program to the
dissertation defense. One learns the job by learning to talk, write, think, and
otherwise work in surely critical and imaginative, but almost always some-
what genre-bound ways. Because the apprentice exam that you are holding in
your hands offers some indication that I’ve during the years as a PhD candi-
date grown to be a skilled enough practitioner to participate in the lines of
scholarly talk and work, I'd like to mark the occasion by thanking the people
that have made the writing of this book possible in a very tangible sense.
First off, Isto Huvila, Sanna Talja, and Sara Kjellberg—thank you for act-
ing as guides and discussion partners. One of the biggest benefits of this par-
ticular supervisory-team roster has been the diversity of its members: you have
all deftly and expertly and greatly, but in markedly different ways, contributed
to the making of this study and its constituent papers. I would also like to
recognize the efforts of Ola Pilerot, University of Borås, and J. Tuomas Har-
viainen, University of Tampere. Ola: the comments you provided during the
mock-viva have helped to put this text in a much better shape than would oth-
erwise have been possible, and I am grateful for your efforts. J.T., my infor-
mation-studies-of-games co-advocate: thanks for your feedback and for our
co-authoring projects during the PhD-candidate years. I am also grateful to the
people who, in different roles and constellations, have discussed and hence
bettered writings related to this research project, most notably the seminars at
the Department of ALM, Uppsala University, and the Division of ALM, Lund
University, the reviewers and editors who engaged in my papers, and the net-
works and workshops and conferences I've participated in during my time as
a PhD candidate.
From the time I finished my master’s thesis in archival studies to sending
this dissertation in library and information studies to print, I've been fortunate
enough to work in three excellent scholarly environments in the ALM field.
I'll proceed chronologically. To Gunilla Widén and the other members of staff
at the Department of Information Studies, Åbo Akademi University: I appre-
ciate the opportunities you provided me to take my first cracks at post-M.A.
research and teaching activities. I am similarly grateful to Olof Sundin and
colleagues for the semesters spent as an adjunct in archival studies at the Di-
vision of ALM, Lund University. Last but not least, it has been a privilege to
finish my doctoral work at the Department of ALM, Uppsala University. In
this collegial environment I've been offered backing and encouragement, and
have been shown lots of confidence in matters of research, teaching, and more.
To Ulrika, Åse, Christer, Reine, Samuel, Bertil, Görel, Inga-lill, current and
former fellow PhD candidates, and all others: it's been a truly great time,
cheers.
Thanks also to my parents Eva and Gert-Arne, my sister Lisa, and my clos-
est friends the doctor, the double professor, and the shopkeeper for encourag-
ing and showing interest in me and the things that I do no matter what they
are. I furthermore wish to extend my gratitude to the people behind LyX for
making word processing a pleasurable experience, to Donald MacQueen for
time and time again showing me how to write in English, and to Tarn Adams
at Bay 12 Games for giving me the thumbs-up to use a Dwarf Fortress map as
the book cover. Special thanks goes to Sandra Sköld Chiriac for creating the
pegboard version of said map.
Sandra—my best friend, wife, and fundamentally important person for me
in basically all things—you have supported me and the writing of this work
immense ways. During the last four years we've had two children (shout-out
to Frej and Liv), completed two PhDs, moved across the country, moved to
the country, sold a horse, and bought a house. I can’t wait to see what the next
four years will bring (but first, let’s take some vacation).

Olle Sköld
Björklinge, New Year's Eve 2017