Qualitative Research Study

Caleb Mercer: Department of Anthropology Ball State University cmmercer3@gmail.com Ace Howard: Department of English Ball State University aahoward@bsu.edu Aaron Wynne: Department of English Ball State University amwynne@gmail.com 4 May 2011

Table of Contents
Executive Summary3 Introduction..3 Literature Review4 Methods5 Findings5 Discussion7 Conclusion.10 Works Cited...11

Abstract: Call of Duty: Black Ops (COD:BO) is a popular online first-person shooter (FPS) video game available on multiple gaming consoles. Online FPS gameplay in titles such as COD:BO creates unique communities for gamers to interact in. Such environments could positively affect gamers by encouraging teamwork or creating for them a sense of belonging. Conversely, online gaming communities could foster bullying, taunting, and harassment. Key Words: COD: BO, X-Box Live, community, social interaction, language, game style, n00b, casual, pro, emblems, single-player, multiplayer, bullying, taunting, harassment,

Executive Summary
Call Of Duty: Black Ops (COD:BO) is a part of the Call of Duty seriesa series has had a presence in video game culture for over ten years, resulting in a dedicated Call of Duty community. The series began on the PC platform and eventually moved its way to the console market. In this qualitative study, we observed player interactions and experiences that with other players over a sustained period of time. Our focus was on one game mode: team deathmatch. Through this, we have gained a deeper understanding of how game communities work for online FPS games, especially one that is not geared towards teamwork. This study shows how communities work in a game that has a new release each year. The researchers, Howard, Mercer, and Wynne, will compile information from six subjects that play COD:BO. This study will show how community is affected and how it works in COD:BO. By observing and interviewing six subjects that play COD:BO, we found that community was not an issue among gamers. An online community was virtually nonexistent, except for a niche group of gamers. For mainstream gamers, community was only an important issue when playing with friends in person or online.

Introduction
The culture of online gaming is a new social science research subject. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) such as Everquest and World of Warcraft (WoW) are typically the focus of social community studies. Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi has conducted and example of an MMOG community study. Her book, My Life as Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World Of Warcraft, discusses data she had gathered in studying the effects of addiction, sexism, and violence in World of Warcraft. Like Nardis study, this project is concerned with exploring community and culture in a video game

community. While online gaming culture studies have previously been conducted, little has been focused on online FPS gameplay. The subject of this study is the game Call Of Duty: Black Ops for the X-Box 360. Call of Duty: Black Ops (COD:BO) is the seventh main installment of the Call of Duty series. It is a first-person shooter video game about the military during the Cold War. Its popular online multiplayer gameplay allows for verbal communication among players, adding a social aspect for even those playing by themselves. Gamer communities are built around this social interaction, which can result in a positive or negative experience. This qualitative study seeks to find out how gaming communities work together in COD:BO. Research is compiled of observations and interviews at the games principle gaming locations. By observing and interviewing six subjects that play Call of Duty, the study will find out if community is an issue for gamers today. This study explores such phenomena in richer detail by focusing on the behaviors and practices used by the subjects in the game. This study will situate itself within the broader subject of video game research. Overall, this research seeks to prove that even violent video games, such as COD:BO, can provide good, fostering communities for gamers despite mainstream negative sentiments about the Call of Duty series.

Literature Review
The literature on the subject of online multiplayer gaming contains many differences from our own research. It is also worth noting that all research on the topic of online multiplayer gaming on console systems is fairly new, due in large to the fact that online gaming has only been possible on console gaming systems now for less than a decade. Although both our research and the literature focus on the same overall subject, there are stark differences between the genres of games studied. Our research focused on a game which is classified as a first person shooter, also known as a FPS; whereas games researched in the literature were from the genre massively multiplayer online games (MMOG). More specifically, the focus on the majority of the research is on massively multiplayer online role-playing game, also known as MMORPG. The difference between these two genres of games is great despite them being similarly built on the idea of playing online with other people in a team based setting; the two genres bring with them a dichotomy in the research findings that could be expected of each style. Overall the literature we read discussed the range of control over something as simple as the players character, saying: The game allows a range of identities (and genders) to be explored by playing a character created by the player. Character identity creation typically involves a number of dimensions such as gender, race, profession and deity alignment (morality), (Griffiths, Davies, & Chappell, 2004). These customizations are directly related to the game and can have an impact on how the game is played as well as how other characters within the game interact with the character (Crowe, & Bradford, 2006). This was something that we found to be in stark contrast with our research findings, which we attribute to the genre of game that we studied compared to those studied in the literature. In some cases the sources also mentioned high rates (78% of respondents) of guild members for the games discussed which is comparable to the clans associated with COD:BOof which none of our participants were members. This is indicative of the every man for themselves mentality as opposed to the heavily team based playing found in the literature (Seay, Jerome, Sang Lee, & Kraut, 2004), (Jacobs, 2008), (Griffiths, Davies, & Chappell, 2004). By and large all of the literature also focused on players with a high level of intensity and frequency of playing their game with one source stating, almost 80% of both adults and adolescents reported sacrificing at least one thing in their lives in order to play at the level that they did, (Griffiths, Davies, & Chappell, 2004)

something we attributed to the nature of the genre instead of differences between the literature and our findings.

Methods
We were seeking to find out how communities acted and were represented in COD:BO. In order to find out how these communities function, interviews were conducted and the researchers observed the subjects playing the game for a period of time. The subjects were chosen from applicants that knew the researchers and had the appropriate hardware for the study: Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and COD:BO. Gaming level, gaming style, races, ethnicity, and sex were not considered for this project. The interviews were for the researchers to find out how the players perceive the community and how they perceived themselves. The interviews followed a semi-structured pattern and involved questions about the games they play, how they play COD:BO, and the community around COD:BO. Each interview lasted around fifteen minutes. The observation segment of the study involved the researchers observing the gamer playing the game and their interaction to the team and community. By observing four or five matches, the researchers gathered information pertaining to the community. Four or five matches is usually a consistent amount of time that a player will spend on one server.

Findings
COD:BO has an interesting player base. Most games have dedicated player bases and this game was no different. Because of the way that communities exist in video gaming, we learned that this community seems to be different from other communities that revolve around other games. The players that exist in the community that we interviewed, 18-25 year old, college students and played the game often each week. Seeing that this is the primary market demographic for these games, this proved to be a good group to study. Finding information about the community proved more insightful and challenged some of our earlier questions. An important issue raised when it comes to video game communities is how long a game has been around and COD:BO is the seventh installment in the Call of Duty series. As all of the interviewee's had played one or more previous games in the series. Communities, or clans, sprung up quickly in the previous games. The ability to identify yourself with a group of gamers leads many users and their personal friends to form groups and have different names. In the most recent iteration, we found that none of the interviewees used the clan tag function as intended. The only interviewee that used the clan tag used it to antagonize other players. Clan's do have a place in this gaming community, but none of our interviewees belonged to that aspect of the game. Because the clan aspect was no present, these players all took the game seriously or casually. Four of the subjects took the game casually and played it for fun. The other two subjects took the game seriously, specifically their kill-to-death ratio, or KDR. These players played more often than the others and limited their playing to COD:BO. These players all focused on team deathmatch. The subjects that played for fun did not care too much about their KDR or how much they scored. These subjects wanted to play the game for fun. A couple of the subjects even poked fun at themselves and they way that they play the game.

Occasionally, there were instances of players being insulted for their skill level, or lack-there-of, over the game communication channel. This was more prevalent after the match was over. Team deathmatch is a game type that requires teamwork to win. By watching the subjects play COD:BO, we were able to observe them in the way that they play the game. When playing team deathmatch, every player was playing for themselves. Interestingly, only one player tried to revive other players, but became frustrated when no one would extend the same courtesy towards them. During all the matches that the researchers observed, there was limited to know teamwork. When there was teamwork, it happened, it was assists. Assists are an important part of this game, even rewarding the player significant points based upon how much damage they did to the defeated player. Only two of the six subjects were dismayed when they got assists. One player even got frustrated at themselves and their teammate for taking their kill. Like before, this factors into the KDR and will not help the ratio improve. The other subjects did not respond with anger or frustration when they received assist points. This is likely because of the way that they play the game. Often, one of the players would yell at the person that took their kill, headset in or not. Most of the subjects did not use microphones and/or headsets. One subject would mute other players. This would happen when the other players were loud or had brash, abrasive voices. During observation, some players would comment on the subjects kills or deaths, but this would more likely happen between matches. One subject had their gamer tag called out and made fun of by another gamer, but they quickly muted that player. It seemed that most of the players would not communicate at all with each other. This severely limited the ability to gain insight on the community. Emblems play an important part in this game and community as well. One subject had a significant complaint about the way that emblems are used in the game. During observation, there were offensive and vulgar emblems that were used by many different players. Another subject purposefully died so that they could view the emblem of the other player. Emblems are an important issue of the community and provided a type of personality of the gamers. There is a hierarchy to the gamers that even the emblems portray. Certain ranks, emblems, classes, weapons, and perks have to be earned or bought by points. Because of this, a gamer hierarchy is established that provides the players playing the game to see where they stand in relation to the other members of the game. This hierarchy is broken down into three levels: n00b, casual, and pro. N00b gamers are gamers that just got the game. They are generally not very good at it, due to learning maps and weapons. Casual gamers are players that sit down and play a few matches at a time. They are generally decent at the game and win and lose about equally. Most the research subjects fell into the casual category. The final category is pro. Pro players take the game seriously and do not like to lose. They focus on their stats more and take pride in their stats. Stats also go a long way in the COD:BO community. The subjects knew that a community existed online, but none of them participated in it. Only one subject said that they would associate with the youtube.com top ten kills of the week community. This is a video of the top kills that players committed that week. This subject has a kill video that they felt would be good enough to upload to they moderators of the top kills video. While this was one instance of the community actually being used, most of the other subjects would not associate nor use the community or even paid attention to gamebattles.com, a site that hosts battles between teams. Most of the teams on that site consist of players that know each other outside of the game. Outside of the game is where we found the most community. Most of the subjects had friends and acquaintances that they played with on a regular basis. Sometimes, they would send messages to get together and play, while other times they organized parties where they would play in close proximity. When this happened, there was usually more teamwork and communication that would happen. Each player would be looking out for each other and informed us that they would win more often than not in this situation.

Discussion
After our research was complete, we discovered that Call of Duty was designed as an individual multiplayer experience. In observing team deathmatch the researchers found that there was no team aspect despite there being some players in the game at which the individual would not shoot. This mentality correlates with the aspects of emphasis on a players KDR rather than assists within a match, escalating to the point of subjects being angered when they achieved an assist rather than a kill. One of our subjects went so far as to state their disgust with an assist rather than a kill by saying, Thats why you will never see Steve Nash win MVP, implying that the numerous assists which Steve Nash accomplishes in the NBA will not help him win the MVP award. We found that people care about kills more than assists, despite the positive impact that assists have while working as a team. Information such as this only helps strengthen the idea of COD:BO as a single player game with multiplayer aspects.

A typical score screen showing player stats

A team deathmatch game is considered a team activity, however, the function that the KDR plays along with subjects strong dislike for assists tells us otherwise. Also, the assist rather than a kill is sometimes viewed as a form of a kill steal, which is when one player shoots the target repeatedly in an attempt to kill them but another teammate comes in and shoots them as well getting credit for the kill while the original player merely receives an assist. The negative association that assists have with kill steals only encourages the disdain which players harbor. After observation, we concluded that this is one of the reasons that why this game lacks teamwork and a solid community. Teamwork is a fundamental design in most online shooters. Because teamwork is so pivotal to winning games and most gamers view winning as fun, companies designed shooters with team deathmatch. Starting with

Doom in 1992, multiplayer in shooters became a requirement for many games. As this evolved, there were many shooters with the term team in them, or made us of teamwork in many situations. Our interviews proved to us that teamwork was non-existent in our subjects methods of playing COD:BO. Our experience with this group of individuals disproved our hypothesis that there would be a solid community around this game. While there is a dedicated community on this game, it seems that this community does not permeate the console market. Knowing how previous games utilize teamwork to win, Black Ops and Black Ops players do not use teamwork to win a game. Often, the top player (who will usually have the best KDR for the match), will provide enough kills that they will carry the team. One of our interviewees was one such player and would become frustrated if they lost. An interesting aspect of losing was that they would blame their team for the loss. By blaming their team, this proved to be the only aspect of team that they utilized in the game. Teamwork is essential to winning in most multiplayer games. We had expected to see a lot of teamwork in covering team deathmatch, but in reality, there was very little. Almost every member of the team was playing just for themselves. This did not provide the data that we had hoped to gain, but gave us better understanding in the way that team deathmatch was played. Knowing what the researcher do from playing multiplayer games themselves, they were given insight into how the game mechanics work in COD:BO. One of the only other games that does not not focus on teamwork to win is a standout in larger multiplayer shooter community: Counter-Strike. While there are many other games that emphasize teamwork, a COD:BO player will care more about personal stats than team stats. Communities do exist in COD:BO, but none of our subjects participated in these communities. They all knew that they existed, but they chose not to join in any community. The community aspect of this game was most prevalent when a group of close friends got together online or at someone's house to play the game. This led us to a new hypothesis about game communities and how they communicate with each other. We found that if their friends were online, they would more likely play with their friends, yet they would still play either way. This opened up new channels of communication and even provided more teamwork in gameplay. None of the subjects would identify with a specific group that plays the game, though. It is impossible for such a large scale game to not have a community. As COD:BO set the five-day sale for most games ever sold. Shortly after launch, 2.6 million gamers logged onto the game to play multiplayer. With such a large community, it became apparent that a community would exist and gamebattles.com provides a matchmaking service for upwards of 35,000 members that play highly competitive matches. We hypothesize that many of the gamers that form the teams that play on gamebattles.com actually know their teammates outside of the game and would likely know each other. We have had experiences where we knew the people that we were playing games with. These internal communities provide a social aspect to gaming. Our subjects all agreed that they had more fun and teamwork playing with an internal community of friends. Internal communities also provide more fun for the opposite team. One subject said that they preferred to play the game with two highly organized teams. This made for a more enjoyable game experience, yet it would require more communication from all the players. Another subject backed this up by stating how much more fun and how much more teamwork and community oriented they were when a group of their friends played with them. This was how community was formed for the subjects we interviewed. The external COD:BO community involves players from every platform. Proof of these communities comes from one of our subjects acknowledging the YouTube weekly top kills videos. While the subject did not participate in this community, the subject is a passive observer of this community. These videos provide a low level commitment to a community and take al of about three minutes to view. These videos also exist for more than just the COD:BO community. With social media, YouTube, and capturing and uploading a video of one playing, all genres of games are developing the YouTube highlight community.

As previously mentioned there are different genres of games that can offer different things to their users. A brief mention of some differences between MMORPG and FPS games occurred in the literature review, however, this will be a more in depth look at what different games can provide. There are several different variations of game genres, and blends of various genres being published now as well, the standard genres usually consist of First Person Shooters (Doom, Halo), Role Playing Games (Final Fantasy, Zelda), platformer (Mario, Donkey Kong, Sonic), Real Time Strategy games (Age of Empires, Starcraft), racing (Gran Turismo, Need for Speed), open world sandbox (Grand Theft Auto), puzzle (Tetris, Bejeweled) and sports games (Madden, Fifa, Nascar). As we can see there are a wide variety of game types, with some genres being left out in the interest of space as well as games that blend genres to create an even more unique experience. These genres all have their own community and many gamers may belong to one or more communities. Because of how social media has become a prevalent part of Internet culture, it is no surprise that video game culture has bought into sharing stats. For many games that are played by MLG (Major League Gaming), which hosts gamebattles.com, there are live simul-casts with commentators that can provide access to a community. We believe that community is affected by the player base and platform of choice. In general, PC gamers are vastly different from console gamers. Console gamers also provide a discrepancy between the consoles. Seeing as how we studied only Xbox 360 gamers, we knew from previous game experience that there are more younger players on Xbox 360. This proved to be a major aspect of the study and how age affects this community. Because there are children that play this game and use the microphone, multiple subjects muted these players right away. This alienated the subjects and helped foster a single-but-multi-player environment. Also, the type of gamer is influenced by the genres of games that they enjoy and play the most. Each of the aforementioned genres presents different opportunities and experiences for the player with different intentions for each style. An RPG is a much more in depth and time consuming game which can present the player with more rewarding accomplishments for players who enjoy this genre, while sports games are often times more casually played and extremely gratifying immediately. The sports games, which are obviously played out in a similar fashion to the real life games, are heavily based on the total sum of points by the end of the game or match. This genre in particular seems to having astounding similarities to the way in which COD:BO is played. Both are casually played with the intent of scoring the most points (kills) in the given amount of time in an attempt to outscore (out kill) the opposing team. With such an emphasis on kills or points we found a contrast in such genres as RPGs compared to FPS or sports games. The literature we reviewed discussed RPG game points such as end game scenarios and missions all built deeply around teamwork being a necessary action taken. Teamwork was built in to those games in the literature and provided discussion on people who were willing to work together as a team for the benefit of each member. In opposition, our research showed a lack of teamwork seemingly built in to the game, as evidenced by the previous discussion on the KDR and assists. There is blatant dichotomy of calling the matches within COD:BO team deathmatch, yet constructing game mechanics in such a way to take advantage of more natural tendencies towards playing or working towards the gain of the individual as opposed to the collective team. The differences raised in each of the issues we discussed provide a view as how a video game community has been affected by many different variables. With our findings based upon the six research subjects, we found that there is an apparent lack of community for this game. But, while our subjects did not participate in the community, we did find that they knew of the community, but no one took the game serious enough to join in the community. The COD:BO community is one of stats, highlights, and hardcore gamers.

Conclusion
From our literature review, research and findings we can conclude several things about the community of players inhabiting COD:BO. There is a juxtaposition of casual (n00b) and veteran (1337) players within the confines of the game. Due to this there is an overall casual appeal to the game, and many players end up playing for themselves individually rather than the collective team, again as evidenced by the emphasis we found on the KDR and lack of assists. We also find that this style of playing is further perpetuated by the mentality of America as an individualist nation rather than working together a collectivist nation. This mentality is thus mirrored within the terms of how the game is played by our subjects and other individuals. This individualist mentality further separates the community of COD: BO players as a whole rather than bring them together in the interest of the team. We can conclude that this games community is vastly different than many others that have been researched and documented, which puts our findings in another category than the literature that is currently available on the subject. By focusing on a different genre of game we have come to different conclusions, which we attribute to the genre as well as this game specifically.

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Works Cited Crowe, Nic, & Bradford, Simon. (2006). 'hanging out in runescape': identity, work and leisure in the virtual playground. Children's Geographies, 4(3), 331-346. Griffiths, M.D., Davies, Mark N.O., & Chappell, Darren. (2004). Online computer gaming; a comparison of adolescent and adult gamers. Journal of Adolescence, 27, 87-96. Jacobs, Melinda. (2008). Multiculturism and cultural issues in online gaming communities. Journal for Culturual Research, 17(4), 317-334. Seay, A. Flemming, Jerome, William J., Sang Lee, Kevin, & Kraut, Robert E. (2004). Project massive: a study of online gaming communities. Proceedings of acm chi (pp. 1421-1424).

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