Social Interaction in Mobile Media and Board Games

Perth.
The second session on this last day of PerthDAC starts with a paper by Larissa Hjorth, who examines camera phone practices in Seoul and Melbourne (the paper is presented by Christy Dena, though). Mobile media is positioned here as a prosumer machine through which we experience media and art in everyday life; mobile phones have become an integral part of everyday life- no longer a symbol of business or a class status symbol, they are now part of almost all social practices, and their uses have grown well beyond voice telephony and SMSing. Mobile phones remain connected to locality in a process of mobility and mobilism; they inform and locate co-present communication. Forms of mobile media are ongoing personal ethnographies, and are frequently banal and implicated in the politics of banality, which requires further analysis.

Mobile media operates across visual, textual, aural, and haptic levels, but here the focus is on visual aspects; mobile phones and mobile phone practices are subject to the local and rehearse power relations while being subject to misinterpretation and serendipity - context and sharing are becoming increasingly important, especially in relation to the sharing, storing, and saving of mobile images. What types of visual phenomena are occurring, especially also in the context of Web 2.0? Will such practices create and image new ideologies, new imagined national communities? Such phenomena can be traced back to analogue visual ideologies as they were propagated for example by Kodak, too - they exist in a continuing continuum linking back to such earlier times, in a process of remediation. The mobile commitment to realism is situated in the mundane - a deconstruction of the banal identifying the sender as ordinary; but how does this link into national and localised narratives, how does it present everyday life, or the family, how does it reterritorialise?

The emphasis on place underlines the role of sharing in sense-making practices; place informs the process of contextualisation for shared narratives. Larissa's study examined students in Seoul and Melbourne to contrast and compare their practices; in this, of course, the vast difference in broadband and mobile phone quality between both nations necessarily introduces points of difference - as does the different ethnic mix of participants (all but two of the Korean participants were Korean, while the Melbourne group was far more mixed). This also manifested in the extent to which sharing photos was used as a means of communicating with loved ones and friends overseas (through Cyworld especially in Korea, through Flickr, and through similar services). Similarly, gender mix also played an important role - female users shared photos of social situations more often, while males focused on objects of desire (e.g. cars, musical instruments).

The Seoul study also found strongly divergent uses across age differences; males here were around two years older than female due to the Korean military services, and therefore appeared more interested in finding a partner than were their female counterparts. When in a relationship, the male user's phone often became colonised by the female partner - adorning it with indicators that he was taken, in a function not unlike an engagement ring. Male photography followed paparazzi-style imagery more than that of females. The Melbourne group similarly used such paparazzi styles, but here females often used the style in an ironic fashion, parodying patterns in the entertainment industry. Female respondents in Seoul focussed more strongly on inanimate objects, toys, and pets which were understood as cute, or as indicating social occasions. Melbourne respondents used many services for sharing images, but some 40% of images were not shared (international students shared some 95% of their images with friends and family abroad, though not through MMS for reasons of cost). Overall, then, the content of the images may be defined as banal, but they are still meaningful images to users; the ironic deployment of mass media genres indicates agency and participation. The visualities of the everyday are constituted by both the banal and the sublime.

Up next is Lisbeth Klastrup, who shifts our focus to mobile stories and the future of narrative. The act of telling is merging with the act of sharing, and mobile communication is converging with online communication at present (especially in countries like Korea and Japan). Mobile stories are examples of artefacts rather than texts - products designed, created, and shared by users within a given framework for designs. This means shifting our emphasis from structure and content to processes of design, production or produsage, and consumption; we must examine the social interaction around stories (the social afterlife of stories), the interplay between framework and individual products, and the importance of this extra layer in digital aesthetics. Additionally, the idea of narrative must be challenged - are mobile stories new examples of new forms of storytelling that are enabled by the mobile, with the camera always at hand and an infinite amount of material able to be created and shared (especially about the mundane and everyday)? Adding the Internet to this enables instant publication and sharing, mediation and sharing of mundane 'real-life' experiences, and the social afterlife of stories in participatory culture. So, storytelling then is the structured and mediated presentation of (personal) experience with a recognisable beginning and end - a mediated experience, as well as a mediated presence (a narrative identity).

How do such mobile story artefacts engage with traditional notions of story(telling), how does the framework shape stories, and how does the social afterlife of stories play out? What is the framework design, what is the timeframe for the telling of these stories, what mediation of content does take place, what themes and topics are common to the stories, and what is the further social life of these stories? Lisbeth examined three different frameworks for storytelling in a Danish context, and examined 166 stories told through mobile photos, videos, and text, including Getmoving.dk (which aims to encourage Danes to live a more active life, and sets a very strict format framework - no more than a set number of words, no more than 20 seconds video) which attracted some 1200 contributors and 20,000 unique visitors; Mobilmarathon.dk (which was linked to the 2006 Roskilde music festival) which attracted stories documenting life at the festival but had only 33 contributors, only 19 of whom were not involved in setting up the project in the first place; and 23hq.com (which enables people to upload images and construct stories from them, using a content management system framework) which had attracted some 100 stories, many using mobile images.

What emerges from this is that frameworks matter - competition sites attracted very traditional forms of storytelling; free-form sites generated more photo album-style content; non-competitive frameworks enabled a wide variety of stories reinterpreting the range of storytelling approaches available to users. Content remains traditional, however, but people share 'spectacular' stories of everyday life; available photos and material generate stories (rather than vice versa); the social life of stories remains relatively low key - even if dialogue and rating are encouraged, this does not necessarily take place on a large scale. People may share for comical or social reasons, but this is contrasted also with competitive elements which lead people to focus on sharing their version of a story. How can we design frameworks to support experiments with narrative form, then, and how can we judge the quality of the stories created in the process? Finally, in the European context, what will be the effect of the increasing number of blog functionality already built into Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones?

The final presenter for this session is Stewart Woods, who moves our focus to social gameplay in board games. Stewart begins by revisiting the question of what makes games games, and he highlights board games as one possible type of game; he also notes the repetitious nature of board game design which constantly reinvents within the same genre (not unlike what happens in videogames). Among such game genres are Eurogames (with simple rules and simple, short gameplay) and diplomatic games (where the game mechanics are secondary to social negotiation across the game table), but these genres are now shifting, and new hybrid game designs are emerging; how we understand and theorise games is also changing very drastically, and there is a strong focus on digital games and play at this point (while ignoring the long history of non-digital gaming). In board games, the game mechanics are very transparent and can be seen to facilitate social interaction, on the other hand, and this can provide many useful insights.

Risk and uncertainty are a central element of gameplay; much of this is stripped out of games through digital gameplay, however. An emphasis on rules ignores some crucial elements of play, and a different focus should therefore be put on winning and losing states in games (which traditionally were final states, rather than points of retrying as they are in the digital environment). At the same time, the goal of board games is not necessarily the winning, even if to win is the aim in the game itself - but we do expect players to be attached to, concerned with, the outcome of the game they are playing. How is winning or losing quantified - through performance measuring (scoring the game), direct defeat, and elimination. Scoring involves all players until the cessation of play, and such scoring is very common in Eurogames; it is often more competitive than contested, and game end conditions are often arbitrary in this model - here, players can measure their own performance and progress through the game along the way. Direct defeat is more common in two-player games where there is a high degree of conflict (as in chess), and where there can be only one winner and one loser. Valorisation occurs only at the cessation of play, as in scoring. Elimination games, finally, extend this model to more multi-player games, where players can be excluded from the game before the end of the game itself; this introduces a new element of risk (of risking ejection from the magic circle of the game) - winning and losing are discrete events in the game, and the rules of the game demand that players aim to eliminate one another from the game. This is less apparent in digital games of progression where absolute loss (elimination) is undermined by design and commercial considerations which lead games to allow re-entry.

If 'death' in a game is impossible (as it is in many digital games), failure becomes no more than a minor, meaningless inconvenience, a minor detail - but virtual mortality is now becoming an increasingly important question in online gaming. Players are used to dying and being reborn in online games, and are developing skills in overcoming death - this also adds to the addictiveness of progressive gaming, but may also turn players off the game if they know that 'it can be done', but that their skills are insufficient to do so. Elimination here becomes a voluntary choice by the player rather than an in-built, fixed element of the game. Stewart now introduces a number of board games that draw on social interactions between players which allow for the actual, final elimination of players and may even draw on knowledge about social relations between players outside the game itself; he also introduces the TV show Big Brother as an extension of this model.

Why are such models not being translated to computer gaming? Here, the focus is largely on the use of processing power and machine mechanics rather than social mechanics. Elements of social negotiation, on the other hand, are intimacy, rich communication, simple strategic decisions, the possibility of elimination, and the presence of fundamental themes of survival. Such games are often games of ruthless expedience; they could also be seen as promoting antisocial behaviour, which in turn promotes a more sophisticated reflection on and awareness of self-other decisions. Errors have real consequences, and loss can be very meaningful. By comparison, we might argue that digital games are not antisocial enough.

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