Someone wrote a thesis on ARMA 3

[pwner 35]

Amy Mack, an anthropology major from uLethbridge in Lethbridge, Canada, wrote an entire thesis on Arma 3:

This Isn’t What War Is Like: An Ethnographic Account of ARMA 3

 

It's a hefty read, around 200 pages or so. From the little I've skimmed from it, it seems like a pretty interesting perspective of the game and the community. It does devote a part to the Gamergate controversy and the whole feminism shitstorm in the rest of the gaming community, so be warned lol.

[silentghoust 132]

Nice, I'll have to read it before giving my a full opinion. I'm already wondering which milsim group it might have been. 

 

Edit: Just read it.

 

It was pretty professional, I can imagine her now writing about our forum post for her next thesis. She said the Arma 3 story involved NATO researching with the certain weapon in the campaign. I thought it was strongly implied it was CSAT and AAF was I wrong?

 

Aside from that, I thought this was very good read. It covers pretty much the entire aspect of the evolution of the Arma community as a whole. With a few outdated bits due to further development of the game. Why it clearly was written as a observational. I kinda wished she would of focused on participation within a group rather then her simply observing them. The part about her being labeled as a researcher vs a girl gamer within the community was interesting as well. I would actually be interested if she did a follow up with a comparison from another game she did a research paper on.

[semiconductor 309]

[ Insert witty joke about usefulness of contemporary higher education here ]

[lumnuon 295]

Interesting read. A few funny parts too: "And I died. Okay, respawn and retry. Oh, look! I died again. How lovely."

[Tankbuster 1733]

It claims to be ethnographic, so the author is looking as closely at us as she is the game.

[arkhir 135]

Gave a brief read to the sections that interested me; really cool approach to the mods. I liked her analysis of SThud.

Some misconceptions about game mechanics here and there, but overall it's pretty solid and spot-on. On the other hand it feels like she was just wasting paper on the whole femminist agenda; she could've put something as fascinating as rest of her work there.

[Tankbuster 1733]

In fairness, I think she has as more of an academic and analytical agenda than an feminist one.

[semiconductor 309]

In fairness, I think she has as more of an academic and analytical agenda than an feminist one.

Uh-huh. And what will the scientific world gain from thorough analysis of some computer game, exactly?

I understand the university though - these students are free to major even in Plastic Spoon History as long as they're paying for being able to pretend that their "work" actually worth something.

 

A few funny parts too: "And I died. Okay, respawn and retry. Oh, look! I died again. How lovely."

Right, very funny indeed. <_<

[chortles 263]

@arkhir: I'd add that it's arguably harder to somehow not acknowledge feminism and surrounding arguments (at least in a way that would pass academic scrutiny) when it comes to the subject of female player characters, especially if using the BI forums thread that she linked and when the developers themselves were asked by/responded to an outside party (a gaming media interview) on the topic, and considering that the thesis is less about the game and more about the people who play it...
 
I do however find interesting that she addressed the shifts over time in the choice of antagonist factions/storylines and claimed a cumination in "a deliberate erasure of racial or geographic identifiers for the enemies", especially due to how posters complained in the past about how immersion-breaking they found the idea of CSAT or an Iranian superpower (as a distinct and separate argument from complaining about the "bug helmet" aesthetic for their infantry or about the idea of an OPFOR fielding more-futuristic-than-BLUFOR hardware). On the other hand, her wording seems pretty agnostic or even 3rd-person-accepting... but that could be my interpretation of her description/contrasting of arguments.
 
And finally, I'm chuckling at what seems to be her confirmation that

the end of the NATO-AAF relationship was basically a green-on-blue waiting to happen with the remaining NATO embodied by Adams doing nothing to forestall that or even egging it on... hell, how much of the initial ambush was really AAF turning on NATO and how much was it just local-to-the-area troops trying to kill Adams and others elsewhere deciding "no turning back from this, might as well go all the way"?

[Tankbuster 1733]

Uh-huh. And what will the scientific world gain from thorough analysis of some computer game, exactly?

I understand the university though - these students are free to major even in Plastic Spoon History as long as they're paying for being able to pretend that their "work" actually worth something.

Value, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

 

I don't agree with all she says and I didn't understand some of it and a part of me is worried that it might be possible to fool me into thinking this has educational merit by using long and flowery words. :)

[chortles 263]

It claims to be ethnographic, so the author is looking as closely at us as she is the game.

If anything the people who play in milsim units (as opposed to, say, Lifers) are the subject, the game is just the basis on which said people are centered around. I did appreciate her seeming (further) validation of just how much wider "the community" is than the echo chamber that these forums can be... when I see people bragging about pressuring the devs into giving in to what they want, I despise it as much as when the Breaking Point guys did it. :rolleyes:

[CameronMcDonald 146]

Interesting stuff.

 

-1 for failing to spell ShackTac correctly. :(

[silentghoust 132]

Not sure what the topic of "feminism" is taboo for some of the posters here. Her point of the thesis was to focus on a new approach to gaming culture, that just happened to be narrowed down to milsims and it's communities. It was a academic exercise, not a life's work of publishing. 

 

Honestly reflecting back, I would probably found myself laughing at the same jokes with the concept of a women in my gaming group. To me it would be the opposite, my personal experience with women makes me biased towards their motives when it comes to gaming. Are they actually gaming because they like gaming? Or do they simply like the social aspect or watched the game on youtube? Maybe it's my competitive like attitude towards games, who knows.

[chortles 263]

Are they actually gaming because they like gaming? Or do they simply like the social aspect or watched the game on youtube?

Thing about this is that there's so much "here because I watched a video/stream" for Arma from guys too that Bohemia's development or at least promoting/marketing of Arma 3 takes that phenomenon into account (to say nothing of the End Game Tournament) so I really can't view questions of "do they like gaming" as a gendered thing.

[semiconductor 309]

Value, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Yeah but I believe that this principle is not really applicable in the academic world. From my standpoint, certain research either solves or helps to understand how to solve some problem or it's just a waste of paper, time and taxpayers / parents money.

While there's noting wrong with researches who try to "solve" some inconsequental or made-up problem to feel important and relevant (as long it's their money they're wasting, their Uni becomes richer and can fund some actual research) that's understandable human desire but it's kinda confusing to see that quite often they're taken seriously by both general public and universities.

Again, I can understand why universities pretend that those people's work is valuable - you never have too much money on the bank account and it's far easier to lecture Worldwide Garbage Can History than Higher Mathematics but when you see people seriously discussing women oppression in computer games or demand a "safe spaces" in the certain gaming community or shaming developer for underrepresentation of black people in a game set in 15th century Europe... well... maybe there is more harm than good in this peculiar attempt to keep universities financially afloat..

[Tankbuster 1733]

Perhaps we should accept, with gritted teeth, that this thesis is the work of a student and it's aim is impress her lecturers and examiners. If she can write something as apparently substantial as this on a subject as esoteric and let's be honest, inconsequential as a computer game, then when she's properly qualified and employed, she can write something actually useful.

 

That, or it's as useful as a media studies degree.

 

Either way, it's provoked a discussion that I'm enjoying taking part in.

[chortles 263]

I'm just sitting here watching the topic fly over the heads of the both of you... the topic isn't the game, the topic is certain people who play it in a particular way (seeing as she mentions but specifically omits the DayZ players and Lifers) with focus on a specific realism unit.

EDIT: Yeeeee-esss she actually acknowledged and credited the pushback against "Arma 3 is all sci-fi"! And the why of people actually giving a damn about audiovisual mods! Which is admittedly something that I myself couldn't feel and thus always looked skeptically at the fans of...

[beastxjason 0]

the arma is strong with this one

[almanzo 144]

I wrote my master thesis in sociology on user generated content in ARMA, focusing on the influence of DayZ, so this was a really interesting thing to see for me. Quite a lot of the older research on modding has actually been conducted on OFP and ARMA modders previously, and this community does provide valuable insights into the role of modding in computer games in general, and it's financial role and so forth.

Personally, I am not much of a fan of the magic circle though, but I won't go into a theoretical debate as of now. I'm going to take my time reading this, as I really do want to pursue a career in video game studies and would like to write my doctorate on the same subject as my master thesis. What I can say about the usefulness of such studies: culture in itself is a central part in human lives, and as such knowlege about cultural trends, cultural products and most importantly, how culture is made is of course useful. I relied heavily on a certain Lawrence Lessig and his book "Remix" in my thesis, where issues concerning copyright is at the heart of the analysis. In addition, DayZ is a very good example of what modding represents financially. Modders are able to take much bigger risks and innovate more than huge companies are able too. Knowlege like this is potentially very useful for game companies, for instance.

Modders can afford to serve the interests of clicks and small groups in a way that bigger game companies aren't capable of. Sometimes, allowing modding might result in a huge pay off for companies, and DayZ is a decent example of this phenomenon, but games like Counter-Strike, Dota and Garry's mod is other examples of how modding has created alot of revenue for developers and publishers. There are ethical questions related to this as well, something this forum is a prime example of. 

I wrote my thesis in norwegian though, so it's not really a point of sharing it here.

 

[silentghoust 132]

Thing about this is that there's so much "here because I watched a video/stream" for Arma from guys too that Bohemia's development or at least promoting/marketing of Arma 3 takes that phenomenon into account (to say nothing of the End Game Tournament) so I really can't view questions of "do they like gaming" as a gendered thing.

I guess let me rephrase my belief. Did you go out drinking because you want to drink alcohol? Or do you go out to socialize? If no friends wanted to go out, would you go drinking anyways?

[chortles 263]

@almanzo And of course understanding of your target market's claimed thought processes is highly valuable as a publisher, though I emphasize claimed since one could wonder how much said players are just saying in public whatever they think the cool kids are supposed to say... still, I'd be extremely interested if you were ever to translate your thesis and make it publicly available. :)

@silentghoust From a publisher POV I'm not sure it matters why so long as they got the alcohol-buyer's money... except of course for the purposes of keeping the alcohol-buyers continuing to buy their alcohol, which admittedly is relevant since the seller can only offer (and be paid for) so many bottles of alcohol per customer within a given period and so they need to continually find new drinkers in order to increase revenue within that period (i.e. while the next brew is being prepared).
 
Indeed, if this article is indicative of the wider industry, the alcohol industry would collapse under its own weight were it not for those who are drinking socially because there just aren't (and never really would be) enough drinkers-for-the-sake-of-drinking to cover the costs of making, marketing, and distributing all that alcohol (to say nothing of the reasons why -- not necessarily including embezzlement -- marketing takes up so high a proportion of the alcohol production budget) unless you started trying to make cheaper, arguably lower-standard alcohol, which could then fall flat in the face of a market having been groomed for years to expect higher-quality alcohol.

[semiconductor 309]

usedul as a media studies degree.

Um... Oh, I'll better leave this thread before I get banned for derailing it into discussion of usefulness of certain Liberal Arts degrees. :D

[almanzo 144]

@almanzo And of course understanding of your target market's claimed thought processes is highly valuable as a publisher, though I emphasize claimed since one could wonder how much said players are just saying in public whatever they think the cool kids are supposed to say... still, I'd be extremely interested if you were ever to translate your thesis and make it publicly available. :)

Well, my thesis covered more than the perspectives of players and end users, I covered quite a wide variety of topics and interviewed both "casual" and "hard core" players, mod authors and an employee at BI. It's 80 pages long, so I doubt I'll ever translate it, however... If I get accepted into a doctorate program some time in the future, I would like to pick up where I left of and improve on the parts that I've found to be lacking. It would be foolish to write a project like that in Norwegian, as it limits the audience significantly. People who are interested in reading academic texts on the topic of video games is fairly limited in a population of 6 million people :P

That being said, the main focus was discussing potential ethical concerns regarding modding, how modders themselves described their motivations for actually spending so much time making mods, how important mods and user generated content was for both "groups" of players. I ended up ditching the casual/hard core dicotome in favor of organized vs. casual (using a term more resembling laid back in norwegian, but yeah), since the term "casual" heavily implies a less dedicated and time consuming relationship with games. At least with my informants, it was often the other way around. The structured and organized play that the clan members play during sessions is a lot less "available" and thus requires more preperation than casual play, but casual players was just as into the game and often spent more time than the organized players.

One of my key arguments though, is that modders represents a very valuable role in the gaming industry because they are a source of new ideas and concepts. Where game companies are limited in what they can do due to the huge potential downfall of a fail, modders can experiment a lot more with new concepts and ideas. In short, modders are a source of innovators in the industry due to the fact that they can afford to take bigger risks. After that, it's a numbers game, but how game companies approach modders could have a huge impact on their success. In addition, I spend a huge portion discussing the ethical implications using mainly Lessig (Remix culture, positive towards user generated content) vs. Terranova who coined the term "Netslaves". Terranova predicted our current internet economy, where the end user is providing the "product" back in 2000. It's quite remarkable to read today, even though I don't share his point of view.

http://web.mit.edu/schock/www/docs/18.2terranova.pdf

But I'm not going to hijack this thread to elaborate on my findings. You are welcome to drop me a PM though.

 

[Tankbuster 1733]

 discussion of usefulness of certain Liberal Arts degrees. :D

My blood has gone from 'simmer' to full on boil over just thinking about it! :) But yes, let us return to the topic.

[Tankbuster 1733]

I do think we're getting some distance from the subject here. The thesis is an examination of the community and this is includes, but is not restricted to this very forum. Readers will see that large parts of what she writes is not actually about the game, but how we play and react to the game and then how we behave as an online community.

Yes, she talks about gamergate and perhaps as an outsider, she over eggs that pudding. I'm not defending misogyny, and what happened there was dreadful, nor do I seek to dismiss it, but I do think it's a minor issue - 'a storm in a teacup' as we say in English.

The thing is, she could have chosen to write this about any gaming community. It's probably only come to our attention because it's about our game. So my question is why here? I suggest it'sbecause of the unique way the devs engage with the community.

Of course, other than the above, this community is typical. It has just as many idiots, trolls, walts and tossers as any other.