[Kevin Moberly speaking]: Dolores Phillips and I just had an article come out in Reconstruction and it’s called “Spectacular Unhappiness” and it has an unwieldy something after the colon. We sort of look at Facebook games in particular and we use Sarah Ahmed’s Promise of Happiness and we sort of talk about how these games actually train people to play, quote unquote, Facebook and how they’re kind of … they fit in together in this kind of relationship where you have to accumulate as much friends, and it’s measured … Candy Crush, for example, is measured in this kind of competitive happiness where you can be more sugary … um, yeah, just more sugary than your friends, and you go through this Candy Land type thing and it’s this kind of competitive thing and you’re evaluated on happiness. And so that’s I think one of the big sort of intersections there is that these games kind of, they depend on platforms like Facebook, or they did, they’re now branching out through apps and things like that. But they did at one point really depend on Facebook to get started and to reach a larger audience and that’s sort of one of the intersections I’m interested in.
[Ryan Moeller speaking]: And speaking of sort of consumerist interests in the game industry, social media games have become huge. In app purchases, in game purchases, becoming a … a largely motivating profit factor for game developers now. I think on the one hand, it’s become easier for me to talk about the social impact of games and the cultural impact of games because more people, especially women, will identify as gamers because they’ve played social games. So I think it’s, on the one hand, brought more people into the game industry and helped people identify the role of play in their daily lives. But on the other hand, I think that because it comes with such a motivation for profit, it’s a … it’s an area we can, games scholars, should investigate. I also think that with social games, and social media and gaming, comes a … a huge opportunity for game developers to track play, play activities and … so I think we need to be careful about what sorts of data we are sending to game developers and to corporate America. And I think there’s some people, like yourself, who are doing that kind of work looking at nondisclosure agreements between player communities and game developers, people who are looking at privacy policies in terms of social games and social media and gaming, and those are some opportunities for further research, I think.
[Kevin Moberly speaking]: I’m kind of also interested in the way that these social games have redefined the landscape of gaming, and as Ryan was saying, now that we don’t always think about games as these Triple A super photorealistic sixty dollar titles, we think about games as these browser based sometimes small things, which I think one thing that I’m excited about as an educator who’s interested in using games and virtual realities, that we’ve kind of … sort of refocused the emphasis of gaming and people’s expectations of gaming on the game play than on the pretty pictures and the photorealistic graphics and we’ve also packaged it in these browser things, which, if anybody has taught games and has dealt with the “Oh, well, I can’t play this game because I only have a Mac and it’s not available for Macs,” well, suddenly you have this whole … like Steam has this MMO that’s just browser based now through the Unity engine, which again I’m also excited about. Social games have really pushed the technologies of Flash and Silverlight and sort of stuff like that to do things they weren’t intended to do and now they’re opening these other avenues for maybe perhaps repurposing games for our own nefarious purposes. [Ryan laughs]
[Ryan Moeller speaking]: That’s a good point. I was just talking to a conference member yesterday, and he was asking what I studied and I of course said professional communication, rhetoric, and computer game culture. And he said well I’m not a gamer. And I said, well, show me your phone [laughs] and I asked him what do you do with your phone, and it was mostly games, and so right there … But then we opened up a conversation about what does it mean to be a gamer, how much time do you have to spend each week to be a gamer? What kind of games do you have to play to be a gamer? But Ken has … Ken McAllister has this really great exercise where he starts, he starts in a big audience, well you know, how many of you consider yourself gamers? And of course, I don’t know, maybe 20% of the audience raises their hands. And then as he gets down to all of the levels of these different games and finally settles on Solitaire on your Windows-based machine, and then everybody’s raised their hand. So I think social media and games really do expose more people to games and also expose more people to game development and to … social tracking.