In an ever-increasing age of technology, it is essential to analyse and understand the catalysts that cause these advancements in human ingenuity. The focus of this blog is on one particular catalyst that is continually shaping how people work towards the betterment of medias that are, at present, the core of human social interactions. Using the Games Industry as an example, this discussion will relate game forums and game communities to the theory of Networks and Collective Intelligence. The end of this Blog will have established a firm argument to support how this form of community based networking has shaped and will continue to shape games and the games industry.
To briefly summarize, collective Intelligence (CI), or in other terms, symbiotic intelligence, is formed when “people, in the process of accessing and using information on networks, create new knowledge without premeditation”. (Norman, L. J. 2003) Just like the gestalt theory, “The whole is greater then the sum of the parts”(Hothersall, D. 2004. Ch.4), when individuals are networked together, they have the power to create a system of information vastly more complex then if they where not connected. The popular game Mass Effect 2 created by BioWare touches on this subject through a robotic synthetic species called the Geth. Once only individual machine platforms, the Geth had the ability to share information with each other to perform manual tasks for their creators. Through this network of individual platforms sharing information, a sentient being was formed creating an artificial intelligence (AI) consisting of thousands of individual synthetic programs working towards the benefit of its CI’s future. (Walters, M. Karpyshyn, D. 2010) In the words of one particular Geth “Together, we form a single gestalt.” (BioWare. 2010)
It is this theory that is implemented in Internet forums created for consoles, fan media, and games. Not only is it a source for players to individually feed information into a system regarding tips, walkthrough, jokes, etc for any particular game, it is also a means for the designers to ask for feedback, asking whether the game was enjoyable or not or to discover missed bugs that are potentially volatile to the game functioning as it should. From this, games can be improved by means of patch updates to fix problems, add features or even expand on narratives. Just like Geth, a CI of human beings can feed information into a particular subject towards the betterment of an industry, in this case, the games industry.
To give an example, World of Warcraft (WoW) is a strongly forum supported MMORPG (Massivly Multi-player Online Role Playing Game). During the first few years after the game’s release, players needed to communicate with each other on a continued basis in game, providing new information on how to progress without having to do it alone. This CI was needed because the game’s world was so immensely large, in the words of Kym Holmes,
“As players saw the need to harness the power of the community knowledge base, wiki sites arose that were dedicated to the accumulation of information about the game, ranging from the lore right through to statistical builds for classes to maximize abilities.” (Holmes, K. 2008)
Through these forums, players could then expand further into the game world, discovering more content and sharing that information with others until a large network of WoW related content covered almost every aspect of the game. The game’s designer Blizzard had to then expand the game even more, adding more and more content to satisfy fans. To date, WoW now has a community of 12 million players (Fahey, M. 2010), each adding their own information, a network of CI that continues to expand. Just as the Geth grew in intelligence enough to overthrow their creators for self-preservation, the future may show the CI of WoW players growing so large that the power of overthrowing their oppressors, whether parents, spouses or other, becomes a reality. Regardless of this, it is through CIs such as these that keep pushing the games industry to new levels of innovation as developers require user input to create larger and more advanced game experiences.
As human technology advances, it is only inevitable that people will continue to feed each other information from across the globe as a mass CI. The games industry is no exception to this, as socially networked games become more and more popular, people will join the fray, creating an ever growing and quite possibly ever present network of individuals sharing stories, tips and other information with each other. Whether through forums, or the games themselves, game community CIs will be a catalyst of innovation in the games industry for years to come.
Gameography
Mass Effect 2, Bungie, 2010
World of Warcraft, Blizzard, 2004
References
Fahey, M. (2010, October). Two years later, World Of Warcraft Hits The 12 Million Mark. Accessed 26th October, 2010, from: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/10/two-years-later-world-of-warcraft-hits-the-12-million-mark/
Holmes, K. (2008, April). Answering Questions: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence. Accessed 26th October, 2010, from: http://www.kymholmes.com/documents/Collective_Intelligence.pdf
Hothersall, D. (2003). David Hothersall: History of Psychology. University of California: McGraw-Hill
Norman, L. J. (2003) The Symbiotic Intelligence Project. Accessed 25th October, 2010, from: http://collectivescience.com/SymIntel.html
Walters, M. Karpyshyn, D. (2010, February). Mass Effect 2 Manuel. Edmonton: Electronic Arts.
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