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Day[9]TV: How interactive Web television parallels game design
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Day[9]TV: How interactive Web television parallels game design
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A CASE STUDY OF DAY[9]TV: HOW INTERACTIVE WEB TELEVISION PARELLELS GAME DESIGN by Sean Saintmichael Plott A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS (INTERACTIVE MEDIA) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Sean Saintmichael Plott ii Acknowledgements I'd like to extend an enormous thanks to the faculty, staff, and my classmates in the USC Interactive Media Division for their encouragement and support in producing the Day[9]TV project. Thank you to my USC advisors Steve Anderson and Peter Brinson for their relentless positivity and enthusiasm, encouraging me to continue when I was on the brink of abandoning the thesis altogether. Thanks to Steve for continually telling me my project was "rockin" and to Peter who helped me discover the core ideas behind the thesis itself. Thank you to Adrienne and Anne for consistently helping me with deadlines and logistics that I'd be incapable of remembering myself. Thank you to Tracy Fullerton who has always provided brilliant critiques that have helped my projects and design processes grow. Thank you to Henry Jenkins whose ideas behind fan participation and transmedia branding helped shape the direction of the show. Thanks to my outside advisor Marcus Graham who was always willing to lend friendly conversation when I was feeling stumped. Enormous thanks to Eric and Cara, the other two legs of the Day[9]TV team, who helped take Day[9]TV from a hobby to a successful, fun business. You helped keep Day[9]TV fun and on the right track. I owe much of the thesis to your insights. See you in our meeting tomorrow. Thanks to the StarCraft community: the smartest, nicest, most playful community on the planet. Many a bad day has been cured with your humor, and the Day[9]TV show wouldn't be the same without you. Most of all, I'd like to thank my classmates: Sean Bouchard, Hua Chen, Emily Duff, Bill Graner, Logan Olson, Daniel Ponce, Elizabeth Swensen, Jim Taylor, and Diane Tucker. I cannot tell you how proud I am to graduate with an amazing group like you. <3 to all of you! iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract iv Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Project Overview 4 Prior Art 11 Chapter 2: How Web Television Parallels Game Design 14 Chapter 3: Precursors to the Daily 18 Recruiting an Audience through Community Trust 19 Experimenting with Media to Reach the Audience 26 Chapter 4: Core Content and Interactivity 31 Rapid Iteration of Core Content 31 Experimenting with Mechanisms of Interactivity 33 The Importance of Storytelling and Host Identity 40 The Importance of Authenticity 48 Chapter 5: Side Effects of Community Participation 51 The Question of Ownership 52 Issues with Monetizing Content 54 Chapter 6: Conclusion 58 Bibliography 60 iv Abstract With the increasing ease of producing and disseminating video over the internet, anyone can create a web television series. Though one may view web television as an extension of traditional broadcast television, we propose that a more appropriate model of production is game design. With smaller audiences, web television producers must maintain an open dialogue with the viewership to adjust content quickly, using the audience like playtesters. And, with modes of interactivity, web television producers must iterate like a game designer to create a desired participatory and interactive experience. We explore the parallels of game design to web television through a case study of Day[9]TV, a highly successful live interactive web television show that focuses on gaming and strategy in the real time strategy game Starcraft. Keywords Interactive Television, Web Television, Starcraft, eSports, Game Design, Competitive Gaming, Community, Participatory Media, Social Media 1 Chapter 1 - Introduction Within the field of interactive media there has been a growing interest in the genre known as “interactive television.” This genre usually takes one of two forms: 1) interactive experiences that are applied to traditional broadcast or cable television, or 2) interactive television experiences that are completely web-based. Though others explore interactive web television as an extension of traditional broadcast television, this project explores the parallels of internet television to game design by a case study of the design, production and syndication of an “interactive web-based television show.” The production in question offers viewers an intense, community-based learning experience surrounding Blizzard Entertainment’s popular online multiplayer strategy game StarCraft. The show is called The Day[9] Daily and is produced by the author of this thesis, Sean Plott. It has been livestreamed regularly since October 22, 2009, and now consists of a library of some 500 videos on demand (“VODs”) archived on Blip.TV and YouTube. As of December 2010, the Day[9] Daily was routinely receiving more than 5 million views a month, with an audience that continues to grow exponentially. The Daily has been positively reviewed not only within the online gaming community but also in the mainstream press, such as The Economist, PCWorld, GamaSutra, Chicago Public Radio, Business Insider, Swedish National Television and others. PCGamer named its host the 2010 “Gamer of the Year;” Business Insider named him a “Rising YouTube Star.” Like the technology which enables it to be broadcast, the show has evolved rapidly since its inception and continues to adapt and change. The Daily has not only capitalized 2 successfully on innovations in streaming, interactivity, and viral distribution but continues to experiment with content and format in order to increase its audience engagement and improve its educational approach. The team behind the Daily also receives an unusually high level of support, both in terms of financial donations and labor contributions, from its community audience, without which the show could not exist. In this sense, the show is a true grass roots production that reflects the democratic sensibilities of its internet community. The effort involved in the creation, design, and delivery of the Daily has given its producers a number of unique insights into what it takes to produce a successful interactive web television series. This thesis will analyze in detail the lessons learned from the show and their implications for the future of broadcast media. In particular, the experiences of the Daily reveal that the role of an interactive web television producer parallels that of a game designer. The producer is often rapidly iterating and experimenting with content, incorporating feedback from an open dialogue with the community and viewership. We explore these parallels through a case study of Day[9]TV. The structure of the case study is as follows: Project Overview: What is Day[9]TV? The central theme: why internet web television parallels game design Precursors to the Daily: • Provenance and community trust are essential for recruiting audience and forming appropriate content. 3 • Experimenting and testing delivery mechanisms: video content has advantages over audio or text that reflect the form of the content (a video game) as well as the behavior of the community. Core Content and Interactivity: • Short production time and clear feedback avenues allow for rapid iteration of core content. • Experimenting with interactive mechanisms allow viewers to influence the show and have a more engaging viewer experience. • Experiments with storytelling reveal the importance of the host’s identity in having a strong rapport with the audience. • Since the show grew from the community, the audience demands that the show maintain “authenticity” in both look and presentation. Side effects of extensive community participation: • Community participation and involvement raises the question of ownership. • Producers must be extraordinarily careful that advertising and monetization models do not alienate the audience. This essay will conclude with a discussion of the implications of applying game design principles to internet media. 4 Project Overview The Day[9] Daily is a 5-day-a-week web television show that provides StarCraft strategy education, geek culture commentary and entertainment. Viewers tune in to watch its host, Day[9], provide strategy tips and analysis for the real-time strategy games Starcraft and Starcraft 2, and to explore the gaming lifestyle and subculture. The show has become a focal point for an extensive fan base of devoted StarCraft gamers who see the Daily as a mouthpiece that articulates the community’s positive values and raises the dialogue surrounding gameplay. The Game Starcraft. Starcraft is a real-time strategy game franchise developed by Blizzard Entertainment and first released in 1998. In Starcraft, each player controls a race that must collect resources to construct a powerful army in order to defeat an opponent. The depth and strategy of the game lies in its careful balance between growing economy and investing in military resources. In addition, gameplay happens in real-time. This means that unlike a strategy game such as chess where players take turns to execute actions, all gameplay in Starcraft occurs continuously. Units have movement speeds and ranges of attack. This increases the skill cap and adds to the excitement and drama of the game, both for the player and for the spectator. This requires the player to have extraordinary depth of knowledge and strategy as well as extreme manual dexterity in order to play the game proficiently. Starcraft has enjoyed a rabid and almost cult-like following among gamers since its launch more than a decade ago. The original Starcraft sold more than 11 million copies worldwide [Graft] and the recently released Starcraft 2 sold more than 3 million copies in 5 its first month [Purchese]. Because it offers such rich and varied play, each release of the StarCraft game enjoys remarkable longevity in the marketplace. Originally popular among the young at LAN parties, a decade later the game has migrated to the internet and still retains those fans into adulthood. The Battle.net server has over 12 million registered users of all ages, making it the single largest gaming service in the world. The anticipated release of two more versions of StarCraft in coming years means that the game and its fan base will continue to thrive for some time to come. StarCraft as eSport. In addition to enjoying mass popularity, Starcraft has the fairly unique status of being one of the few professionally played eSports. An eSport is the broad term used to describe gaming at an intensely competitive level for prize money. Though many gamers casually compete with friends, an eSport offers broad competition across state, national, or even international levels, both online and offline. Examples of such large StarCraft tournaments include Major League Gaming, the World Cyber Games, the World eSports Festival, and Devastation. Professional teams often support players with salaries provided by sponsors. Teams such as Evil Geniuses or 3D enjoy the patronage of such Fortune 500 sponsors as Intel and Tylenol. Players even earn salaries of up to $400,000 annually [Staebell]. Nowhere has professional Starcraft enjoyed more widespread popularity as an eSport than in Seoul, South Korea. In fact, in Korea, Starcraft is a national sport, aired on up to four television stations simultaneously [Staebell]. The Korean pro circuit includes two major individual leagues, (OnGameNet Starleague and the MBCGame Starleague), as well as a large team league (ProLeague). Starcraft’s popularity in Korea helps support 11 major 6 proteams, each with dozens of full time professional gamers sponsored by major Korean corporate sponsors such as Samsung, KTmobile, and SKTelecom. Top ranking StarCraft players are national celebrities and icons, including Lim-Yo Hwan who has a fan club of nearly 500,000 members at http://cafe.daum.net/yohwanfan. Like mainstream sports, eSports have given rise to large groups of fans who do not play the game, but are nevertheless ardent spectators. With its fast-pace action, dazzling graphics, and understandable battle moves, StarCraft makes for an electrifying and viewable spectator experience. One of the express goals of the Daily is to promote StarCraft as an eSport in the West, and to establish a supportive fan and sponsor base like those currently existing in Korea. Although this effort is still a work in progress, Day[9]’s eSports message is often repeated in the gamer community and has been picked up by a number of mainstream publications, including The Economist, PCWorld, GamaSutra, PCGamer, Chicago Public Radio, and Business Insider. The Daily host has also been recently approached by a number of mainstream media outlets to consult with respect to and/or produce eSports tournaments in the US and Europe. To that end, the host spends considerable time (at least twice a month) traveling to tournament events where he acts as a play by play game analyst or “shoutcaster.” The Daily producers negotiate exclusive streaming rights to many of these tournament events and then broadcast them over the Day[9]TV channel. For example, over Thanksgiving weekend, 2010, the Daily livestreamed four days of non-stop StarCraft tournament action by striking a production deal with the Swedish organizers of DreamHack, a convention billed as the largest LAN in the world. The DreamHack organizers brought in dozens of top StarCraft players from all over the world to 7 compete on stage before a live audience, and the Daily brought in not only its host to emcee the event, but also a Los Angeles-based film crew specializing in livestreaming. Together the two organizations broadcast a StarCraft tournament that was billed by the Daily as a “gamer-friendly holiday alternative” to traditional football fare. The success of the show was indicative of the strength and size of the gamer subculture: more than 150,000 unique viewers stayed with the program each day throughout the entire holiday weekend, and the archived matches were viewed more than 1.35 million times. Gamer culture and lifestyle. The Daily is also intrigued with examining the pro gamer sub-culture, the emergence of gamer identity, the evolution of top players into community archetypes of good and evil, as well as the establishment of gamer community values. Daily episodes that focus on “storytelling” about the gamer culture, and these “heroes” and “villains” are among the most popular aired. The producers feels strongly that the gamer subculture, which has long existed, but which has been to some extent marginalized by mainstream media, is expressing the desire to explore gaming with pride not just as a hobby, but as a lifestyle. The Daily host has even been approached by a vendor wanting to collaborate to create a geek clothing line that is expressive of the values and style of the iconic gamer (creative tshirts, subtle embroidered references to StarCraft insignia on cotton jackets and hoodies, distinctive tailoring). This renewed community interest in defining and exploring gamer culture will be discussed in greater detail in the case study below. The structure and content of the Daily. The Day[9] Daily is a livestreamed web television series hosted Sunday through Thursday at 7pm PST. The frequent, consistent, 8 episodic nature of the show has been key to its success. Viewers report that the Daily has become an integral part of their own daily ritual. They also report that the host, “Day[9]” has become a familiar figure in their lives. The viewers have flooded the show’s producers with photos that feature viewers watching the show daily at work (US), over breakfast (Europe), while commuting or studying. Viewers comment that they use the Daily as a private respite from the day’s stress, for purposes of entertainment and education, and as a retreat into a community of like-minded individuals. Also key to the success of the show is the live nature of the broadcast. Viewers report that they enjoy the spontaneity and unpredictability of the content, the sense that the host’s narrative is unrehearsed and unfiltered and that they have been given entry into his private world. Viewers also report that they like the feeling that the gaming community has gathered in a virtual place in real time, and that they have the ability to chat about the show with one another and with the host in real time. The show’s audience numbers are revealed publicly on the stream, and when viewer counts rise above certain benchmarks (such as 10,000 or 20,000 live concurrent viewers) this is generally a cause for community celebration, self-congratulation and excitement. These high viewer counts often result in a surge of twitter posts that result in even larger viewing audiences. In each episode, viewers may type in the accompanying chat window to interact with one another and to influence the production of the show. A typical episode is approximately one hour long. Each show generally opens with a two minute introduction that includes announcements and a broad overview of the upcoming topic of the show. This 9 is followed by a short comedic improv about the struggles of the gamer/host in his real life. Based upon audience feedback, the viewers profoundly relate to the hosts’ humorous descriptions of his attempts to integrate his gaming persona with his real life persona. His monologues about dating issues, work issues, trolling issues, money issues, poor game performance, bad internet connections, and fluctuating self-esteem have been embraced as fodder for laughter and introspection by the entire community. While the host sometimes interviews a top gamer, or reverts to telling anecdotes about gamer lifestyle and culture, the core content of the Daily is educational, with at least 90% of the shows focusing on game analysis. For 30-45 minutes, using a combination of slow motion, fast forwarding, pausing, and rewinding, the host highlights noteworthy moments of gameplay and comments on their purpose and meaning. In the final 10-15 minutes of each Daily, the host takes questions from the audience via a live chat stream. There are generally 6 to 7 chat rooms running concurrently, each moderated by volunteer administrators who operate independently of the show’s producers. Members of the community have also spontaneously offered their services to build a website for the show (www.day9fan.com), tag its content, create show descriptions and playlists by topic, set up subforums on screddit, teamliquid.net and other popular community sites, transcribe and translate episodes, and restream the show on other hosting platforms. There is even a Day[9]TV ipad app. In fact, virtually all of these projects have been launched without any input or feedback from the show staff at all. This community- based work is done efficiently and professionally, and with remarkable speed and organization. The producers interpret this as a sign not only that the community embraces 10 the show, but feels proprietary towards its content. In the eyes of the community, Day[9]TV belongs to the community. This volunteer effort has been a source of both delight and concern for the show’s producers. It speaks to the devotion and support of the audience but at the same has raised a number of legal ownership issues, since these derivative works by the community are becoming an increasingly integral part of the show, and grow without any control or direction. Day[9]TV audience. Who watches the Day[9] Daily? The show demographic is largely male, 15 to 35, tech savvy, educated, serious about gaming, gainfully employed or enrolled in school. Women, often recruited by male companions, represent a vocal, but rising minority within this group, and often write to the host to admonish him about the lack of female professional gamers and shoutcasters. Approximately 30% of the entire audience is located outside the United States, and that segment is largely located in Europe (particularly Sweden and Germany). This demographic mirrors the demographic of the gaming community as a whole. The Daily’s audience is evolving from a niche group of hard core StarCraft gamers into a surprising mix of newcomers and serious gamers seeking strategy education, casual gamers enjoying StarCraft purely as a spectator sport, and non-gamers drawn to the storytelling aspects of the show. 11 Prior Art In creating the Daily, its producers took the time to study other successful, television shows with a similar audience demographic and highly curated content. Revision3.com and the show “Diggnation” with Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht Revision3 is a leading internet television network. With episodic content targeted at passionate niche markets, Revision3’s shows are viewed through its website, al ong with more than 40 distribution partners including TiVo, iTunes and YouTube. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht discuss some of the top stories from Digg, the social news and bookmarking website. The Daily producers liked the cheerful irreverance of Diggnation, with its improvised set, smart repartee and low production values. They agreed that its style felt authentic, edgy and fresh. Inspired by Diggnation, the setting for the Daily show is low key and intimate—it is the host’s college room. That room is filled with evidence of the host’s actual life. Like Diggnation, there is no green screen, no elaborate production values, just a fixed cam shot of the host at his desk. http://www.revision3.com Twit TV with Leo Laporte On Twit.TV, the affable Leo LaPorte livestreams more than 40 hours of talk show content on technology topics to the software development community. Leo hosts and produces over 15 different shows at www.twit.tv, covering all aspects of technology. He has a staff of seven with revenue in the millions. The Daily producers pondered over Leo LaPorte’s comments that he believed that Twit.TV was talk radio for programmers and software developers— 12 that it acted as a kind of background noise for the viewers while they were at work, keeping them up to date on industry developments and providing respite from the loneliness of coding. The Daily producers particularly admired the way LaPorte seamlessly integrated audience comments from the chat box into his talk shows. Finally, they were intrigued by LaPorte’s hyperdistributed broadcast system (for stability and ease of use, the show livestreams simultaneously on not one, but four different hosting platforms). http://www.twit.tv iFanboy with Josh Flanagan, Conor Kilpatrick, and Ron Richards iFanboy is a weekly video and audio podcast that focuses on comic books and the comic book industry. The casual setting involves the three hosts discussing their favorite comic picks, as well as themed shows focusing on various aspects of comics. The video and audio shows are also accompanied by an extensive website that functions as a means to interact with the community and index and organize content. www.ifanboy.com Deca.tv and the show “Project Lore” with Alex Albrecht DECA (Digital Entertainment Corporation of America) was founded in 2007 to create a new model for the online entertainment experience. Though DECA’s philosophy originally focused on recognizing and nurturing personalities and properties distinctive to digital technology, the site has shifted focus to target affluent and educated women online. www.deca.tv 13 Mixergy.com with Andrew Warner Mixergy is a wildly successful website where Andrew Warner interviews successful entrepreneurs. Most interviews are done via web, and all videos are archived on the site. www.mixergy.com Tv.winelibrary.com with Gary Vaynerchuk Gary Vaynerchuk, the star of Wine Library TV, is Director of Operations at Wine Library in Springfield, NJ. With his unconventional, often irreverent commentary on wine, Gary has attracted a cult-like following of more than 80,000 viewers a day. http://tv.winelibrary.com 14 Chapter 2 - How Web Television Parallels Game Design With the increase in bandwidth and decrease in hosting costs, the ability to disseminate video on the internet is easier than ever before. Making content for previously untapped niche markets is both fast and inexpensive. So, when considering the production of a new web television series, what is the best model to follow? Though one may consider mimicking traditional broadcast television models to produce a show, the methodologies and tools of game designers are more appropriate for the creation and implementation of interactive web television shows. The first issue when considering applying a traditional television model to web television is audience size. In traditional television broadcasting, shows target broad demographics such as “18 to 35 males,” a demographic numbering in the tens to hundreds of millions, a demographic the show is attempting to scoop a small percentage of. Since a niche market may only number in the hundreds of thousands, a show must necessarily engage a higher percentage of that market, or even expand it. To do so, producers of the show should maintain a dialogue with the viewership to determine and maximally satisfy their desires. The act of receiving feedback from the audience, exploiting quick production times to iterate upon that feedback, and testing the results is much like the process of iterative design in games. In Game Design Workshop, game designer Tracy 15 Fullerton shares the idea of iteration, that the role of the designer is to “design, test, and evaluate the results over and over again, improving upon gameplay or features” until the desired experience is created. Most importantly, the core idea of Fullerton’s book is a playcentric approach, that the designer should “involve the player in the design process from conception through completion” because “the designer cannot be the advocate for the player without knowing what the player is thinking” [Fullerton]. In interactive web television, the viewers are the playtesters, and the producer is the one brainstorming and testing the structure of the content. With so many individual viewers and individual opinions, the producer of the interactive web television show must be very careful to appropriately use and interpret feedback, similar to how Fullerton describes playtesting and iteration: “The common misconception is that playtesting is simple—just play the game and gather feedback. In reality, playing the game is only one part of the process that involves selection, recruiting, preparation, controls, and analysis” [Fullerton]. For instance, small groups of dissatisfied viewers might be the most vocal, or the vast majority of viewers may be satisfied and never provide feedback at all. The web producer must carefully examine subjective statements over time, compare feedback with concrete data, and isolate and test accordingly. The second issue when applying traditional broadcast television models to web television are the new modes of interactivity. By being embedded on the internet, comments, forums, social communities, live chat, and other interactive 16 mechanisms allows audience participation in a way traditional television never could. These modes of participation and interaction are similar to the mechanics of a game. As Ernest Adams notes in Fundamentals of Game Design, the mechanics are the “verbs” of a game, the actions that the player may perform [Adams]. In traditional television, there are no verbs; the viewer passively consumes. However, in an interactive web television space, a producer can manage, adjust and utilize mechanics for interactivity in way that creates a desired experience. For example, the target market may have preexisting online communities that serve as a home for the show, a forum where the producers can participate in discussions with the viewers as equals. The live chat feature of web television shows allows the producers to see the mood, thoughts, and questions of the viewers in real time. Because these communication lines are public, viewers can definitively see how and where they have successfully exerted influence on the show. The important note is that the producer, similar to a game designer, has a variety of mechanics at his disposal, mechanics used to create an appropriate experience for the audience. Whatever the audience or desired experience may be, the producer must test, adjust and iterate based upon the feedback of the viewing community. Short production times and low production costs allow the producers to implement feedback or experiment with content with ease. 17 We examine Day[9]TV as a case study of the idea of interactive web television as game design. First, we examine how Day[9]TV formed a connection and dialogue to an established community and the early experiments in media. Second, we examine Day[9]TV’s experience with experimentation and iteration of the core content and mechanisms of interactivity. Third, we consider potential issues and side effects for Day[9]TV of having extensive community participation and influence. 18 Chapter 3 - Precursors to the Daily In forming a successful interactive web show, access to a willing and trusting audience is just as important as the production crew or use of media. More significantly, understanding the personality and the desires of the community is essential to producing appropriate content. By analog, regardless of its production quality or interface design, an MMO like World of Warcraft would not be a full experience without the emergent behavior of an active player base. And, the MMO must be created appropriately with the personality of the audience in mind. For example, Warhammer Online, created for the hardcore MMO market, utilizes the language of the MMORPG regular, labeling classes as “DPS” or “Tank” in the character creation menu of the game, language that would not be appropriate for a casual gamer [Warhammer]. Consequently, the beginnings of the Daily and the foundations of its success lie in two key pieces: 1) Years spent cultivating a relationship with a community, a relationship that helped recruit initial viewers and shape the structure of the show. 2) Experimentations with media to find the appropriate form to communicate with the audience. 19 Provenance and community trust are essential for recruiting audience and forming appropriate content In spite of its press, Day[9]TV was not an overnight internet sensation. In fact, the host had put down roots in the gaming community at least ten years earlier—when StarCraft Broodwar was first released. During that decade, he was a frequent contributor to gaming forums, including TeamLiquid.net, gosugamers.net and broodwar.com and was also a member of a number of gaming “clans,” including “rS gaming” and “MYM.” Because the host was known and trusted by the StarCraft community, and because he had established a voice and a persona in text-based forums, he had a platform from which he could effectively launch the initiative that became the Day[9] Daily. The Day[9] Daily would not have risen to prominence on the internet or enjoyed viral dissemination without the active support of the established StarCraft community. This is the first lesson to be learned in building a successful internet television show—begin with a host who has a solid relationship with an established online community and seek that community’s support to build an audience. Ten years of posting and commenting in gamer forums meant that the host of the Daily could—literally with a single thread--call upon thousands of fellow gamers for their support and response. And yet this does not tell the whole story of the Daily’s success. The Daily, after all, is not unique in its subject matter. Own3d.tv, one of the largest streaming platforms, has built its entire business model on streaming gaming commentary. There are dozens of 20 competent StarCraft shoutcasters producing shows there at present. Why has the Daily touched such a chord with gamers? Why did PCGamer nominate its host Gamer of the Year? The answer lies with the StarCraft community itself. The StarCraft subculture. In his book Fans, Bloggers and Gamers, Henry Jenkins describes the thriving subculture of fandom as follows: “Fans were marginal to the operations of our culture, ridiculed in the media, shrouded with social stigma, pushed underground by legal threats, often depicted as brainless and inarticulate….but…an alternative image of fan cultures was one that saw media consumers as active, critically engaged, and creative.” [Jenkins] The host can affirm that the StarCraft community—and gamers as a whole—were particularly marginalized in this way, as games were tarred by the media as being dangerous and addictive, and hard core gamers, mindless and violent. This widespread social condemnation tainted and overshadowed the early gaming experiences of many members of the gaming community. “Gamer” was a label synonymous with being antisocial, a poor communicator, subversive, addicted to fantasy violence, unemployable, living with parents, physically unhealthy, unwilling to grow up and poorly connected to reality. This article is typical in its paranoid and exaggerated description of a young gamer’s motivations and behaviors: A quick search online for information about video game addiction yields multiple stories about detrimental, and potentially harmful, social decisions people have made because gaming takes priority above all else. One such story was about a man who installed an online gaming program onto his laptop so he could play at work, even though he knew that getting caught would mean getting fired. 1 Yet another told 21 of a wife whose husband had begun playing "all the time” because he said it took his mind off his problems. 2 The lack of social interaction that results from obsessive gaming can have long-term social consequences. An addicted teenager won't develop effective social skills, which will hinder his ability to develop and maintain healthy relationships in college and beyond. Suddenly, he's 21 but has the social skills of a 15-year-old. He doesn't know how to make friends, talk to girls, or just "hang out” and enjoy people's company. The social awkwardness created by the isolationism of gaming addiction, unfortunately, feeds the addiction. The gaming addict will likely retreat back to his online world where relationships are easier and already waiting for him. [Social Consequences of Gaming Addiction] Adult gamers report in forum threads that they remember feeling misunderstood or deeply conflicted as children about their interest in gaming. Many hid their practice time from their parents or peers. The problem was that the more they practiced and refined their gaming skills, the higher they rose in ladder rankings and in community status, but the more they alienated their parents. The fact of the matter was that StarCraft, in particular, was a “thinking man’s game” and tended to attract an educated, intelligent user base. Most young gamers enjoyed the challenge of the game and enjoyed joining its gaming community. Adult gamers report that StarCraft provided them with an opportunity for experimentation, analysis, debate, self- testing, and self-discipline. As they played and practiced and improved, StarCraft became nothing less than the psychological “proving ground” of their adolescence, as evidenced in this gaming forum post: I've been working my ass off in school trying to get straight a's for the past 16 years. And now that I'm almost done I can honestly say that the one thing that really taught me how to work hard and improve myself as an individual was playing Starcraft competitively. Sure, being a pro gamer is a pipe dream for most people, but the people who get there don't do it through luck or talent, they do it through devastating, grueling hard work. And they do it because they love to do it. 22 That's the secret to being successful in any area of life. Find what you love to do and give it your all. I don't think I would have learned that if it weren't for starcraft. Gaming all day isn't smart for most people. But if somebody spent all day gaming, improving themselves and working as hard as they possibly can, I will say go for it. If you can lose over and over and over again, and keep playing until you start winning, you've got a stronger spirit than 99% of the people who slide by in high school and end up working dead-end jobs, and you'll probably end up more successful than those people because of it. [TeamLiquid] Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that many devotees of StarCraft, finding little sympathy for their hobby among friends or colleagues, soon withdrew into online communities, where gameplay was understood and accepted. In the words of one poster: Anyway, no one I really know in real life is an avid gamer like me. Especially not at work. I'm a postdoc doing medical research at UCLA. Most researchers aren't into games in the least and they even look at me funny when they find out I am into them. There is a CSL team here at UCLA; however, even that is pretty small here and we've only done a couple events together. It's just tough to find gamers to hang with irl. Most of the people I show games to are interested for like 5 minutes, but then they just stop playing. [TeamLiquid] By congregating in online forums, these individuals were able to create a virtual gaming subculture, with its own canon, rules, primers, mentors, pranksters, heroes (the Korean pro-gamers) and demons (the cheaters, hackers, trolls and disconnectors). For many members of this subculture, the hope is that eSports will rise in mainstream Western media, legitimize their lifestyle, and finally validate their standing as skilled gamers: So the day will come to all of us when we have to tell someone in real life that we play starcraft. I [can’t] put into words why starcraft is such a big part of my daily routine (dare I say life?). … the time I spend at my computer is not shooting at people with pre-pubescents but in fact working on my build, honing my skills and most importantly, playing an Intelligent game. 23 Perhaps if e-sports is to become big in the west the gaming industry needs to shrug off its 'childish' tag that mainstream media still gives it, and sc2 is the best way. [TeamLiquid] TeamLiquid.net. TeamLiquid.net was one of the earliest and most important of the StarCraft forums. It not only attracted an extraordinary diversity of forum members, but— and this is key—managed to retain those members as they matured from high school to college to adulthood. This retention rate meant that as the community matured, so did its discourse, and its resources to support and organize the community. Today, TeamLiquid receives over 100,000 unique views daily. TeamLiquid.net counts among its members a surprising number of professionals, including doctors, lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, and software engineers. Although largely male, it has a number of active female members. The forum tolerates a wide variety of lifestyles. Humor is widely appreciated. The diversity, intelligence and longevity of its members have helped temper and elevate the level of discourse surrounding the game on the forum threads. There are clear rules governing forum contributions; trolling is strictly monitored and restricted; newbies are carefully grandfathered in, and the quality of posts remains high. Thread topics are not limited to StarCraft. Over the last decade, TeamLiquid.net has become a safe harbor for its community to discuss a wide range of social issues, from sexuality to religion to politics and culture. Always central to these discussions is how StarCraft and gaming informs the user’s personality, life goals, values, sense of self, etc. Where other gaming forums have rapidly disintegrated into marketplaces for the casual gamer to exchange gossip, insults and cheats, TeamLiquid continues to distinguish 24 itself by its high-level discussion of strategy and analysis, its advanced sense of self-satire and its exhaustive reporting and promotion of the Korean eSports scene. The StarCraft community at TeamLiquid has also played an important role in terms of recruiting, training and absorbing new gamers and propagating the game’s market share. An ironic byproduct of the complexity of StarCraft gaming is that, as older players improve and dominate ladders, the game becomes increasingly demoralizing for newcomers to play. Without the community to encourage and advise these new players, the game risks becoming esoteric—a professionals only arena. The Daily is a direct outgrowth of those community efforts to recruit, train, entertain, and make a home for gamers. The tone of the content reflects the tone of the community. For example, the core content focuses on education and assistance, providing learning tools for viewers to help not just themselves, but also their fellow gamers. Moreover, the discourse builds respect for the top players as well as the game itself, warmly embracing the identity of the competitive gamer. Aside from the game itself, the tangents and personal stories of the host are continuations of the similar discussions among the gaming communities. TeamLiquid and similar forums now make up a significant portion of the Daily audience and continue to shape the content and direction of the show. The Daily has a permanent thread on the TeamLiquid forum where the audience discusses each episode of the Daily, and debates the strategies and analyses that have been presented. The host’s relationship with the StarCraft community. Over a ten year period, the Daily’s host has slowly built up an online reputation within the StarCraft community as a 25 trusted commentator, competitive gamer, prolific poster and generous resource. Rheingold (1993) and Kollock (1999), have studied the motivations of online information gift giving, and suggest that contributors are motivated by a desire to gain reputation and win prestige. Kollock: “High quality information, impressive technical details in one's answers, a willingness to help others, and elegant writing can all work to increase one's prestige in the community." [Kollock] This was essentially the case for the show’s host. He was at first a mere participant and a passive student in these online communities; then an active poster and a proactive debater of game mechanics, then a ranked gamer on ladders who offered advanced commentary on strategy, and then a professional gamer whose own progress was followed in forum threads. Most importantly, the host posted frequently and maintained consistent visibility in the community, never disappearing for long stretches of time. His standing as an “expert” was further solidified when he became a “quality poster” at TeamLiquid, and his posts distinguished by a coveted “*” (star) next to his name. The fact that the host was deeply embedded in the community forums, had a long history as a reliable poster—in short, had “provenance” within the community—was key to the show’s successful launch and rapid growth. The community, recognizing the efforts of one of its own, immediately lent its support to the show and widely embedded links to the episodes in various forums. 26 Experimenting and testing delivery mechanisms: video content has advantages over audio or text that reflect the form of the content (a video game) as well as the behavior of the community This essay has stressed the host’s long term standing and reputation in the online StarCraft forums and his history of being a reliable and prolific poster on game strategy. As StarCraft grew in popularity and the StarCraft forums grew in terms of members and threads, the host found it increasingly difficult for the voices of the senior members of the community to be heard above the noise of the forum. TeamLiquid, in a sense, had evolved into an enormous bazaar at the crossroads—full of different cultures, voices, age groups, experience levels, interests, prejudices, fears, rumors, and misinformation. The host began to feel that the sheer volume of posts was degrading the quality of the community dialogue about gaming strategy. Threads were filled with average players flaming one another’s advice and offering contradictory positions. Debates about StarCraft strategy became endless, unmoderated and circular. In many cases, the admins could barely keep up with the number of threads being started. The loudest voices were not always the most seasoned voices but they seemed to receive disproportionate attention. Newcomers kept asking for explanations of “tricks” that would allow them to win. This type of question was, of course, heresy among the older members of the community, who were proud of the fact that StarCraft gamers advanced not through cheats but through merit, strategic analysis, self-discipline and practice. 27 Audio Podcasting. In an attempt to combat the degenerating strategy discussions, the host abandoned the thread format, and launched a series of audio podcasts directed at the community on the topic of StarCraft strategy. The audio podcast format not only allowed him to put together a series of lengthy, carefully organized lectures, but permitted him to present his positions authoritatively and without interruption. He worked hard to refine these lectures, to avoid “dumbing down” his analysis, but rather to freely intellectualize it. Apparently, the host was not alone in his desire for more highly curated content. The experiment was a wild success. The TeamLiquid community took the podcasts, transcribed them, tagged them, promoted them and disseminated them widely on the internet. This was one of the host’s first experiences of the power of crowdsourcing and viral distribution. The podcasts generated thousands of posts and comments on forum threads, and became part of TeamLiquid “canon.” The extensive commentary provided by the community on the forum in response to the podcasts was of equally high quality and actually improved upon the content of the podcasts by providing a secondary means to digest and dissect their content. Forum members provided links to games and replays that supported arguments in the podcasts. Players even tested strategies from the podcasts and posted results and adjustments. While encouraged by this response, the host began to realize that there were limitations to the audio podcast format. StarCraft is a highly visual medium, with a great many complex moves, and it was sometimes difficult to articulate strategy in a way that the audience could follow. 28 Live Video Webcasts. At this juncture, YouTube was about three years old and livestreaming platforms UStream, LiveStream and Justin.TV were beginning to explode with user-generated content. The host began to reflect on ways that he could transform his audio podcasts into video content. Doing so would give him the advantage of actually showing replays and demonstrating strategies onscreen. However, the host sought a medium that involved participation. The audio podcast format distanced the producer from the community. In contrast to the dynamic conversations of the forums, the podcasts were presentations created in isolation. So, he chose the livestream format largely because he was intrigued by the potential for real time chat and thought that chat streams might facilitate viewer questions and enhance the teaching environment. In October, 2009, the host began to livestream the Daily five nights a week (Sunday through Thursday) on the hosting service LiveStream. The move to video repeated the viral success of the podcasts. The audience not only migrated to the new format, but expanded in droves. In short, there was a clear preference for video content. The show was again promoted on various StarCraft forums and, each night, an audience of a hundred or so viewers grew to 3 then 5 then 10 thousand viewers. Currently, each episode enjoys a livestream audience of between 6,000 and 15,000 concurrent viewers a night (occasionally rising to 20,000 plus viewers for special episodes) followed by another 80,000 to 150,000 views of the archived version. For the game content, the video format is clearly superior to audio or text blogging as a tool for education. The host downloads a game of two experts playing and explains in detail the key elements of the strategy and how to execute it. He can switch camera shots 29 between the streamed gameplay and a headshot of his own face to add variety to the production. The host of the Daily is particularly fond of a show format he calls the “point of view” format, in which he focuses exclusively on one player’s point of view for the entire episode. The primary advantage of a POV show is that the analysis and decision making more closely mirrors the experience of actually playing the game—the viewer sees exactly what the expert gamer sees and how he reacts. As a result, the viewer learns to execute a gaming strategy more effectively. The chat room is also a boon as an educational tool, as it allows the audience to pose questions or seek clarification at the conclusion of a strategy lesson. As further explored in the next section, the live audience can also help shape the content of the show. Interestingly, the experimental switch to livestream video revealed benefits to the social and communal aspect of the show. For one, it would be hard to overstate the excitement which comes from the immediacy of a live event with a live audience—it is huge not only for the host but also for a community that exists only on forums, is widely dispersed and communicates largely through text threads. Videostreaming offers both the producer and the audience real-time data quantifying the audience size, engagement and participation. This live data becomes not only a part of the show experience of the host/broadcaster but—since it is publicly posted—also a part of the spectator experience for the audience. As previously mentioned, when the Daily breaks 20,000 concurrent live viewers for an episode, the entire audience becomes consumed with enthusiasm and self-congratulation, proud to be where the action is, proud that a significant portion of its membership has 30 elected to be present. It is a feedback loop that generates its own sense of heightened drama. For another, livestreaming offers the broadcaster a true sense of the mood of the audience in real time: as the numbers of viewers rises, so does the chatter in the stream. If a successful joke is made, the stream explodes with text laughter. Conversely, when thousands of viewers simultaneously quit the stream, the host feels very much like he is watching a theater audience flee up the aisles to the exit. The Daily currently hosts six or seven chat rooms a night. There are interesting cliques that gather nightly in particular chat rooms before the show, each representing a social microcosm of the community, with the hardcore fans arriving early to stake out the first chat room. In the future, we hope to launch curated chat rooms, each with its own identity and focus, to better improve the interactive experience for the viewers. Because the show streams live, things sometimes go wrong. The audience seems to particularly enjoy reaching out to the host unexpectedly with more nefarious forms of contact, to “toy” with his head. For example, if a Skype username is accidentally revealed on screen, joyful pandemonium ensues as hundreds of viewers send pop-up messages to the host’s screen in an electronic version of whack a mole. This is considered to by the community to be a happy form of interactive play. 31 Chapter 3 - Core Content and Interactivity With quick production times and low production costs, web television shows have the ability to adjust rapidly. Moreover, with a small niche market, a web television show must behave much like a designer performing usability testing: implement rapid change, seek feedback, and iterate upon the content to quickly meet the needs and desires of its audience. Short production time and clear feedback avenues allow for rapid iteration of core content Each episode of the daily takes approximately 7 hours to produce: 3-5 hours to prepare, 2 hours for the live stream, and another hour to encode and upload the final video. So, the host can theorize and brainstorm topics in the morning, prepare them in the afternoon, and then produce the live show in the evening. In other words, the one day turnaround time allows for rapid iteration of ideas and adjusting of content. Moreover, by being embedded in a community, viewers have multiple means to provide feedback, via live chat, forums, or private messages. Combined with data for viewership numbers, the producers have a variety of ways to measure and weigh feedback and, hence, adjust the content of the show quickly to satisfy the desires of the viewership. For example, iteration has helped zero in on the overall structure of the daily. The introduction, containing announcements, funny stories, and an overview of the day’s topic, is always approximately 4-5 minutes long. If shortened to remove the funny stories, 32 viewers complain that the show lacks friendly, personal moments. If the stories are too long, large percentages skip ahead to the core content after 4-5 minutes. Similarly, the core content, about 30-45 minutes long, has also been determined through testing. Again, if too short, viewers complain that there wasn’t enough educational content. However, past the 45 minute mark, the rate at which viewers close the video spikes dramatically. The Q&A session at the end of the show is a particularly interesting instance of iterative testing. In virtually every episode, a significant portion of viewers drop off when the Q&A begins. Upon testing shortening or completely removing the Q&A session, the team received some of the harshest complaints it had ever seen. In studying responses, the producers found that the Q&A demographic was largely the hardcore end of the market, the diehard players and fans. Incidentally, these viewers are the most vocal segment of the viewership, regularly posting in forums and evangelizing the Daily. Consequently, though the number drop off would suggest eliminating or reducing the Q&A, the Q&A turns out to be an essential foundation for pleasing a critical segment of the viewership. For the core educational content, successful experiments and iterations have included “Point of View” dailies (where the entire episode is watched from one player’s point of view), “Choose Your Own Adventure” dailies (where the viewers periodically vote whose point of view to study), and “In Depth Strategy” dailies (where the host shares multiple games of the same strategy in different circumstances). Unsuccessful experiments have included delving into 2v2 and team analysis (apparently too few observers were 33 interested) and “Live Example” dailies (where the host himself tests and iterates upon strategies in front of the audience). Without sensitivity to the dialogue with the audience, immediate feedback, and a rapid iteration and testing environment, discovering a solid structure for the Daily’s content would be much more difficult. Experimenting with interactive mechanisms allow viewers to influence the show and have a more engaging viewer experience With a wide range of interactive mechanisms at the producers’ disposal, choosing how and when to use each one has been a long and ongoing process. Much like the design of a game, these mechanisms continue to be actively tested, refined and iterated over time as the producers learn what works. These modes of interactivity not only help the content of the show become fresh and interesting, but also allow for emergent and unexpected behavior from the audience. Forums. Interactivity was introduced into the show in the simplest of forms: a thread about the show was featured on TeamLiquid.net. The thread contained links to the show’s stream and archived episodes. It immediately generated a response from the audience: before long it was filled with suggestions and requests. Among the more popular requests was a Day[9] analysis of certain matches circulating on the internet. These viewers wanted the host to analyze a match so that he could answer their questions about what was taking place in the game. In short, the 34 feedback was that viewers were eager for post-match analysis. This heavily shaped the early direction of the show. As the thread grew, it soon became apparent that viewers were increasingly excited about their ability to exert influence the show and their ability to engage with the host. In response, the host began to regularly post in the thread, answering questions and thanking viewers for their recommendations. In a sense, the thread allowed the community to feel a certain amount of authorship and ownership over the content of the show--the show was no longer exclusively the host’s point of view. This resulted in a surge of “regulars” appearing on the thread, who posted frequently and engaged in extensive discussions about what the show should cover. Viewers also realized that they could interact with the host by sending a PM (a private message) to his email box at TeamLiquid. Again, the host at first endeavored to answer each of these emails individually, but was soon overwhelmed as he began to receive over 100 PMs per day, and could no longer keep up. Eventually, the host went on air and ashamedly announced that he was abandoning his private inbox but would continue to actively post in the forum thread. However, as the thread continued to grow in popularity, that too became overwhelming. Eventually the host settled on answering only a handful of the most interesting, well articulated thread posts. Paradoxically, limiting interaction with the community had the curiously positive effect of raising the quality of discourse on the thread. The community began to compete to see who could post a question worthy of being answered by the host. Having a question 35 singled out for an answer was a badge of credibility for that poster. This carried over into the livestream chat. It meant that the “curated” content of the show was now inspiring equally “curated” discussions within the audience. This in turn increased the audience's pleasure with and pride in the show. Ironically, the host now rarely posts in the text forums, as he finds the community discourse over strategy there sufficiently expert and useful to visitors without any of his input. Exploiting the live chat. As previously noted, one of the most exciting interactive tools offered by livestreaming technology is the realtime chat box. The chat box truly distinguishes livestreaming from traditional live television broadcast. With chat, the user can log in and mingle with other viewers, adding his or her own voice and side commentary to the experience of the show. The host can see all commentary being posted by his audience in real time during the broadcast. The host had originally assumed that the chat box would be most useful as means for the audience to interact with the host—to ask him questions or seek clarifications. In fact, the host soon discovered that viewers primarily used chat to interact with one another, or to independently annotate or qualify the content of the show. Chat users particularly enjoyed pointing out to one another show mistakes, jokes, or insights. The host came to understand that the chat box was a virtual representation of a sports bar: a place where viewers could gather to hoot, cheer, jeer and collectively experience what was taking place on the big screen, but not necessarily interfere with the action--to interrupt the entertainment. The chat box is a community hangout. 36 This made the host realize that he was not expected to engage in every argument taking place in the chat stream. Instead, the host learned to scan the chat stream periodically and look for trends (generally words that are reiterated) in the commentary in order to subtly steer the direction of the show. He came to understand, for instance, that if viewers were posting comments such as “no tanks?” “Why is he not making tanks?” “LOL that guy isn’t making tanks!” he could seamlessly digress into a discussion of the role of tank units in game play. This preserved the flow of the show but kept the host’s commentary relevant and the audience engaged. To encourage this type of audience input, and make the flow of information feel more two way, the host occasionally validated these useful digressions on air: “Well, it seems like many of you are currently asking why Morrow is not making any tanks.” The chat box has also been used very effectively at the close of the show to facilitate audience Q&A. The value of the Q&A was that it allowed users to be recognized on an individual basis. For each question, the host read the name of the poster out loud. Audience members delighted in this type of recognition and frequently typed celebratory comments in both the live chat and the forum thread when they were chosen. Again, the selective recognition of top questioners by the host promoted the submission of increasingly intelligent questions and raised the quality of the discussion. From the host’s vantage point, there were several “top question askers” who regularly viewed the Daily live and continued to pose strong questions, helping maintain quality of the show. With the help of volunteer admins, the live chat now incorporates automated scripts to allow for audience polling and to facilitate the detection of chat trends. These permit the 37 host to explicitly pose questions to the audience and reshape the show on the fly to its feedback in a kind of “choose your own adventure” format. For instance, the host can pose the question: “if you’d like me to focus on Player 1 for the next 5 minutes, type 1. If you’d like me to focus on Player 2 for the next 5 minutes, type 2.” The volunteer admins run the polling script and post the exact percentage of audience votes to the host. Additionally, these scripts help immensely in identifying technical issues with the broadcast. By using live polls, the admins can easily determine whether the stream is lagging or skipping. Themed Days: Funday Monday and Newbie Tuesday. For the first 100 episodes, the Daily had very little overarching structure. Other than its consistent 7pm time slot, each Daily was a self contained unit whose content bore no relationship or connection to other episodes. Each Daily involved selecting a high level game and analyzing it live and stood a lesson in itself. There was no organized progression of learning from basic to advanced. Though the Daily was experiencing steady growth, the host eventually realized that he needed to impose some simple structure upon its content so that the episodes could be more easily organized and consumed as video playlists by the audience. The host therefore began to target different segments of his audience in different episodes, breaking out game lessons by level, and allocating some episodes to advanced players, and others to newbie play. This rapidly evolved into certain episode types being aired on certain days of the week (“Newbie Tuesday”). The most successful of these new “themed” shows was “Funday Monday.” The host had been thinking about ways to expand the focus of the show beyond pure game analysis. 38 He had also been looking for ways to maximize the potential of livestream technology in order to “play” interactively with his audience in real time. Funday Monday was a weekly show in which the host would announce a StarCraft “gameplay constraint” to the audience, and audience members would then submit replays of themselves attempting to win under that constraint. For example, in the first Funday Monday, the host challenged the audience to play StarCraft with NO Queens, an almost unheard of restriction. The Queen is a powerful unit within the Zerg race that accelerates army production. StarCraft gamers always acquire Queens as they provide an obvious advantage in the game. The audience went wild for this challenge, uploading hundreds of replays of their games. The host then sorted through the submissions, found the most clever or outrageous or hilarious solutions devised by the players to win, and showcased these on the following Monday accomplished by the host's satiric shoutcasting. This was StarCraft with a twist--and the audience found it both witty and insightful about the role that unit played in the game. This experiment had other interesting impacts on the community. In a sense it shook up the ladder system—no longer were the highest ranked players assured to win the game—and it lightened up the intensity of the StarCraft gaming experience. Newbies and experts alike jumped at the challenge. Having a submission chosen began to have real social currency in the community. The outcome was that the handicapping of units actually inspired enormously creative play on the part of the audience. (In fact, the host derived the idea from the notion of the magic circle [Adams], i.e. that abiding by restrictions and rules form play and inspire creativity.) Moreover, it leveled the playing field: the replay 39 submissions revealed a wide range of clever problem solving by audience members of all skill levels. Suddenly, players who were constantly suffering defeat while ‘trying to play the normal strategies’ were winning games ‘while doing the Funday Monday strategy.’ In particular, many players felt significantly less pressure about playing StarCraft. If they lost, they could simply blame the Funday Monday constraint. If they won, then they were unusually clever. Struggling players were encouraged to re-immerse themselves in the game and to think more creatively and clearly--a useful mental state for RTS gaming. Moreover, the introduction of Funday Monday served as phenomenal viral marketing tool for the Daily. Before the first Funday Monday, the Daily received a peak of 6500 live viewers a night. On the first ever Funday Monday, the Daily spiked to 11,500 live viewers. In virtually all replays seen that day, the audience member proudly proclaimed some variant of “Day[9]’s Funday Monday strategy baby!” Whenever the opponent appeared confused, the Day[9] Daily viewer would excitedly share links to the show’s archives, and even encourage the opponent to participate in Funday Monday. There are now whole memes on the internet which riff off particular moments from the Funday Monday episodes. For example, in one episode, a gamer by the name of Uniden made an astronomically unlikely blunder that cost him an easy win in the game. On air, the Daily host took off his glasses, buried his face in his hands, and repeated “oh Uniden… oh no Uniden no…” Now, at major StarCraft tournaments, audience members hold up signs with the words “Uniden!” or “Don’t do it Uniden!” On the official StarCraft 2 ladder, over 50 new accounts have been created with the ID “Uniden.” The host sees these as further evidence of 40 the audience's desire to play interactively with him, to "own" the content, and to proactively prolong the fun of the show. Eventually, the sheer volume of Funday Monday submissions necessitated the host recruiting help to sort through it all. Many viewers and moderators volunteered to assist. Again, without any direction from the producers, the volunteer staff spontaneously got to work creating tools like automated bots to tag and comb through replays and to organize them into categories by matchup, map, and game length. The success of Funday Monday led to another theme day, “Newbie Tuesday,” which focused on the fundamentals of game strategy and improved game mechanics. Since previous Dailies had focused on analysis of top players, these shows were really directed at intermediate to advanced level players. Newbie Tuesday took a step backwards and presented extremely basic concepts to which new RTS gamers were likely never to have been exposed. Each week, the host invited new players to submit their games, and then selected the most interesting for analysis, focusing on particular types of play. At the end of the day, the interactivity of these shows, their focus on audience games, their spawning of inside jokes, and their inclusiveness of all types of gamers has helped to build a stronger sense of community for StarCraft gamers as a group. Experiments with storytelling reveal the importance of the host’s identity in having a strong rapport with the audience As mentioned before, experimentation and iteration were implemented to sculpt the core content: education and learning tools for StarCraft and StarCraft 2. However, one of 41 the most important experiments revealed the importance of storytelling and identity, the 100 th episode. The Daily finds its identity. Something magical happened on the occasion of the 100 th episode of the Daily; something that permitted the show to come into its own and establish a unique voice and identity that resonated with its audience. Up until that episode, the Daily had largely focused on educational content. Instead, to celebrate the milestone of 100 consecutive shows, the host decided to throw a “special event” and devote an entire show to his life’s story of StarCraft. The host then spent two entire hours without break telling the story of his life as a gamer, from his upbringing by a single mother in Kansas, to his struggles to climb the competitive gaming ladders, his travels to StarCraft tournament events, his own sense of inadequacy and failure, and his subsequent triumph and his eventual coming to terms with his identity as a gamer. As it turned out, in telling this story, the host also retold the story of the community itself, describing its early moderators, its early gaming giants, and the lessons he learned from each. The story was surprisingly emotional for the host, and the details went far beyond the game of StarCraft to embrace life issues such as failure, success, family support, and the meaning of gaming itself. The host concluded by stating that he was deeply proud of the fact that he was a gamer, that he embraced his gamer identity, that he loved the StarCraft community, and that he hoped someday to be an ambassador for eSports in the West. This rambling autobiography struck an immediate chord with the community, which had long struggled with questions of identity and marginalization. The episode went viral 42 and was widely reposted on the internet, generating a great deal of commentary in the gaming community in the process. As of this writing, the 100 th episode has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube. The airing of this episode marked a turning point in the show. Until the release of the 100 th episode, the show had largely been about strategy education, and its host had established himself as a professor of the gaming scene. Now the show had struck a chord in the collective consciousness of the StarCraft community. The community embraced the episode as an impassioned defense of their gamer lifestyle and identity, an uplifting statement of community core values. Overnight, the show and its host were transformed into something greater and more iconic. There was a collective recognition by the community that many members had lived as closeted geeks, ashamed by their fondness for gaming. Viewers posted comments in droves, describing how their gaming had not been understood by their parents or teachers, how they had been condemned and ostracized for their “obsessional” or “addictive” play, how they had struggled with this rejection and criticism. When the host publicly embraced himself as a devoted gamer, these viewers expressed a kind of collective sigh of relief, and responded with an equal outpouring of pent-up emotion. From the YouTube comments on Day[9] Daily #100 [YouTube]: • know you probably wont read this but thanks for doing this day9. I've spent far too much of my life hiding the part of my life that I enjoy because it was nerdy and I was afraid people would reject me for it. IÓ now know I need to embrace this part of me as it is what I love to do. Thank you • Insperational story. Sitting here at 3:30 in the morning, realizing that my favorite game is so much more that just a game. It's a lifestyle. It is a wonderful practice for 43 buissnes, economics, and for you and plenty of people, a way to connect with people over somthing you love. AllÓ the friends I have who play sc are always complaining about somthing being over powered or whatnot. It's a lot harder for me to find friends that are passionate about this game. I wish I had tasteless as a brother. • Amazing, just amazing. I have to admit I cried a lot during this video, because my brother and I are close too within video games. We have been since the Mega Drive games, to gamesÓ like AoE/AoC, WC3 and finally SC2 (never played the original SC, was AoCing at the time!). We always discuss strategies, always trying to improve and support each other in what we love the most. I've just found this video so inspirational not just for aspiring video gamers but for anything you want to do in life. • That was great :)Ó I myself have been playing video games since I was wee one and began playing Starcraft around the seventh grade. I dedicated many hours to it, but never did have the chance to share it with my family in the same respect as you have. I just want to say that listening to your tale brought back many memories of those times, but most importantly has made me feel like I did not waste my time doing something that appeared meaningless to those who did not understand what it was. • Holy shit, the namedropping.. all theese oldschool names, it's so cool to hear about them again, I remember sitting at my computer talking about how fantasticly awesome they whereÓ with my friends. I was acually around 21 years old at the time, but thinking back, it feels like I was just a little child, and I mean that in a good way, it was just a simpler time, and holy crap, SleepingDrone.. it sure rings a bell, so aperently you where "famous" enough to be conversation fuel over in Sweden :> • Absolutely wonderful. I honestly feel like a better person from having watched it. I understand more about myself and my love for this game than I ever did before, and I thank you so much for helping me realize that its not something to be ashamed of. I actually cried twice during this video, while listening to the emotional parts of your recollections. This was truly moving. Thank you. • we are with you day9,_ lets make this world apreciate our sport, our passtime, let's show people why we are not going dumb over a game, but learning how to be stronger as gamer and human beings! We are millions, hidden behind our screens, lets make the XXI century our century, the E-sports century! Long live Starcraft, LONG LIVE OUR GREAT COMMUNITY! 44 There was also a collective agreement on the part of the community that gaming had, in real sense, prepared them well for life. For many viewers, StarCraft had been the testing ground on which they had proven themselves, won self-control, established self-discipline and persistence, and learned to cope with failure and defeat. They reported that the StarCraft community was the first community into which they had integrated themselves, the first community that had accepted them as individuals; that the community had been a helpful way station on the path to society at large. I've shared this with some parents, I believe many of them need to comprehend video gaming for the_ new generation. It's been to much looked down on in the media as an addiction. StarCraft is more than just an addiction, it's a preparation for some of the skills needed in mastery of life. The viewers also responded to the host’s refutation of the establishment message that games were about brainwashing, addiction and violence; that he liked how his brain felt on games. They embraced his position that the gaming community stood for support, mentoring, education and self-improvement, the forging of an independent, non-conformist identity, and respect for others. • I have mad respect for starcraft and the starcraft community and day9. I just recently got into starcraft and was a smasher (super smash bros) before and its just amazing the kinds of connections and_ experiences and emotions that you can get from games and in sharing and competing with people doing something you love. This is so cool to_ hear, as my family throughout high school and before was extremely unsupportive of my gaming career. I started playing PC games as I started middle school with Age of Empires. My parents felt that doing what I did deteriorated parts of my life which in fact had no impact on my situation besides what I wanted to do in my free time. However I continued to do what I loved to do and played all of the major games and I still do every day. I love what I do and I love people like us! • Loved reading this. I think it's proof that people are truly beginning to understand the culture that gamers immerse themselves in. 45 Many viewers shared the episode with their parents, feeling that its impassioned articulation of core values spoke for them in a way they could not. • This 2 hour daily is the 101 of SC culture and I think every damn parent/teacher andÓ video game hating prejudiced person needs to watch this and realize what skill- sets/entertainment they're missing out on in life... • Today while watching this my mum came in to see what this regular voice she hears is. She sat down and watched the entire video with me.Ó I've played games my whole life and I'm so grateful to you for explaining to her in words I could never find why I spend my time doing what I do. Thanks Sean, your message is spreading and I'm so thankful • i too showed it to my mom, over the summer. day9 completely changed her perception of gamers. she had been trained by the media to think that video games were evil and lazy and sloppy and that everyone who plays them is evil and that gaming is as waste of time. she was reluctant at first, but after the first 20 minutes she was so hooked that she watched the entire two hours with her eyes completely glued to the screen. she couldn't believe that such a touching, heartfelt story was coming from the likes of a gamer. completely changed her perception of gamers and games. she thinks the starcraft community is a really wonderful thing now. just the other day i sent her an email about the day9 donation drive to show her how many other people love day9, and she told me that she donated 10 dollars after reading it. One mother even wrote a formal essay about the episode on her blog, which in turn stimulated a number of forum debates between parents and community members about the nature of gaming and education. An excerpt: My youngest son is a serious gamer. It is a label that invokes judgment from even the most liberal adults. Gamers are viewed as lazy, unmotivated, and self-absorbed. I always suspected that something magic was happening in the gaming communities– the joy on my son’s face told me that it was serving some great purpose, and I’d understand it in time. Psychiatrists believe that the gamers are programming their minds for war. I once asked my son about this, knowing that he probably knew more 46 than most therapists. His answer set me straight, “Mom, don’t you think we know the difference between pretend and real.” Of course, he did. It is the adults that don’t know the difference between pretend and real… I watched Sean’s two-hour video biography twice, and I enjoyed every moment. I didn’t understand half of what he said as I don’t know how to play Starcraft. But his passion was real. I got that, and it was beautiful. Sean summed it up this way, “I love Starcraft and I love that I love Starcraft.” Wow! How many people can say that. His Starcraft community A-list includes the best players from all over the world–talk about no borders. His goal is to become an ambassador for electronic games in the western world so that they become as accepted as they are in Korea. He wants to prove that gamer doesn’t mean “homeless.” Well, given the depth of Sean’s insights and mastery of life, I think we ought to drop the reading, writing and rithmetic and let him teach Starcraft in schools. [Eck] The importance of storytelling to the community. After this, the host began to set aside episodes from time to time to focus on a story about his experiences in the gaming community (“The Back Story to the StarCraft 2 Launch Party”). Although the show content was largely predicated on the idea of game strategy education, the host has been repeatedly struck by the fact that these “storytelling” episodes have among the highest audience ratings of anything he airs. It is clear that this type of storytelling fulfills a need within the community, that it helps it forge a public identity and a voice. Just as interesting was the fact that after the 100the episode, viewers began to report that they were watching the Daily in groups in dorm rooms, or with a close partner, and that the show made them feel more optimistic and human. The experience of the storytelling clearly offered an opportunity for viewers to bond over a shared set of experiences and values; the spectator experience became more tribal. The Daily episodes that tell stories are also key because they help articulate and affirm the core values of the StarCraft community. Those values are succinctly summed up 47 by the host’s mantra: “Learn lots. Don't judge. Laugh for no reason. Be nice. Seek happiness.” As an example of how the show stands for community values, the lead interface designer for the Daily’s new website, he a fan, insisted that the show establish a “manifesto” page. In response, the host of the Daily provided him with the following blog essay by Bernie DeKoven about “FunSmiths” which he thought closely described is own role within the community: Say you want to make something more fun - a game, a toy, your job, your company, your relationship with your spouse or kids, your life... So you call or email or Skype your local Funsmith, and you say: "I want to make something more fun." And you arrange to meet, by phone, by email, over Skype, at a coffee shop, or at a local park for a walk'n talk. For, say, a couple hours. For some agreed-upon, agreeable sum. You know this Funsmith is a fun guy - warm, welcoming, caring, insightful, and most of all, playful, very playful. An expert player, in fact - someone who knows many different ways to play, many different kinds of games and many ways to play them, who knows how to have fun, how to create fun, how to share fun, how to be fun. A professional player. Someone so playful and so knowledgeable that you'd pay to play with that person - for a lot of reasons. Because it's fun to be with that person. Because you like yourself even more when you're with that person. Because, during the time you or your child or your parents spend together with this person, you can, without any sense of guilt or obligation, expect that that person will focus all that playful expertise entirely on them. On having fun with them. On helping them find ways to make things more fun. [DeKoven] 48 Since the show grew from the community, the audience demands that the show maintain “authenticity” in both look and presentation As previously mentioned, the Daily is streamed live by webcam from a college room; the view is of two walls of that room (one wall revealing two StarCraft posters, the other a door and a dresser). The camera is a fixed webcam shot of the host at his desk. Because the host actually lives in this room, a laundry basket of dirty clothes occasionally appears on the dresser, or a towel on a chair. At one time, the producers of the show had contemplated installing a green screen to improve the production values of the show. However, audience outrage at the idea caused the producers to abandon it almost immediately. The audience feedback was that the charm of the show lay in its “authenticity,” and that slicker production values would ruin the intimate sense that the host had invited the viewer into his very personal world. As a result, the host has improved lighting, sound and HD recording equipment, but has left his set untouched. Indeed, the audience has expressed endless interest in the details of the room and what they reveal about the host. The two StarCraft posters and the closed door alone have generated so much interest (“What is beyond the closed door? Existential nothingness?”) and become so iconic for the show, that the producers plan to take them on the road as stage props when the host makes personal appearances. The producers suspect that that familiar space is as comfortable and reassuring to the viewers as their own rooms. The graininess of the production, the messiness of the room, the empty soda can on his desk, the dirty laundry, the word “rent” written on the host’s 49 hand, the random music playing in the background, the host’s broken and taped glasses-- all these elements invite the viewer into the host’s personal world and suggest to the viewer that he is an intimate and trusted insider. They suggest that the host is unafraid to expose himself to his community. For a stretch of more than a month in January, the show concluded with the host turning his audio off, leaving his stream on, and quietly playing Text Twist on his screen for an hour. An average of 2-3 thousand viewers a night remained on air to watch him silently play, happily suggesting solutions in the chat text box and commenting to one another how soothing it was to just hang out and play. The experience was comfortable, homey. Likewise, the host presents himself daily in an unglamorized, unvarnished persona. He frequently has uncombed hair, a rumpled shirt, sometimes looks exhausted or ill. He jokes about arm pits stains and regularly displays these on air. For three months, he wore broken glasses taped together in one corner. The community embraces this down to earth persona as well—even putting hundreds of unsolicited donations into the host’s PayPal “tip jar” to get his glasses fixed. The rhythm of the host’s life is part of the rhythm of the show. The show’s message: as a community member, you are a close and trusted friend of the host’s; he chooses to let you into the inner sanctum of his life. This message distinguishes the show from other popular gaming shows such as those broadcast by Major League Gaming or G4. This is not a broad gaming spectacle; it is a show with a personality and a heart. When the producers did live audience polling at Blizzcon (where the Daily host was hired to emcee the StarCraft tournament), about ways to improve the show, the almost 50 universal response from viewers was “No. Don’t mess with the Daily. It’s so spontaneous and authentic. Don't make it pretty or canned.” 51 Chapter 4 - Side effects of extensive community participation and influence In forming a game, a game designer carefully weighs user feedback to shape a game system that creates fun play. The constraints of the game can lead to interesting and unexpected emergent behavior from players, such as the structures and machines built in the game MineCraft. Though such emergent behavior is desirable, concerns can arise when the players develop a personal stake in their emergent forms of play, that players may push in a direction opposite the goals of the designer. For instance, players took World of Warcraft in a more competitive direction with 5v5 team battles called WoW: Arena. To support the community, Blizzard eventually incorporated Arena into WoW. However, the Vice President of Blizzard Rob Pardo later noted how this move created problems for the design of the game: We didn't engineer the game and classes and balance around [Arena], we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There's constant pressure on the class balance team, there's pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don't PvP don't understand why their classes are changing. I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction. [Sacco] Likewise, for the interactive web television producer, heavy involvement of the community may help make the show dynamic and appropriate for the audience, but 52 may also result in undesired concerns about direction, ownership, and monetization, all of which heavily influence the design of the show. Community participation and involvement raises the question of ownership The rabid support of the community can be both exhilarating and alarming. With the amount of support around the show raises the question of ownership Does the show belong to the host, or to the community that supports it? The minute the show became an established favorite in the community, the fans became adamant about actively supporting and maintaining the show, often without contacting the host. As previously indicated, the fans have transcribed, organized, and are currently translating and subtitling a number of episodes, including the 100th episode. They have written a number of software tools to help sort through replays. They have organized themselves into chat room admins, and taken upon themselves to police the talk there. They have created fan websites, graphic art, logos, and overlays for the show. Community members purchased and registered various permutations of the domain name 'Day9.TV' before the host could. There was even an iPad app for viewing the show that was recently released. Since the production operates on a tiny budget, the host has been touched by and grateful for these contributions. At the same time, there are legal issues of ownership that remain unresolved when the community contributes content. 53 In the case of domain names, the community members attempted neither to blackmail the host nor hold the domain names hostage. Instead, when contacted, the community members were happy to hand over ownership for free. The members indicated that they had acted in the spirit of getting this “done right.” However, their actions suggested strongly that the community felt that it owned the show, that it had a right to organize the show as it saw fit if the Day[9]TV team was not efficient enough. Some community members are sensitive to this issue of ownership, reminding others on threads that Day[9]TV needs to be contacted if the show content is to be used extensively in a derivative work. Other members however clearly feel that the StarCraft community is a utopian community, in which all content is owned equally by its members. These members act without inhibition to disseminate, modify, satirize, reuse or restream content. When the host is slow to archive a live Daily episode, these fans often publicly provide links to torrents or alternate hosting platforms. The issue of content ownership and fan approval/rage is becoming a larger and larger issue over time. For instance, Day[9]TV launched its live stream on the hosting platform "livestream.com," but because of the size of its audience, almost immediately experienced stability problems with the stream. Exasperated that he could not negotiate a solution with the platform's tech reps, the host then abruptly shifted the show to UStream.tv. This provoked a certain amount of outcry on the part of the community, who were offended that the host had taken the liberty of making a sudden change without any warning or, more importantly, without any consultation with the community. Consequently, when the show’s stream experienced technical instability again, the host was careful to poll the community 54 extensively as to what the show should do. After a certain amount of internal debate on the threads, the consensus was that the show should move to Justin.tv. When the Day[9]TV switched shortly thereafter, it garnered overwhelming praise from the community for having listened and been responsive to its advice. Producers must be extraordinarily careful that advertising and monetization models do not alienate audience With strong community involvement, and especially when the community feels a sense of ownership or stake in the show, monetization of a web television show can be a particularly sticky issue. The considerations and experimentations with monetization models are similar to those of a game designer, as the model can directly affect the interactive experience. For instance, games like World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online implement monthly subscription models, a model that could potentially deter more casual players from dabbling in the gameplay (a problem many MMOs try to combat with 1 free month). Or, League of Legends implements a Freemium model, whereby players can play the game for free, but may pay extra money to gain in-game benefits, a model that has offended some gamers. However, some players may feel that the game doesn’t reward skill, but rather money added. 55 The answer to appropriate means of monetization, again, comes from community personality and feedback. Monetization in the StarCraft community. Because the community believes that it has a significant ownership stake in the show, and because the community believes that it is solely responsible for the success of the show, the community believes that it alone should determine whether the show can be monetized. In addition, there is a widespread belief that internet content should be free. This is no doubt influenced by the fact that much of the audience is young, i.e. still in school, and not yet self-supporting. Many of these viewers are enraged to see product endorsements on the show, although they will tolerate discrete sponsorship of tournament prizes, in the belief that this "grows eSports." At the same time, they are thrilled to hear that the top StarCraft players in Korea are making hundreds of thousands a year. The host assumes that this is because he is perceived by his audience to be "just one of the guys"--i.e. a forum member as opposed to a professional StarCraft gamer. He is expected to be an ordinary college kid making videos in his room for his friends. This is the intimate space in which they all meet. It would be tasteless in the eyes of the audience to make money off of that intimate friendship--tantamount to inviting someone to dinner and billing him afterwards. As a result, the economic tone of the Daily is more about voluntary support rather than impassable restriction. The host has publicly pledged to live off of his tip jar, and to donate all revenue from other sources back to the show and to grow eSports. He has had 56 many offers from commercial platforms, to put the show behind a "paywall." However, to date, the show remains free and the audience “chooses” to support it in return. At the same time, the host is under considerable pressure from advertisers who want to pay small sums of money in exchange for endless amounts of on air promotion. It is hard for the host to get these potential sponsors to understand that their message will not be well received if it is too invasive, that because the show belongs to the audience. In the words of another YouTube producer: " In contrast to many sites,…[they] seemed to be one of the few brands who were willing to get behind a web series without completely smothering it with their sales pitch. Selling and revenue first is a recipe for disaster." [Koval] In short, where monetization is tolerated, that money may not be made directly from the community, which would be seen as exploitative. It must be made from sponsors, and in order to be tolerated, it must have additional benefit for the community as a whole beyond the support of the show itself. At what point will the audience permit the show to be monetized more fully? The host believes that this will be when he is able to offer extraordinary additional value to the audience: a jump to network television, for example. As Henry Jenkins suggests: "…[this allows] advertisers to tap the power of collective intelligence and direct it toward their own ends but at the same time [allows] consumers to form their own kind of collective bargaining structure that they can use…" Here, the show would be transitioning to "establishment" status and this would be a cause of celebration for the entire community, because the ultimate goal for the community has always been to mainstream eSports. In 57 return for this goal being achieved, the community would be willing to reckon with corporate advertisers. Until then, in the words of one of the host's advisors, "What has been free must stay free." 58 Chapter 6 - Conclusion With extensive community involvement and iterative production of content, producing an interactive web television show mirrors the experience of designing a game. Such a comparison provides a strong starting point for someone attempting to form a new interactive web television series and the problems that may arise. To start, one should have a deep connection to an existing community, a connection that should be expanded into avenues of feedback and dialogue. Experimenting, testing, and iterating are key for shaping the core content. And, depending on the personality of the community, various forms of interactive play can be incorporated into the show to make the content more personalized and engaging for the viewership. And yet, the experience of Day[9]TV is more than just an isolated example of how to establish a successful web television series. As Paul Ford writes, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted is the fundamental question of the web. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.” Though it may have just seemed like an inexpensive conduit to distribute stream video content, the medium of the internet is built around participation and exercising influence as Paul Ford notes. Day[9]TV is one instance 59 of how the internet’s need to consult and engage influences strongly influences the final product. As more media shifts to the internet, producers of text, video, audio, social media, and even traditional media alike must acknowledge the increasing shift of audience demanding its need to be consulted. 60 Bibliography Adams, Ernest. Fundamentals of Game Design. 2nd. Berkeley: New Riders, 2010. 5, 313. Print. DeKoven, Bernie. "The FUNcoach." Deep Fun. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://www.deepfun.com/Funsmith.html>. Eck, Cathy. "Life Lessons from Nerdy Gamer." Gateway to Gold. Nov 13 2010. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://gatewaytogold.com/lessons-from-a-nerdy-gamer/>. Ford, Paul. "The Web Is a Customer Service Medium." Ftrain. Jan 6 2011. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html>. Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. 2nd. Burlington: Elsevier, 2008. 10-20. Print. Graft, Kris. "Blizzard Confirms One "Frontline Release" for '09." Edge Magazine 12 Feb 2009: 1. Web. 22 Mar 2011. <http://www.next-gen.biz/news/blizzard- confirms-one-frontline-release-09>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. 1st. New York City: NYU Press, 2008. 63. Print. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age. New York City: NYU Press, 2006. 1. Print. Kollock, Peter, and Marc A. Smith. Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge, 1999. 228. eBook. Koval, Matt. "About 8 Dates." Matt Koval's Blog. Jan 22 2011. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://mattkoval.com/about-8-dates/>. Purchese, Robert. "Starcraft II sells 3 million in a month." Eurogamer 1 Sep 2010: n. pag. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-09-01-starcraft- ii-sells-3-million-in-a-month>. 61 Sacco, Michael. "Blizzard: Arenas were a mistake." Joystiq Nov 13 2009: 1. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/11/13/blizzard-arenas-were-a- mistake/>. "Social Consequences of Gaming Addiction." Video Game Addiction. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://www.video-game-addiction.org/social- consequences.html>. Staebell, Brett. "The Escapist: Boxer in Brief." Escapist Magazine 5 April 2010: n. pag. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_248/7378- BoxeR-in-Brief>. TeamLiquid: Various Posters, . "TeamLiquid.net." N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar 2011. <www.teamliquid.net>. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning V 1.4. September 18, 2008. Mythic Entertainment. Electronic Arts. YouTube. "Day[9] Daily #100 - My Life of StarCraft." Web. 23 Mar 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJztfsXKcPQ>
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Plott, Sean Saintmichael
(author)
Core Title
Day[9]TV: How interactive Web television parallels game design
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Degree Program
Interactive Media
Publication Date
05/03/2011
Defense Date
05/01/2011
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Community,competitive gaming,esports,game design,interactive television,OAI-PMH Harvest,participatory media,social media,Starcraft,Web television
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Brinson, Peter (
committee chair
), Anderson, Steven F. (
committee member
)
Creator Email
plott@usc.edu,splott@hmc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3843
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UC1272923
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etd-Plott-4296 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-456243 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3843 (legacy record id)
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etd-Plott-4296.pdf
Dmrecord
456243
Document Type
Thesis
Rights
Plott, Sean Saintmichael
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
competitive gaming
esports
game design
interactive television
participatory media
social media
Starcraft
Web television