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Blog #7: Social Gaming

Social Gaming is a term that refers to games made specially for social networking sites, such as Facebook. However, gaming communities have been around for a lot longer than just social media. People have been connecting through gaming network platforms, for those people to form relationships around, within and in relation to the games and the experiences and activities that they provide. These can include YouTube videos, game review sites, and social forums. The following types of games come under social gaming:

·        Card games – involving multiple players

·        Social networking games – that are integrated or has elements of social network

·        Board games – although not always on social media

·        Multiplayer video games

·        Role playing games

·        Miniature war-gaming – a form of war-game that incorporates miniature figures, miniature armour and model terrain.

·        Alternate reality games – an interactive narrative that offers a platform to explore possible situations and social interactions while avoiding real world consequences.

Multiplayer video games are where more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, and turn into non-traditional parties such as LAN parties (a temporary gathering of people establishing a local area network (LAN), primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer computer games; and MMO parties (massively multiplayer online games – such as World of Warcraft and Diablo). These are also referred to as MMORPG (Massively multiple online role-playing games), going back to another social gaming network the multi-user dungeons (MUD’s). Where World of Warcraft first became the iconic social networking game that it is now, starting with PC online games.

Role playing games are games in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. These become Live action role-playing games – which is a form of role-playing games where the participants physically act out their characters’ actions.

References

Hepburn, A, Uluak ,F, Daniells, K, Felix, E. (2012). Infographic social gaming demographics statistics. Available: http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-social-gaming-demographics-statistics-2012/. Last accessed 21st January, 2017.

Wikipedia. (2016). Social Gaming. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_gaming. Last accessed 21st January, 2017

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Blog #4: Trolling and Social Media Conflict

As our world becomes more and more technologically advanced, and social media becomes used more world-widely, it is naturally going to bring out those that were bullies in the playground, those that have nothing better to do but to make everyone else feel awful about themselves. Unfortunately, these days there are more avenues that people can take to troll and bully other people. Young people seem to be highly targeted individuals. And now that teenagers and even younger children have access to the internet and social media every hour of every day of every week, there is no escape from the bullies; while before this – and when I was at school, there might have been bullying in the school, but once you were at home, that was it, only friends would call you on the home phone or come over for a visit. This meant that the teenagers psyche would heal before having to go back to school and face those bullies once again, whereas now the teenager is exposed to the trolling and cyber-bullying constantly. It is dangerous and many teenagers have committed suicide from this experience.

While cyberbullying has been around since the dawn of the Internet, the consequences of such actions have become catastrophic. Over the past seven months, seven teenagers have committed suicide after they were brutally cyberbullied on Ask.fm, a question and answer site. Hannah Smith, 14, was the most recent teenager to taker her life after she was tormented with messages like "every1 will be happy if u died," "drink bleach," and "go die." Following Smith's death, /b/ raided her Facebook remembrance page with equally disturbing messages. On Monday Ask.fm announced that it will make its report abuse button more visible and add a "bullying/harassment" category to the site (Alfonso, 2013).

The questions that now needs to be answered are, should there be something in place to assist with this issue? Should the government get involved and extend a law and criminal justice? Cybersecurity efforts must consider the growing potential for cyber-attack using social media, where hoax messages are incorporated into a stream of otherwise legitimate messages, and understand how quickly mobile apps and text services can disseminate false information. Authorities and volunteers must develop a healthy scepticism about information derived from these systems and new research and tools are needed to facilitate the self-policing of social media (Goolsby et al, 2013).

References

Alfonso, F. (2013). Troll-hunting mom falls prey to 4chan trolls. Available: http://www.dailydot.com/news/4chan-b-troll-hunter-mom-kaitlin-jackson/. Last accessed 10th January, 2017.

Goolsby, R ; Lovell, A; Shanley, L. (2013). On Cybersecurity, Crowdsourcing, and Social Cyber-Attack. Available: http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA580185. Last accessed 10th January, 2017.