Activity Theory and Games Part 2:

Players, their baggage, and everything else

In the last entry, I outlined a rudimentary skeleton that would form the foundation for my analysis of Catan gameplay using Activity Theory. Activity Theory breaks play down into the activity of play and then moves on to calling that activity a system. Any activity theory analysis begins with the premise that Engstrom outlined that states:

• An activity system consists of individuals attached to the activity at hand.
• An activity system is comprised of the mental models as well as equipment required to perform that activity in question.
• An activity system is comprised of rules that shape the mental models of those objects, tools, or equipment.
• An activity system is comprised of a purpose, goal, or objective.

In addition to individuals, tools, rules, and an outcome, an activity system is also comprised of:

• a community that is dictated by the relationship of individuals to the environment the activity is being performed in.
• a division of labor through which individuals, their tools, and the objective all mutually influence one another.

At the center of the activity is a certain degree of contradiction. This contradiction is how the community of the activity is constantly changed or is constantly evolving. I ended the previous discussion by saying that games are one of the best ways to evaluate an activity at its systemic level because games keep their tension and contradictions in the fore of the activity. As games are competitive in some way, it is possible to watch contradictions play out in real time with their consequences being something to catalog.

Addressing How the Data Was Gathered

When the players who agreed to participate sat down to play Catan, they did so with the knowledge that they would be playing at the table with the people in front of them. There would be no other players. I intended to pull from the ideas of “game night” as well as “broadcasting play” in order to minimize the standard interferences from the researcher. After a brief description of what I wanted to know in which I stated, “I am interested in the iPad application for Catan and how it changes your experience with Catan.” I then handed over control of the games to the players.

Each experiment was conducted the exact same way. The game was played via the tabletop and then the game was played via the iPad. I was not interested in the iPad version being played first for control purposes as this was not so much an experiment, but a way for me to situate each group within normalcy in order to better understand how the iPad shifted the relationship. All of the groups, all of the players save 1 in each group were very familiar with the game itself. As such, the context across all games were as “normal” as they could be made to be.

The Players and Computer-Mediation

The place to begin an analysis of how an activity shifts when a computer begins to mediate it is with those who are being mediated — the players. Overall, the first and most obvious observation about the differences between computer-mediated games and tabletop games was simple — the players became users. Many of the internal discussions of what the game rules represented were suddenly not allowed. The computer program guiding the games of Catan on the iPad was not a program that could be changed, reasoned with, or could make a mistake.

In 2 of the 3 games, players discovered that a rule they had been following their interpretation of was wrong when the rulebook was codified by the computer program controlling the iPad app. For example, Development Cards have a very specific space that they are supposed to be played in. However, most players of Catan do not follow this rule.

Development Cards are those aspects of Catan wherein certain aspects of the game can be bent. Road Building allows a player with no resources to build 2 roads immediately. Some Development Cards offer hidden victory points. Other Developent Cards like Monopoly allow players to gather ALL of 1 resource held by all players.

During play, some players will ask other players if they want to trade any of 1 type of resource. Upon hearing that someone has that resource, they play the Monopoly Card to get it. However, this is “technically” against the rules but as we are discussing the activity of play, if the contradiction of rules is met with a mutual agreement of the other players, then the players win.

However, when the game is computer-mediated, this is not the case. No longer can players change the rules as they need. This has the added impact of possibly changing the play state for those players who previously agreed to a change in rules. Below is an exchange about this specific instance of the rules.

Red: Oh can I not use a monopoly card after offering trades?

White Oh good try.

Red: Oh. That’s so disappointing.

Orange Oh so you can’t ask people what they have?

White Oh you’re trying to be sly.

Blue: Look at this guy.

Red: Well you can do that in person too. You can be like, “Yo who wants to trade wheat?” Then if someone offers you can be like, “Oh screw you.” *makes motion throwing down a card*

Orange: With that *motions to iPad* you can be like no one wants to trade and you don’t really know if they’re bluffing.

Red: Right.

Orange: With this *motions to game box* you definitely know.

Red: Mm-hmm

Orange: That’s very interesting that it does that.

So this is the first aspect of activity theory interpretation of a game space moving to computer-mediation— player agreement about interpretations of rules are no longer relevant. This is doing is adding an aspect of hierarchicy to play that did not exist previously in that the keeper of the rules can no longer rely on their social capital for a rule to become interpreted in a specific way. The appearance of a computer-mediator of rule interpretation seems to be the result of a community producing a tool that will maintain a rule state that is consistent across all groups of people who play.

But this aspect of interest in the computer-mediated rulekeeping quickly became problematized by the user-interface of the Catan app. While players quicklly learned the “proper” interpretations of the rules, players were then forced to learn how to do basic actions through a new interface. Within each group that played was a near-constant stream of negative comments like, “I don’t like that.” “How do I remember what resources I have?” and “What button do I press?”

For example, the most complex aspect of person-to-person interaction through the computer-mediated version of Catan was trading, an essential component of the game.

Blue: You want to give me a sheep for my wheat?

White: Yes, that’s what I did. Oh yay!

Red: I said no.

Orange Oh.

White Oh. Did everyone say no?

Orange: I didn’t get a chance to say anything, I think you might have said yes Red.

Red: I said no.

Blue: I think I might only hand it off to the people that have what you’re looking for.

Orange: Oh that would make sense.

White: Oh.

Orange: I don’t know what I have, I’m so bad at this version.

Blue: It’s all good. Out of sight out of mind.

White: Okay, because it’s saying you guys have automatically declined my offer, which probably means you guys-

Orange: Don’t have wheat.

In terms of design, players constantly referred to missing information. In 1 game, the players began to write down their resources and did so for 2 turns before giving up and just allowing the game to remember everything for them. In another game, players inadvertently peaked at each others’ resources because they misinterpreted a particular call for the iPad to be passed to another player. Computer-mediation turned Catan from something everyone was present with and responsible for maintaining to an activity they only participated in when they had the iPad in their hands.

This is the contradiction that sits at the core of computer-mediated board games and board games themselves. Like all contradictions, the community who is within the activity act to absorb and resolve that contradiction. In this case, the players simply resigned control of resources to the iPad and began to interact with the game system when it was in front of them. While players often had the iPad in front of them multiple times in one round, they often took to doing other things while one player was interacting with the system itself.

The User Interface of Catan represented what might have been the worst possible interface for such a central aspect of the game. However, as is often the case with user interfaces, once users became competent enough to actually achieve the necessary actions for Catan, the interface rarely mattered and play continued. This had other impacts on play in that the pieces of the board and the colors for each player began to be disconnected.