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Introduction

Iran, 1997: Politicians discover the internet as a platform from which they can campaign.

Iran, 2003: Students discover rudimentary social tools online to organize and express their opinions, even if they be completely against the regime. (Rahimi, 2003)

Iran, 2009: Iran is ripe for a revolution where social media would be a major proponent. Iran has a population of about 70,000,000 people, where just over half of those people are below 25 years old. (Chiesa, Sukarya, Temes & Kageyama, 2008) Their generation has grown up with technology and the internet; they’re much more agile with it than ever before. Mozorov said it best: “The government’s tight control of the Internet has spawned a generation adept at circumventing cyber roadblocks,making the country ripe for a technology–driven protest movement.” (Mozorov, 2009).

June 6^th, 2009. Merely 6 days before the fated presidential election in Iran, a government-sponsored poll was issued that showed the incumbent Ahmadinejad fighting a losing battle. 16 to 18 million Iranians stated that they were going to vote for Mir Hossein Mousavi, compared to the 6 to 8 million who sided with Ahmadinejad. The election seemed that it was going to be a landslide victory for Mir Hossein Mousavi. (Bahari, 2009)

On election day, however, Ahmadinejad came out on top with over 60% of the votes. The Iranian population cried foul, took to the streets, and began what would be a massive protest, and one that fully relied on the new technology.

Social media such as Youtube, Twitter, and Blogging were employed to get the word out to both a local and international audience. (Carafano, 2009) Cyber-warfare and Internet loopholes like proxy servers were employed to ensure that the right information got into the right hands at the right time as well. To the West, it seemed like the perfect storm for a digital revolution. Some believe that this revolution was completely pushed forward by the tech-savvy youth, but others believe that social media played a minimal role. This paper will examine both sides of this argument, beginning with the highly popularized social network, Twitter.

Introduction to Twitter

Twitter is a social network founded in 2006 around the concept of short updates, or “Tweets”. Twitter has become notorious for it’s 140-character limit on it’s Tweets, a limit originally imposed to facilitate updates through text messages by mobile devices. (Twitter, 2009)This is important because of the manner they are intended to be consumed. While some blogs are designed to be read over a period of time, Tweets can be read at any time, in any place, within a matter of seconds. These short updates are very important for spreading short messages across the internet very quickly. These small messages may link to larger blog posts or websites, but the initial message is what needs to get around, and Twitter is excellent at this.

Twitter’s conversations are organized into two categories: “@ replies”, “trending topics”, and “retweets”. @ replies allow a user to respond to a previous user, or a specific tweet. “Trending Topics” are key words or phrases that have appeared very often in tweets globally. This gives any visitor to the site a general idea of what kinds of topics are being discussed on a massive scale through Twitter. Retweets are the standard for repeating information through the social network. Retweets are a direct copy of the original update, but are preceded with “RT @[original Twitter Username]”.

Why Twitter?

Some may wonder why Twitter was the medium of choice for the majority of discussion involving the Iran Election Protests. Twitter was chosen for many reasons, such as the level of simplicity, the portability of the platform, the public forum, and the agility of the network in the face of censorship.

Twitter is as simple as a social network can get. There is one question to ask: What are you doing? This question has a 140-character answer that can relay almost any message about the current state. In this way, protesters could shout out that they were en route to a protest at a specific location, and the message would spread, causing more people to join in. The ability to tweet from anywhere is also a boon to organization. Any cell phone with text messaging capabilities can be set up as a Twitter client, enabling access to the social network from anywhere with a cellular signal.

Another benefit of Twitter is that it is 100% a public forum. On most accounts, anything one could say is instantly viewable from anyone in the world, without any of the restrictions one would find on a website like Facebook. This is beneficial, because through Trending Topics or simple Twitter searches, protestors can reach out and broadcast their message across the world. Finally, Twitter is a very versatile website. This is possibly one of the most important aspects of the social network. In the face of governmental censorship, it was necessary to avoid internet blockades through the use of Twitter apps (“Applications”) and proxy servers.

There are countless applications through which one may interact with the social network. If one uses one of these applications to update their Twitter status, their message will not be routed directly to the Twitter service, rather it will pass through the application’s servers, and then those servers pass the information along to the Twitter service. This is important because if the government saw fit to block access to Twitter.com, Twitter apps would be able to get around these restrictions. Twitter applications are available for many mobile platforms in addition to any home computer.

Proxy servers are another way that the population can connect to government-blocked websites and services. They are a computer set up in a remote location that will act in the same way that Twitter applications do. A user in the oppressed area would connect to a proxy, and ask that computer to fetch all the websites for them. In this way, the Iranians would be able to access the unfiltered web. Many Twitter applications like ÜberTwitter also have built-in proxy support, making them doubly effective at avoiding the overall.

Carafano highlights the biggest advantage to using Twitter: Street Journalism. Street journalism takes two forms: one where the citizen collects the content and edits and publishes it themselves, and another form where the citizen collects the content and passes it on to professional news outlets to be edited and distributed. Through Twitter (and Twitter multimedia-sharing services like TwitPic or TwitVid), everyday people are able to report on a specific occurrence. This content can be aggregated through websites en masse, or carefully dissected by bloggers or professional news outlets. (Carafano, 2009) This is important in combating the messages of state-sponsored propaganda.

Some may wonder just how much content is uploaded to Twitter on the subject of the Iranian election. One need look no further than Trendrr, a website devoted to “real-time social & digital media tracking”. On June 21^st, there were over 440,000 Tweets posted to Twitter with the term “iranelection” (a popular trending topic at the time). To put this into perspective, if each Tweet was exactly 140 characters, the content produced on that day would fill a book of over 28,000 pages. While the sheer volume of  content being posted alone is astronomical, many online efforts were organized through Twitter as well.

Organized Online Efforts through Twitter

Many a layperson to the whole situation may have heard of the so-called “green revolution” that was happening through Twitter. Users were changing their profile icons to have a green tint in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi and the protesters. (news.bbc.co.uk, 2009) The origin of this can be traced back to the website helpiranelection.com, where any Twitter user could click a link and have their icon automatically changed to either a green tint or have a green bow added in the corner. As of the 22^nd of June, over 160,000 users had joined in to show their support. This was very important in bringing the message to the rest of the world, since it was such a drastic change to see one’s Twitter feed filled to the brim with green-tinted icons.

To view the other side other side of the coin, this lazy action falls within Morozov’s concept of “slacktivism”. Many people in the Western World wish to aid in global crisis situations, but oftentimes only until it becomes inconvenient or boring. Slacktivism is an idea where one can simply click a button to join a facebook group, and one’s presence alone is enough to support a cause. Slacktivism is a good tool for getting the word out, but ultimately it will accomplish nothing if no one completes any real actions towards solving the crisis.

Due to the sheer volume of Iran-related Tweets, there came the need for a filtering, or at least aggregating system. Several websites such as iran.twazzup.com appeared on the scene to offer compilations of tweets and other media from the Iran protests. These hubs were very important in making information available quickly and efficiently when a simple Twitter search would generate thousands of results.

Finally, thanks to the efforts of many to spread the word, many Twitter users outside of Iran began to set their location to Tehran to confuse the authorities there who were looking for dissidents online. (Heinz & Fletcher, 2009)

The Downside to Twitter

Evgeny Morozov wrote a very compelling piece on the downside to the Twitter revolution. His main arguments were that Twitter did little for the positive for the protests, but instead made things more dangerous for the protesters. Morozov explains that the digital revolution we in the west are exposed to are far from the truth. In our frame of reference, every Iranian is 20-something years old and liveblogging the event from their iPhone. In reality, those on Twitter represent a “tiny percentage” which is “untypical” of the Iranian population (Morozov, 2009).

Morozov goes on to state that the protests were too organized and well orchestrated to be simply a bunch of Twitter rabble rousers. They were planned out events by Moussavi supporters rather than the spontaneous flash mobs that western bloggers would have us believe.

Although Twitter may represent a minority of Iranians, it presents a very dangerous sum of very public information. As easy as it is for a protester to see where the next demonstration would be, a government agent could do the same. What’s more, these government agents could track down users and the government’s legal action would “cost them dearly”. (Heinz & Fletcher, 2009)

The protesters aren’t the only ones who are allowed to create twitter profiles as well; government agents can use Twitter to pass along fake information. The influx of Iranian government agents in Twitter was so great that Twitspam.com, a blog dedicated to rooting out commercial spammers through twitter, dedicated a page for “Fake Iran Election Tweeters”.

On a massive scale, Twitter has been useful in getting the message out of Iran and placing the issue on a global pedestal. However, as an organization tool, it’s far too public a forum to plan out protests or any anti-governmental activity.

Cyber-Warfare

It was inevitable that when a demonstration grows to this size, information becomes a very valuable commodity. Just as there are efforts inside the social media by the government to restrict communication and promote their ideals, there are efforts in what some have called “hacktivism” on the part of the protesters. Generally, “the most common forms of attack include distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, web hijacking or defacement, spam and limited attempts to introduce viruses” (Anderson, 2008).

In the case of the Iranian election protests, most of the known attacks were DDoS attacks on government websites to halt their propaganda (Schachtman, 2009). DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm a website with requests until it collapses under the pressure. At least one of the DDoS initiatives were successful, as WIRED.com reported that government outlets such as leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir were unaccessible as of June 15^th; a very quick turnaround if one looks at the June 12^th election day. (Schnachtman, 2009) However, multiple sources have warned that executing these kinds of attacks on a network as young as Iran’s could have destructive effects. Since Iran’s network is so centralized, the government could have shut down the network if they had decided.

Why didn’t they?

James Cowie explains that one could approach this question from three different points of view.

The cynic would say that the Iranian government kept the Internet mostly intact in order to survey and round up dissidents. The optimist would say that the Iranian government would not dare shut off the Internet for fear of the economic turmoil it would thrust their country into. Finally, the realists believe that Ahmadinejad probably has too many flesh and blood protesters to worry about virtual ones. (Cowie, 2009)

Another effect of the centralized internet in Iran brings up another worry for DDoS attacks: since most communications are leaving Iran by only a few venues, any bandwidth-intensive activities could clog up the connection for everyone. This makes it difficult for important messages to leave Iran, thereby defeating the other protesters’ efforts.

YouTube

A less popular, but nonetheless crucial, social media tool in the Iranian dissident’s repertoire. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. YouTube offers a venue for uploading video content of varying qualities whether they be captured on a professional camcorder or a cell phone camera. The ability to share your first hand experience in a protest with a video will reach so many more people than if one were to simply describe the situation in text.

To give this some context, there have been over 600 videos uploaded from Tehran found through the query of “election”. Although this sounds like a large number for video files, New York City, having roughly half of the population of Tehran, has uploaded over 1,900 videos to be found through the query of “election”. (YouTube.com)

There are various issues that would prevent Iranians from uploading content to YouTube. First is the block on YouTube itself. YouTube, just like Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, are often blocked by the Iranian government. In fact, the week immediately following the election, YouTube saw a drop in connections from Iran by about 90% thanks to a well-timed block by the government.(Stelter & Stone, 2009)

The second thing restricting content being uploaded to YouTube is bandwidth. In addition to outright banning YouTube, the Iranian government also caps bandwidth at will, causing extremely slow upload and download rates. Uploading very low quality videos becomes something of a trial, but uploading videos of decent quality become nearly impossible. Videos are one of the most bandwidth-intensive applications on the internet, and with a crippled connection, YouTube does not become the most favourable option.

Neda

Although a direct connection from Iran to YouTube wasn’t always perfect, YouTube proved to be a key supporter in the proliferation of the Neda video that caught the world’s attention.

Neda Agha-Soltan was a bystander who was killed by a bullet wound on June 19^th in Tehran. Her loss of life would have been a simple statistic had it not been recorded on video and sent out to various western news outlets as well as YouTube. The video soon had hundreds of thousands of views around the world and became the rallying point for many protesters both in and outside of Iran.

It’s important to understand the impact of Neda’s death. According to Trendrr, there were over 16 billion google searches for “Neda” in one day at it’s highest point. On July 7^th, there were 55,000 new Twitter updates posted in the #neda trending topic. By July 7^th, there were almost 900 videos matching the query “Neda” to be found on YouTube, but as of the writing of this paper there are over 15,000 videos. (Trendrr.com) Additionally, the most popular upload of Neda’s death clip on YouTube has almost 700,000 views. (YouTube.com) With these staggering statistics, one can do nothing but accept that her passing touched all corners of the world.

Although YouTube was not the vehicle of choice for the message coming from Iran due to many

technical constraints put on it from the government, it proved invaluable in disseminating the message in the Bandwidth-rich west.

Blogging & Bulletin Boards (Forums)

Weblogs, or blogs, are the one of the oldest of the social media platforms. They usually have more thought-out content than Twitter, and bloggers can choose whether they want to use their real names or pseudonyms. In Iran alone, there are over 700,000 blogs, with 100,000 of them being “actively maintained”. (Chiesa, Sukarya, Temes & Kageyama, 2008) Blogs are key in that they can be used for a variety of discussions and planning. One can post detailed information about an upcoming rally, as opposed to the 140-character missive shot out through Twitter on a small cellular keypad. One can also embed video and other multimedia right inside of the blog itself, which is very important if one is trying to get a message across.

Online Bulletin Boards (also known as online forums) have been around from since the beginning of the world wide web, and many people have the ability to set up forums to discuss different topics. Most forums require you register, and some allow you to be completely anonymous, like Anonymous Iran at iran.whyweprotest.net. This forum allows for a completely anonymous method of communication for organization and discussion. The only issue with anonymity is that it’s increasingly difficult to tell a government agent apart from a fellow protester.

Bulletin Boards excel at organizing conversation by containing it all in one place. While the dialogue on Twitter may be very difficult to discern who is speaking to whom, bulletin boards are very organized and offer a chance to have reasoned thought. Bulletin Boards also benefit from the ability to embed multimedia in it’s posts, achieving a higher level of interactivity and engagement for their users.

Finally, bulletin boards can be very local or very national; they can serve as a forum for discussing neighbourhood affairs or international affairs. In this way, bulletin boards can facilitate organization very effectively.

While bulletin boards and blogs may sometimes be considered the older brother of new social networking tools, they still serve their place in organization and discussion.

Conclusion

Due to the nature of the incident, official studies on what went on in Iran are doubtful at best. What scholars have to work with are the news reports, the Twitter updates, the blog posts, and the recorded effects of the DDoS attacks. While it is very difficult to say conclusively that social media were the direct proponents of x, y, or z, it would be foolish to deny them any stake in the effects of the Iran election protests. Would this issue have been brought to the world stage had it not been for the supposed “Twitter Revolution”? Would Neda’s death have caused such a stir had it not been recorded on a cell phone and sent to social networks and news outlets? Did bringing down government domains help the protesters at all?

While the last question may lie in murky waters, it’s obvious that social media has  had an effect on the Iranian election protests, and if social media had an effect in a country where the internet was blocked, throttled, and guarded closely, one can only image what kind of an effect social media would have in a protest in the West.

Works Cited

“About Us.” Twitter. Web. 17 Nov. 2009. <http://twitter.com/about>.

Anderson, CISM, Kent. “Hacktivism and Politically Motivated Computer Crime.” Papers Published by Kent Anderson, CISM – Encurve, LLC. Encurve, LLC, 2008. Web. 23 Oct. 2009. <http://www.aracnet.com/~kea/>.

Bahari, Mazier. “The InternationaList: June 6, 2009.” Newsweek.com. Newsweek, 6 June 2009. Web. 18 Nov. 2009. <http://www.newsweek.com/id/200960>.

Carafano, James J. “All a Twitter: How Social Networking Shaped Iran&#39;s Election Protests.” The Heritage Foundation – Conservative Policy Research and Analysis. 20 July 2009. Web. 24 Oct. 2009. <http://edgeweb.heritage.org/Research/InternetandTechnology/bg2300.cfm>.

Cowie, James. “The Proxy Fight for Iranian Democracy.” Web log post. Rensys.com. Rensys, 22 June 2009. Web. 20 Nov. 2009. <http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/the-proxy-fight-for-iranian­de.shtml>.

“Fake Iran election Tweeters.” Twitspam. 17 June 2009. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. <http://twitspam.org/? p=1403>.

Hines, Nico, and Hannah Fletcher. “Live: confusion and fear in Iran.” Times Online. Times Online, 17 June 2009. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6520425.ece>.

“Internet brings events in Iran to life.” News.bbc.co.uk. British Broadcasing Corporation, 15 June 2009. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8099579.stm>.

Iran: A Nation of Bloggers. Dir. Aaron Chiesa, Hendy Sukarya, Lisa Temes, and Toru Kageyama. Iran: A Nation of Bloggers. Vancouver Film School, Nov. 2008. Web. 23 Nov. 2009. <http://www.vimeo.com/2139754>.

Morozov, Evgeny. “Iran: Downside to the “Twitter Revolution”" Dissent 56.4 (2009): 10-14. Project Muse. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. <http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/dissent/v056/56.4.morozov.pdf>.

Rahimi, Babak. “Cyberdissent: The Internet in Revolutionary Iran.” Middle East Review of International Affairs 7.3 (2003). Middle East Review of International Affairs. Sept. 2003. Web. 25 Oct. 2009. <http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2003/issue3/jv7n3a7.html>.

Shachtman, Noah. “Activists Launch Hack Attacks on Tehran Regime | Danger Room | Wired.com.” Wired News. 15 June 2009. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. <http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/activists-launch-hack-attacks-on-tehran-regime/>.

Show Support For #IranElection on Twitter. Web. 20 Nov. 2009. <http://helpiranelection.com/>. Stelter, Brian, and Brad Stone. “Web Pries Lid of Iranian Censorship.” The New York Times 23 June

2009. Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 23 June 2009. Web. 20 Nov. 2009. Trendrr. Web. 20 Nov. 2009. <http://www.trendrr.com/>. Why We Protest – IRAN – Powered by vBulletin. Web. 22 Nov. 2009. <http://iran.whyweprotest.net/>. Youtube -Broadcast Yourself. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. <http://www.youtube.com>

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Introductions

Digital games are often lumped together with the cinematic medium for several reasons. Whenever a new medium is introduced, it’s usually compared to an older, more familiar medium to ease the transition. For example, e-mail, while vastly different from traditional mail, was described as such to make things simpler to understand. In that regard digital games have been compared to the medium of film. A second reason is that many publishers believe that trying to associate one’s game with a cinematic experience is good for business, or a valuable bullet point to put on the back of the packaging. In doing so, publishers and media evangelists alike have simplified the digital gaming medium to nothing more than a film + 1 to be had in your own home. To be fair, film and digital games often (but not always) exchange notes, and many of the stylings of the cinematic genre have bled into games.

One of the largest differences in digital games cpmpared to film is in the use of sound, and music in particular. In film, the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic sound is painfully obvious. The gunshot from the action hero’s firearm is diegetic, but the striking orchestral score backing him up is non-diegetic. Bordwell & Thompson define diegesis as: “the world of the film’s story. The diegesis includes events that are presumed to have occurred and actions and spaces not shown onscreen.”(Bordwell & Thompson, 2001, p. 430). It’s simple to define what would be diegetic or not in many cases. However, in digital games, this definition is not sufficient. Should diegesis refer to a story in digital games, or should it just refer to the game’s scenario? What would be considered diegetic in Tetris? Sound? Gameplay? If one could consider a world where random block patterns fell from the sky to create rows that disappeared, would it be a stretch to consider that music was constantly playing in this world?

Digital games present music for three different reasons: to create atmosphere or to elicit a particular emotional response, to act as an audible cue or hint, or as a major gameplay element. By exploring these three elements, one can begin to understand how both diegetic and non-diegetic music works in digital games, and how that is critically different from film.

Music is Used to Manipulate Emotions

An age old use of music is as a narrative supplement. Nothing helped a fireside tribal hunt story better than some good drum accompanyment, and nothing can compare to the rousing scores of today’s films that are designed to leave a memory of the film’s audible themes. Films such as Mission: Impossible and Pirates of the Caribbean have very distinct themes that encapsulate the energy and adventure that both these film series present. In the same way, you could ask the gaming community about themes that are important to them. Some would tell you of the Halo theme that called the proud Spartans to battle, or the whimsical Zelda theme that was sending off a boy in a green tunic into a wild adventure. Some would reference the fun Super Mario theme, and others would recall the haunting melody of Silent Hill. No matter what song they chose, the music has a direct connection with their memories in the game. Music in games is not simply something just to keep players’ ears occupied while their thumbs do the walking. Music is meant to modify emotions to suit the emotions in the game. An example of this manipulation of emotions can be found in the game Flower.

In Flower, the player controls the wind to push a flower petal through fields of grass. The object of the game is to breeze past (pardon the pun) more flowers, thereby adding to the player`s gust of petals. The experience is very calm and peaceful, with no threat of death or dismemberment that is so common in many digital games today. As such, it was necessary to create a musical soundscape that would match the mood and tone of the game. The non-diegetic music is slow and flowing, and is successuful at setting the proper tone for the game.

Oftentimes general soundtracks are strictly non-diegetic. Games often take a cinematic approach in this respect and create non-diegetic themes to score an event. The line between diegetic and non-diegetic music becomes blurred in the next few sections.

Music is Used to Provide Audible Cues

While film can use music to give hints about how a certain character feels, or what kind of an environment a character finds themselves in, it is far more subtle than the audible clues given by digital games. Audible cues can be found in almost every game, and they come in a variety of different flavours. Some cues are used to inform the player about their character’s status, some are used to indicate the pacing of the game, some are used to warn of hazards or enemies, and some are used to identify a location.

Illustrating the status of a player is traditionally done with a heads-up display in game, but it’s often aided by more obvious visual or aural cues. In 2002, Nintendo published the cult-favoured Eternal Darkness, which had an overarching theme of insanity. The player’s character had a “sanity meter”, and as it fell, the camera would gradually skew and things would happen to make the player feel insane. What aided this was that after it fell past a certain point, the music changed to fit the level of sanity the character was presently at.

This situation is one where the diegetic and non-diegetic seem to collide. While the player’s sanity meter is full, the musical background is strictly non-diegetic. As the player descends into madness, the musical score is erratic, creepy and would perfectly fit an unstable mind. It’s debatable whether the insane musical score would be non-diegetic.

An excellent example of pacing can be found in the WarioWare series, and especially in WarioWare: Touched! (Nintendo, 2005). In the WarioWare series, players complete series of microgames in ever diminishing time frames in an attempt to complete as many microgames as possible. The first round of microgames is at a normal pace, but with every new set, the total time available to complete each microgame is diminished, but the musical accompanyment that goes with every theme increases in speed to fit the smaller time frame. In this way, sound is creating a sense of urgency, and establishing the pacing of the game. Many of these microgames have a mix of diegetic and non-diegetic music, but they all depend on the gameplay to instruct them on their play time.

An example of music warning of incoming enemies would be in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks, 2007).  In Oblivion, the player could be running about outside, but an enemy could spot them and begin to make chase. The player would otherwise be completely unaware that they were being chased would it not be for the battle theme that played as soon as the player is spotted by an enemy. This is especially important because in Oblivion, some enemies will spot the character and initiate attack from a far distance, so it’s important to know when one is being targeted. This is an example of simple non-diegetic music.

Finally, music can be a guide or a landmark for physical space. For example, in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998), many of the areas in the world have their own distinct theme music. This would help give the player their bearings, as well as give them a sense of what to expect in a new location. For example, the player’s visit to the bustling Castle Town Market is met with a lively jig while his exploration of the empty and ominous Temple of Time was supported by a echo-laden choir hymn. The first step into the Temple of Time is confusing because the intial reaction one has is that the music is diegetic, but upon searching the building, no chanting monks are to be found, proving the music to be non-diegetic. This kind of uncertainty is found elsewhere in Ocarina of Time: a section in the game requires the player to follow music through a maze of tunnels in the Lost Woods. In the rest of the Lost Woods area, one believes the music to be non-diegetic, but once they follow the music they discover that a friend of the main character is playing it on their ocarina.

So, as explained, even musical cues have a possibility of being diegetic when placed in digital games. Film would never have such confusion or controversy over what is to be considered part of the film’s world. Musical cues are only the tip of the iceberg when one begins to consider the wealth of games that use music as a gameplay elements.

Music is Used as a Gameplay Element

In many games, music is incorperated somehow into the actual gameplay. In film, music can be the basis for many films such as musicals or music videos, but rarely does one see the level of connection music can have with the digital game medium. Music can be used to create game scenarios, music can be the gameplay itself, or music can be created from gameplay.

Music can be used to create game scenarios in a variety of different games. Chiefly is the Guitar Hero franchise, where one plays along on a guitar-shaped controller to their favourite musical tracks. The game involves a player pressing buttons in time with corresponding notes falling down a virtual fretboard on screen. The notes are arranged to give the illusion that the player is actually performing the track that is playing in the background. In this way, music, with the help of developers, has created a scenario for a video game.

A similar situation is AudioSurf, (SOMETHING, SOMEYEAR) an on-rails driving game where the levels are created based on sound data extracted from MP3 files supplied by the player. The game would dynamically fill the track with blocks to correspond with the music.

In both Guitar Hero and AudioSurf, gameplay is being created by music, both directly and indirectly. In these cases, the music would be diegetic, but due to the more ambiguous nature of the game world of AudioSurf, it causes some confusion. Although both of these games feature music heavily, timing and reflexes are the core resources for gameplay rather than aural proficiency.

In Mario Paint (Nintendo, DATEYDATE), players are given the chance to create their own music in the “composer” mode. Players are able to drag esoteric instruments (Ducks, Nintendo GameBoys, Planes) onto a virtual music sheet. The location of the instrument on the scale would determine what pitch it would be played at, and the location of the instrument in the piece would determine when it would be played. This tradition was held over until current day, with Guitar Hero: World Tour‘s “Studio” mode where players could use the Guitar Hero interface to create songs and share them online. This kind of music, while diegetic, is the apex of distinction between digital games and film. In no way could a situation like this exist in a film.

Finally, music can be created from gameplay. In Bit.Trip Beat, the player controlls a paddle to reflect incoming blocks, in the vein of a single-player Pong. However, each block creates a musical blip, and if the player manages to reflect most of the blocks, the musical blips add to the background music that was previously assumed to be nondiegetic. Due to the ambiguous nature of the game world, it’s unknown what the diegesis entails. Again, it’s observed that the difference between film and digital games are becoming increasingly stark.

Conclusions

From the cases studied, it’s obvious to see the radical differences between the media of film and digital games. What is considered diegesis in film applies far less often in digital games, since some games contain multiple kinds of music with unknown sources. In digital games, music does serve the emotional and stylistic causes, just like film, but it also serves as a set of audible cues to indicate the status of the player, their location, the pacing of the game, and proximity to hazards. Music is also used in gameplay directly by providing gameplay scenarios, being the gameplay itself, and being born from gameplay. As scholars work to understand this new medium it is important to identify it as a new medium rather than a simple film + 1.

Works Cited

AudioSurf. 2008. Dylan Fitterer. April 2^nd 2009.

Bit.Trip Beat. 2009. Aksys Games. April 2^nd 2009

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction with Tutorial CD-ROM. New York City: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 2001.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The. 2007. Bethesda Softworks. April 2^nd 2009.

Eternal Darkness. 2002. Nintendo. April 2^nd 2009.

Flower. 2009. Sony Computer Entertainment. April 2^nd 2009.

Guitar Hero. 2005. RedOctane. April 2^nd 2009.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The. 1998. Nintendo. April 2^nd 2009.

Mario Paint. 1992. Nintendo. April 2^nd 2009.

WarioWare: Touched! 2005. Nintendo. April 2^nd 2009.

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Introduction

Virtual worlds have been proliferating for years. From the MUDs of the 80s to the MMORPGs with millions of players, virtual worlds have grown to proportions unimagined when they began. From the blistering deserts of Kalimdor in World of Warcraft to the cold empty space of EVE Online to even the isometric pixel-world of Habbo Hotel, all of these virtual worlds have one thing in common: social human interaction.

These virtual worlds are sometimes better known as social games. They involve massive amounts of users logging into the server at once and playing the game usually together. For example, in World of Warcraft, one could conceivably play the game without interacting with anyone, but it would hardly be effective. To be able to play the game to the fullest, with all of the dungeons and the bosses and the player versus player battles, one must join a guild.

Guilds are the basis for any social structure in virtual worlds. They are organized and run by players and they have different purposes. Some guilds aim to complete all of the high-level dungeons, feats that require the utmost practice and precision. Some guilds aim to help out low level characters, to make it so they have an easy time learning the world. Some guilds are even just made up of low level characters, helping each other out to eventually become one of the high-level dungeon guilds.

How do players form these kinds of groups? Do natural leaders begin groups, or is it simply players who have more time to invest in the game? Are guilds age-restrictive? Gender restrictive? There are so many questions pertaining to how players organize and operate within guilds, it requires an ethnographic approach to really understand how these social structures are formed.

Why EVE Online

In the massively multiplayer world of EVE Online, guilds are called Corporations. In this virtual world, players begin in the training corporation and quit it when they are ready to join a player-run corporation. The focus on large, player-run corporations is one of the things that set EVE Online apart from other virtual worlds.

EVE Online is unique in the virtual world space due to the open-world sandbox nature of the game. Although it could be argued that worlds like Second Life have more sandbox capabilities, EVE Online provides a framework for the play. If Second Life is a big, open field, EVE Online is a big field with play structures in it, clearly defining the purpose of the area. EVE Online can be considered an open-sandbox world because of the high level of player power. A large portion of the game world is left without any kind of protection from Non-Player Characters (NPCs), and that leaves it open for powerful corporations to set up bases in that area. Those bases can be contested, and corporations can lose control of a star system just as quickly as they gained it.

The corporation system goes one step further as well: any corporation can join an alliance, which is several corporations who band together mainly for the purpose of mutual protection of both ships and real estate. One might think that there isn’t really that much danger, but again it’s the players that present the danger to other players. Rival corporations vying for power or space can attack each other or declare war at a price per week to the fictional policing body in-game, CONCORD. When there are over 30,000 players online in the same world at once, one could find it hard making it alone.

With all these factors practically forcing players into corporations and alliances, EVE Online is the perfect virtual world to learn how these guilds are formed, governed and run from day to day.

My Experiences In the Virtual World Beginnings

Upon beginning the game, I was tasked with creating a character to play with. I created a character with the professions of Mining and Engineering (I thought it would be useful), and named him Don Doak. Once in the game, I made one observation: This was complicated. The game UI was vastly detailed with many buttons and lights. I was accustomed to the simple setup of World of Warcraft; this array of controls was confusing to me. This is important to note because due to the high learning curve of this game, it would tend to drive away younger players, which might help the corporation-founding efforts as younger players may be less co-operative when trying to work together.

After stumbling through the tutorial, I found myself at a station and I noticed that there was a recruitment station (advertisements in a list) for different corporations. I would later learn that the corporations actually needed to pay to place these ads here, so recruitment was serious just as it is when recruiting for an available position at a workplace. At the recruiting station, I browsed through the corporations until I found something called “VR Corp”. Their advertisement read:

“The perfect corp for rookie pilots. We are recruiting only rookie miners, manufacturers, traders, fighters and mission runners now. Join this young but ambitious and fast-growing corp right now as a founding member and help us shape the corp’s future. We are all rookies learning about EVE and how to runa [sic]corporation, so you won’t be looked down on as a new player but will be seen as a colleague and an equal. We have no tasks that members are required to perform for the corporation and all participation is voluntary. We can help with supplying ships and equipment and advice. Join us now and we can all learn and have fun together.” I was really excited to join the corporation because it sounded interesting to me, and seemed like a corporation where I might have a better chance of seeing how it worked from the inside. A few days later, I received an EVE-mail from VR Corp’s CEO, Val Vherosan. I was in.

Being Accepted

From here on in, it was about getting to know the corporate structure and how it worked. First thing that the CEO told me was that we were in a war, and whether I was a miner or a fighter. This organized approach was needed especially when corporation sizes grew. Val (the CEO) also told me that most of the players in the corporation were either students, or had full-time jobs, so a lot of people played at uncommon hours. This was interesting to me because I had expected most people to be on during the hours of 8pm-midnight religiously, as it had been in World of Warcraft.

A few days later, I struck up a conversation in the corporate chat channel to the only fellow online corporate, Danni Levy. Danni told me that we were at war with a pirate corporation. These kind of corporations are made up of players who wish to play as aggressively and ruthless as possible, and to be prepared for the big leagues, they would train their rookies by declaring war on small corporations and having them attack whenever possible. As a small corporation, VR Corp had no space to defend, the only thing the Pirates could take was our ships’ remains  and our dignity. As an Engineer/Miner, I posed to Danni how I could help the war effort. She suggested that I create certain types of ammo for our fighters to use. I knew doing so would increase my reputation, so I began to gather the necessary blueprints and materials.

EVE-Mail has a dedicated section where one can read messages sent from co-workers to the rest of the corporation. Much of what I learned about the corporation came from correspondences through that system. The first major information break I received from EVE-Mail was the following:

“BlakDice has accepted the position of Admiral of the Fleet and help develop our pvp [player versus-player combat] tactics and experience. He has been fulfilling that role anyway in recent times. That will give me the opportunity to focus more on the business and industrial side of the

corp.” This was a major breakthrough because this meant that there were multiple roles within a corporation. As an ex-World of Warcraft player, I had never seen this level of organization. I wondered if it could be an issue of demographic that stopped World of Warcraft from being this organized.

Val was working towards putting VR corp on the map, and he had begun ‘talks’ with other corporations to form an alliance. He has offered a cash prize (in game funds) for the player who suggests the best name for the corporation. I would imagine that not many corporations choose their alliance names in this way; it might be a product of the easygoing nature of both the CEO and the corporation as a whole.

As in real life, the corporations in EVE Online are public companies, and have stocks that can be traded. Although there is no stock exchange one might visit in space, Val Vhersosan sent out an EVE-Mail to the entire corporation, offering shares for purchase to the corporation employees. He said that it was a way of building up capital to fund the creation of the Alliance, and that the shares entitle you to power to vote on decisions for the corporation, and share in the corporate profits through dividends.

Apart from shares, the other way that corporations gain currency is through taxes. On every in-game mission a player completes, a percentage of their reward money is given to their corporation. The percentage is usually around 10%, but VR Corp asks for 5%. This tax is mandatory, and automatically deducted by the game. However, taxes are not automatically withdrawn if a player sells items to other players. This kind of tax is not paid automatically, and according to VR Corp, is a voluntary donation. With all these corporations amassing such huge sums of currency, this opens up a host of new possibilities… what about embezzlement? Corporate theft? Could this happen?

It actually could. A player-run bank in EVE had actually lost over 100 billion ISK (EVE Online‘s currency) to embezzlement by the former investments manager (Egan, 2009). While a player can hit their first million within a week of play or so, to accumulate 100 billion would be a lot of hours lost. One would think that this would actually turn people off the game, but this kind of scandal excites most players, and helps subscription numbers, according to one of the developers (John, 2009).

With this kind of backstabbing possible, it is easy to see how players are slow to trust one another. One might wonder how a world ( the economy in particular) can function if everyone is suspicious of everyone else? A system of “contracts” is a way for both players and corporations to make agreements that will be honored. The contract system is able to diffuse a lot of potential double-crossing by including a neutral third party: the game itself.

The contract system is a hard-coded feature in EVE Online that allows for players to create binding agreements with other players. Contracts can come in many different forms, including auctions, courier services, item exchange, loan and freeform. Auctions allow players to auction off items to the highest bidder, with no fear of the bidder not paying or making off with their goods. At the beginning of the auction, the game will remove the auctioned items from the auctioneer’s inventory, and will remove the currency from the highest bidder’s wallet. The transaction is completed through the game, so both parties don’t need to worry that they’re going to be ripped off. Courier contracts  are a way of having other players shuttle items across the virtual universe for a fee. The player can put out a contract asking another player to deliver X item to Y location, for Z sum. The way the player knows they won’t be cheated by the delivery player is the inclusion of collateral. Collateral is an amount of ISK set by the player requesting delivery to be paid to the 3^rd party (the game again). Upon successful delivery of the package, the collateral is returned by the game. If the delivery player fails to complete the contract, their collateral is given to the player requesting delivery. Collateral is often over five times more expensive than the net worth of the package, so double-crossing is unlikely. Item exchange is a way of trading outside of the market (which is a secure transaction already), and loan is exactly what it claims to be. Freeform contracts can be anything; it’s a way of ensuring that an agreement will be honored, and it allows for great levels of flexibility that are often required in high-level corporate contracts.

Attending Events

The first corporation event I attended was a mining operation. It began about a week before the date, when Val sent out an EVE Mail message seeing if anyone would like to participate in a mining operation on an upcoming Saturday. The purpose of the mining operation is to raise money and resources for the corporation by having most players mining while one player makes trips between the nearest station and the asteroid field, bringing back the harvested ore. I definitely wanted to know how the operation would work, so I replied in the affirmative via EVE Mail, and then waited for Saturday. On Saturday, I logged in at the set time, and there were only three corporates online: Val, myself and a third player. More players were expected, so the three of us decided to wait until more players logged in.

I had believed that the mining operation was going to be really organized and regulated, but I was wrong. Everyone was fine with waiting for everyone else to show up, even if some people were up to 45 minutes late. Everything was very low-key, and Val was very patient in explaining the facets of the mining operation. What I did find odd, however, was when the event was in full swing, no one seemed to be talking. I was used to the very chatty nature of players on World of Warcraft, and this awkward silence was deafening. I wasn’t sure if people were on TeamSpeak (a third party voice over ip client) or if they were simply not speaking to one another. After an hour or so of mining I did a final pass with my cargo of minerals, said goodbye and logged off.

The mining operation turned out to be the apex of my experience in EVE Online. From this point forward, I had hoped to do more events, but my school and work schedule would not permit it. What I did hear about being run was a fleet training event, which I found very interesting. Speaking with Val Vherosan, I learned that another corporation was holding a meeting to train the fighters in their fleet, and our corporation had been invited to attend. Unfortunately, I was not able to make the event, but the very description of it gave a new level of depth to the level of social interaction found within this virtual world. In World of Warcraft, I had known of guilds doing lower-level dungeons to teach their guild how to work as a team, but that always profit the experienced players through items and in-game currency obtained in the level. To have a set time where some players will teach other players, without any promise of reward, how to be better at the game, is unheard of.

That was the final bit of research I conducted within EVE Online. Due to time restraints, I was unable to interact more with the players, but I did get a good sense of how they operated in-game. However, in-game is only half of the interactions that guilds/corporations have. There is also interactions outside the game, which I will be detailing in the next section.

Otherworldly correspondence: The VR Corp website

In addition to all of the events in-game, VR corp runs a website that is complementary to the in-game corporation. At the website, there is a calendar, forums, news posts, and ways to connect to players outside of EVE. This website serves as a hub for those who cannot get online due to being at work, at school, or otherwise away from their computer.

The Forums

First order of business is the elephant in the corner: The forums. Online forums have been a staple of the gaming community for longer than I can remember. Their ease of use and simple set-up attracted everyone from the smallest guild to the largest corporation. Forums allowed for scheduling events, discussing news topics, and making decisions that would affect the entire guild.

At the VR Corp website, the forums are a major part of the out-of-game discussion. The forums are broken into two major sections: general and divisions. The general section is for general discussions on any topic relating to the corporation, while the divisions section is for discussing topics relating to the different “departments” of the corporation.

In general, there are three sub-sections: Open, Secure, and Allies. The Open section is available to be viewed by anyone who is a registered forum user, the Secure section is open only to corporate members in-game, and the allies section is open to VR Corp members and any allied corporations’ members. The reason for all these levels of security is that as it has been mentioned earlier in this paper, security is an issue in EVE. If rival corporations get information on when and where VR corp is doing a mining operation, they may be able to stage a surprise attack. During these mining operations, the ships are poorly equipped for battle, and are very vulnerable. As such, it is necessary for some topics to remain a secret.

Open General Discussion is mainly filled with simple and somewhat lighthearted topics. There is a thread for introductions for new players, helpful tips on how to play the game, and game update news discussions. Secure General Discussion covers many of the internal issues of the corporation. Events are scheduled, corporate structure and goals are questioned and discussed, and otherwise secret information is discussed. Allies’ General Discussion is where Val Vherosan has been working on the alliance constitution. It’s interesting how far and how formal players can get when they inhabit this virtual world. The constitution itself describes things such as shared principles and values, an executive council, a senate, rights and duties, and more. This proves that although I have spent many days exploring these social structures, I have but scratched the surface.

The other main section of the forums is the Divisions section. The corporation is split into several divisions, all taking care of a particular aspect of the corporation. These sections are: Corporate, Mining, Fleet, Manufacturing, Trading, and Research.

The first section, Corporate, reveals another interesting development that I’ve missed while I have been out of the game. There is a thread there outlining the impending vote for a new Corporate Director. The thread called for nominations for new players to the position, and players posted their picks for who would make a good director. This is the same kind of democracy one would have found in older, smaller real-life communities. A vote of hands, as it were, has changed to a vote of clicks in this new online universe. More on the polling system will be detailed later.

The Mining section mainly focuses on upcoming mining operations, the Fleet section includes security messages, game tips for combat, and lists of in-game characters to avoid. The Research, Trading, and Manufacturing sections all deal with tactics for doing new research (obtaining blueprints for items), creating the items using the blueprints, and selling those items at top price.

The forums prove that this isn’t simply a game. This virtual world has real traction on the players’ lives, because they feel they should communicate with their in-game friends outside of the game world. Although the forums are the main attraction of the website, there still are some sections that are interesting to be examined.

The Polls

The VR Corp website has a section devoted solely to polls. In this section, one can vote on issues that require a referendum in the corporation. Topics in the Polls section ranged from the simple questions such as “how do you like the new website” to more complex and serious questions such as the Director Election and deciding on new corporate tax rates. These polls are critical to be able to get a judge of how the entire corporation feels about a certain topic. It’s very interesting to note that even with such a limited form of communication (text only), these groups can organize themselves to the point that they have a functioning democratic system.

Contributing News

The final section that is worth mentioning is the section that enables one to submit news for the website. As with the democratic practices of the polls, and the open discourse of the forums, players are able to submit news stories for approval by the moderators who are the high-ups of the in-game corporation. This freedom of participation is key in making the corporation a welcome place for new players and unemployed players.

Conclusions

In my time in the virtual world of EVE Online, I’ve met many people. Some were from North America, some were from Europe. Some were old, but some were young. The mask of the virtual world is key in allowing widespread acceptance and connection where there would otherwise be none. I had a strong idea of what I may experience coming into EVE, but once I arrived, my opinions radically changed.

This open world is unstructured and untamed. Whereas World of Warcraft is somewhat static when it comes to content, EVE Online is a dynamic, thriving world. Players are the chief architects of culture in this world. Players decide they wish to begin a corporation and they can recruit through several venues. Once they begin to get members, they can schedule events and set short and long term goals for both players and the corporation as a whole. As corporations grow, other corporations will be growing as well and they will prove to be either allies or rivals in this virtual world. It’s like some kind of parallel history of humanity. Civilizations form from small groups of people banding together for economic and defense purposes, and as they grow they may ally or clash with other civilizations.

In EVE, the social aspect is huge. Theoretically, one could play the entire game alone, simply doing missions for NPCs (Non-Player Characters), but this would become tedious at best. There are no NPC vendors in the entire game. The market is run for the players, by the players, and prices are set drynamically based on demand and supply of the current region, so one would have nowhere to sell items that one acquires. Furthermore, there is the security issue. There is safety in numbers, and a single player trying to do their business in zero security space is a deathwish in itself. Corporations are a necessity for this world to function, and even if the feature wasn’t hard-coded into the game, players would form these groups on their own.

The corporate structure is both complex and simple. At it’s simplest form, there is a CEO with some employees beneath them. At it’s most complicated, it involves executive councils, taxes, meetings, external communications, annual reports and everything associated with real-life corporations. There are wars and alliances, there are trade agreements and anything that a contract could support. In the same way as real life, goal-oriented and organized players are able to successfully create corporations, and eventually claim a bit of space as their own.

For EVE Online, I know that my research has only scratched the surface of this massive world. I have not examined the finer points of the corporate structure, I have not seen how corporations act towards each other in alliances, and I’ve not seen how a corporation operates when trying to defend space they occupy.

Suggestions for Further Research

As I’ve said numerous times in this paper, studies of virtual worlds, and especially EVE Online, are lacking in today’s academic scope. The universe and inhabitants of EVEi are a goldmine for social researchers; the social groups players form,  the interactions they have, are all worth understanding and studying. For further research I would recommend firstly a longer stay in the game world as well as a more involved stance in the corporate structure. At my position, I got but a glimpse of what influenced the CEO to make the decisions he did, but more time and effort invested in this world would have gone a long way. Secondly, I would also recommend a much broader study that encompassed more than one corporation. A study that could span multiple corporations and alliances would be a perfect way to understand the social workings of such a rich and diverse universe.

Social Implications of this research

Although some may believe this kind of research to have no bearing on the offline world, it is a completely false assumption. Studies made in this world could be used to simulate situations where conventional power structures were lost and humanity was forced to regroup again. Of course it’s difficult to say whether people would take the same degree of chances in a real world situation as opposed to a virtual one, but the same laws apply.

First is the issue of democracy. In the absence of law or social structures, would humanity reform as an overall democratic society? If this research is to be used as a model, then yes it would. There are no mandates or even features in the game software to allow democratic participation within corporations, but as it stands, VR Corp opened up democratic discussion and polls for all to discuss the future of the corporation.

Also, on the topic of democracy, does this prove that online democracy could work? Many have argued for and against the possibility of  online democracy, and the fact that players voluntarily vote and discuss the politics of the corporation would lead one to believe that online democracy could be possible.

Second is the issue of discrimination. In online worlds, your gender, race, age and physical appearance is hidden to the rest of the online world. A player can decide what others see them as. This kind of interaction is a way of breaking down discrimination by eliminating first impressions based on visual cues such as skin tone or gender. How would people act if racism, sexism, and ageism did not exist? It’s important to see how these prejudices affect society from day to day.

One cannot discount the importance of using these virtual worlds as a research setting. Often, researchers will dismiss these worlds as being simple “games” and being inapplicable to larger situations. They refuse to attempt any kind of understanding of these worlds, and in that respect, they lose. There is so much to be learned from these social ecologies and all a researcher needs to do is log in. Ironically, this is often the most difficult step.

Works Cited

Egan, James. “Over 80 billion ISK embezzled from player-run bank in EVE Online.” Massively — Daily News About MMOs. 21 Jan. 2009. 30 Mar. 2009 <http://www.massively.com/2009/01/21/eve-online-player-embezzles-over-80-billion-isk-from­dynasty-ban/>.

John, Tracey. “MTV Multiplayer » ‘EVE Online’ Designer: Players Actually Like In-Game Scandals, Corruption.” MTV Multiplayer. 2 Mar. 2009. 30 Mar. 2009 <http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/03/02/eve-online-designer-players-actually-like-in­game-scandals-corruption/>.