ON FACEBOOK, THE GAMING COMMUNITY, AND DRAMA

How Facebook and Social Media Actually Reduce Social Drama in the Gaming Community

By Jason Hubbard

Do you know what game of telephone is? For those who are a little fuzzy on the idea, it’s where you tell one person one thing and then they repeat it to another person, and that person repeats it to still another person, and so on and so forth until the message has been passed through everyone playing, at which point it is repeated back to the originator of the original message.

If you’re playing with a group larger than three or four, then almost invariably, that message will come back distorted, so that the message the last person in the chain gets is very different from the message the original sender originally sent. I’m sure there have been full on scientific studies of the phenomena, but suffice it to say: humans are not good at communicating data. Like at all.

This is relevant to a discussion on social networking, gaming, and drama, because often people will refer to the medium of social networking as the problem. They will say things like “Facebook is the problem,” or “Internet communication is the problem.” “We wouldn’t have so much drama in <insert gaming social group here> if it weren’t for <insert name of electronic communications medium here>.”

This is patently false.

Other Major Shifts in Communications Paradigms

The telephone example is extremely relevant because when folks of an older generation were young, telephony was still new thing, and expanding in new ways. And sure enough, when that generation was young, the old people would say, “Young people these days, they have so much drama! They spend so much time on the phone.” “There would be less gossip in this town if all those busybodies weren’t on the phone so often!” Sound familiar?

The same was said about television, and radio. People would blame television and radio for putting all these ideas into the heads of impressionable youths, which ultimately resulted in a great deal of effort being put into an effort to censor and blacklist broadcast television and radio, but now we know that TV doesn’t make kids gay, or that Jazz or Rock and Roll doesn’t make women promiscuous. But such was the culture shock of the new technology that people found it easy to believe that these communication technologies were responsible for altering human behavior.

And it goes back before electronic communication as well. The printing press, for example, allowed people to communicate the written word at a previously unknown scale. The printing press would allow for the dissemination of books, and eventually lead to pamphleting and newspapers. And people really believed that the social changes that occurred as people became more literate and ideas spread through printed medium, that the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of popular democracy was all to do with the books, the pamphlets, the newspapers themselves, that somehow people would be perfectly content among the peasantry if only they had not read the ideas of social agitators. And so for a time book burning and the censorship of the press became the aristocracy’s answer.

Aha, you will say, but what about face to face communication? But I guarantee you that no matter how anthropologically isolated a culture is, it gossips. Do you seriously think that the remote natives of the Amazon don’t gossip, or that bushpeople of Africa don’t lament the gossiping of their internal social hierarchies? Gossip is endemic to the human species because we are social animals, because we have a psychological need programmed in our DNA for social interaction with others of our kind. So far as we can tell, this applies to all primates to some degree or another.

Use of Network Theory to Understand Social Drama

From there, we can use networking theory to understand just how the natural urge to gossip, to integrate into the social hierarchies of our culture (i.e., to network), leads to so much drama. As the telephone game demonstrates, as driven as we are to communicate, we are poor conduits for information. In network theory, you would say we have poor fidelity— the information/signal we transmit is usually degraded from our inputs.

Any network with fidelity loss will eventually generate problematic distortion as it grows in size, particularly when that network features feedback (inputs looping back through the network to their original source). Microphone feedback? Most people reading this knows that microphones and speakers can generate a feedback look. That’s the simple network loop that consists of the microphone, the amplifiers, the speaker, wires connecting the electronic equipment— and the air between the speaker and the microphone, which completes the network loop through the transmission of sound.

In people, that means that any closed loop of communication will generate it’s own feedback— often times loud and screechy drama, the social equivalent of the microphone feedback.

Network theory lets us know that these negative loops will occur more frequently as the size of the network grows, and as more loops are established. With people, consider that every relationship is a network loop of two people, where both members have inputs and outputs, and fidelity loss occurs within each person between these inputs and outputs. In people that means network size is governed by the number of participants, and the number of loops grows as the participants establish relationships between themselves (i.e. form acquaintances, become friends, enemies, lovers, etc.)

The Kevin Bacon Effect

Now you might initially think that this is evidence that social media would generate more drama, because it allows people who never would have physically met to form new relationships with each other, thus creating new loops, leading to further distortion and more negative feedback loops of larger scale. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

You’d be wrong because we have so far assumed each network is isolated. In that supposition, the network size of a gaming group is limited by number of participants in the gaming group, and the number of relationships between them. But these gaming groups do not exist in a universe where no other people exist. These groups are actually subgroups of much larger social networks, which are in turn networked together, ultimately consisting of a network consisting of all living individuals.

Some people will say ‘man, that’s some drugged up hippy circle of life bs,’ but we know this more intuitively by another name. This is the six or seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. Really, it could be anyone, but most of us know that reference because of a television show. (We’ll get back to that). The basic idea is that you can connect anyone in the US (and often beyond) to Kevin Bacon through six or seven relationships between people who know each other somehow. In networking, that is the minimum distance between nodes (nodes in this case being people), distance being measured in number of transmission lines (in this case being relationships).

That number in the US is actually smaller, we just perceive it to be larger because we don’t know the details of all the relationships the people we know have with other people. Hence how the seven degrees game works— players have differing knowledge of these relationships, and so someone with more knowledge can actually connect subject of the game to Kevin Bacon through increasingly fewer relationships than seven. You see, another, even folksier, more intuitive name for the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon is just “It’s a small world after all.”

So understanding that all these people in the gaming group already exist in an interconnected, broad scale network, we can understand that the feedback loops would still occur— they would just be channeled through larger loops external to the gaming group. The larger loops would introduce more distortion (i.e. make the drama worse) because there would be more individuals included in the loops, and more lines of transmission across which fidelity would be lost.

With this in mind, we can see that what social networking actually does in relation to drama (negative social feedback loops) is decrease loop size and hence reduce distortion due to loss of fidelity. Instead of something scandalous being communicated by a friend of a friend of a friend, the people who would otherwise not have a direct relationship now do in fact have a relationship of some sort, and communicate directly. In other words, social networking actually reduces drama for large groups by reducing the distance between nodes, and hence the size of feedback loops, leading to less fidelity loss. Put another way— there are fewer games of telephone taking place.

Effect of Fidelity in Communication

But wait, we’re not done. You see, electronic media— media in general, actually— accomplishes something else with regard to fidelity. Which is that the technological medium actually increases fidelity in transmission between two nodes. When someone makes a Facebook post or comment, everyone reading that post or comment reads the same text. That is very high fidelity compared to verbal speech.

Yes, verbal speech conveys a great deal more context, and face to face conversation more still, context not easily captured in the written word. But when we consider the game of telephone, we start to understand why that is a low fidelity means of communication.

The line of transmission is not just the expression, but it’s receipt and interpretation. So tone, body posture, facial expression, etc. convey lots and lots of context— which are also much more easily misunderstood and are highly subject to varying interpretation. That is loss of fidelity and distortion right there.

You’ve likely been in a social dispute that arose from simple misinterpretation of tone, or even body posture (“Don’t give me that look!”) From a network theory standpoint, that’s just a negative feedback loop in the simple loop consisting of two individuals communicating. In the context of a gaming group, that feedback distortion would only grow if people who otherwise had no direct relationship were further communicating about the original dispute (i.e. gossiping about it).

To which some will express an objection to the assumption of gossip— but remember that gossip is endemic to our nature as humans. You can be sure that all of Noah’s family on the Ark knew if Noah and his wife had a dispute, because it’s in human nature to gossip.

Understanding that increasing fidelity in communication mediums reduces drama actually helps to explain all those social changes that did occur with the advent of new communications technologies. It wasn’t the medium of communication that caused them— it was the fidelity of the medium that allowed them to occur where they previously had not.

The advent of the printing press allowed more people to communicate their dissatisfaction with the aristocracy, and soon enough people figured out there were more disaffected peasants than there were aristocrats.

Radio and television allowed more people to tune in to the same broadcasts, and judge the ideas presented in those broadcasts for themselves, rather than as interpreted by others who had seen it. Everyone saw the same transmission of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. Conversely everyone saw the same episodes of Leave It To Beaver, the Honeymooners, or I Love Lucy, and many decided that these were not models for the lives they wanted for themselves (hence the advent of numerous counter-cultures.)

Counter-intuitively to the stereo-type, the advent of telephony likely reduced drama due to gossip by more easily allowing higher fidelity communications to occur more rapidly— instead of exchanging gossip and messages more casually at social engagements, the busybodies and gossip-hounds of a small town or high school could call all the people involved to get the story straight from the source, reducing misinterpretation and hence conflict arising from that distortion.

This could even explain what Boomers feel to be a major shift in modern teenage culture away from phone conversation and towards texting. Not only is texting more convenient, but it’s higher fidelity than voice conversation. By preferring textual conversation through a socially negotiated textual lexicon, fewer misinterpretations arise, and hence less drama. Rather than being maladaptive, as the luddites would have you believe, the behavior is positively adaptive, allowing for larger and more cohesive social networks. Teenagers get more of the social input they crave.

Importance of Network Size

Larger is more important there, too, because it explains why we feel there is more conflict than there used to be. Higher fidelity transmission networks allow for larger networks, because more information can be communicated at larger distances between nodes without fidelity loss. A lower fidelity network would become dysfunctional at smaller sizes due to the increased distortion feedback.

So as individuals we have larger social networks than were previously possible because of social media. In turn the reason we feel we have more drama due to social media is because we have these larger social networks, and are thusly exposed to more potential for conflict. Those conflicts are, as covered, of lesser intensity due to the higher fidelity and reduced distance between nodes (i.e. less contextualized communication and more direct relationships).

This is why social media conflicts feel so ‘pointless’ and ‘small minded,’ because they usually are— they’re more often than not just the immediate consequences of simple miscommunication, which never grow larger because these simple misunderstandings are not amplified and distorted through games of telephone (and further loss of fidelity) into something more substantial. They are instead recorded in textual format in high fidelity for quick reference and corrective re-interpretation.

Instead of a few fights over wildly inaccurate gossip, you get many more minor conflicts of misunderstanding. Overall social cohesion is higher, but you still feel the increased quantity as ‘more.’

Conclusions Regarding Gaming Communities

So what does this say about Facebook Drama and the gaming community?

It says that the reason gaming drama can get so massive is because of the size of our gaming networks. But it also says that the size of these organizations we’re part of (OWbN, MES, UT, Nero, Amtgaurd, DR, SCA, list goes on) wouldn’t be possible without social networking (through E-mail, forums, Yahoo groups, livejournal, Facebook, Twitter, list continues to grow). For most participants in these groups, the size is actually the selling point of these organizations. Otherwise we would just play in small local games and not be part of these networks.

Speaking of small local games, it also gives us a clue as to why these games flare out and die. It’s the low fidelity of communication between participants. Relying on face to face discussions that will be at best half remembered, gossip at after-game diner runs, telephone calls, and the like is a very low fidelity means of managing a social network. Throw in that most communication at game occurs in-character, and you’ve added a whole new source for distortion to generate negative feedback loops, especially in games that feature players actively deceiving other players in-character. Add in a porus firewall between information known by staff and information known by players, and you add in another layer of fidelity loss and distortion. Eventually the drama generated out of these loops with all these extra sources of fidelity loss and distortion causes the game to become dysfunctional, and poof, the game flares out and dies.

But to get to the final point of all of this:

What it says most directly is that discouraging discussion via social media is actually a recipe for more drama, not less. Because we are social animals, we will continue to gossip no matter the stigma placed on gossip. But a prohibition or cultural rejection of social media as a valid means of discussion and conflict resolution will shunt that gossip through larger feedback loops involving more people with a higher loss of fidelity and increased distortion, amplifying what would otherwise be small-peanuts disputes over minor miscommunications into full blown flame wars and character assassination.