Students share their impressions of the mini-conference “Social Studies of Games, Internet and Virtual Worlds”

This year, the annual student conference "Sociology in Action" became a part of the International Student Research Forum in St. Petersburg. At this forum, three sections were organized by the SELS staff and students. Our research assistant and student Denis Bulygin is sharing his impressions on one of them, "Social Studies of Games, Internet and Virtual Worlds".

Two guest lecturers were invited to our section "Social Studies of Games, Internet and Virtual Worlds”: Professor Frans Mayra (University of Tampere) and Elena Bogdanova (Gothenburg University). Our guests presented most interesting talks on their research projects on game studies, and provided many valuable comments on the projects presented by our students.
Professor Frans Mayra, Head of Game Research Lab of iSchool, was

 glad to accept an invitation from the HSE head, Professor Daniel Alexandrov, and participate in the conference with his lecture on the main directions in the game studies. After his talk, he held a discussion with other conference participants about computer games, the prospects and problems of gamification, and about the study process at the University of Tampere. Unfortunately, due to his packed schedule, Professor Mayra was able to attend the conference just for one day. 

The second day of the conference was also very interesting. The Head of SELS and the second guest lecturer, Elena Bogdanova, presented their talks. Elena works in the area of economic sociology and studies the patterns of pricing at the antiques markets. In her lecture, she described the types of values ascribed to the goods, and how customers evaluate their quality.

Professor Daniel Alexandrov, the Head of SELS, talked about online games, and how rapidly they become a platform for sociological studies of human behavior in real life. The strict framework of the reality does not allow researchers to develop full explanatory models, because there are too many factors in reality that affect people's actions. In games, these factors are restricted by game rules, but at the same time they leave enough freedom for players, which makes their in-game behavior similar to that of the “real life”. Professor Alexandrov gave several examples that clarified how exactly the study of games allows us to understand the actual processes that take place in society.

A few of our students took part in the panel section: Daria Kharkina, Denis Bulygin (that’s me) and Maria Sergeeva. Daria and Maria presented the first results of their study of the fan fiction culture in the area of games. Fan fiction, or fan fic, is a phenomenon of creating literary works based on the already existing popular literature or on other works of art and culture. The students described the features of fan fiction based on games, and explained how game mechanics in games or specific genres on the whole may affect the content of fan fic works. In addition, Darya discussed the use of social networking methods in game research, using fan fiction as an example.In my report, I presented the first results my study of pricing of virtual goods in a popular online game, DotA 2. Most of my report was focused on a description of the virtual trading system in the game. In addition, I presented the results of a regression analysis, with a preliminary attempt to identify the factors affecting the price of virtual goods. My report sparkled a long discussion.Two students from the St. Petersburg department of the HSE, Grigory Lysov and Daria Krysanova, also presented very interesting reports. Their study was focused on characteristic aspects of inter-player communication, and, from their analysis of two online games, they have shown how players acquire a social status in their online games.All presenters answered a lot of questions and received many comments on their projects. That’s the reason why I think that this conference was a success.