先說(shuō)明一下哈哈哈：

這是以前留學(xué)的時(shí)候?qū)懙囊黄撐模?/span>

我是一個(gè)考雅思托?？谡Z(yǔ)閱讀能拿比較好的分?jǐn)?shù)，但是寫(xiě)作低分的人，

這篇論文很潦草，剛到及格線，感謝導(dǎo)師！

之前很多人問(wèn)我是不是某吃雞轉(zhuǎn)cod的，我想用這個(gè)告訴他，

：其實(shí)我一直都玩cod系列，吃雞端游也玩的不多，但端游fps我基本都涉獵，

后來(lái)學(xué)業(yè)工作太忙端游玩的少了，進(jìn)軍手游fps轉(zhuǎn)的吃雞，可是興趣點(diǎn)確實(shí)匱乏，以前的一指視頻大家很明顯能感受到，我都是打的吃雞的團(tuán)隊(duì)競(jìng)技，我個(gè)人很喜歡pvp和pve；

后來(lái)cod出手游了，從一開(kāi)始的渣畫(huà)質(zhì)內(nèi)測(cè)（以前的視頻有發(fā)過(guò)）操作都不流暢的時(shí)候開(kāi)始玩，因?yàn)槲艺娴暮芟矚g這個(gè)ip，不管怎樣我都很希望這個(gè)產(chǎn)品有一天能出彩，現(xiàn)在codm是我自己很喜歡的游戲類型之一

正文開(kāi)始：

Introduction

With the rapid development of internet technology and digital technology, electronic games or online games have already come into people’s eyes. Unlike the household consoles with the image of low pixels in the early time, such as Nintendo’s FC (Famicom), a household console with only 2KB video memory, 8x8 pixels, and 256x240 resolution, today’s video games are all developed through the combination of both internet technology and digital technology (Shaw, 2010). Moreover, production teams with high standards and solid ability to engage in research and discovery will always make the graphics, acoustics, and storytelling of video games become unique and beautiful. Thus, video games are able to attract players from different ages through its delicate image and attractive stories. One of the most prevalent types of video games is the war games which are developed based on the real histories of human wars. With advanced image technology, these war games could be very realistic as the United States Air Force once had the computer games as flying simulation training, and Chinese army had used the game Medal of Honor as virtual strategy deployment training. Generally, most of the military guns and vehicles that appear in the game should have authorization from the formal military otherwise they have to change the names and models of the relevant content (Machin & Van, 2005). However, there are lots of war video games currently, such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Warframe, Warface and so on. This essay will mainly concentrate on analyzing the data from Call of Duty as it is one of the most famous first-person shooter war game in the world, as of February 2013, the Call of Duty franchise has sold over 250 million copies (Reisner, 2013). This essay will also focus on analyzing the network data collected from Facebook pages as well as Facebook public groups and trying to find out the reasons why players are fond of war theme video games

?

The main reasons for using such a network analysis methods are: first, these video games are all products of advanced internet technology and digital technology, so if players want to play these games they have to gain access to the internet. Second, Game production companies would usually publish update patch information of their game products through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as these companies can directly interact with audiences and get the first-hand feedbacks of the products (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Moreover, the company will also try to analysis the interaction quality with game players, send a direct in-game questionnaire to all players, or use the big data flow provided and created by players through mass media to predict the future market of their products and arrange follow-up game producing and distributing schedules. Third, selecting the Facebook platform to do the network analysis is because there is much powerful software such as Gephi which could extract Facebook public group data, Facebook page data, Facebook page like data and so on. In addition, software like Gephi could make these data visualized, which could be convenient for people to analysis the central topic of certain groups or pages, the brokers between different Facebook pages, the structural holes of different Facebook networks and so on.

?

However, there are advantages and disadvantages of using Gephi. The advantage of using such an approach is that the data are directly collected from Facebook users including the players which could partly promise the authenticity and accuracy of the data and make the results more reliable whereas the disadvantage is that due to the limitation of personal computer and software operation capability, the data used in this essay are not huge enough to guarantee the results make sense since the actual game companies themselves are also data companies, they can analysis their huge database with more powerful computers that can increase the software’s operation speed. Furthermore, there are other methods that could be used to analysis this type of network and supplement the results, such as using other software Phyton, combine the data collected from other type of network such as Twitter, or directly ask the game companies for permission to use their network analysis report as reference and so on. Hence, due to the advantages and disadvantages listed above the results that this essay gets might not be perfect, but this essay will try to be as objective as possible towards the analysis.

?

This essay will fist briefly discuss the influence that internet technology and digital technology have on video game market. Then, this essay will use Gephi to analysis Facebook group data and page data related to Call of Duty to get a specific result. Next will be followed by a discussion of the result get from Gephi. In brief, this essay will focus on analyzing the network data collected from Facebook pages as well as Facebook public groups and trying to discuss the result got from the network analysis.

?

Literature Review

As for video games, there are many reasons that they can attract people’s attention and even make people be addicted to them. First it that games can bring fun to players. there are three main types of fun that a game can offer to players: destructive happiness, creative happiness, and competitive happiness (Hromek & Roffey, 2009). For instance, a famous sandbox game called Minecraft, this game provides players a world with endless possibilities, players can build constructions, plant flowers, and trees and have pets as well as farm livestock in this world. The happiness that Minecraft brings to players is creativity. As for Call of Duty, this is a first-person shooter game that provides both story mode and multiplayer mode. In the multiplayer mode, players will be separated into different teams with 6 people and put into the same lobby to have a certain competition mode, such as Deathmatch (both parties have to kill each other, and the party who gets 100 kills first will win and end the game) or Domination (both parties gaining points by occupying appointed locations, the more time players stay in that positions the more point their team get, and the team who get 250 points first wins and ends the game). Call of Duty brings players the happiness of competition. The example of destructive happiness would be a game called RUST, actually, RUST has all three elements that could bring fun to players. Players have to fight with other players for resources to survive and build their own territories. However, the player can also build destructive weapons and explosives to destroy or damage other players’ home buildings to steal the materials for surviving. RUST provides players the fun of creativity, destructiveness, and competitiveness.

?

In addition, video games could also be the carrier of people’s pressure in the real world (Klimmt & Hartmann, 2006). As human beings, there are more or less some violence in us, especially for men, due to historical reasons they are always considered to be more violent than women. In primitive tribes, a man would show his strength and social status through the violent fight with other tribal members. However, today’s society is far different from the primitive tribes. The modern society has restrictions on violence from both law and morality, even if people have huge pressure from works or stress from emotions, they are not allowed to release their pressures by harming others through violence (ibid). Therefore, playing games becomes one of the important methods for those people to release their pressures and have fun, because in the virtual world of games, they do not need to worry about receiving legal sanctions or moral constraints. Take the game Grand Theft Auto (GTA) as an example. GTA is a sandbox open world game designed by rockstar Games, in GTA, players are playing as criminal members, they can drive different vehicles to hit pedestrians, they can randomly kill any passers-by as they want, and they can even procure women in the game. This video game is banned by multiple countries because of its violence. Even though the game could help people release the pressure, it is still too violent and against mainstream morality. Moreover, such a game could play a misleading role among teenagers and adults who are not psychologically mature (Bartholow & Anderson, 2002). It is true that the game is restricted to people who are under 18 years old, the gameplay videos of the game could still spread through the internet, and people who are curious would still try any possible ways to get access to this kind of games. Thus, it seems that even though videos can provide fun to players and become their emotional carriers, some of the violent games still have the potential to bring mental harm to players.

?

However, video games do not only attract people’s attention by providing fun content and carrying people’s pressure, but also their practices with advanced internet and digital technologies. For instance, the most popular online games today are always doing good in details. A game with good quality usually requires the cooperation from game art team, animation team, audio team, game engine team and all other departments. In order to become a good game developing team, the help from digital technology is needed. A good example for gradually using advanced technology compared to before is the game Tomb Raider (Figure 1), the modeling changes for the female leading role Lara Croft is extraordinarily astonishing.

?

Figure 1, Tomb Raider, Lara Croft modelling revolution (wordpress.com, 2016)

?

Not only is the character becoming more of three-dimensional, but also the facial expression becomes more and more realistic. The realistic reproduction of real life and the players’ psychological satisfaction of it make computers be known as ‘electronic heroin’ (Bartholow & Anderson, 2002). Moreover, speak of character modeling, it is necessary to mention another feature of modern video games called Virtual Reality Model (VRM). From the view of the visual, video games can be divided into the three-dimensional game and two-dimensional game (Harrop & Armitage, 2006). Date back to the early stage of the development of digital science and technology, most of the games are 2D games. For example, one of the most fashionable game for that time is Super Mario Bros in 1985, although the graphic of this game looks pretty simple with nothing to compared to realistic and the game engine is as simple as ‘jump’, it still became the best choice for relaxation for people at that time. Today, with advanced 3D modeling technology, players are able to play as a 3D super Mario to experience this classic game in another game world again. What’s more, players are able to experience all roles either exist or not in real life in the game, put their happiness, sadness, anger, temper and all the other emotions into the virtual character, and become a member of virtual game community through communication and cooperation with in-game Non-Player Character (NPC), and with the storylines changing in the game, players’ desires to participate and challenge increased thus making them even more enjoyable of the game. The 3D game offers players the feelings of both real and unreal. In this way, players are no longer the operators of the game program, but become the character him/herself while experiencing a different life in the game.

?

Furthermore, the online video games always have their own interactive network either inside the game or outside the game (Squire, 2008). When it comes to online video games, people would commonly refer to MUD, which is the abbreviation of Multiple-User Dimension, Multiple-User Dungeon or Multiple-User Dialogue. Generally, MUD could be defined as a multiplayer real-time virtual world (Harrop & Armitage, 2006). Different from the previous game which is not combined with internet technology and is only the computer program that players could not team up with friends in the game. However, now through the internet, players can meet players that come from all around the words, they are able to communicate and make friends with others. They can promote their relationships through cooperative games, and build certain game groups. When going back to real life, players can establish online game community center through different social network sites to share and exchange their own opinions, which make the interaction in the virtual world become more realistic.

?

analysis and Results

1.Network analysis on Call of Duty related Facebook Pages and Groups

The objects that this essay has analyzed contain Call of Duty Facebook Page (24,179,390 likes) data and page like data, Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Facebook Public group (13,459 members) data, Battlefield Facebook page (8,207,086 likes) like data. (All the scaling value of the Visualized Networks remains100)

?

?

First, this essay tried to find whether there is a broker that linked two most famous war game Call of Duty and Battlefield together by generating both of their Facebook page like data network together, as shown in figure 2. The black nodes indicate Call of Duty Facebook page like, the blue nodes belong to Battlefield.

Figure 2, Call of Duty Facebook page like data and Battlefield Facebook page like data

?

The results turned out as two competitive game companies, they have three brokers which are PlayStation, Xbox, and rockstar Games. As mentioned above rockstar Games is the company who designed Grand Theft Auto, and PlayStation and Xbox are two mainstream platforms of video games. rockstar Games node could be seen as a mediator broker which might have cooperation with both other two companies. Both PlayStation and Xbox nodes are inside of the intersection area as local brokers between Call of Duty and Battlefield nodes. However, it turned all the brokers are not related to war games, they are either game publish platform or cooperator, thus this essay continues to analysis another network.

?

Then, I analyzed the Call of Duty Black Ops 3 (COD BO3) Facebook Public groups data and trying to find the group leader and central topic. Seen figure 3,?

Figure 3, Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Facebook Public groups data and data table

Figure 4, Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Facebook Public groups data with colored nodes

?

I analyzed 100 posts of this public group which has more than ten thousand members. From the data table that is sorted by engagement, we could see the top 4 posts are all related World War II based games (Figure 3). The top 2 posts had been colored as yellow and red (Figure 4). This group actually belong to players from COD BO3, which is a game based on future warfare and future technology. It seems that they are not really fond of discuss the futuristic COD but the warfare that happened in real history.

?

?

Moreover, another data from YouTube seems to prove that players are much fond of war based on real history but not future. As seen in figure 5,

?

Figure 5, YouTube Call of Duty Infinite Warfare Reveal trailer

Figure 6, YouTube Official Call of Duty WII Reveal Trailer

?

The future warfare game trailer published last year Call of Duty Infinite Warfare (CODIW) compared to the Call of Duty World War II (CODWWII) trailer published recently. The video of CODIW has been on the internet for almost a year, it only gets 573,555 likes compared to CODWWII which has been on the internet less than a week and gets 894,784 likes, 300 thousand more than CODIW. As for the dislikes, CODIW gets seven times more dislikes than its likes while CODWWII only gets one tenth of its likes. On the one hand, it shows how people dislike the war game based on imaginary warfare, on the other hand, it tells us how players like the war game based on World War II.

?

However, the group data above seems not very representative since it could because the players who play future based CODBO3 have already got bored and want to try some new types of war game. Thus, we went to the official page of Call of Duty (COD) and analyzed 200 posts from February to April this year (figure).

Figure 7, Official Facebook page of Call of Duty with 200 posts

Figure 8, Official Facebook page of Call of Duty Data table

Figure 9, Colored Nodes’ information

?

As a result, I ended up in getting such a huge network. As usual, I colored the 4 most engaged posts (Figure 9) and because of the huge amount of data, I made the size of each of these 4 nodes 500 times bigger. In figure 7, we could see that the central topics are gathered in the lower right corner. We could see from this figure that the red, blue and green nodes are located in the area with high density, while the yellow node located at the edge of the high-density area. Thus, in order to find out the reason that the fourth most engaged topics are not in the high-density area I checked the exact content of each post. It turned that this one was the one posts most recently about the official CODWWII game trailer, which means it might be approaching to the high-density area. Moreover, the other 3 posts were about the leak information of the CODWWII.

?

Although the data from the official page shows that the World War II based COD game is still the most discussed topic by players, it might because during February to April, the game company is trying hard to conduct propaganda for their next game CODWWII. Therefore, I continually analysis more data, and this time I chose 400 posts from last year November which was the time that CODIW was officially published to public to this year February (Figure 10).

Figure 10, Official Facebook page of Call of Duty with 400 posts

Figure 11& 12 Official Facebook page of Call of Duty with 400 posts with colored nodes

?

This figure seems like one single huge cluster with an extremely strong structural hole. With no doubt, I checked the central nodes of the structural hole, and colored it as red (Figure 12), this post was posted on February 21th, it had 30259 likes and 107743 engagements, its content was the confirmation that COD WWII would be the next COD game and the trailer would be out on April 26th. Hence, it seems that this again proves that players are indeed really crazy about the next COD game based on World War II.

?

However, what is the reason behind this result as the data showed above that player seem to be really excited about the next Call of Duty game based on World War II. First, from the perspective of history, the World War II (WWII) is a war that fights against the Nazis, and the Nazis are undoubtedly the evil one, that is to say, WWII is a war that right and wrong could be completely distinguished from the battle. The Nazis could be regarded as the zombies and the robots in the virtual game world that can be entirely destroyed and not make the player feel guilty (Ramsay, 2015). In other words, there is nothing to be regret or worried to destroy the Nazis. Therefore, a lot of war games tend to use WWII as background, as the game companies would not worried about their war games be banned because of offending the history truth. From the perspective of war game companies, the weapon from WWII is relatively simple compared to modern warfare’s complexed weapon equipment (ibid). Thus, the game companies could save a lot of money in designing weapon models, or they could be more focused on designing the details these delicate weapons. From the aspect of players, most of the war gamers tend to be military fans which mean they might not tolerate the futuristic gun that disobeys the law of physics. Generally, WWII could be regarded as a war that has many different types of the battlefield, there are forest guerrilla warfare, beach assault, and street fighting. Different battlefields make players’ have multiple choices to play in the game. They could take a sniper and stay in the bunker and wait quietly for enemies to pass and kill them, or they could play short machine gun for an excited street warfare. Another important reason for people being fond of WWII based game it the cruelty and brutality of the World War II (Ramsay, 2015). Players have to become a soldier and fight with their teammates in the real history warfare. As game companies make all of the teammates have their own families, backgrounds, and stories. While playing the game, the player would feel like watching a Hollywood movie with the first-person view, at the same time, players will also enjoy the honor of being a hero that saved the world.

?

Although it seems to be true that war games do bring players the honor of being a hero and the happiness of having good teammates, it is still games of the brutal and cruel war happened once in the real world. Indeed, that player in the games are not killing real people, and those NPC are Nazis they have to be killed. However, the cruelty of the war are two ways, the war is cruel to both the soldiers and enemies, in other words, the war is cruel for human beings (Keeley, 1997). It is true that players are killing zombies, robots, and the Nazis in the game that they will not feel guilty, but this does not change the fact that the game is teaching the player how to ‘kill’ a thing. It is virtual violence programmed by 3D technology, it makes players feel like real, as there are always videos on the YouTube about how many kills player get in one game, or how these pro players melting newbies. Players seem to enjoy the killings. There are studies show that people who always play violent games have more probity to use violence to deal with their emotional pressures (Jansz, 2005). Perhaps only those who have experienced the real war would think that these war games are conveying the wrong idea of war to normal people.

?

In conclusion, this essay has first discussed the influence that internet technology and digital technology have on modern video games. Then, this essay has analyzed the data extracted from different Facebook pages and use Gephi to visualize the data for more deep analysis. Finally, this essay has discussed the reasons hidden behind the result. The conclusion is that today internet technology has improved the gaming experience from a variety of aspects, including game graphics, game storytelling and so on. Moreover, from the network analysis on the official Facebook page and public groups, it shows that war game players tend to be fond of war games based on real wars especially World War II and not the futuristic warfare made up by game companies. The reasons that WWII based war games were welcomed are including its simple and sophisticated weaponry, its diversification of battlefields, the emotions such as being the member of the brotherhood, being a hero and so on. However, war-based video games still partly related to mental violence. In short, the development of the internet and digital technology have greatly promoted the development of video games while the war game is one of the favorite types of games among players.

?

References

?

1.Bartholow, B.D. and Anderson, C.A., 2002. Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior: Potential sex differences.?Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,?38(3), pp.283-290.

?

2.Hromek, R. and Roffey, S., 2009. Promoting social and emotional learning with games:" It's fun and we learn things".?Simulation & Gaming.

文獻(xiàn)超字了！我會(huì)補(bǔ)在評(píng)論區(qū)！