November 22, 2014
Intimacy is one of the most cherished aspects of human social existence. Guo Zhang Freeman's dissertation research explores how computing technologies such as multiplayer online games (MOGs) shape interpersonal relationships and (re)create intimate experiences. Guo will defend her dissertation in Spring 2015 in the Department of Information and Library Science.
The virtual world she has chosen to study is Audition, a MOG that attracts mostly young women in their late teens and early twenties; the object of the game is to “dance” with a partner through a sequence of keystrokes, keeping time with the music. Players earn more points if they are married in the game to their dance partner, who must be a member of the opposite sex, and collaborate on game-related tasks.
Drawing on data from multiple sources (interviews, ethnographic in-game observation, web forums, online documents), Freeman contrasts the traditional gender ideology of marriage in Audition with how in-game marriage is actually experienced by the young players. Since most of the players are female, the opposite sex requirement for a marriage to take place presents an a priori challenge; this leads players to create a variety of work-arounds to the opposite-sex marriage requirement.
Two of Guo Freeman’s recent co-authored papers have been accepted for presentation and publication by The 2015 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), one of the top conferences on social computing and human-computer interaction. The first paper (Freeman et al., 2015) focuses on how players perceive, experience, and interpret their in-game marriages, especially with regard to representations of gender and sexuality. In the second paper (Zytoko & Freeman et al., 2015), Freeman collaborated with HCI designers to argue that collaborative activities such as online marriage in MOGs can potentially address evaluation challenges in online dating. She and her co-authors propose a series of design concepts for online dating systems in order to improve users’ abilities to evaluate their potential romantic partners for in-person meetings. The two papers will be presented at the 18th CSCW annual conference, March 14-18, 2015 in Vancouver, Canada and published in the conference Proceedings.
Freeman, G. Z., Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S, & Herring, S. C. (2015). Simulating marriage: Gender roles and emerging intimacy in an online game. In Proceedings of 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2015).
Zytko, D., Freeman, G. Z., Grandhi, S., Herring, S. C., & Jones, Q. (2015). Enhancing evaluation of potential dates online through paired collaborative activities. In Proceedings of The 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2015).