Initial research proposal - Are games just social experiments?

Subject chosen for the project:

Are games just social experiments?

Does playing a utopian scenario affect the way you live your real life? -Can we identify a phenomenon of transfer of personality from game to reality?

Can games influence and remodel the player's personality?

• Social experiments that have been done, in general, and by Sophie Calle in particular, can certainly be regarded as games. She has played with situations and people, in order to find out and map people's reactions to different situations. 

• newspaper articles (GTA V) Guardian Tech
• game reviews  (gamespot.com)
• testing sessions (youtube videos)
• World of Warcraft - creating dependency
• Sophie Calle - the address Book
• Sophie Calle - M'as tu vue
• mention GTA and  connection between  in game and real life violence attributed to it 
• second life ?
• I M V U  - kid being abandoned by parents due to addiction to playing IMVU videogame - social services had to intervene - lots of articles with real life stories about how playing teh game made them abandon their real life
• "the affects of pro social video games on pro social behaviours"
• results of a social survey about online experiences

Research: The Address Book by Sophie Calle is a book which documents a really interesting social experiment. This is what, in my opinion, games are: social experiments, and it is very interesting to find out if games, as a virtual reality aspect life, can have a direct effect on one's attitude, personality, etc in reality.

"Sophie Calle is well known for her unique brand of ‘socially engaged’ projects,5 regularly involving strangers and members of the public, often unwittingly, in her work. Her oeuvre, as a whole, can be understood as a series of games in and through which she conducts bizarre and interesting social experiments, all of which involve a dialogue between texts and images "(http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/luminary/issue3/Issue3article6.htm)

Research google scholar!!!!

K Squire - Int. J. Intell. Games & Simulation, 2003 - webertube.com

YB Kafai, M Resnick - 1996 - books.google.com

designing, thinking and learning in a digital world - very interesting article!!!

some interesting books : example of books

pro social videogames

effects of pro social video games on prosocial behaviour

(ex: one experiment she did - documented in one of her other books - Sophie Calle, M'as tu vue. Centre Pompidou & Edition Xavier Baral, 2003- was to offer her bed for people to sleep in over a set period of time and document it. That experiment created quite a hype around it and a while after it had finished, she had received a letter from a stranger who read about it and has requested to "borrow" her bed for a while, as he though that will make him feel better after having been through a traumatic situation. So, this has given me the idea to study further the effect of social experiments on people's real lives, and in particular, how games can influence a player's real life behaviour, attitude and social interaction in general.

check Curiosity - What's inside the Cube - another social experiment game done by 22Cans ( Peter Molineux)

*secondary research sources: colour code the bibliography (ex: black for article to read, green for article read and orange for article I have already written about)

*primary research sources: interviews (face to face, telephone, mail)
*plan: time organisation: make a schedule for work