Hi, my name is Jesse Martinez and on behalf of my research team, I’m excited to present
our work “Joint Media Engagement in Families Playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons during
the COVID-19 Pandemic.
For a brief introduction, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a lifestyle simulation game
in which you play as a human who moves to an island inhabited by friendly animal villagers.
It was released shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it saw record-high
sales and widespread popularity, which was in part attributed to its wide appeal and
pleasant, positive tone.
However, we also suspected that part of its popularity was due to how it supported productive
Joint Media Engagement, particularly within families.
Joint Media Engagement, or JME, is when any two or more people are looking at the same
media at the same time, and are involved in the content together.
This interaction with each other and with the media helps produce additional meaning
in the interaction.
Prior work from Takeuchi & Stevens has identified six conditions that facilitate productive
JME.
These are mutual engagement, dialogic inquiry, co-creation, boundary crossing, intention
to develop, and a focus on content, not control.
And so, we set out to answer the following research questions:
First, how are Takeuchi & Stevens’ six conditions manifested in AC:NH?
Second, in addition to these six conditions, what other conditions are present in AC:NH
that support productive JME?
Third, how has the COVID-19 pandemic environment impacted JME, as we observe through families
playing this game?
And fourth, what design implications can we derive for building games that support productive
JME, based on this case?
Within this talk, we’re going to cover primarily the first two research questions and touch
on the fourth, but I encourage you to look to the paper for a full analysis of these
questions.
In order to answer these questions, we conducted an interview study with 27 families, consisting
of a total of 33 parents and 37 children.
We used a three-phase interview structure, where the first phase involved the parents
& children together, the second phase was only the children, and the third phase was
the parents only.
We did this so that we could get the group perspectives as well as individual perspectives
that were not influenced or biased by the other groups.
Our first result is that we found that all six of Takeuchi & Stevens conditions for productive
JME were, in fact, present within Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Within this talk, I’m going to touch on how these three manifest within the game–
that’s Dialogic Inquiry, Co-Creation, and Intention to Develop, but I once again encourage
you to look to the paper to see our analysis of how all six manifest.
Our first condition, Dialogic Inquiry, describes when participants engage in dialogue about
how game topics extend beyond the world of the game.
So we found that some game mechanics provided explicit facts for parents and children to
share and discuss with each other.
So this included when players donated a fish that they caught to the museum, they would
receive facts about the real life habitat of the fish, and similarly real-life paintings
were recreated within the game and players would receive information about the art and
the artist.
Other mechanics used more complex topics as a framing, such as mortgages or investment
in the in-game “Stalk Market”, and this prompted families to discuss the larger implications
of this beyond the information that was presented within the game.
Our next condition, co-creation, describes the collaborative creation of artifacts or
designs that produce shared understanding among the players.
Within Animal Crossing, we found that families often collaborated on the design of their
in-game island.
This included public, shared spaces across players, as well as sometimes collaborating
on private spaces.
So here we have one of our participant families’ islands, where this winter castle theme extends
from the outside public spaces all the way into each player’s private space.
Some families also recreated real-world locations within the game, and this was often attributed
to sentimental reasons of not being able to visit these places due to COVID restrictions.
These included a favorite Chinese restaurant or bowling alley.
And other families created metagames within Animal Crossing together, such as musical
chairs or something that uses specific mechanics within Animal Crossing, such as a game where
players try to keep each other from talking to a specific Villager.
And then our third condition, Intention to Develop, describes a focus on growth and the
development of skills through the gameplay experience, particularly skills that extend
beyond the world of the game.
And so we found in Animal Crossing that parents often motivated children to pursue passions
which they could explore within the game.
The game has options for artistic pursuits and also has a lot of factual places to explore,
such as learning about fish and bugs, and parents tried to foster this excitement within
their children.
We also found that this was often viewed as a place for children to develop social skills.
Parents considered social play in this space a safe environment, where parents could also
observe how their children interact with each other.
As one dad framed it, he said there was a weird nerd dad pride in watching his daughter
leave him behind, like watching your kid on the playground being a good person.
Moving beyond Takeuchi & Stevens’ six conditions, we also found that there were several other
emergent conditions that we felt were contributing to productive JME.
The first of these conditions was Variety & Flexibility in Play Style.
Essentially, we felt that different play modes attracted more players, and allowed for collaboration
across different play styles.
So within the game, varied game activities allowed players to choose how they wanted
to play, and notably these activities did not infringe on other players’ games.
Varied co-play options allowed families to choose how much their gameplay affected each
other: they could all play as the same villager on the same island, or, some families even
had separate islands via separate Switch consoles to really set those boundaries.
Then finally the flexibility of goals allowed players to change their gameplay style without
needing to “catch up” to other players.
So if someone had invested a lot of time in design, they could just as easily join their
other family members in a fishing contest without being at a disadvantage.
Our second condition that we found was Indirect Jointness & Disentrainment in gameplay.
Essentially this was opportunities for connection and interaction during single-player gameplay,
even when other family members were not involved in the gameplay or even present.
Artifacts of other players’ gameplay actions connected players in asynchronous play: if
someone created something on the shared island, independently, someone else would go back
to the island on their own and find that, and that created a sense of connection between
these people playing separately.
Additionally, the game lent itself to families taking “shifts” to complete shared tasks,
where one family would wake up early to do the weeding, and another would harvest all
the fruit from the trees later in the day.
We also found that specific family members sometimes completed tasks on another person’s
behalf, with the intention of those actions being noticed later.
And then our third JME condition we found is the scaffolding of affective interactions.
So essentially these are built-in game features that allowed players to consider other players
in the game, and this facilitated meaningful interactions between them.
The game included a lot of explicitly inter-player social mechanics, such as the ability to send
letters or presents to each other, and this prompted players to do things for each other
even when they were playing individually.
Similarly, communal tasks and the ability to share resources allowed parents to support
their children’s gameplay.
As one mom framed it, she considered herself the “Bank of Mom” and said “I give everybody
all my stuff because that’s fun for me, seeing the kids enjoying the game without
the grinding”, without the repetitive harvesting actions.
And so we found that in addition to Takeuchi & Stevens’ six conditions, these three additional
emergent conditions really helped facilitate meaningful interactions and connections between
family members, particularly across parents and children.
And so based on these emergent conditions for productive JME, we provide three recommendations
for game designers looking to support JME within their games.
The first is to provide a persistent and shared digital space to enable disentrained and asynchronous
interaction.
The second is to allow for flexible in-game progress that enables players to play in personalized
styles.
And the third is to enable social life simulation, both between players and NPC’s, and notably
within players.
Thank you so much for listening!