Tag: CHI (Page 1 of 2)

ARMY’s Magic Shop

Understanding the Collaborative Construction of Playful Places in Online Communities

By: Kathryn E. Ringland, Arpita Bhattacharya, Kevin Weatherwax, Tessa Eagle, and Christine T. Wolf

[This article was written by Kate with the help and support of her co-authors.]

This work is cross-posted on Medium: https://kateringland.medium.com/armys-magic-shop-668cb8a3c0c0

Preview: Using ethnographic fieldwork, we dive into the world of BTS and ARMY’s Magic Shop. The Magic Shop is a conceptual place for community members to relax, connect, and support one another. The Magic Shop is built on a foundation of play and exists in all the spaces that the BTS ARMY community lives and plays. This research helps us understand the deep importance of the BTS ARMY Magic Shop to community members and how we can create better and safer platforms for the community in the future.

This work will be appearing at CHI 2022. The preprint can be found at https://bit.ly/MagicShopCHI2022

BTS & ARMY’s Magic Shop

Introduction

When we think about researching play, we often think of studying play in children, designing educational games, or using games to improve health. In this work, we’ve taken research on play in an understudied direction by looking at adults engaging in play for their leisure or as a hobby. In particular, we are looking at spaces not intentionally designed for play — that is, technologically mediated social spaces that are repurposed as socially playful places. For example, we are looking at social media platforms instead of multiplayer games where the play is scaffolded into the platform. This research is vital for better understanding how communities at play use technology. Outcomes of this work will ultimately help designers and researchers build better supportive and safer platforms for communities in the future.

Specifically, we turned our attention to the musicians BTS and their fandom, ARMY. We look at ARMY because of the community’s reach and diversity. Composed of a diverse but often underrepresented majority, ARMY is also a largely misunderstood community as it experiences biases, stereotyping, and oppressions that intersect across the different identities and interests of people in this fandom. We hope this work helps to reverse some of the stigma around ARMY and fandoms as a whole.

The goal of this work is to illustrate how BTS and ARMY work together to create a socially playful place in-person and online, built upon what the artists and community members call the “Magic Shop.” The foundations of this Magic Shop are people and their shared values, transcending the physical space to online and emotional or abstract places.

BTS & ARMY

BTS (방탄소년단 or Bangtan Soyeondan) is a group of seven musicians from South Korea who debuted in 2013. Their fandom, ARMY, has been growing globally since the band’s inception. ARMY, as a community, uses a variety of social media platforms to communicate such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Weverse. ARMY has a flat, non-hierarchical and participatory power structure [6]. That is, there is no clear “leader” of ARMY, other than, perhaps, the BTS members who also consistently share their power and success with ARMY.

ARMY has been stigmatized in the media for a number of reasons, including its majority fem-identifying membership and its supposed “bot-like” behavior [7]. However, as this work and others have shown, this is far from reality. ARMY is a large, diverse fandom with many different contexts, experiences, and values, and cannot be described in singularity [1]. ARMY is perhaps best known for their organizing and activism, such as raising donations for causes like Black Lives Matter in short periods of time.

Welcome to the Magic Shop: Research Methods

In this study, we report the findings from an ongoing online ethnographic study of the ARMY community. Data were collected through ARMY’s public social media posts on Twitter and TikTok, as well as through publicly available media posted by BTS on social media platforms including TikTok, Twitter, Weverse, YouTube, and VLIVE (this portion of the study was conducted before the members of BTS opened their individual Instagram accounts in December 2021).

Where is BTS & ARMY's Magic Shop? anywhere BTS & ARMY are together: Concerts, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Weverse, VLIVE
Some of the spaces BTS and ARMY occupy and create the Magic Shop.

I was responsible for all data collection and primary data analysis, identifies as an ARMY and has been on ARMY TikTok since September 2020 and ARMY Twitter since January 2021. For more details about data collection and analysis, please refer to the full paper.

Important Research Considerations: Keeping BTS & ARMY Safe

Safety of BTS and ARMY are the priority in conducting this research. This work is exempt from ethics board approval because it involves ethnographic observations of public social media data. However, I and my co-authors took extra care while collecting, analyzing, and presenting this data.

As a member of the ARMY community, I take responsibility for protecting individuals who may interact with my various social media accounts. The BTS ARMY community has a history of being marginalized, including incidents of racism, xenophobia, and ageism. Further BTS ARMY faces more criticism among media and other outsiders [2,4,5]. ARMY has a fraught history of outsiders seeking to cause harm or use ARMY and BTS for their own profit or agenda [8,9].

The epistemic violence [11] enacted upon the community has left many with little trust for academia, with valid cause. For this reason, being a member researcher was imperative for this work to be positively received by the community and to ensure that knowledge-making about BTS and ARMY is done in conjunction with the ARMY community. At the same time, to ensure validity for research contexts in addition to the ARMY fandom and that solely my perspectives are not biasing this research, I worked with other ARMY and non-ARMY co authors during the analysis and writing process.

The data presented in these findings are exemplary of the themes found during analysis while prioritizing the integrity of the community. Everything has been anonymized and paraphrased unless otherwise noted.

This work relies on data from my online ARMY community where I am transparent about my identity as a researcher/professor and an ARMY. Therefore, when ARMY is referred to in the study, this is referring specifically to my extended ARMY community, rather than ARMY as a whole. It serves as a starting point for scholars to understand the ARMY community and playful adult places more broadly.

BTS & ARMY Creating the Magic Shop Together

The Magic Shop exists in the spaces where ARMY and BTS go to seek comfort and to play with one another. The Magic Shop can exist anywhere BTS and ARMY have the potential to play, such as in online spaces (social media) or in offline spaces (concert venues). To create the Magic Shop, BTS engages in and encourages playful activities through their conversations and content. ARMY then follow suit in fostering play through fan-made edits and commentary, role-playing, and in-group humor. BTS and ARMY engage in play to construct safe and enjoyable online community places.

Jin, Jimin, and RM having way too much fun eating salad. Clip from Jin Jun Min~ Making Salad live (https://www.vlive.tv/post/1-21792394)

The play of BTS and ARMY in the Magic Shop should not be dismissed as less valuable than other aspects of life because it is play among adults or a hobby or leisure activity. Indeed, BTS and ARMY’s play has real-world impact and consequences — not the least of which is to support coping, meaning-making, and a sense of connectedness, thus improving quality of life and well-being for those in the community [3]. “Play” as we understand it, is a concept big enough to be a thing that is both purposeful and joyfully purposeless. This work provokes the need for future research taking a more expansive view of play — and a more expansive view of its benefits and boundaries in the everyday lives of communities online.

Some of ARMY’s play includes content transformation and curation, creating specific themed accounts, humor, crafting theory about BTS content, and creating new content. Doing these activities builds upon the foundation of the playful place set by BTS. For example, the following video is a skit performed by BTS on the Late Late Show with James Corden.

From this type of content, ARMY then create various content including hourly or daily accounts of specific clips that ARMY use to convey a mood or to add to conversations playfully.

An example account using a clip from the BTS Crosswalk Concert which is shared to convey a mood, reminisce, or for laugh. (*Owner of the account gave consent to this being shared in this blog.)

The Magic Shop in online spaces has become all the more meaningful since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when BTS, due to public health concerns, canceled their world tour and ceased all in-person activities with fans. Both ARMY and BTS leaned into the spaces still available to them — that is, online social media platforms — to continue creating this sense of community and connectedness. ARMY may not know each other’s legal names or even reside in the same country, but they have nevertheless created an intimate bond through play as well as connection to BTS, their message, and their discography. BTS and ARMY, first and foremost, are connected to one another by BTS’s music. This is the first point of contact and the common ‘language’ used throughout the community. Other media and platforms, then, become further means of communication.

Boundaries of Play in and out of the Magic Shop

Being able to play together requires a feeling of safety (whether they are actually safe or not) and trust between players [10]. Likewise, the Magic Shop cannot exist without these prerequisites. Many of these playful moments only have meaning within the playful place. Outside the playful place, much of the antics and humor can be misunderstood and stigmatized. Concerns about this can be seen in how ARMY negotiate with one another about what is appropriate “for the timeline” (that is, public posts) and what should be reserved for private conversation. Indeed, this is reflected in the careful choosing of examples for this paper, as well as the extensive explanation of the methods in this work. For the play to be truly playful, a trust between members of the community must be developed to create the sense of consent and safety needed for fun play.

In fact, when the Magic Shop is noticed by outsiders (such as a reporter taking ARMY tweets out of context and without consent), there is a sense of violation among ARMY — play no longer feels playful. Almost all of ARMY’s playful activities occur on public platforms and can be accessed by outsiders at any time, yet the community maintains a sense of in-group and out-group engagement. ARMY still holds to the trust among each other and in BTS as they go about their play. This type of social clustering within a public space without any physical or digital boundaries is often seen in interest groups (such as, gaming, other fandoms) and is also facilitated by the current tailoring algorithms on social media.

The time and place to be playful is context-dependent — both the context inside and outside of the Magic Shop. The public nature of these platforms requires extra social effort and infrastructure to maintain the boundaries of the community’s playful place. Within ARMY spaces, the community has leveraged affordances of the various social media platforms at their disposal (such as using the report and block feature, embedded videos and gifs, threads on Twitter, music on TikTok), as well as social norms for this boundary maintenance. Without having a strict “game” platform, BTS and ARMY have still managed to foster a set of rules for their play. This includes following BTS’s lead in knowing what is meant to be fodder for playful content and what is not (such as being respectful of emotionally laden images and video).

Outro

The goals of this study were (1) better understand how communities at play use technological platforms for play even when they are not designed as such and (2) to begin to reverse the stigma and marginalization of BTS and ARMY. BTS and ARMY have built a community based on mutual respect, love of music, and being playful with one another in their Magic Shop. The Magic Shop is often impacted by real world non-play issues such as being summarily dismissed, harassed, and stigmatized by outsiders, which can harm BTS and ARMY. The members of the community collectively work to look out for each other’s well-being and reorient to restore play in the Magic Shop — making sure that BTS and ARMY are safe and having fun.

Curious to learn more about this research? Visit: https://kateringland.com/btsarmy

💜 Thank you to those who provided invaluable feedback on drafts of this work including Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, Kendra Shu, and Severn Ringland, as well as our anonymous reviewers. This work was funded in part by the University of California President’s Office. A very special thank you to the ARMY community and those within the ARMY community that have helped shape this work. Finally, thank you to BTS for their music and continued love and support of the ARMY community. 💜

Kathryn E. Ringland, Arpita Bhattacharya, Kevin Weatherwax, Tessa Eagle, and Christine T. Wolf. 2022. ARMY’s Magic Shop: Understanding the Collaborative Construction of Playful Places in Online Communities. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

A video of the presentation of this work can be found here

References

1. BTS ARMY Documentary Team [@amidocumentary], On Wings of Love [@OWOLMovie], and Research BTS [@ResearchBTS]. BTS ARMY CENSUS. BTS ARMY CENSUS. Retrieved June 25, 2021 from https://www.btsarmycensus.com/

2. Stephanie Choi and Thomas Baudinette. 2019. Why Are BTS Fans Always Dismissed As “Hysterical Teenage Girls”? hello asia! Retrieved September 7, 2021 from https://www.helloasia.com.au/news/why-are-bts-fans-always-dismissed-as-hysterical-teenage-girls/

3. Jin Ha Lee, Arpita Bhattacharya, Ria Antony, Nicole Santero, and Anh Le. 2021. “Finding Home”: Understanding How Music Supports Listerners’ Mental Health Through a Case Study of BTS. In Proc. of the 22nd Int. Society for Music Information Retrieval Conf., 8.

4. Condé Nast. 2019. Criticism of BTS Is Often Just Xenophobia in Disguise. Teen Vogue. Retrieved March 13, 2022 from https://www.teenvogue.com/story/bts-criticism-xenophobia-in-disguise

5. Condé Nast. 2021. Racism BTS Continues to Face Is Part of Larger Anti-Asian Xenophobia. Teen Vogue. Retrieved March 13, 2022 from https://www.teenvogue.com/story/racism-bts-continues-to-face-is-part-of-larger-anti-asian-xenophobia-op-ed

6. So Yeon Park, Nicole Santero, Blair Kaneshiro, and Jin Ha Lee. 2021. Armed in ARMY: A Case Study of How BTS Fans Successfully Collaborated to #MatchAMillion for Black Lives Matter. CHI 2021: 14.

7. Lady Flor Partosa. 20210329. We Are Not Robots: A Preliminary Exploration into the Affective Link between BTS x ARMY. The Rhizomatic Revolution Review [20130613], 2. Retrieved June 30, 2021 from https://ther3journal.com/issue-2/we-are-not-robots/

8. Bryan Rolli. Topps’ Racist BTS Garbage Pail Kids Sticker Would Have Been A Terrible Idea At Any Time. Forbes. Retrieved September 5, 2021 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrolli/2021/03/17/topps-racist-bts-garbage-pail-kids-sticker-would-have-been-a-terrible-idea-at-any-time/

9. Bryan Rolli. The Grammys Once Again Did The Bare Minimum For BTS. Forbes. Retrieved September 5, 2021 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrolli/2021/03/15/the-grammys-once-again-did-the-bare-minimum-for-bts/

10. Jaakko Stenros. 2014. In Defence of a Magic Circle: The Social, Mental and Cultural Boundaries of Play. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 1, 2: 39. https://doi.org/10.26503/todigra.v1i2.10

11. Anon Ymous, Katta Spiel, Os Keyes, Rua M. Williams, Judith Good, Eva Hornecker, and Cynthia L. Bennett. 2020. “I am just terrified of my future”: Epistemic Violence in Disability Related Technology Research. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’20), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3381828

CHI 2019 Recap Part 4: “Having it all” or How I can be a mother while attending CHI

This is a continuation of my series of blogs recapping CHI 2019. You can catch up with the first blog, if you missed it, and the second blog on self-care at conferences, and the third blog on the social impact of our research. In this final blog of my CHI 2019 series, I wanted to answer a Frequently Asked Question: “How are you managing being at CHI with kids?”

a toy airplane with a blurry grey background

The short answer: Not easily. It’s hard. It’s expensive. I have to make tough choices.

The longer answer: I was fortunate enough to be one of the inaugural postdocs to get a grant from Northwestern that helped cover the cost of my mother’s plane ticket. This grant was to help postdocs who have dependents still attend conferences. It’s meant to cover costs such as a caregiver at home or for a child or caregiver to travel with. My daughter is still nursing and has never taken a bottle, no matter how much convincing we try to do. So, we made the choice that she comes with me on my overnight trips until she’s ready to not do that anymore.

What does this mean, really? That every time I want to travel, my daughter comes with. But if I am presenting or trying to network, I’m also looking for childcare. It’s difficult to be watching a running toddler while networking at cocktail hours or staying out late at dinners or after-dinner drinks. So, for a long international trip like CHI in Glasgow, I bring my mother who gets to spend time with her granddaughter while I’m off networking, going to workshops, and giving presentations. I will be real and tell you that this wasn’t an ideal set-up, but compared to the wrangling and horrible experiences of going to onsite job interviews with her as a 5 month old, CHI looked like cake.

I’ve learned to make tough choices. Do I go to this dinner or an afternoon session? Do I skip the morning in order to be able to stay out later that night? Do I bring the toddler to the poster session in order to give my mother a break? Much like other people who have accessibility issues or other needs, I have to prioritize what is most important to get out of a conference and not feel guilty or like I missed out on all the rest. And this is above and beyond the fact that I do have my own set of physical needs and accessibility issues. I learned very early on in my PhD that taking care of myself was the most important part and then prioritizing everything else after that.

I’ve also come to rely on the support not just of my own family, but of the wider network of Academic Mamas. I’m part of a large Facebook group, and many smaller groups as well. These women have really helped me figure out how to navigate the sometimes challenging and strange waters that is academic life.

My daughter is going to be done nursing soon. There will be a time, probably in the not so distant future, that I will miss these moments I got to spend with my children while they were young. While doing my research well and hopefully getting a job this coming year are important to me, I do have to stop and recognize that these moments will not be here forever.

A sign hanging on a wall that reads "Home Sweet Home" and a plant in a vase.

And I also would like to take this moment to recognize that this is very hard. Being a full time postdoc, going on the academic job market again, and being a mom to two young children is supremely challenging. I relish the challenge. But I want to say to other Academic Moms who might be reading this: I see you. This is hard work. Take a moment to appreciate yourself and all that you do for your little ones.

CHI 2019 Recap Part 3: Social Impact

This is a continuation of my series of blogs recapping CHI 2019. You can catch up with the first blog, if you missed it, and the second blog on self-care at conferences. For this week’s blog post, I am focusing on social justice and the social impact of research. A number of problems with accessibility arose during the CHI conference, which led to, among other things, a protest by disabled scholars during the CHI Town Hall.

But on a more positive note, this year at CHI, my advisor, Gillian Hayes, won the social impact award. You can and I highly recommend watching the full speech about doing socially impactful work in the CHI community.

As researchers, we are in an enormous place of privilege to be able to do the work we are doing. This privilege did not necessarily come easily and those that are more junior have to work harder than ever to earn that privilege. We have worked hard to educate ourselves. Speaking of which, if you want the list of recommended books from Gillian Hayes’s talk check it out here. However, the number of articles coming out about grad student mental health (as in, they are not healthy) is growing. Young scholars coming from marginalized groups are finding it more challenging to stay in academia, with many leaving altogether. How can we leverage the privilege we have not only to help the communities we work with, but elevate them? How do we elevate those within our own walls that get discounted or even out-right oppressed? This work is hard, but we do not need to make it so very hard, especially if we have any hopes of increasing diversity.

Social impact in research means building relationships in the communities we work in. And relationships means building trust and a true understanding what people need. My own Autcraft work is an example of how I worked closely with a community to help them understand their practices and they were able to leverage my work to help them reach their own goals.

A paved road starting in foreground and going to horizon, fall leaves on trees in mid-ground, and snowy mountains in the background.
The road ahead is for you to choose, but remember the choices you make impact everyone.

As a sneak peek: Along with my cousin, the wonderful Annie Forsman-Adams, I am in the process of co-founding a nonprofit organization, The Kaina Institute for Equitable Research, to continue some of my community-based work. There are many paths to doing research that has a positive impact on communities and still furthers one’s own research agenda. Let’s all keep up the good work and push ourselves even further. Let’s see what kind of force for good we can be in the world.

CHI 2019 Social Impact Award Reading List

Gillian Hayes won the CHI 2019 Social Impact Award and gave a wonderful speech, which you can now watch from the convenience of your own device.

In this talk she gives a number of great book recommendations. I decided to pull all the titles and provide links to everyone can add to their own libraries. I’ve tried to provide links to all the items.

When you’ve finished reading all of those, I have another list for HCI researchers who wish to engage in community-based work. Check that out here: (Qualitative) HCI Student Reading List.

CHI 2019 Recap Part 2: Importance of Self-Care and Community Care

This is a continuation of my series of blogs recapping CHI 2019. You can catch up with the first blog, if you missed it. For this week’s blog, I am focusing on the importance of care. This takes many forms, but for this short blog, I’ll be honing in on self-care and community care. Both of these are about taking care of the individual, but one (self-care) implies the individual is taking care of themselves and the other (community care) implies that the group as a whole is making space and watching out for the individuals.

a row of people sitting writing with notebooks in their laps, their heads are cropped out of the photo

Self-Care

Conferences are hard. They are taxing on the body both physically and emotionally. CHI 2019 took place in Glasgow, Scotland. This means that many of the community experienced some kind of jet lag. And this is the case for every conference. Some people will be experiencing jet lag and the other effects of having to travel long distances. Then when you get to the conference, there are thousands of people. Rooms are crowded, halls are noisy, many people are consuming alcohol at evening functions. Through all of this, early career scholars are expected to show up, be engaging, and network like mad. Conferences are hard.

My advisor, Gillian Hayes, gave the best advice before my first conference. It’s okay to not go to every session. It’s okay to skip certain events. Quality over quantity. Take care of yourself. Save your energy for those key interactions that you need to further your career, your research, or your learning. As is the case with all of academia, learn to say no to things. To that end, I’ve learned that I would rather save a bit more money at home in order to be able to stay at a hotel closer to the conference or to be able to order in room service for a night when I just can’t face going out to eat one more time. I realize that that is steeped in privilege. Conferences are not only hard, but they are expensive – CHI especially so. My only rationale is that my moments at CHI, having quality interactions with people, will help further my career in incalculable ways. I’m banking on it, and whether this will actually pay off in a tenure track job in the long run remains to be seen.

a steaming cup of coffee on a table top

In summary: Take care of yourself before, during, and after a big (or small) conference. Listen to your body. Focus on quality interactions over quantity.

Bonus tip for students: Make a list of 5-10 people you would really like to meet or touch-base with while at the conference. Focus on that list and make those your quality interactions. You’ll thank your tired self later.

Community Care

This one is a little trickier. As I’ve said, conferences are hard. We can all help make each other’s conference experience better. I will get into the larger, organizational issues of these big conferences like CHI in my next blog post, but for now I will focus on the community-on-the-ground. This could be simple things like, if you’re chatting with people, try to get out of the way so you can all hear each other and you aren’t in the way of those trying to get through. Maybe this looks like simply not guilting people into going to the late parties or finding safe spaces for women and other marginalized community members. This also means accepting help when others offer it (an important part of self-care!). I’ve seen a lot of positive movement in this area, especially at CHI. But, of course, there is always room for improvement and we should strive to find ways to help each other out.

dark leafy background with pink neon letters that spell breathe

CHI can be a wonderful experience if done right. I have had conference experiences where I’ve just felt ill the entire time and ended up not getting much out of it. I then I have to ask myself why I spent money to even go in the first place (because let’s be real, as a student or postdoc, you’re losing money even if you’re getting reimbursed).  But I’m happy to say that prioritizing my own self-care and looking out for others has really improved my overall CHI experience. I hope these tips are helpful for you as you plan your next conference trip!

CHI 2019 Recap Part 1: Play and Technology

Given that I’ve recently returned from CHI, I thought I would write up a few of my thoughts in a little mini-series of blog posts. Some, like this one, will be related to research, while others will be related more to going to the conference and my reflections on academia and HCI more broadly given my experiences in Glasgow.

an open diary with blurred writing, flower pressed into middle of book

One of the opportunities I had this year, as a newly minted PhD, was to chair a session (that is, run the session of paper presentation, introduce the speakers, hand out the best paper awards, ask questions if the audience is shy, and, most importantly, keep to time). It was a fun job and gave me a chance to engage with the speakers for some great papers! So, I thought I would recap some of the highlights about play and technology that piqued my interest during the conference.

Play (with/through/around technology) is one of the pillars of my research, as you can read in the blog recapping my own paper presentation at CHI. The other work I saw presented was a nice compliment to my own research. One paper, “Coding for Outdoor Play: a Coding Platform for Children to Invent and Enhance Outdoor Play Experiences,” was about an outdoor play activity that teaches children how to code. This game also had a social component with children working together to create game rules (which translated as ‘code’). Another paper, “Group Interactions in Location-Based Gaming: A Case Study of Raiding in Pokémon GO,” also looked at social aspects of play in outdoor spaces. I think there’s a lot of interesting avenues of this research at the intersection of play (indoor or outdoor, virtual or physical), technology, and social interactions.

A toddler holding up a toy camera

These papers give a us a road map forward in terms of understanding children’s play in the 21st Century. What most excites me about this work is I can see the opportunity here to be inclusive. Children with disabilities can benefit from augmenting environments with technology. I have seen this in my own work and I can see the natural extensions of some of the work above to move into disability spaces. In fact, Microsoft seems to also be moving a similar direction with the announcement of augmented reality Minecraft. This space is new and exciting, and I think with a little forethought and care we can make this inclusive for everyone.

A Place to Play


The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces

Preview: Play is an important part of childhood that is often inaccessible for children with disabilities. This work looks at how Autcraft, an online community for autistic children, uses different social media and games platforms to enable access to social play. First, the spaces the Autcraft community uses make the place that is Autcraft possible. Second, these spaces, though some of them are digital, are no more or less “real” than the physical spaces making up a schoolyard or playground.

Cross-posted on Medium.

Sunset in Minecraft.

Importance of Play

Social play is an important part of childhood. It is how children develop and practice their social skills. Children engage in a wide range of playful practice roles and test the boundaries of social rules. These playful interactions are vital not only for children to grow into competent, functioning adults, but also to discover who they are and what kind of adults they want to become.

Disabilities and Access to Play

Disability is created when a person is trying to interact with the world and are not accommodated by their environment. An example of this would be a child who wants to play on a playground, but they cannot roll their wheelchair into the space. Access and disability are inextricably linked. Access, in general, is not a given experience for any single individual. Disability is created in the moment that access is faulty or denied to a person. What this means is that disability is not created within a person.

Because a person’s body and their environment are constantly changing, disability is not happening all the time, but rather, a person is disabled by the context with which they are trying to engage. As disability scholar Tanya Titchkosky states, “While we all have bodies — bodies that we act, sense, feel, or move in and through — only some bodies, only some of the time and only in some places, are understood as disabled ones.” Access, therefore, is dynamic and ever shifting.

Accessibility signs in front of rough, grassy terrain.

For children with disabilities, including autistic children, access to play is often limited or of low quality. One way to help autistic children gain access to play and socialization is through online spaces, such as social media, games, and virtual worlds. This paper extends previous work in this area, by exploring the disabled experience and how that affects access to play.

Access is really only noticeable when it is not available and creates disability. The disabled body becomes the oppressed body, when they are denied access (advertently or inadvertently), not only in a social sense, but also in a literal, physical sense. Children who do not conform to “normal” and “normal play,” then, are not invited to the game. This is done both literally and through the making play objects that a disabled child cannot use.

Among other activities, individuals with disabilities use online spaces to socialize — empowering themselves to do what they may not be able to in the physical world. Online spaces have different ways of creating access from physical spaces. In this ethnographic work, I explore how one community uses the sense of place and the digital experience in Minecraft specifically to give autistic children access to play with their peers. In this sense, they are using Minecraft to mediate their play experience, just like a physical world playground mediates another kind of play experience. One type of mediated experience is not better (or less mediated) than another. Rather, these experiences, from face-to-face to text to avatars on a computer screen, are diverse kinds of experiences. Simply put, playing in Minecraft with friends is still social play, even though it might look different from playing in a physical playground.

For this work, I studied Autcraft. Autcraft is a Minecraft community for children with autism and their allies run by parent volunteers. The goal of the Autcraft community is to have a safe space for children with autism to play Minecraft free from harassment and bullying (for more information visit the Autcraft website). As part of this study, I have been conducting an on-going ethnography within the community (see my paper for details). This study included analysis of activity within the Minecraft server, forums, website, Twitter, Facebook group, YouTube, and Twitch.

The Different “Spaces” of Autcraft

In this work, I found the Autcraft community actively creates access to social play using a variety of social media and other technology. By looking at the entire constellation of social media in the Autcraft ecosystem, we can understand how community members are engaging in a variety of social play experiences.

Access to the Autcraft community happens through three layers of interconnected environments: physical, liminal, and virtual. The physical space includes computer hardware and the environment in which players access the computer. This would be things like a bedroom, home office, or computer lab in the library. The liminal space includes the installation and configuration of the software, as well as user authentication. Finally, the virtual space includes the various social media.

When combined, these spaces allow play to happen because the children have access to play in a context in which they “fit.” When educators, therapists, parents, and researchers privilege face-to-face interactions, they are, in effect, creating disability in children who cannot or will not play in that way. In the Autcraft community, members can recreate the playground in an environment that is more comfortable for them. Community members leverage technology to create a playground where children are most able to play. And, having done this, autistic children engage in social play of which people thought them incapable.

The Autcraft community has used a constellation of platforms to enable social play for autistic children. Here the Autcraft community is using the constellation of technological platforms to help create the sense of place. These platforms cross into physical, liminal, and virtual spaces, working together to create access to play. Here the Autcraft community have leveraged virtual worlds to their advantage — in essence, transforming the disabled play experience into an enabled one.

How someone interacts with others is meaningful, regardless whether that interaction is online or offline. For the autistic children of Autcraft, playing in online spaces is preferable to physical-world, face-to-face interactions. The Autcraft community has defied the conventions set out by many educators, parents, researchers, and therapists by creating a space that privileges digital engagements over physical-world ones. In doing so, they have made a playground that is more comfortable for many autistic children.

Children need a place to play. There are two things to consider: creating a sense of place and allowing for both the real and unreal in these places. Therapists, educators, parents, and researchers tend to privilege the physical realm over all others for mediating sociality. Members of the Autcraft community turn this notion on its head, instead privileging virtual interactions over physical ones. But further still, I have shown how all these spaces — physical, liminal, and virtual — must work together to make play possible. The spaces the Autcraft community uses make the place that is Autcraft possible. These spaces, though some of them are digital, are no more or less “real” than the physical spaces making up a schoolyard or playground. Ultimately, it the sense of place in Autcraft that gives children access to social play.

A Minecraft sheep with hearts around its head.

For more details about my methods and findings, please see my paper that has been accepted to CHI 2019 (to appear in May 2019). I am pleased to announce that this has received Honorable Mention (top 20% of all papers) Full citation and link to the pdf:

Kathryn E. Ringland. 2019. A Place to Play: The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces. In CHI 2019. [PDF]


Acknowledgements

I thank the members of Autcraft for the warm welcome to their community. Thank you to Chris Wolf, LouAnne Boyd, and Oliver Haimson and other members of LUCI for their feedback on various iterations of this work. Special thanks to Severn Ringland for his diligent editing and Kyle Lee for insights while writing this up. Shout out to my dissertation committee who helped me shape my thoughts: Gillian Hayes, Tom Boellstorff, Mimi Ito, and Aaron Trammell. I would also like to thank Robert and Barbara Kleist for their support, as well as the ARCS Foundation. This work is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (T32MH115882). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. This work is covered by human subjects protocol #2014–1079 at the University of California, Irvine.

Players hanging out together in the Autcraft virtual world.

CHI 2016 Paper on Sociality in Minecraft Getting Some Great Press!

I was recently interviewed by a reporter from the New Scientist who wrote a piece on our paper, “Will I always be not social?”: Re-Conceptualizing Sociality in the Context of a Minecraft Community for Autism, that I will be presenting on May 9 for CHI 2016.

We were also covered by “Don’t Hate the Geek” in their article Minecraft Server for Autistic Gamers on May 2, 2016!

Want to find out more? Please see our full paper that has been accepted to CHI 2016. Full citation and link to the pdf below:

Ringland, K.E., Wolf, C.T., Faucett, H., Dombrowski, L., and Hayes, G.R. “’Will I always not be social?’: Re-Conceptualizing Sociality in the Context of a Minecraft Community for Autism”. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2016). To Appear. [Acceptance Rate: 23.4%]

POST LAST UPDATED: May 2, 2016.

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Advancement to PhD Candidate

I’m happy to report I successfully passed my advancement to become a PhD Candidate!

My talk was titled “Technology Mediated Socialization for Children with Autism.”

Committee: Gillian Hayes (Chair), Rebecca Black, Mimi Ito, Josh Tanenbaum, and Tom Boellstorff

Abstract: Traditional face-to-face social interactions can be challenging for individuals with autism, leading some to perceive and categorize these individuals as less social than their peers. For example, autism can be accompanied by difficulty making eye contact, interpreting some nonverbal cues, and performing coherent verbal utterances. While these challenges can be interpreted as an inability or lack of desire for social interactions, researchers have begun to explore how to expand the definition of sociality for those with autism. My research explores how technology can support alternative means of sociality, particularly for children with autism engaged in social play. In this advancement talk, I will present two research studies: SensoryPaint and Autcraft. SensoryPaint is a multimodal sensory environment built to enable whole-body interaction with the Kinect. Evaluation of SensoryPaint was conducted in two stages: a lab-based study and a deployment study. Results from this study show how these systems can promote socialization. My second research project explores Autcraft, a Minecraft community for children with autism and their allies. I will present results from on-going ethnographic work exploring the community’s Minecraft server and other community affiliated social media. Results from this study highlight ways in which community members use technology to create a safe environment for children with autism to explore alternative forms of social expression. Findings suggest an expansion of how sociality has traditionally been conceptualized for individuals with autism and how technology plays a key role in facilitating this new sociality.

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