ENGL794-SP16: Case Study 1: “Steam Profiles”

As proposed in Tracing Genres by Spinuzzi (2003), there are three loose categories through which the work which solidifies into genre activity take place: macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic (p. 30). Describing the ways in which people use tools, develop workflows, and settle into how processes, as Spinuzzi (2003) writes about them, “crystallize.” These categories allow an examination of how agents work within a network toward a standardization of how their informational exchanges happen.

Within Steam, a vast platform designed initially for selling games but has expanded out to player-identity maintenance (“Steam – About”, 2016), there are many interconnected forces ranging from pocket networks of marketplaces that exist within only a single game out to macroeconomic forces shaped by the influence of anything from new games on the market to the selling of large amounts of “Bill’s Hat,” an item found within a popular game, Team Fortress 2 (“Steam Community Market :: Showing results for: ‘Team Fortress 2”, 2016). Agents within Steam, positioned in the metaphor of a network, are often vast and sometimes connected only by the strongest forms of weak ties. Yet, for all of these forces and powers within the network of the platform, the greatest movements might very well come from the users and their actions. Positioned as both decision makers, in their use of Steam Greenlight (“Steam Greenlight”, 2016) and leaving comments on games (“Steam Reviews”, 2016), and as economic forces in the purchasing of games, users represent both a stream of income for the platform and the source from which new items are created and sold on the marketplace (“Steam Workshop”, 2016).  It is in this former and latter combination, as creator-buyer hybrid, that is actually shown as part of each user’s Profile page, letting a user showcase their in-game achievements, in-network capital, and compose an identity from ‘networked’ elements  (“Steam Community :: Videlais”, 2016).

A confluence of all of levels of Spinuzzi’s (2003) construction, the Profile pages represent an opening within the network through which most users have the greatest control. Thus, as a function of user development and identity maintenance functionality, the pages represent a strategic lens through which to operationalize the ways in which users have taken parts of other sub-networks within the larger platform and used them as a form of identity construction and showcasing that itself draws in connections toward the greater marketplaces within the system itself through links to games, user creations for those games, and what any one user has achieved within the game (Figure 1).

Through this solidifying of practices stretching across the network and converging within this hub of activity across games and market practices, Profiles represent, centrally, the methods in which the microscopic ways through which users understand Profile pages on other social network and similar sites has itself collided into a genre. Users have come to expect to share details like their username, location, and other personal identification information with other users. Such “habitual” actions, as Spinuzzi (2003) explains, relates to the ways in which users act according to what they have done in other sites, both literal and metaphoric, thinking very little of how such actions relate to their current situation and merely acting out social scripts picked up and developed in other spaces (p. 30).

As goal-oriented actions, users can craft, to various degrees, their Profile pages in order to perform certain identification practices interconnecting with the outline of the mesoscopic level Spinuzzi (2003) highlights. Through arranging either their individual actions in games or their group affiliations, users can display different elements either ‘above the fold’ (top third of the page), ‘below the fold’ (middle third), or not at all. However, while each user is given some control of this displaying, a greater granularity and increasing of options only comes with a higher “Level,” a measurement of the creation of Badges through cards either won through gameplay, purchased on the marketplace, traded with other players, or some combination of the three. Although not often articulated as such within the platform itself, those users with the highest Level are simultaneously those who have the greatest inculcation into the display practices within the system; through “unlock[ing] more profile showcases,” users with higher Levels can demonstrate a higher interconnectivity and in-network identification with the system at the same time (Bob Fizzle, 2013).

At the highest, cultural level, Steam Profiles are along the same lines as Spinuzzi’s (2003) macroscopic descriptions, matching the ways in which users act according to cultural rules through the genre creation and maintenance actions. For many users, exemplified within the Steam Community thread of “What is a badge used for?”, Badges, Levels, and even achievements become gendered actions used not only for in-network identification purposes, but extending toward masculinity preservation. The ability to showcase greater actions and achievements quickly becomes, for some, a way to perform gendered actions (along with group affiliations as part of usernames and on the Profile pages themselves). In this way, choices that lead upward from the filling in of personal identification leads to a strong relationship with the system itself; using the same elements asked for the system by way of locating and detailing the potential networks between users, cultural actions such as the masculinity preservation practices in the example become dual-coded as part of the experience of a user. Both their cultural identity outside the system and as performed within become tied to the way that they are hailed by others, conflating, both good and bad, an in-network persona with their in-market and in-games actions at the same time.

While useful for looking at the development and mutation of genre-related actions within a network, Spinuzzi’s (2003), three loose categories of macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic do not speak to the reasons behind the actions, nor account for the gendered ideology behind the collision of system-user and user-user that results in the categorizing of the genre levels. While the framework can look at actions, their results, and the “tracing” through the user, group, and larger, organization levels, it does not — and largely cannot — account for the cultural practices intersecting each category and how users, at each individual rhetorical situation, act through the available means for larger formations like identity performance and maintenance as associated with the analysis through this application of the methodology present.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Steam Community Profile for “Videlais” (Dan Cox)

 

References:

Bob Fizzle. (2013) “What is a badge used for? :: Help and Tips.” Steam Community. Retrieved from http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/864974276843790635/

Spinuzzi, C. (2003) Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Acting with Technology). Kindle Edition.

“Steam – About” (2016). Steam. Retrieved from http://store.steampowered.com/about/

“Steam Community :: Videlais.” (2016). Retreived from http://steamcommunity.com/id/videlais/

“Steam Greenlight” (2016). Steam Greenlight. Retrieved from http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/

“Steam Reviews” (2016). Steam Reviews. Retrieved from http://store.steampowered.com/reviews/

“Steam Workshop” (2016). Steam Workshop. Retrieved from http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/

“Steam Community Market :: Showing results for: ‘Team Fortress 2’.” (2016). Steam Community. Retrieved from https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?appid=440