Documentary at Play

Docu-games designate a versatile group of games that have in common an attempt to depict and reflect on aspects of reality such as military conflicts, historical periods, or contemporary political and socio-cultural issues. As such, docu-games have become a new communication tool for individuals or organizations. This chapter explores different perspectives on games as documentaries, going beyond the mere subject matter and visualization of docu-games to approach questions about simulations as statements about reality and gameplay as a tool for communicating statements about reality. Combining cognitive documentary and games theory with content analysis, the chapter offers a theoretical framework for understanding how docu-games reference the relationship between reality and game, as well as how they establish credibility in relation to these representations.

“I Rolled the Dice with Trade Chat and This is What I Got”

In this chapter, the authors extend Warnick’s (2007) appropriation of Toulmin’s (1958) “field-dependency” as applied through an ecological lens to examine credibility and ethos in the virtual world of a massive multiplayer online game. The authors theorize that ethos in such virtual environments is context-dependent—that it is in the interaction between designed game and user action/communication that ethos is engineered in a process that is fundamentally different from both websites (which are static) and other social media (where the environment is not nearly as much of an actor in the development of ethos/credibility). To better understand how players (as inhabitants of the game ecology) view the establishment of ethos, the authors collected in-game chat and near-game forum posts that included responses to requests for assistance or invitations to join a guild, and we asked our participants to evaluate these texts. The chapter uses the data collected about the perception of ethos to identify three key elements for successful demonstration of credibility in multiplayer games: specificity, demonstrated expertise, and experience.

Ethical Challenges for User-Generated Content Publishing

Mainstream online media is gradually encouraging user contributions to boost brand loyalty and to attract new users; however, former “passive” audience members who become users are not able to become true participants in the process of online content production. The adoption of user-generated content in media content results in new legal and ethical challenges within online media organizations. To deal with these challenges, media companies have restricted users through adhesion contracts and editorial strictures unlike anything encountered in the users’ past media consumption experiences. However, these contractual precautions are targeted to protect the media organizations’ editorial purposes or reputations rather than to engage ethical issues that can also ensure them credibility. It is expected that some public service media strive to play a vital role in deliberative culture; on the other hand, some commercial global media have noticed the importance of worthwhile user-generated content even though all of them are far from “read-write” media providers due to the lack of an established guiding ethos for publishing user-generated content.

Theory and Application

Scholars are increasingly engaging with their peers in synchronous and asynchronous online forums. In order to adapt to this current trend, librarians and faculty must consider the nuances of computer- mediated communication and learn to understand the potential benefits and hazards of creating online identities that may round out others’ perceptions. It can be overwhelming and confusing to determine how to best present oneself or to “create” a credible identity. Through the introduction and explanation of communication concepts and theories, this chapter discusses online credibility, or ethos, and examples of those who have successfully built online credibility.

Establishing Credibility in the Information Jungle

In this chapter, the authors locate blogs and microblogs such as Facebook and Twitter in the information landscape. They explore their diverse habitats and features, as well as the explosion of uses discovered for them by academic and journalistic researchers. The authors describe an approach to evaluating the quality of blogs and microblogs as information sources using the CRAAP test, and they show how a consideration of digital ethos in the application of the CRAAP checklist imbues the test with flexibility and effectiveness, and promotes critical thinking throughout the evaluation process. The chapter demonstrates how the special features of blogs can be leveraged for rigorous assessment. For the purpose of defining examples, it focuses on blogs and microblogs such as Facebook and Twitter, but the authors see their approach as having application across other yet-to-be developed platforms because of its flexibility.

Digital Parrhesia as a Counterweight to Astroturfing

Astroturfing—fake grassroots communications about an issue of public interest—is further problematized in digital space. Because digitally mediated communication easily accommodates pseudonymous and anonymous speech, digital ethos depends upon finding the proper balance between the ability to create pseudonymous and anonymous online presences and the public need for transparency in public speech. Analyzing such content requires analyzing media forms and the honesty of speakers themselves. This chapter applies Michel Foucault’s articulation of parrhesia—the ability to speak freely and the concomitant public duties it requires of speakers—to digital communication. It first theorizes digital parrhesia, then outlines a techno-semiotic methodological approach with which researchers—and the public—can consider online advocacy speech. The chapter then analyzes two very different instances of astroturfing using this techno-semiotic method in order to demonstrate the generalizability of the theory of digital parresia, and the utility of the techno-semiotic approach.

Credibility in Web Search Engines

Web search engines apply a variety of ranking signals to achieve user satisfaction, i.e., results pages that provide the best-possible results for the user. While these ranking signals implicitly consider credibility (e.g., by measuring popularity), explicit measures of credibility are not applied. In this chapter, credibility in Web search engines is discussed in a broad context: credibility as a measure for including documents in a search engine’s index, credibility as a ranking signal, credibility in the context of universal search results, and the possibility of using credibility as an explicit measure for ranking purposes. It is found that while search engines—at least to a certain extent—show credible results to their users, there is no fully integrated credibility framework for Web search engines.

Building a Professional Ethos on LinkedIn

In the face of increasing use of digitally mediated contexts, teachers and students on all levels are expected to be familiar with creating content appropriate for the World Wide Web, and their professional lives are affected by the digital content they create. The professional online networking site LinkedIn, for example, is a group of communities where professionals can create an ethos that will benefit them in both searching for work and maintaining their current working status. In such venues, both students and teachers still need guidance on how to create a profile and presence that will establish a positive, approachable ethos. Specific examples show how the author accomplished this in the $50 billion per year pet industry. These examples clarify both what to do and what to avoid in creating a profile and presence in a professional online community.

Press C→ to Play the Ocarina

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the intersection where digital media studies meet rhetoric and rhetoric is re-introduced to musicology. In the recent academic excitement surrounding game studies, the music of games has been overshadowed. The author would like to call attention to the significance of game music and to consider a rhetorical method to approaching it that calls upon a rekindling of the history of coupling rhetoric with music. The author builds on this history by suggesting the foundation of a rhetorical framework for understanding the argumentative power of video game songs. He then moves to offer an approach for evaluating the ethos of game music that consists of assessing worlds and how they are carried through, and by, music. While 17th century baroque composers thought music to be fundamentally an issue of affections—and especially played off of emotional binaries such as joy/sadness as a rhetorical approach—the author hope to here revive this lost art of applying rhetoric to music through broadening the discussion beyond the matter of human emotion. This rhetorical approach allows the individual a framework with which to evaluate the ethos of game music as it now appears through numerous mobile operating systems, online environments, and as remediated forms manifesting in/as cultural artifacts. As games become ubiquitous, so do their songs.

The Credibility of Sources 2.0 in Journalism

This chapter addresses the use and credibility of news sources 2.0 in journalism. Starting with traditionally established views about the credibility of news sources in pre-Internet journalism as depicted by Gans (2004) and other authors, this chapter discusses the new situation that the Internet and, in particular, Web 2.0, brought about. More specifically, the authors intend to: i) Characterize the way Portuguese journalists use sources 2.0; ii) Study how Portuguese journalists assess the credibility of sources 2.0; iii) Compare the results obtained among Portuguese journalists with the results of other international studies in this field. To do this, the authors analyze and discuss the main results of a survey administered to Portuguese journalists, which is also compared with results from other international studies, in order to discuss its external validity. According to the data, Portuguese journalists, like journalists in other countries, consider news sources 2.0 to be unreliable, but the Portuguese journalists surveyed still use them, so the authors examine that discrepancy and other findings in light of other research.