Non-verbal communication plays a large role in online competitive multiplayer games, as team members attempt to coordinate with each other without distraction to achieve victory. Some games enable this communication through "pings," alerts that are easy to activate and provide auditory and visual cues for teammates. In this paper, we review the literature on gestures and non-verbal communication and, through an empirical analysis of 84,489 players across 10,293 matches in the popular game, League of Legends, illustrate ping use in multiplayer games and test the impact of ping actions on performance in teams. We show that the amount of pings depends on player role and in-game activity and that pings by players have a positive but concave relationship with player performance. These findings demonstrate the importance of non-verbal communication and interruption on the performance of virtual team members. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theorizing and designing sociotechnical systems that rely on users to engage in synchronous, collaborative work in shared visual spaces.

In most sociotechnical systems, individuals are tracked through user accounts. This paper explores the various ways in which people create and use multiple user representations, specifically in online games. Using 8 years of population data from a popular multiplayer online game, EVE Online, we examine how multiple character creation and use occurs at scale and how operationalization of individuals between accounts and characters impacts methods. We suggest that conceptualizing participants in online games based on the assumption that one character equals one individual can lead to incorrect analyses regarding the demographics or behaviors of the population. Additionally, social network analysis suggests that a character-centric, rather than account-level, viewpoint can change the results of statistical relationships with network metrics such as eigenvector centrality.

This paper uses the case of Hurricane Sandy and reddit's topical community (subreddit) /r/sandy to examine the production and curation of news content around events on a social news site. Through qualitative analysis, we provide a coded topology of produced content and describe how types of networked gatekeeping impact the framing of a crisis situation. This study also examines, through quantitative modeling, what kind of information becomes negotiated and voted as relevant. We suggest that highly scored content shared in a social news setting focused more on human-interest media and perspective-based citizen journalism than professional news reports. We conclude by discussing how the mechanisms of social news sites conflict with the social norms and culture of reddit to produce differing expectations around news.