Russian gaming

Gaming is always present but it is elusive to some extent and different people engage in different kinds of games, often oblivious to other potential forms of entertainment available just a click or two away. In Russia gaming appears in all its forms from game-playing computer clubs that promote within and between club tournaments and serve food alongside use to the complex hybrid reality "night games" to the run of the mill farmville in social network sites. These "toys" as Russians call them, are mostly seen as inconsequential time-waster entertainment, available for relaxation or forms of socializing and mostly by no means a serious past-time. In fact, much of the language around these games uses terms of drug use, addiction and sickness only half in jest.

I first started hearing about Farmville and other Zynga knock-offs that had appeared on Russian social network sites when I was in Kazakhstan. In Moscow the story took on a slightly different turn. Initially, I was intrigued not so much by gaming, but by a somewhat startling increase in the use of Facebook as the favorite social network site for young, technically advanced and relatively financially well off respondents. Where last year Facebook only came up in conversation as a site for use with foreign friends or contacts that explicitly did not speak Russian, this year Facebook came up as one of a number of site where people hung out with their local friends. In fact, Facebook was more common specifically for hanging out with other young moscovites. I was intrigued and my respondents confidently explained that Facebook had become "cool" among a certain "kind of person" in Moscow just in the last six to eight months when suddenly everyone who was in any way interesting was using it incessantly... apparently in order to play Farmville and other assorted Zynga games. After getting into the games, they then got all of their friends to sign up and play as well, devising various methods of getting their friends to join in the madness, often terming this as "getting them hooked" in words specifically used to indicate introduction to intravenous drug use.

Where Farmville, although social because it is often played with friends (sort of), happens to be a slow and individual game, the very technically advanced users of smartphones are playing location-based games like four-square and Gowalla. Here the excitement is in the instant feedback of friends involved in the game and feeling of being perpetually connected and present. "If you are not using social media and if you are not on top of the buzz in Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook and all the rest, then you do not exist!" was the statement I had heard several times from the diehard fans of all things social media. They insisted on existing in their respective favorite social media realms (seemingly as many as possible at the same time) yet they insisted on meeting in person and frequently hanging out as well.

Neither the Farmville players nor the location-based Gowalla-gamers however, were particularly interested in a third kind of game playing that I frequently encountered in the interstices between IT professionals and the less sophisticated users of social network sites. These players of what they themselves termed "night games" were of a different kind - often technologically proficient but not IT professionals, calling the game an "alternative form of entertainment" - the players here were dedicated to the idea of being different and engaging in a kind of activity that might not be understood by the mainstream but that was ultimately an intense bonding experience. Every player that I had spoken to expressed one particular idea about the game that seemed an important reason for their attraction to the whole idea. It was the notion that real life stopped outside the realm of the game and inside the game space, whether on the online discussion boards or during the game itself, the rank, file and social standing of each player played zero difference. Young teenage kids reprimanded men and women in their 40s and got agreement and acquiescence. The game to them was an ultimate expression of democracy and equality where external and commonly culturally accepted markers of status did not count.

The game had spread like wildfire throughout eastern Europe and FSU countries, mostly depending on the extensive russian speaking diaspora. There had been attempts to bring the game to Western Europe and the US as well, but law enforcement in those countries did not look quite so positively on random groups of people running around abandoned urban areas at night with flashlights. There was a lot of location-based technology and mobile internet use in game, but once again purely in service of the game at hand and not for gathering of status or points of any other kind. The game was about extending yourself and going outside safe boundary zones both socially and physically and people involved cherished both kinds of experience. The most intriguing aspect of the conversation about the game with one of the ardent promoters of the game was his story about their attempts to spread the game out to China. They had tried to run similar games there both in Russian and in Chinese, but got few takers and little traction. They hadn't been able to really figure out why but had given up for now.

I've been trying to think where these games are in the scheme of the everyday life and why they are both really important to some people and utterly incomprehensibly silly and unnecessary to most others. Where some games are there to feel minor achievements in the haze of everyday busy life and other games are all-night efforts of pushing yourself beyond your limits and running around basements with a team of others competing for some odd codes written in dusty corners, where members of teams often playing together in the same town may not even know each others' names, only game-handles and never find that particularly limited by a complete lack of knowledge of each others' background. In fact, for many that's exactly the point of the game... and the only way the could play it. Is it escapism? Is it a way to increase social capital without making it all about conscious calculation? Is it just entertainment? Or is this entertainment of a specific, post-soviet flavor? I don't yet know...

The Russian IT Community

The Russian IT community is far more mature than its Kazakh counterpart and they see the Kazakh community as several years if not half a decade behind in expertise, ability and financial solvency to ensure production of data that is necessary for the industry to go forward - real, well collected data about Internet use. There are large and public IT powerhouses such as the search engine Yandex or the mail system Mail.ru as well as smaller but no less agile and financially solvent systems for businesses and IT development companies that are less visible to the public. There are many investors with money, interested and willing to invest substantial amounts into start up IT businesses than there are actual good ideas for said start ups to move things forward. An IT professional I had met over tea mentioned that he had heard not one but two ideas that week that might be worth a million rubles each (30 rubles = 1$) and that might actually know how to spend that money wisely. He excitedly repeated that fact to me several times throughout our conversation. 

Both the IT giants and the smaller companies haven't yet quite figured out the value of user experience engineering, but they are learning very quickly. I met someone who for all intents and purposes does the function of a user experience engineer at Yandex although she does not quite perceive herself as such. The IT market here is moving and they actually make real money (unlike Kazakhstan where not a single Internet-based business makes over $500K a year in revenue so far except of course for the providers, but that's a story best told with reflections over pirated content traffic). Most of the money is made in the capital (Moscow) and its northern counterpart of St. Petersburg but the regional centers are important as well. 

Curiously, regional internet use patterns differ in fairly specific ways according to data collected by Yandex and several other independent data sources (see infact.ru). Where Yandex with its mail services, news, search, maps and games dominates main population centers, regionally, mail.ru is more popular for nearly everything except for search. For search Google and Yandex compete far more closely in the regions than in large population centers where Yandex rules. For most intents and purposes however, Google (if you don't count Youtube) and Facebook do not present competition to their Russian counterparts. The explanations that people at Yandex gave me for the regional vs. population center differences were fascinating and profoundly culturally based with an emphasis on levels of sophistication and recognition for quality as the main culprits. 

Another regional difference that seems to be important at the very least for people who live either in St. Petersburg or Moscow is the prominence of one or another social network site as the main hangout place for its residents. Vkontakte is perceived in Moscow as THE  St. Petersburg site. Everyone in St. Pete is on Vkontakte regardless of age or anything else. "It's a St. Pete local thing, 'cause Durov (the founder of vkontakte) is from there" one of my respondents confided. Many people in Moscow have a profile there as well, but this is very much age and social class dependent. Older people still hang out on odnoklassniki despite the fact that the site now requires pay for many types of uses including initial registration. Younger people are mostly on vkontakte, although the upper to upper-middle class 25 to 35 contingent of Moscovites is now suddenly hanging out on Facebook (and I am told this has to do with gaming of Farmville type where descriptions of such forms of gaming are always presented using a very specific vocabulary of drug addiction). The people from infact.ru however tell me that this increase is insignificant still, because Facebook hasn't even surpassed Twitter in Moscow yet (and Twitter use is minor though on the rise). Facebook of course has to compete with vkontakte here that happens to have what they themselves call 'an unfair advantage'. Vkontakte is the largest database of pirated music and video in Russia at the moment, all contributed by its users. So far, it has been able to do so with impunity, however, just the other day it has received its' first legal challenge from a local content-distribution entrepreneur. 

The IT community in Russia and generally the technical elite is heavily using Twitter, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, FaceBook and other networking, self-presentation social software all at the same time. It is also a fairly small and interconnected community. Small enough that apparently my short visit had generated enough generally positive noise on Twitter to even get  back to me as weird sort of third-party feedback that hopefully will pave the way to more productive meetings in St. Petersburg.