Clash of Clans Players’ Environment and Language

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Background
Clash of Clans
The Environment of COC Players
The Language of COC Players
Strategies for Improving a Clan’s Performance
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

For this research, I studied the environment of the players of Clash of Clans (COC). This game is significant since it is global, it presents several chatting platforms for gamers, and its tasks require a team effort and careful strategic planning. For these reasons, COC gives a wide opportunity to study communications. During my fieldwork, I studied a COC team in action. I emphasized two particularly interesting topics: the language of COC players and the efforts of the team to improve their performance. The language of the players consists of three layers: youth slang, common video games slang, and the specific COC slang. Due to the democratic structure of the team, each player can make their own suggestions on improving performance.

Thus, the specific characteristics of the tasks in COC make communication a primary part of success in this game.

Background

As a topic of my final project, I selected a Clash of Clans, a popular mobile game. The reason, for which I chose this game, is that it offers different chat platforms, both in and out of the game. It means that the game providers gave the players an opportunity to chat during long periods of time and discuss the problems of the game even when they are not playing. It is also necessary to mention that the out-of-game chatting platform is more developed than the in-game platform, so gamers spend more time chatting out of the gaming process. Therefore, studying the Clash of Clans environment is a good opportunity to understand communications inside of the game culture. Additionally, the game is global, and the players in the game are divided by countries, which presents an opportunity to study the group game strategies of different nationalities.

In my research, I study the in-game chatting platform, as well as the other platforms that players use to discuss their plans and strategy. I believe that I have a serious knowledge on this problem because I have been playing Clash of Clans daily for more than a year, and I am a great fan of this game. For this research, I used such an ethnographic method as participant observation. This method requires establishing familiar relations with the group, which the researcher examines, and participate in all the activities of that group (Boellstorff 31). As I am already a gamer and have many friends, who are gamers, I decided that this method will be very useful. In addition, this method is effective and is often used in ethnographical studies, especially game studies.

Clash of Clans

Before studying the environment of players, it is necessary to understand the goals, tasks, and the whole setting and organization of Clash of Clans (COC) since the organizational mechanism has a serious influence on the field of study (Boellstorff et al. 62).

COC is a massively multiplayer online game produced by Supercell, which exists since 2012 and can be loaded from Apple Store and Google Play. The game is available on mobile phones, laptops, PCs, and tablets. COC is consistent with the abilities of a mobile phone and mobile internet. It is built on a team basis and requires groups of players to attack other groups. COC is quite a challenging game, but it gives a unique experience. The game trains a player’s strategic skills. The strategies, which players need to use in the game, are related to defense, offense, farming, base setups, army compositions, and necessary upgrades.

All of them are crucial to the survival and success of the clans and their transition to a higher level. The defense is no less important than offense: it also requires careful planning, for example, responsible use of castles and building barriers. Various strategic patterns exist in COC. On the Internet, one can find special strategy guides on COC. It is also important that the enemies are getting stronger on each level; it means that the strategies of a clan need to get more complicated. It is not a straightforward game where you can simply destroy enemies and run; COC requires careful collective strategic planning and a serious team effort. The clans have to spend some time on team building activities and planning their actions if they want to win (Bennani 23-45). All these factors make this game particularly interesting for an ethnographic study.

The Environment of COC Players

I have long since been in the environment of COC players as I have been a player myself. For this research, I studied a group of my friends, who are COC players as well and participate in a game team. I took field notes at our meeting at a cafe when I could observe them in the process of playing COC as a team. I used this group as a typical example of the COC gaming environment.

First of all, it is necessary to mention that the contingent of COC players is mostly young and male. Players use their smartphones in most cases because it allows them to play anywhere. For example, my study group played the game on their iPhones at the cafe. It is known that the culture of video game playing involves such an important factor as nicknaming; it allows us to stay anonymous, as well as to “show off,” using a pretentious, funny, or witty nickname. COC gamers, including my study group, use nicknames and even call each other by the nickname when they are not playing.

It is also interesting that game players take their occupation quite seriously. They see it as their business, not as some entertainment. For them, the individual tasks assigned to each player are a great responsibility to the team, and they need to organize their time so that they have an opportunity to participate in in-game actions. Because of that, game players often have very little time for sleep. For some gamers, COC is so important that they can even play it along with having breakfast.

Two particularly interesting topics, which I want to emphasize, are the language that the COC players use to talk about the gaming process and the way, in which a clan tries to improve its performance in the game.

The Language of COC Players

COC players, as well as many other subcultures, have their own unique language. This language is used in both written and spoken conversations. It consists of three layers: common youth slang, common gaming slang, and the specific slang of COC.

Youth slang is the basis for the language of COC players. This layer does not have any relation to gaming. Players use words such as “lol” (laughing out loud) and other abbreviations related to laughing, “yeah” (instead of “yes”), frequently insert “like,” “hella” (as a means of expressing a high degree of something), etc.

The next layer is video gaming slang. This layer of language is shaped by the common features that all multiplayer online video games have. The purpose of this language is to describe the nature and features of tasks that players need to fulfill, as well as the circumstances of a game. This layer includes such terms as raid, upgrade, level, noob, attack, and many others (“Online Gaming Slang” table 1).

Finally, there is a layer of specific COC language. It includes specific terms such as clans (basically, teams), preparation day and war day (the day before the attack and the day of the attack), leader and co-leader (the administration of a clan), troops and their specific divisions, gold and elixir (necessary entities that clans need to get), spells (and the names of their kinds), stars (awards given for a successful attack, their number depends on the level of performance), base, village, Xbow (a strong offensive and defensive weapon), resources, heroes, loot bonus, town hall, castle (a strong protective structure), canon (a light self-protective structure), archer tower (an effective defensive structure), mortar (a primary foundation of spray spoil), etc. Here is an example of a COC player’s speech: “It’s EZ man, boost your barracks and COC everywhere anytime just like me, I just raided 30,000 dark elixirs last night.”

Strategies for Improving a Clan’s Performance

Another interesting topic is the way, in which a clan tries to improve its performance in the game. As was already said, COC players use different chat platforms to communicate with each other such as the COC in-game platform and WeChat. Some teams, such as my study group, have a possibility to meet in real life. Due to the fact that COC requires a consolidated team effort and good strategic planning, the members of the teams have to meet out of the gaming process ad discuss future strategies and some possible ways to boost their performance.

It is significant that the team, which I studied, had a good tradition to discuss and analyze their mistakes after each game and suggest ways to avoid these mistakes in the future.

The team also had an already developed strategy pattern; they were adjusting the details to the unique circumstances of each game, but the pattern was the same. This pattern lied in the following. The team had the top three mates (the strongest players of the team), who helped the lower players to win the stars. However, a team has lost a little time before our conversation because the top three players wasted their forces on helping lower mates and failed to defeat the corresponding opponents. The team discussed ways to improve the performance of lower players. It was interesting to observe the behavior of the clan’s leader because it did not look like the interaction between a leader and his subordinates, it was more like a friendly council among equal people, who presented their opinions. For instance, when the leader insisted that lower players needed to improve their performance, two contradicting opinions were presented, and there were no sanctions. As can be seen, the organizational structure of a clan is rather democratic.

Conclusion

In the course of this research, I found that COC is built in such a way as to make strategic planning the only way to succeed in the game. Therefore, communication is a necessary part of winning in COC. An important aspect of team communication is discussing ways to improve performance.

Works Cited

Bennani, Farah. “Game Based Learning Best Practices: Using the Metagame.”Proceedings of EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2015. Ed. Steve Carliner and Charles Fulford. Boston: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. 2015. 1371-1373. Print.

Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.

Boellstorff, Tom. “A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies.” Games and Culture 1.1. (2006): 29-35. Print.

Online Gaming Slang. n.d. Web.

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