A Reality Game to Cross Disciplines: Fostering Networks and Collaboration

This paper examines "Reality Ends Here," a semester-long, deliberately hidden game introduced to incoming freshmen at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in fall 2011 and 2012. Designed to reward student teams for collaborative media projects, the game ties points to card use, and the authors use it as a testbed for understanding how game mechanics shape social networks among students. Their central argument is that games can be deliberately structured to build networks and collaborative relationships, and that network analysis can provide useful formative feedback for educators and game designers.

The analysis draws on two years of data, covering 119 projects in the first year and an overall participation rate of 47% across both cohorts. Players' eigenvector centrality proved strongly associated with their game scores, with network centrality explaining a substantial share of score variation (R² = 0.522). The authors also identify influential students who bridge otherwise peripheral members, and they observe that network density rose in the second half of each semester, a finding supported by a bootstrap test significant at p<.01. Team sizes clustered around six and 24 people, with the larger groups suggesting stable, club-like organizations.

Participation varied considerably, from 33% to 67% across five academic divisions, and the study finds only mild homophily among Production students and a modest gender-based homophily among male players in the first year. The authors caution that participation gaps may leave non-participants feeling alienated and that attrition may skew the observed networking results. In response, the second year expanded orange cards to sophomores to encourage inter-cohort collaboration.

The paper concludes that few games have been explicitly optimized for Putnam's social capital criteria, including outward attention, social interaction, group identity, and reciprocity-driven trust. While Reality Ends Here addresses some of these implicitly, the authors argue that a more systematic link between game design principles and network theory could further improve networking outcomes.