Communities of Play:
Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds
Editorial Notes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Conclusion
Celia Pearce
Version .08
With Clark’s Edits – Kathy add yours to this.Editorial Notes
· An overview of what I’m trying to do here: This book is meant to be “academic but accessible.” The writing style is designed to be somewhat formal and academic yet at the same time readable and accessible, not obtuse. It is not a mass-market book like some of the recent Second Life books that have come out; but it might be comparable to something like “Guns, Germs and Steel” in that it makes an academic argument in a way that the average, reasonably well-educated reader can understand. I am also grappling with the challenge of giving people who have no prior experience with MMOGs an overview without talking down to the more knowledgeable reader. I anticipate the audience will be the following:
o Academics interested in MMOGs and fan culture
o A text book for MMOG design and ethnographic methods classes
o Anthropologists and Sociologists with no prior exposure to MMOGs
o MMOG designers their industry counterparts
o MMOG gamers who like to read about game culture
o An educated, curious general public
Scope of the task:
· Look at the sequence and see if it makes sense (might need to do this last after reading everything)
· See if tone is even throughout, except in Part IV where it’s not supposed to be
· Part II needs to remain relatively intact, due to comments from subjects, but stylistic edits are perimissiable as long as they don’t make substantive changes in meaning
· See if there is content missing or transitions needed
· Look at intro and conclusion (Part V) to see if they are doing what they are supposed to
· Language stuff (I have a bad habit of tossing extra “no food value” worlds in like “indeed” and sometimes lapse into passive voice, which I know you hate)
· Check for redundancies in content that are repetitive rather than reinforcing
· Cut stuff that seems unnecessary or not relevant
· The final manuscript will also be copy-edited and proofed by the publisher
Notes on formatting/style
· Don’t worry about the references. I am doing those last because of the issues with Endnote.
· The original thesis had to be “anglicized” for British readers, so it might have to be de-anglicized as you go along. If you see weird stuff like single quotes and commas in the wrong place relative to quotations, just to ahead and change them.
· I’m also sending you the page formatting so you can make sure it conforms to that
· There may be editorial notes/questions, but I think many of those have been resolved
Table of Contents (Revised 4/23/08)
Acknowledgements
Preface
(two facing pages; one page by each author)
Stephen Johnson
& one of the following (others can be reviewers)
· Tom Boellstorff (confirmed)
· T.L. Taylor (declined)
· Janet Murray
· George Marcus
INTRODUCTION
Applied Cybersociology as Design Research
Scope
Why a Book?
PART I: Games, Community and Emergent Cultures
CHAPTER 1: COMMUNITIES OF PLAY, PAST AND PRESENT
Play Communities
Multiplayer Games: The “Next Big Thing” Since 3500 BC
Networked Play and Virtual Communities
The MMOG Boom
MMOWs Through the Ages
Communities of Research: Traditions in Game Studies
The Return of Player-Centric Digital Game Studies
Defining MMOGs vs. MMOWs
Spatial Media and Spatial Literacy
Common Characteristics of Persistent Virtual Worlds
Ludic vs. Paidiac Worlds
Play Ecosystems: Fixed Synthetic vs. Co-Created Worlds
Playing with Identity: The Rise of the Avatar
Virtual Worlds/Real Communities
CHAPTER 2: EMERGENCE IN CULTURES AND GAMES
Emergent Cultures
Games as Emergent, Complex Systems
CHAPTER 3: READING, WRITING AND PLAYING CULTURE
Situating Culture
The Social Construction of Virtual Reality
Methodology: Multi-Sited Cyberethnography
Playing and Performing Ethnography
Feminist, Alternative and Experimental Ethnography
Reading and Writing Cultures: Ethnography of Fictional Worlds
Virtual Worlds Covered in This Study
PART II: The Uru Diaspora
CHAPTER 4: AN IMAGINARY HOMELAND: A POLYPHONIC CULTURAL HISTORY
A Polyphonic Cultural History
History & Context: Myst, Uru and Beyond
Laying the Groundwork: Myst Players Come Together
Understanding Uru Players
Myst Uru: Story, World, Game
The Uru Experience
[Description of each of the areas in Uru]
The Gathering of Uru: Birth of a Hood
The Rise and Fall of Uru/Becoming Refugees
Virtual World/Real Grief
Yearning for the Homeland
Immigration: The Quest for a New Home
A Home of Their Own
Assimilation/Transculturation
Uru Reclaimed
Self-Determination
The Inner Lives of Avatars
Avatar Representation
Becoming and Losing an Avatar
The Social Construction of Identity
Avatar Presence and Intersubjectivity
Communities and Cultures of Play
The Power of Play
A Community of Loners
Communities of Play
Intersubjective Flow
Group Cohesion: The Role of Values in the Play Community
CHAPTER 5: PATTERNS OF EMERGENCE
Porous Magic Circles and the “Ludisphere”
Communities of Play
The Social Construction of Avatar Identity
Intersubjective Flow
Play Styles as an Engine for Emergence
The Gathering of Uru Signature Play Styles
Spatial Literacy
Exploration
Puzzle-Solving
Cleverness and Creativity
Mastery
Games-within-Games
Togetherness
Wordplay & Multimodal Communication
Horseplay
Dancing/Acrobatics
Bottom-Up Leadership
The Inventive Urge
Productive Play: Cultural Production, Meaning-Making and Agency
Restoring a Lost Culture
The Longing for a Homeland
Artifacts as Carriers of Meanings
Creating New Ages
Porous Magic Circles and the “Ludisphere”
Ludic Leakage and Multitasking
Traversing Magic Circles
Migrating Individual and Group Identities
Migrating Play Patterns
Migrating Identities and Play Patterns to the Real World
CHAPTER 6: EMERGENCE AS A DESIGN MATERIAL
Emergence and Design
A Narrative of the Movement from Synthetic to Co-Created Worlds
Contributing Factors to Emergence
Fixed Synthetic vs. Co-Created Worlds
Communities of Play
The Social Construction of Identity
Intersubjective Flow
Productive Play
Porous Magic Circles
Ages Beyond Uru
PART III: Playing Ethnography: Research Methods
CHAPTER 7: METHOD: PLAYING ETHNOGRAPHY
My Avatar/My Self
Fieldwork
Analysis and Interpretation: The Search for Patterns
Writing Ethnography
The Ethnographic Memoir
PART IV: Being Artemesia: The Social Construction of the Ethnographer
PART V: Beyond Uru: Communities of Play on Their Own Terms
Applied Anthropology: Uru Resurrection
Online Games and Virtual Worlds as the New “Global Village”
INTRODUCTION
Applied Cybersociology as Design Research
In 1983, I began a career as a designer of games and interactive media, a lifetime passion that has gone through several transmogrifications leading me to my present “avatar” as an academic games researcher. These transmogrifications changes have occurred in tandem and intertwined with major paradigm shifts in the world and the communication landscape. 1983 was the year before “The Internet” and the Macintosh computer were born, two years before the first mass-market CD-ROM hit the streets, and ten years before the “World Wide Web” began transforminged the communications and the economyic landscape forever.
When I first began my career in New York City, there was no term to describe what I did. This was probably for the best since I wasn’t allowed to talk about it anyway due to the nondisclosure agreement I had signed along with my contract. A decade later, returning to my hometown of Los Angeles, “interactive multimedia” was the big buzz. The first exposure I had to the Mosaic web browser (, later Netscape), was in the office of a record company executive. The Electronic Entertainment Expo was launched duringthat my first year back in Los Angeles. Everything was changing, and changing rapidly.
TFor me the thread that pervaded through all my different instantiations can be summed up in three words: social mediated play. The first games I designed were multiplayer games, and I went on to work on public venues for museums and theme parks. I was fascinated by the power of networks to augment social play. It was also very apparent that there was a great social need for expanded play opportunities among adults. In my initial role as director of play testing, I was constantly surprised by people’s responses to the games we were designing. Over and over again, I saw adults using multiplayer games as a way to experiment with social roles, to reveal and explore sides of their personalities that might not be accommodated in theirr regular, day-to-day lives. An example of this could be seen inwas a stock trading simulation game we designed. Players sat in a semi- circle in front of touch screen consoles that allowed them to trade items. Each player position had a phone. On numerous occasions, I witnessed players turning to the player to the right or the left and asking: “Do you want to trade?” When the other player answered “yes,” the first player would say: “Great. I’ll call you.” It was if the telephone somehow gave them permission to take the role of a wheeler-dealer.
Through this and other experiences in testing, designing and playing games, I realized the tremendous power of mediated play. In Throughout the nineties, I continued to work on high-tech attractions and museum projects, because I was less interested in the decade’s popular medium of single-player games. continued to work on high tech attractions and museum projects, less interested in the single-player games that pervaded dominated at that time. I also developed an interest in the emerging field of online virtual worlds, open-ended play spaces that had the same kind of social and public character as the projects I was accustomed to working on. During this period, I was began to be dubbed a “cybersociologist” by some of my clients and peers.
By the end of the 1990s, things started to change, once again. The Internet and gaming merged, and online multiplayer games grew from an arcane niche to a mainstream entertainment genre. Similarly, virtual worlds have grown an order of magnitude or two in size, although admittedly, they still remain much smaller than their game counterparts.
Why is this design background in design important? TAlthough my research into multiplayer games and virtual worlds borrows extensively from both traditional anthropology, sociology and Internet research, at the core, I am still a game designer. Thus, my research continues to be about the intersection between play and technology, between interaction and design. I am interested not just in how people play in mediated spaces, but specifically in what it is about particular specific mediated spaces that enables them people to play in particular ways.
This work is meant to compleiment writing that focuses primarily on behavior, and writing that focuses primarily on design, by bringing these two elements together in a form of “design research” that might be termed “applied cybersociology.”
What do I mean by “applied cybersociology?” Today’s multiplayer games and virtual worlds are vast in their scope, housing containing hundreds of thousands , to millions to tens of millions of players. They are three-dimensional, graphical representations of entire worlds that players, in the guise oif “avatars,” can explore, communicate through, and, in some cases, take part in building. Sometimes rivaling nations, they have become their own mini-societies that both reflect, contrast and illuminate the larger societies they inhabit and connect.
Because they are framed as spaces of “play,” they create their own unique massive mediated playgrounds, in which players just as often invent their own rules just as often as they follow those of the designers.
And this is an important point: these worlds are designed. Even worlds that are largely emergent, in which most of the content is created by players, are designed. TAnd the types of behaviors that occur within them constitute a collaborative interchange between designers and players. Designers may have various ideals and ideas, goals and visions, abouts to how their game should be experienced and played. But once the game is “turned on,” the game is no longer in their hands, but it iss in in the hands of its players.
The role of design in the sociological phenomena that play out in online games and virtual worlds, (and indeed most online spaces), isf often under-explored. But Studying dDesign it helps to understand the affordances (features) of software applications in order toin order to understand the emergent behaviors that propagate within them. It is through the intersection of play and software that emergent behavior develops; they do not happen in a vacuum.
Key to this study is the investigation of the features of software applications themselves and their roles they play in permitting or, in some cases, hindering emergent behavior. These affordances aremay not always be deliberate on the part of the designer., and Iin fact, it is of often the very features that designers take for granted, the errors, oversights or even bugs, that provide the raw material for emergent behavior. Players, who are at liberty to explore a world for many more hours than the developers, often know learn more about these worlds than the designers themselves. In fact, in the studyis case, they know enough about the world to recreate it, and even to extend its content. Emergent behavior is highly creative, and also sets up a kind of meta-game with or and against the designers themselves. In some cases, such as in the instances of cheats and exploits (REF), this can take on an very antagonistic character. In some other cases, as in this researche story told in this book, the relationship is much more dynamic, with tensions, and contentions, but also withand a great deal of mutual, if sometimes uneasy, respect. Indeed, for the community this study concerns, its relationship to the developers is a keyvery important factor in the overall trajectory of its narrative.
Scope
The scope of this book is both broad and narrow. It is broad in that it attempts to look at general principles surrounding its theme of play communities and emergent cultures. At the same time, keeping a narrow focus can sometimes help us arrive at broader, more generalizable concepts precisely because we are looking in-depth at something very specific.
As theits title indicatesmplies, this book is about two things: communities of play and the emergent cultures they create, as manifest in networked play spaces. I will go into much more depth about the meaning of all of these these terms in Part I, but here I’d like to expound upon them a bit by way ofin an overview.