PART I: Games, Community and Emergent Cultures
CHAPTER 1: COMMUNITIES OF PLAY, PAST AND PRESENT
Editorial Notes: Clark says I need an intro paragraph to explain my unique
perspective, but I like the start below and I think the intro does that now.
Play Communities
Play communities are nothing new. They surround us in many forms, from chess
clubs, to sports leagues, to summer camps, to bridge clubs; from tabletop roleplaying groups such Dungeons & Dragons, to live-action role-playing
communities, such as civil war reenactment and renaissance fairs. In the latter
cases, part of what draws a play community together is a shared imagination
space in which they can express aspects of their personas that might not find
expression in other realms of everyday life. This form of expression can be seen
in tribal and traditional cultures in the more serious form of ritual. (Schechner
1988b) (Turner 1982)
Adult play tends to be marginalized in the West, particularly the United States,
with a few exceptions. Ritually sanctioned events such as Halloween and Mardi
Gras create allowances for anyone to engage in provisional, short-term, play
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communities. In fact, year-round communities have formed in preparation for
annual Mardi Gras celebrations. By and large, adult play communities that form
around sports or card games tend to be more socially acceptable, while those
who engage in role-playing communities tend to be viewed as outside the norm.
This is especially true of communities whose play cultures is deeply tied to
imagination, fiction and identity, such as “Trekkies” who engage in role-play
around the television series Star Trek. Like renfair participants of members of the
Burning Man festival, these play communities apply a high level of effort and
creativity to their play culture, often to the bewilderment of the population atlarge.
With the emergence of digital networks, whole new varieties of adult play
communities have begun to appear, enabled by global networks and increasingly
popular online games and virtual worlds. Some of these are extensions of nondigital forms of play, while others present offer entirely new play experiences
and playscapes. Networks enable these communities to grow at a significantly
faster pace, and significantly larger scale, than play communities that aren’t
connected online. Because they are typically geographically unconstrained, they
also allow play communities to form beyond national boundaries. These
phenomena allow for new and creative playgrounds to form, not only within
discrete networked play spaces, but also through “real-world” interventions,
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such as “alternate reality” and “big games,” “smart mobs,” and other forms of
play that bleed out into the real world.
Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village” to describe the shared
storytelling space of television. In a similar way, online games have created a
kind of “global playground” where people can now interact dynamically in real
time and build new and increasingly complex forms of play community. The
most common of these new global playgrounds is the “MMORPG,” the
“massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” in which players develop
roles derived from fantasy literature to engage in epic fictions. Others include
more open-ended “sandbox” style environments where players can create their
own homes and stage events. Between these two extremes are an array of
networked playgrounds in which a variety of play communities and emergent
social phenomena take shape.
This book’s purpose is to look at how these play communities are formed and
sustained, and in particular, to study the intersection between a play community
and the global playgrounds it inhabits. What is it about play environments
themselves that promote certain types of communities to form? How does their
design, governance, and ongoing management effect play communities? How do
players both leverage and subvert these playgrounds to their own ends?
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What happens with a play community develops such a strong commitment to its
collective relationships and identity that it transcends the very context of its
formation and begins to traverse into other playgrounds, building and
maintaining its own unique play culture?
Multiplayer Games: The “Next Big Thing” Since 3500 BC
While massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are lauded as the newest
and fastest- growing genre of computer games, they could as much be viewed as
a return to the natural order of things. In fact, the advent of single-player genres
as the central paradigm for games is an historical aberration of digital
technology. Prior to the introduction of the computer as a game-playing
platform, virtually all games played by hundreds of cultures for thousands of
years, with few exceptions, were multiplayer.
The earliest archaeological evidence includes the Egyptian Senet, dating back as
far as 3500 BEC, and the Mesopotamian game of Ur, whose evidence dates back
to c. 2600 BCE, or perhaps earlier. Other evidence reveals variations of the
popular African game mancala, typically played on carved wooden boards,
etched into the stone of ancient ruins in Eritrea and Ethiopia. The Chinese game
of Go, which eventually spread throughout Asia, is believed to have existed as
early as the Twenty-Third Century BCE.
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From a cultural perspective, games have a checkered past. According to historian
Marilyn Yalom, chess vacillated from high culture to low, from the game of
Kings to the source of social ills such as gambling, violence and even sex.
,Consequently, in each of its cultural contexts, from India to Islam to Western
Europe, there were various attempts to ban the game. (Yalom 2004). In her book,
Birth of the Chess Queen, she follows the migration and development of the game
of chess across epochs, cultures and geographies, tracing the emergence of the
queen as the dominant piece on the board to the time of Queen Isabella and the
Age of Discovery.
The commercial board game of the industrial revolution has a similarly
checkered history. Early board games of the 19th Century were surprisingly
didactic. Board games of this era arose in the socio-economic context of an
emerging middle class and its family “salon.” (Orbanes 2003) (Hofer 2003) The
first published in the U.S., Mansion of Happiness, was a didactic “serious game”
designed by a woman to teach children values such as prudence, charity and
thrift. The game used a “teetotum,” a kind of numbered top, because at the time,
dice were associated with gambling and vice. Other play practices of this era
included dollhouses, predominately for females, and the male equivalent, the
miniature war game, a historical tradition whose resurgence in the early 20th
Century can be traced to science fiction author H.G. Wells. (Wells 1913). This era
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also saw the growth of hobby culture as epitomized by the decidedly industrial
model railroad. Throughout this early period, board games were largely
informative and edifying, with series such as “The World’s Educator” and games
such as Authors, What’s His Name (a trivia game), and The Dissected Map of the
United States, a geography game. (Hofer 2003)
The first board game to be patented, designed by Lizzie Magie in 1904, was also
a “serious game” with an activist bent. Based on the economic theories of Henry
George, the game was designed to demonstrate how the rental system benefited
landlords and exploited tenants. With the rise of capitalist values, this simple
game, in which players encircled the board based on dice-rolls accumulating
property, eventually evolved into the pro-capitalist Monopoly. (Orbanes 2003)
The turn of the Twentieth Century saw a shift of direction with the publication of
games such as Finance, Banking Commerce, Railroad and Department Store, all
celebrating the emerging capitalist ethos of Industrial Revolution in America.
(Hofer 2003)
Throughout the first three quarters of the Twentieth Century, games continued
to be viewed as a social, parlor-room activity, although the television vied for the
attention of middle class families. It was not until the advent of computer games
that the single-player game emerged as the dominant cultural form, though the
earliest of these were multiplayer. Tennis for Two, a pong-like game developed in
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1958 and played on an oscilloscope, and and Space War, generally (although
mistakenly) credited as the first computer game, both had multiplayer
interaction. Even the Magnavox Odyssey, the first videogame console released in
1972, was envisioned as a two-player experience, merging the television and the
board game to create a new form of family entertainment. Early console games in
Japan were developed by card and toy companies, with the “Famicom,” later
called the Nintendo Entertainment System, leading the pack in the early 1980s.
Some early arcade games, such as Atari’s 1972 classic Pong, were also
multiplayer, but over time, perhaps due to the complexity of the technology,
perhaps due to the unavailability of networks, console and arcade games took a
decidedly more solitary trajectory. It is not until the introduction of computer
networks that we see a return to the dominant historical paradigm of multiplayer
games.
Networked Play and Virtual Communities
From the very inception of networks, people have tried to play on them. The
hacker ethos epitomized by early games such as Tennis for Two, Spacewar! (and
the MIT Model Railroad Club that spawned it), and the Odyssey (which began as
a speculative experiment in the R&D lab of a military contractor) has been the
primordial soup for games from the very beginning. As networks began to
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appear on college campuses, curious and adventurous researchers and students
experimented with their applications to play.
Today’s massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) descend from this
college-hacker tradition. Text-based MUDs (multi-user dungeons or domains)
and MOOs (multi-user object-oriented environments) emerged in the late 1970s
and early 1980s on nascent computer networks in the U.S. and Europe, most of
which were on university campuses. One of the earliest of these was MUD
(multi-user-dungeons), a roleplaying adventure game designed by Richard
Bartle and Roy Trubshaw at the University of Essex in 1978. (Bartle and
Trubshaw 1978) MUD was highly influenced by the tabletop roleplaying game
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) (Gygax and Arneson 1974), the J.R.R. Tolkien worlds,
and other popular fantasy literature of the day. The tabletop adventure game,
with its masculine themes of heroism and combat, its exaggerated gender roles,
and its male fantasies of the female body, tended to situate it primarily (though
not exclusively) as a male play practice. This, combined with limited computer
access, meant that the majority of these early games were designed by and
largely for male college students. Over time, the games integrated graphics and
eventually made the shift from a niche amusement for technology geeks to
mainstream entertainment. Not surprisingly, the games that descend from these
genres still tend to attract a demographic of young males in the 18-28 age range.
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These trends run a parallel trajectory with the development of military
simulation technologies, including military networks in the 1980s and 1990s such
as SimNet that can be viewed as the precursor to the more graphical games we
see today. A few experiments were conducted during the later end of this period
in applying these technologies to entertainment applications for theme parks and
attractions. These included BattleTech Centers, Walt Disney’s DisneyQuest
interactive gaming and virtual reality centers, and Iwerks Entertainment and
Evans & Sutherland’s Virtual Adventures, designed by the author, among others.
In the late 1990s. we see the merger of networks, virtual reality and massively
multiplayer role-playing drawn from MUD traditions, and graphics.
The next two sections will be devoted to defining the terrain of the MMOG, the
massively multiplayer game, and the MMOW, the massively multiplayer online
world, a more open-ended type of play space. Although these two tracks work in
parallel, their histories, roots and characteristics are significantly different to
warrant a discrete description of each.
The MMOG Boom
Over the past decade, MMOGs have emerged as the fastest growing sector of the
video game industry. Yet despite an explosion in the quantity of offerings, the
range of those offerings remains surprisingly narrow and continues to be deeply
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tied to their MUD origins. Games like Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Ages of
Camelot, the Korean mega-hits Lineage, Ragnarok and Maple Story, the American
blockbuster World of Warcraft, and more recently, The Lord of the Rings Online,
embody this role-playing, D&D-derived, Tolkienesque fantasy genre. All of these
revolve around a well-established set of conventions, each representing an
incremental evolution within a given set of narrative and gameplay frameworks.
More recently, also following in the heels of tabletop roleplaying, have been
science fiction-themed games such as Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside and Eve
Online. City of Heroes and its counterpart, City of Villains, stand out as being
unique, as roleplay takes place around superhero characters, although many of
the conventions of the game mechanic are borrowed from these other genres.
Recently, we have also seen the addition of pirate and gothic themes to the
MMOG repertoire.
There are several popular misconceptions that continue to plague the discourse
on MMOGs in industry and academia. These misconceptions often stem from a
combination of historical amnesia and U.S.-centric perceptions of the
marketplace. For instance, few even in the game industry are aware that the first
graphical MMOG to be published was Merdian 59. (REF) Developed by
Archetype Interactive and published by the now-defunct 3DO Studios in 1996,
Meridian 59 was released a year before Ultima Online, which is more often lauded
as the first. (REF) Meridian 59, like its antecedents, was highly influenced by text-
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based MUDs. Although it closed shortly after its launch, a small but ardent fan
base inspired designer Brian Green to re-launch the game in 2002, and as of this
writing, it operated as a small, independently owned MMOG. (REF: Indie Game
conference keynote)
Ultimately far more successful than Meridian, Ultima Online derived from the
popular Ultima single-player adventure role-playing series, designed by Richard
Garriott (Lord British). The Ultima series introduced a number of terms into the
MMOG lexicon, including popularizing the term “avatar,” and introducing the
concept of a “shard,” an instantiation of the game world, a method for
partitioning server space to prevent overloading. (FactCheck) While it was the
first big MMOG hit, Ultima’s subscription base peaked at 250,000, (FactCheck), a
relatively small audience by today’s video game standards.
EverQuest, (REF) published in 1999, eventually felled Ultima Online with a
whopping 750,000 players at its peak (FactCheck). Meanwhile, unbeknownst to
most Americans in both industry and academia, EverQuest (or “Ever Crack” as it
was colloquially termed) was being outstripped by the Korean offering, Lineage,
(REF) released a year earlier in Korea, which peaked at about 3 million
subscribers, four times the number of EverQuest. (FactCheck) World of Warcraft,
which launched in 2003 and reached ten million subscriptions (FactCheck) in
2008, has been generally and mistakenly believed to be the largest MMOG in the
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world. In fact, in 2008, the largest MMOG was another Korean game, fantasythemed side-scroller Maple Story, developed by Wizet. According to its publisher,
Nexon, Maple Story has over 72 million mostly tween subscriptions worldwide
(some of these may represent multiple accounts) as of this writing and boasts the
second best-selling content card in Target stores, after iTunes. (REF) Another
popular misconception is that game-based MMOGs are more popular and
marketable than open-ended virtual worlds. Maple Story’s somewhat astonishing
numbers are eclipsed by those of a social massively multiplayer online world
(MMOW) targeted to a similar demographic, Habbo Hotel, which had 89 million
subscriptions as of this writing. (REF)
Virtually all MMOG and MMOW publishers count demographics by the number
of “citizens,” avatars, or subscriber accounts, which does not necessarily
correlate to the actual number of players. Especially in games with free
subscriptions, many players who have subscriptions seldom if ever log on, while
the most regular players often have multiple accounts.
Nonetheless, these figures suggest a genre that is exploding, but even so,, the
repertoire on the gaming side is still relatively homogenous. Part of the
narrowness of appeal may arise not only from the themes and representations in
these genres, but also from the game mechanics. Most MMOGs, with a few
exceptions, are combat-based and work within a similar leveling structure to the
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earlier medieval-fantasy games derived from D&D, regardless of their themes.
Players select from a variety of classes (professions, such as hunter, mage or
warlock, or hero archetypes in City of Heroes) and races (typically fantasy races
such as elf or human, or, in the case of City of Heroes, origins, such as science,
mutation or technology) to determine the capabilities of their characters.
Players earn experience points by killing “enemies,” typically non-player
characters, but also other players with whom they can do combat in playerversus-player, or “PvP,” areas of the game. Players accumulate virtual currency
and gear, known as “loot,” from their kills, which can be utilized (armor or
healing potions, for example), sold for game currency to purchase appropriate
gear and even exchanged on the black market for real-world currency.
As players gain experience points, they “level” in the game. Leveling represents
an increase in both status and strength, the ability to fight higher-level enemies
and the ability to use new skills and special gear. Unlike first-person shooter
games, which entail actually aiming at targets, killing in MMOGs is generally
based on a statistical virtual dice throw, mimicking the polygonal dice used in
Dungeons & Dragons. The outcome of each battle is calculated based on the dice
throw in relation to the current level of both the player and the target. Players
can incur damage from the target in the process, which may result in a
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temporary death. Even games that depart from Tolkienesque fantasy themes
tend to borrow heavily from this stats-based style of game mechanics.
For the most part, these online roleplaying games require a fairly high time
commitment. Quests and missions can take as many as three to four hours or
more, depending on their difficulty level. And because of the relentless leveling
system, players who wish to maintain an ongoing play community must put in a
certain number of hours per week simply to keep up with their playmates. Most
research shows that the average figure is around 20 hours per week, (Seay,
Jerome, Sang Lee, and Kraut 2004) (Yee 2001-2008) a figure that is actually lower
than the roughly 30 hours per week the average American spends watching
television. (Holmes 2006) Hardcore players spend significantly more time ingame, in excess of 150 hours per week at the high end. (REF: Seay et al)
MMOGs have been incredibly successful in terms of promoting play
communities in various ways. There are generally two grouping mechanisms in
the more popular MMOG genres: a large, long-term group, typically called a
Guild, and a smaller, provisional group for pursuing specific quests and
instances, typically called a Party or Group. The former serves as a means for
players to form and sustain play communities over the long term. The latter is
comparable to a pick-up game in basketball, where players group for a finite
period of time to complete a specific quest or mission. Larger variations, the Raid
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Group, are typically formed for particularly challenging, high-level tasks. Guilds
and long-term groups can form around a variety of factors: they might include
real-life friends and family members, individuals or groups who have met in
other games, members of a larger online play community, or players who come
together in a specific game around a specific play philosophy. Groups dedicated
to a high level of achievement in the game, often measured by the high statistical
status of their members, are termed “uber-guilds.” Both other groups may
commit to low-pressure enjoyment of the game, just for fun. Groups can also
form around various real-world identities, such as Christian and Gay Guilds,
which are quite common. Members of the online game community “The Older
Gamers” have guilds in multiple games devoted to a promoting a more mature
style of gameplay, free from some of the classic social problems associated with
playing with younger players, including grief play, sexism and sexual
harassment, and contentious social interactions. (REF: Pearce)
Many play communities support their activities with out-of-game web sites and
social forums to help in defining community goals, forging relationships, and
planning events and activities. These are sometimes used to plan real-world
social gatherings, whether associated with fan conventions or organized by
individual groups.
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In addition to traditional MMOG genres, and often overlooked, are a few
independently produced virtual gaming environments that depart dramatically
from this mold. One striking example is New Medeon’s Whyville, an MMOG
devoted to science learning for kids that had about two and a half million
subscribers at the time of this writing, mostly tweens, 60% of whom are female.
REF) Puzzle Pirates, a game in which players collectively pilot a ship by playing
casual-style puzzle games, is another example of an alternative theme and game
genre that has done exceptionally well. (REF) Other pirate-themed games by
large publishers have emerged over the past year, including Pirates of the Burning
Sea, and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean MMOG. (REFS) Other genres are on the
horizon, such as the horror game World of Darkness, based on the popular “gothic
punk” tabletop series by White Wolf. Because online games are based on an
ongoing revenue and development model, rather than a single-product sale like
traditional PC or console games, smaller companies have been able to sustain
and grow these alternative virtual worlds and games, and even exploit the “long
tail” effect over time. (REF: Long Tail)
One of the games that falls into the alternative MMOG genre category is Uru:
Ages Beyond Myst, also known as Myst Online: Uru Live, the subject of this study.
Based on and set in the world of the popular single-player Myst series, Uru took
the spatial storytelling and puzzle-solving mechanics of the earlier games in the
series and added a multiplayer, cooperative component. As described in later
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chapters, Uru has no fighting, neither points nor levels, and no killing. As such,
and as we will find, it gave rise to a distinctively different play community than
games of the more traditional genres described above.
Understanding the conventions, genres and mechanics of MMOGs is important
to us in our study of emergence because it helps us to unpack why certain games
attract certain types of players with a proclivity towards certain game mechanics
and play styles.
MMOWs of the Late 20th Century
In parallel with the development of MMOGs has been the trajectory of MMOWs,
or massively multiplayer online virtual worlds. Initially, the open-ended textbased environments that prevailed in the early 1980s and 1990s were, like
multiplayer roleplaying games, rendered entirely with words. Unlike their game
counterparts, these worlds were open-ended and focused primarily on social
interaction and creativity.
The most famous of these is LambdaMOO, created by Pavel Curtis at
XeroxPARC in 1990, and perhaps the most-written about of the text-based
MMOWs. LambdaMOO was significant in that it allowed players a high level of
creative freedom to actually add onto and build the world, a tradition that was
later picked up by its graphical descendants.
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Somewhat surprisingly, the transition of MMOWs from text-based to graphicical
worlds preceded their MMOG counterparts by a decade. The first online
graphical world of this ilk was Habitat, a 2D social environment designed by
Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer for LucasFilm Games (later LucasArts) and
Fujitsu in 1985. Habitat launched on the Commodore 64 in 1986, and eventually
evolved into WorldsAway as part of the CompuServe online service in 1995.
Habitat was the first graphical user world to adopt the term “avatar” to describe
a player character in a virtual world. The mid-1990s saw a now-forgotten
blossoming and eventual decline of wide variety of 2- and 3-D graphical worlds.
The Palace, another 2D graphical chat environment, and Active Worlds, a primitive
3D environment, both launched in 1995, followed in 1996 by OnLive.
These two foundational worlds, Active Worlds and OnLive, have some significant
parallels with and foreshadow some of the design considerations of their 21st
Century descendents. Active Worlds, the oldest continuously running graphical
virtual world, was the first 3D world to promote the idea of user-created content.
It is without a doubt the precursor of Second Life, many of whose key features see
their seeds in its design. Active Worlds uses an ingeniously simple basic interface
that allows players to copy any item they see in the world, carry it to another
area in the world, and plop it down. (Figure-ActiveWorlds) Land ownership is
based on a model of squatting; as soon as you start building, the land became
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yours. The initial world, AlphaWorld followed a highly emergent pattern of
development from a dense core area to a sprawling suburb-like perimeter. The
aerial view looks strangely like areas of Southern California. (Figure) More
sophisticated players could also create models in other 3D programs and add
them into the world. Active Worlds also allowed players to create their own
original worlds from scratch for a fee. Many different worlds were created, and
Active Worlds has been used for everything from art projects, to distance learning,
to virtual conferences and trade shows.
OnLive, now DigitalSpace Traveler, had similar characteristics and could be
viewed as the predecessor to There.com. Like There.com, OnLive chose a path that
was more concerned with socializing than building, and had a more abstracted
avatar representation. While ActiveWorlds, like Second Life, was focused on
expression-through-creation, OnLive was focused on the expressiveness and
social interactions of the avatar. Players were represented as a 3D head (vs.
ActiveWorlds low polygon, full-body avatar), which allowed for two innovations:
facial expressions, and speech. OnLive was the first 3D virtual world to use voiceover-IP combined with avatar lip-synching, and a variety of expressive “emotes” that triggered avatar animations and facial expressions. Both of these
features are staples of There.com now. In addition, OnLive also allowed for playercreated spaces. The metaphor used by designers in developing this world was a
virtual cocktail party. (REF: DiPaola)
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During the Virtual Worlds boom of the mid-1990s, there were also a number of
other worlds that came into being, including Cybertown and Black Sun, later
Blaxxun (due to a trademark dispute with Sun Microsystems), named for the
company that built the metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s cyberspace classic, Snow
Crash. (REF) There were many more worlds, as well as virtual world-building
tools and technologies such as VRML (virtual reality markup language), a lowbandwidth solution to sending 3D graphics over the Internet. For the more
technically inclined, in might be of interest that VRML accomplished this using
primitives, geometric shapes, rather than the traditional computer graphics
technique of polygons; this is the same 3D consruction method that is currently
used in Second Life.
This mid-nineties metaverse boom also gave rise to companies such as Construct,
which designed virtual architecture and characters for 3D worlds, and Protozoa,
which specialized in motion capture animation. Most of the companies that came
and went during this period were located within a few miles of what later
became the San Francisco headquarters of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life.
Similarly, there are now entire companies that service the design and production
needs of a rapidly growing Second Life population.
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These histories are significant for two reasons. First, in the grand tradition of
digital media entrepreneurialism, historical amnesia prevails among today’s
virtual world-builders. Second, these primeval virtual worlds struggled with
many of the same design, technical and sociological issues as their descendents a
decade later. MMOWs continue to wrestle with seemingly simple problems:
bandwidth and server processing on the network side; interface, tools and
graphics rendering on the client (user computer) side; and social and cultural
aspects of design on the player side. They have evolved well past their
antecedents in terms of cultures and economics, but today’s MMOW designers
and researchers alike would do well to investigate their historical roots, and
might be surprised to find that very similar patterns emerged in the virtual
worlds of the late 20th Century.
Communities of Research: Traditions in Game Studies
The study of online play spaces has lagged behind other related disciplines in the
fields of Internet Studies and Computer-Mediated Communication. As early as
1995, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, an online academic journal,
had a special issue on “Play and Performance,” but the coverage of networked
play environments has been sparse, with the notable exception of LambdaMOO.
Of all the early text-based worlds, LambdaMOO is perhaps the most written
about, and uniquely, from three different perspectives: Jennifer Mnookin’s
foundational scholarly analysis of the emergence of law in the virtual world,
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Pavel Curtis’ perspective of the practitioner/creator, and Julian Dibbell’s famous
excursions as perhaps the first “embedded” journalist in a virtual world. (REFS)
As the Internet became more public and its uses multiplied throughout the 1990s,
scholarly research on a vast array of social applications of networks grew. While
communities of interest, communities of practice and computer-supported
cooperative work have all been recognized among scholars as legitimate research
domains since the mid 1980s, games remained largely unattended to within
Internet Studies. A few pioneering scholars and authors who covered this
territory before it became a discipline, notably Taylor, Klastrup, Damer, DiPaola
and Book, continue to play a leadership role in the emerging study of MMOGs
and virtual worlds. name them here. (REFS: Klastrup, Taylor)
“Game Studies,” the academic study of computer games, is a relatively new
discipline devoted to a wide range of research questions.i Game studies embraces
a wide array of research angles and scholarly disciplines encompassing the
expressive qualities of computational media (Murray 1997), the critical analysis
of “ergodic,” or participatory, texts (Aarseth 1997), the formal structure of games
(Juul 2005) (Salen and Zimmerman 2004) (other taxonomies), the relationship
between games and narrative (Ryan 2001(Pearce 2004)), and the behavioral and
psychological aspects of gameplay. (Mäyrä and Ermi 2005) As such, it might be
more accurately defined as an “interdiscipline.”
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And while it is true that the study of digital games research is a relatively recent
phenomenon, the broader topic of games research as an academic discipline is
not new. Most video game scholars are aware of the work of Huizinga, Caillois
and Sutton-Smith, but they may not be as familiar with the extensive body of
sociological and anthropological research that predates “Game Studies” as we
know it today. Indeed, most scholars of analog play and games came from
cultural disciplines, predominately anthropology and sociology, as well as
behavioral and developmental psychology. Many were interested in the
implications of play and games as a defining characteristic of human culture.
Johan Huizinga, whose seminal monograph on games Homo Ludens (Huizinga
1950) is now a canonical text for computer game designers and researchers, was a
Dutch cultural historian. Sub-titled, “the play element in culture,” his treatise is
an exhaustive study of the many facets of play in human society throughout
history. Its follow-up, Man, Play and Games, by Roger Caillois, a scholar of literary
theory and sociology, builds on Huizinga to develop a more cohesive theory of
play and play genres. (Caillois 1961),
Both of these volumes have become deservedly influential in the field of digital
Game Studies, although there has been a reluctance to critique them, producing
the unfortunate side effect that game studies has inherited some of their flaws as
well as their strengths. Both books suffer from a predictable (perhaps historically
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inevitable) disregard for female play styles and culture, a point that is made
transparent by their titles: Man, the Player and Man, Play and Games. Huizinga
explores every conceivable aspect of male human culture through a “ludic”
(play-oriented) lens, specifically focusing on agonistic play and citing concepts
such as virility and, “frenzied megolamania,” and speaks of the way men
compete for superiority. (REF; page #) He makes only passing reference to girls’
play activities, such as dress-up and doll play, and even goes so far as to suggest
that baroque fashion originated with men and was co-opted by women.
(Huizinga 1950) Caillois repeatedly asserts, somewhat dismissively, that girls’
play is, of course, entirely devoted to rehearsal for motherhood. (Caillois 1961)
REF: page # (For a feminist theory of game design, see Mary Flanagan’s
Playculture.) (REF) Brian Sutton-Smith, also highly regarded among digital game
scholars, has written on games since the 1970s and provided us with a more
rigorous, more nuanced picture of the various aspects of play from an
anthropological, sociological and behavioral perspective. (Sutton-Smith 1997)
But these texts are not isolated phenomena. The 1970s and 1980s saw a
significant growth in the discussion of games and play as socio-cultural practice.
Sutton-Smith’s influence here can be seen beyond his own work, as the founder
of the academic journal Play & Culture. Among its contributors was Gregory
Bateson (husband of Margaret Mead) who famously put forth his “Theory of
Play and Fantasy,” describing the astonishing ability of both animals and
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humans to distinguish between real and play fighting. (Bateson 1972). Also
included are anthropologists Robert Schechner and Victor Turner, both of whom
embraced games and play within the rubric of theatre, performance and ritual,
and introduced useful concepts that have significance to digital game studies.
Schechner himself notes the marginalized position of play, pointing out that “In
the West, play is a rotten category tainted by unreality, inauthenticity, duplicity,
make-believe, looseness, fooling around, and inconsequentiality.” (Schechner
1988b) (REF: page #) Victor Turner introduced the concepts of the liminal space
of ritual and liminal space, more commonly associated with entertainment.
(Turner 1982) Developmental psychologists such as Piaget and Winnicott
explored the importance of play and make-believe in early childhood
development and learning. The former found that children perceive the world
differently through different phases of play, and also that discovery was a vital
part of both play and learning. (Piaget 1962) Both Winnicot, like Schechner, also
explored the notion of make-believe characters and play identity, observing that
both children at-play and actors in performance contexts inhabited a character
that was “not me” and “not not me.” (Winnicott 1971) (Schechner 1988b) Early
childhood development expert Maria Montessori also spawned an entirely
school system based on the observation that children learn while playing
through a process of experimentation and discovery. (REF: Montessori)
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As far back as the 1960s, sociologists Iona and Peter Opie conducted a
comprehensive ethnographic investigation of street and playground games,
mapping popular street games and their variants throughout different regions of
Britain. (Opie and Opie 1969) There are also some independent game writers
who might be characterized as “game philosophers,” such as Bernard Suits,
Bernie DeKoven (DeKoven 1978; Suits 1978), and the founders of the “New
Games” movement in the 1970s, whose ranks included Stewart Brand, also
known for founding the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL, one of the oldest
continuously running online communities in the U.S. (Brand 1972; Fluegelman
1976)
The Return of Player-Centric Digital Game Studies
Pre-digital research trajectories were principally concerned with the act of play as
a psycho- or socio-cultural phenomenon, rather than with its artifacts. It is not
until we enter the realm of the digital that the game “object” becomes the
prevalent focus of scholarly attention. Ermi and Mäyrä have pointed out that this
tendency towards what might be considered an “object-orientation” within game
studies is inherited from its the disciplinary origins in art, literary theory, film
and media studies, disciplines primarily occupied with the critical analysis of
cultural artifacts. (Mäyrä and Ermi 2005) This has been abetted by the prevalence
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of single-player digital games, further drawing the focus toward the game and
away from the player.
In object-centric games research, the primary focus of study has been the game as
a cultural artifact or artwork in the tradition of critical theory and comparative
media studies, where the “text” and “conventions” of the media content are
analyzed in detail. (Aarseth 1997; Murray 1997) (REFS) Game scholars are in
general agreement that it is necessary to play games in order to perform such
analyses (Aarseth 2003; Konzack 2002); however, the focus has tended to be on
the game, rather than the player or play process. As a result, this type of research
tends to carry with it the implication of a generic player whose desires are
uniform and consistent with that of the researcher. Because this generic player is
also consistent with the prevalent definition of the “market” for computer games
(generally young, white and male), with a few exceptions, games research has
engaged in little critique of the “normative” player type. Issues of games and
gender, which were addressed in the early years of games studies, (Cassell and
Jenkins 1998) are being taken up again, highlighting the continuing lack of
equitable labor representation and the prevalence of alienating stereotypes, in
terms of both gender and race. (Kafai, Heeter, Denner, and Sun 2008) Artist and
author Mary Flanagan has called for feminist game design, an approach which I
have also taken up in my work with the Ludica women’s game collective. (Fron,
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Fullerton, and Morie 2007) (Fullerton, Morie, and Pearce 2007) (Fron, Fullerton,
Morie, and Pearce 2008) (REF: Flanagan)
Although game designers often speak of “gameplay” as the elusive quality that
makes a game “fun,” they, too, often fail to distinguish between different types of
players. Many take as normative a player who typically has the same
characteristics and play preferences as the designers themselves. (Crawford 1984)
With some exceptions, game designers tend to use the word “fun” in an equally
generic sense, as if the experience of “fun” were the same for all people (Falstein
2004). (REF: Koster?) Others argue that “fun” is overused, misleading, an
oversimplification, or difficult to quantify. (REF) Nonetheless, many of these
writers continue to work with the unstated assumption that a “one size fits all”
approach can be used in evaluating the success of gameplay (Crawford 2003;
LeBlanc 1999; LeBlanc 2000). (REF) The one place where some designers begin to
articulate distinct player styles and play preferences is in the discussion of
MMOGs, which we shall address momentarily. (REFs: Bartle, Koster???) Thus in
both game studies and game design, the game itself (and by association its
designers) have taken a privileged position over the player, and there has been a
notable absence of critique of this one-sided approach.
This is not to say that there has been a complete absence of player-centric
considerations in either game design or research; however, there has been a
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notable imbalance. With the growth of the study of multiplayer computer games,
we have begun to see a return to the player-centric approach more typical of predigital games research, a tradition that concerns itself with the individual and
social act of playing, the practice of play itself. (REF: Flanagan, Steinkeueler,
Taylor) (PEARCE: MediaTerra, and others at that conference.) Play practice can
be studied from a variety of scales and perspectives, ranging from the
individual’s phenomenological, psychological or cognitive experience of play to
behavioral aspects of play to larger patterns of social interaction and fan culture,
including productive, subversive, and grief play. (REFS: Pearce, Salen?,
Consalvo, Bainbridge)
Player-centric research inevitably converges with game-centric research, as Game
Studies continues to encounter the ways in which game artifacts are activated
and transformed through play practice. Even researchers who previously
favored a game-centric approach have also begun to integrate the player into
their discourse. (REF: Aarseth, Juul) At the same time, player-centric researchers
may sometimes err on the side of underemphasizing the importance of software
design itself when analyzing play patterns and styles. Understanding this
convergence involves unpacking the ways in which designer values, aesthetics
and agendas dictate affordances, representation and gameplay which influence
play patterns and behavior. (Taylor 2003a)
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The study of massively multiplayer games is the fastest-growing branch of Game
Studies in part because the MMOG is the fastest growing genre of commercial
computer games. Even within this relatively narrow scope, we see a diverse
array of research topics and methods that include studies of player psychology
(Yee 2001), demographics and player segmentation, (Yee 2001-2008) (Seay,
Jerome, Sang Lee, and Kraut 2004) the economies of fictional worlds (Castronova
2001), the relationship between learning, cognition and MMOGs (Steinkuehler
2004b; Steinkuehler and Squire 2006) (Ref: Gee) , critiques of power structures
and representation (Taylor 2002; Taylor 2003a), social and cultural aspects of
online gaming (Lin, Sun, and Hong-Hong 2003; Taylor and Jakobsson 2003;
Whang and Chang 2004; Whang and Kim 2005) (Taylor 2006) (Steinkuehler and
Squire 2006) (Duchenaut and Moore 2004; Duchenaut, Moore, and Nickell 2004),
gender play preferences (Kerr 2003; Taylor 2003b) governance and law in online
games (Lastowka and Hunter 2003; Reynolds 2002) (Castronova 2005) (Taylor
2002), their educational qualities and discursive practices (Steinkuehler 2004a;
Steinkuehler 2004b) (REFS), as well as poetics and typologies of virtual worlds.
Klastrup 2003a; Klastrup 2003b) (Aarseth, Smedstad, and Sunnanå 2003; Klastrup
2003a; Klastrup 2003b) (Konzack 2006) (FIX REFS) Game designers have also
contributed to the canon of knowledge in this area, and it is one of the few
subsets of games studies where practitioners and scholars have engaged in an
ongoing dialog. (REFS: Koster, Mulligan, Bartle, etc.) Traditional anthropologists
have applied the tools of their trade to the study of virtual worlds, most notably
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Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life. (REF) At the cutting edge have also
been journalists, particularly Julian Dibbell, whose “A Rape in Cyberspace” is
now considered an MMOG-studies classic, Peter Ludlow, who was evicted from
The Sims Online for his audacious exposés on the game’s mob and prostitution
cultures, as well as Wagner James Au, who has spent several years as an
embedded journalist in Second Life, among others. (REFS)
Historically, the study of MMOGs has inevitably been delimited by what the
game industry has offered. Consequentially, much of MMOG research to-date
has been highly genre- and gender-specific. The vast majority of foundational
research focused on medieval fantasy-themed role-playing games, with the
majority of early research focusing on a single game, EverQuest, and, more
recently, World of Warcraft. The lack of availability of other genres has made such
a focus unavoidable. In addition, there is a natural tendency to gravitate toward
games that are perceived to have the largest player population.
These games follow a consistent trajectory of conventions and themes, which
limit not only their formal elements, but also their audiences. While the total
quantity of players for MMOGs in general and medieval fantasy-themed games
in particular continues to grow, the demographic mix for the traditional statisticsbased roleplaying game remains relatively consistent. Even though claims
continue to be made that MMOGs are attracting more and more women,
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virtually all of the quantitative research corroborates the finding that, in a typical
MMOG, between 10% and 20% of the audience are female players who tend to be
slightly older than their male counterparts, regardless of the overall number.
Thus, while it is correct to say there are more women playing these games, there
are also more males playing them, and women still represent a relatively small
percentage of the overall audience. Although the median age seems to
broadening in both directions (MapleStory is targeted to a younger audience, for
instance), most studies show a bell-curve that peaks somewhere between 18 and
28 and tapers off at the mid-thirties. (Castronova 2001; Seay, Jerome, Sang Lee,
and Kraut 2004; Yee 2001) We often see a spike between 18 and 22, the
implication being that males of college age (coincidentally, the founders of this
genre), as well as recent grads, remain the primary audience for traditional
MMOGs.
Because the MMOG landscape has been dominated by a narrow range of both
genres and demographics, researchers have somewhat unwittingly arrived at
generalizations about MMOGs that say more about particular game genres and
their players than they do about MMOGs in general. Probably the best example
of this is the ongoing effort to create a refined taxonomy of MMOG players.
Richard Bartle, designer of the original MUD game, has laid out a detailed player
taxonomy that has been cited extensively by researchers and designers in
describing play styles. Bartle’s types of Achiever, Killer, Socializer, and Explorer
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hold up in many instances. However, some have argued that they are overly
simplistic and have attempted to test his assumptions against empirical research,
developing more multi-dimensional approaches to player types. (REF) However,
many of these studies continue to focus on the same game genres. There is a tacit
assumption that play style is somehow independent of the game and its
affordances. Rather, I would argue that Bartle’s taxonomies are a “self-fulfilling
prophecy,” with play styles and preferences that emerge largely from the
properties of the game itself. Indeed, Bartle never claimed that this typology
should be applied to all MMOGs, merely to games after the fashion of the MUD
he designed.
Bartle’s taxonomy exposes several weaknesses of the games themselves, even
when applied within its intended genre. Although the four types are clearly
identified, combat-based MMOGs almost without exception favor the Killer and
Achiever types over the Explorer and Socializer. Players receive a fraction of the
points for discovering new lands as they do for killing monsters, and socializing
is generally rewarded indirectly through teamwork, and in some cases is
penalized. (Some games, such as Lineage, gave players increased rejuvenation
points for resting in pubs, thereby providing a nominal reward for socializing.)
In addition, Bartle’s definition of Achievement is primarily level-based, and does
not take into account players within the standard roleplaying genres who seek
economic achievement, a growing motivator in MMOGs and virtual worlds with
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dynamic economies. In games where puzzle-solving is the primary feature of
gameplay, such as Puzzle Pirates (James 2001-2006) or Uru: Ages Beyond Myst
(Miller 2003), the subject of this book, Bartle’s types fall apart. His Killer type, for
example, has no relevance in games that have no killing, such as Uru. More
recently, Bartle introduced a more generalized classification of game world types,
which he describes as “Alice,” the unstructured exploratory style of play, and
“Dorothy,” the more linear, goal-oriented style of play. These classifications,
which are much broader than his earlier taxonomy, provide perhaps
generalizable applications across a wide variety of MMOG genres. (REF)
MMOGs vs. MMOWs
One of the fundamental questions posed by these play spaces is the distinction
between “games” and “virtual worlds.” This discourse comes out of a longstanding debate among both game developers and games scholars about what is
and is not a game. Due to early dueling taxonomies in game studies, varying
definitions have yet to be resolved in any official, scholarly sense. Among game
designers and critics in the game industry, there tends to be a notable bias
against defining as games play experiences that lack a goal or a win state. Hence,
hugely popular single-player games such as The Sims and Animal Crossing are
frequently critiqued as “not being games.” This may also be an encoded means
of marginalizing game patterns that are favored by females. (REF: Ludica)
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Now that we have seen some examples of each, it is useful to discuss the
commonalities and distinctions and similarities between them. A detailed
description of the games and virtual worlds covered in the Uru study is
provided within the monograph. However, here we shall attempt to provide
more general definitions and ground them in some of our current
understandings about the role of virtual worlds in structured and unstructured
play.
While they are very distinct in your underlying structures, MMOGs and
MMOWs share a number of defining characteristics. Both can be described as
“persistent virtual worlds,” a term I will use generically (along with “virtual
worlds”) to encompass both categories. Thus categorized, virtual worlds can be
defined as entirely digital, networked environments that simulate threedimensional space and have their own sets of intrinsic rules, “natural” and
“man-made” laws, narratives and aesthetic style (also known by practitioners as
“look and feel.”) The term “persistent” means that players create an identity that
remains the same and is cumulative each time they log into the world, and which
therefore develops over time. This distinguishes them from first-person shooter
games, for instance, which are typically smaller in size and do not possess the
quality of persistence. This is also the distinguishing characteristic of virtual
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worlds that predisposes them to emergence. Emergence, by definition, requires
persistence, since one of its underlying characteristics is change over time.
Spatial Media and Spatial Literacy
The most fundamental characteristic shared by MMOGs and MMOWs is their
spatiality. Janet Murray introduced “spatial” as one of the four unique properties
of computational media in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), along with
“participatory,” “encyclopedic,” and “procedural.” Indeed MMOGs and virtual
worlds could be characterized as possessing all of these qualities. The application
of participatory (interactive) and procedural (rule-based) characteristics to
MMOGs and MMOWs is obvious, but most of these worlds are also undergirded
by massively elaborate databases and augmented by a wide array of extra-virtual
web-based resources, such as forums and knowledge bases, that support players
in-world activities.
“Spatial media” is a term I’ve adopted to describe digital environments whose
primary characteristic is their spatiality. In The Interactive Book, I elaborated on
the notion of spatial media by describing architecture as a storytelling medium
and discussing the craft of creating “narrative environments” (Pearce 1997), what
Norman Klein has characterized as “scripted spaces.” (Klein 2003). I have also
argued that due to the predominately spatial nature of contemporary video
games (whether real-time 3D, top-down, or isometric), they are more closely
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aligned to architectural forms of entertainment and communication (e.g., cave
paintings, cathedrals, and theme parks) then they are to the other media to which
they are more commonly compared. (Pearce 2002b) (Pearce 2007)
Other scholars have also written about the spatial characteristics of games, most
notably: Henry Jenkins’ famous essay on “Games as gendered play space” in
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (Jenkins 1998); Espen
Aarseth’s critical theory analysis of the relationship of play to space (Aarseth
2000) and his typology of virtual space, with Smedstad and Sunnanå (Aarseth,
Smedstad, and Sunnanå 2003); and Marie-Laure Ryan’s discussion of Narrative as
Virtual Reality, in which she explores the ways in which all narratives possess
some core properties of spatiality. Nitsche has also argued that in video games,
time and space are integrally related (Nitsche 2007). In Game Zone, Iacovoni
explores the relationship between game space and urban space. (REF 2004) More
recently, von Borries, et al have edited a volume of scholarly articles on the topic
of games architecture, and urban space that explores a number of issues related
to game-space in depth. (von Borries, Walz, and Böttger 2007) The topic of game
space and gender is also covered in some of my more recent writing with my
collaborators in Ludica (Fullerton, Morie, and Pearce 2007).
Perhaps the most extensive study of spatiality in virtual worlds is Lisbeth
Klastrup’s writings on “the poetics of virtual worlds.” In these, Klastrup
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attempts to point the way, after Aristotle, to a deeper understanding of the
properties and conventions of these spatial environments as a form of cultural
expression and production, including the defining characteristic of “worldness.”
Klastrup attempts to define “worldness” as the elements of a game design that
make it believable and immersive. (Klastrup 2003a; Klastrup 2003b) From a
design perspective, this definition is a bit vague for our purposes. The sense of
“worldness” is difficult to pin down, but we might define it as a sense of
coherence, completeness and consistency within the world’s environment, its
aesthetics and its rules. In a Tolkien world, for instance, the introduction of a
cyborg or a space whip would disrupt the sense of worldness. Thus, to maintain
a sense of worldness, a virtual world must create a vocabulary, a culture, and a
narrative framework that is extensible, sustainable, and robust. A sense of
worldness can also exist in both structured game worlds and unstructured social
worlds. A case in point would be There.com, which has a very distinctive aesthetic
that prevails throughout the world, and a consistent set of parameters about
things like vehicular travel and fashion design affordances. In Second Life, the
sense of worldness is more one of décollage, where incongruous juxtapositions
are a natural part of the landscape and culture.
The illusion of three-dimensional space creates affordances for a mode of
nonlinearity with which most people will be naturally familiar, as spatial
navigation exploits the intuitive metaphor of navigation through the physical
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world. Nonetheless, this translation from three-dimensional reality to the illusion
of navigable three-dimensional space requires the establishment of a set of
conventions as a means of understanding or “reading” techniques of threedimensional visual representation and interaction. Just as audiences had to learn
how to see films as two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional timebased events, players of online virtual worlds must learn how to both interpret
and interact with a medium whose primary aim is to immerse them in the
illusion of a three-dimensional space. Films are unreadable by those not
acculturated to the conventions for interpreting events in time-based media, such
as time compression, montage, flashbacks, establishing shots, close-ups, and
reverse-POV. Similarly, players of three-dimensional games and virtual worlds
must become acculturated to conventions of spatial media. They must develop a
sense of “spatial literacy.”
Conventions of spatial media concern themselves with both representation and
navigation and are largely challenged by the fact that the computer screen is in
fact a two-dimensional dynamic surface. Traditional immersive VR attempts to
address this problem with elaborate body gear, including motion sensors, stereo
displays, and binaural audio. In PC games, the classic convention is the almostuniversal paradigm of using arrow keys to navigate through a virtual world, or
the “point and click” method of pointing to the location to which you want to go.
In console games, manipulation of a joystick is the most common method of
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navigation. The use of forced perspective, although quite common in
contemporary virtual worlds, is not a foregone conclusion and was preceded by
a variety of tricks to compensate for earlier computers’ poor graphics processing
capabilities. Methods such as a fixed, isometric view (the perspective used in the
original versions of Sim City, The Sims, and Civilization) and virtual sets on which
sprites are overlaid onto a static background (games like Blade Runner and Grim
Fandango) are just a few of the conventions that were developed to help enhance
the players’ sense of dimensionality. [Figure]
A key set of conventions concern the player’s relationship to the space: am I a God
(or Goddess) overlooking a simulated environment, as with games like
Civilization and Sim City? Am I immersed in a first-person viewpoint, as in a firstperson shooter like Half-Life or Unreal? Or is my presence in the world
represented by an avatar, which I and everyone else can see, such as is the case in
most MMOGs and MMOWs? These and other properties of virtual worlds
require players to possess some measure of “spatial literacy,” which enables
them to engage in these worlds in a seemingly intuitive way. This so-called
“intuitive” interaction is typically learned and adopted, as anyone who has
fumbled around with a clumsy and opaque interface when learning a firstperson shooter or virtual world will appreciate.
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In the case of MMOGs, and in particular, as we shall soon see, within Uru,
understanding the conventions of space and of spatial storytelling is particularly
integral to gameplay. Typical MMOG quests often take players across continents
of a virtual world, and many times quests are merely a McGuffin to lure players
into another part of the world. A significant percentage of the effort in such
games is applied to learning the layout and cultural nuances of the world.
Understanding the properties of different areas can be a matter of life and death
when entering an area populated by hostile enemies or outside of one’s own
level capabilities. Uru, and all Myst game, uses an elaborately complex set of
storytelling and navigation conventions that require players to adopt a particular
type of spatial literacy in order to understand, navigation, agency and narrative
within the world.
Common Characteristics of Persistent Virtual Worlds
Regardless of whether a virtual world is classified as a “game,” a “metaverse,” or
merely a “social world,” they all seem to share the following key characteristics:

Persistent: Identities, structures and objects remain the world and evolve
over time; the world remains “on” at all times and actions within it are
cumulative.
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
Inhabitable: The world is inhabitable, meaning one may enter the world
and live inside it. Marie-Laure Ryan points out that this is a distinguishing
characteristic from literature and most other media in general. (REF)

Populous: A virtual world is by definition a social world; this is one of its
distinguishing characteristics from most immersive virtual reality
applications, which are largely single-user experiences. Thus, they can be
inhabited in real time, simultaneously or asynchronously, by a large
population of users. While the population does not have to be massive in
all virtual worlds, those with the extra M, such as MMOGs and MMOWs,
are by definition, massive: populated by large numbers of people,
typically in the tens to hundres of thousands or even millions.

Maintain Persistent Representation/Identities: All virtual worlds include
player representations, also known as avatars, which are persistent and
which also evolve over time. One of the key properties of these worlds is
that the avatar name is fixed: while you may be able to change your
appearance or other aspects of your character, your avatar name is
primarily identifier, your virtual fingerprint.

Contiguous: A virtual world is typically geographically contiguous, and
possesses a sense of spatial continuity, or a reasonable premise for
breaking that continuity. Games sometimes use the premise of an
“instance,” in which a certain part of the world is presented to a selected
group of players for a quest or mission. However, even instances typically
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have some physical relationship to other elements in the world. In some
worlds, areas can be conceptually contiguous through a fictional
construct, such as the linking book in the case of Myst games, or
interplanetary travel in a science fiction games. They may also be
contiguous through scale shifts, such as the tiny room a player build
inside a television in LambdaMoo.

Explorable: The contiguous space of virtual worlds also makes them
explorable; players may go wherever they want, although their
movements may be constrained by their level or status in the world, or by
available transportation. Traversing the world can sometimes be
challenging or involve complex mechanisms. Furthermore, exploration is
often “real time” so that the time it takes to move from place to place is
directly related to the distance traveled. Unlike films, which use time
compression to remove the boring stretches of story or distance, in virtual
world, travel happens in real time. Transportation modes can be used to
make exploration more efficient or even more scenic. In World of Warcraft,
players must walk for sometimes hours to get from one area of the world
to another. Obtaining a mount at a higher level significantly shortens
travel duration. “Flight points” throughout the world allow players to fly
between fixed locations on rented creatures, while viewing areas of the
world below them. Players can also take a subway train between the main
Human and Dwarf cities in the world. Travel between continents is done
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by boat. In the original Lineage, there was no compression to sea travel;
you sat on the boat for the entire duration of the passage. World of Warcraft
has introduced time compression to shorten the duration of what is
typically a fairly uneventful trip. Most virtual worlds also use portals of
some kind. Myst games use the construct of the “linking book” that takes
players between game levels, some of which may be geographically
connected. In role-playing games, teleports can be earned as a spell or
through collecting a special rune or scroll. In social MMOWs, players can
typically teleport at will and even summon friends directly to their
location.

Worldness: A sense of coherence, completeness and consistency within the
world’s environment, aesthetics and rules. To maintain a sense of
worldness, a virtual world must create a vocabulary, a culture, and a
narrative framework that is extensible, sustainable, and robust. To create a
sense of worldness, it is important that every accessible location in the
world be accounted for, in order to create the sense of contiguous,
explorable space. Indeed, he very mechanisms of exploration, as described
above, are elements of worldness. One would not, for instance, expect to
see a space ship in a Tolkien-inspired world, or an elf in a pirate world.
Worldness can also be characterized by what the attractions industry calls
“theming.”
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All of these characteristics transcend genres and can be applied across anything
that is classified as a virtual world whether it is an MMOG or an MMOW. The
next section presents a particular approach to making distinctions between these
two sub-genres of virtual world.
Ludic vs. Paidiac Worlds
It would be possible to generate an entire PhD thesis on the definition of the
word “game.” Many have indeed attempted to define this term in detail, and the
existing bodies of scholarship possess a wealth of game taxonomies that attempt
to present the fundamental resolution of what is not and is not a “game.” (REFS)
While these arguments and their resolution are not within the scope of this book,
because this study includes virtual worlds that are both games and clearly “not
games” by anyone’s definition, it is helpful to articulate the distinctions and
similarities, especially where they relate to emergent processes.
It might be helpful to begin with a generally accepted definition of play. We have
already introduced Johan Huizinga, considered the father of “ludology” (the
study of play), who defines the formal characteristics of play as:
…a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not
serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an
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activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It
proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules
in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to
surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common
world by disguise or other means. (Huizinga 1950). (pp.#)
For the purposes of this study, this definition is serviceable, though I shall argue
later against the assertion that “no profit can be gained by it;” this point was later
expanded on by Caillois who argues that play is "an occasion of pure waste:
waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money." (REF: Caillois, p#)
The notion of a game standing ”outside ordinary life” is central, and games are
also frequently characterized taking place within a “magic circle,” or a play
frame, in which participants have arrive at a mutual agreement to put aside
everyday rules and social agreements for the time being to abide by a shared set
of constructed rules, although these rules can and often are subverted or bent in
the process. This “magic circle” can be a completely amorphous, abstract
construct, as adopted by children in a street or playground, can be constrained
by a ritual framework or context, such as Mardi Gras, can be defined by a
“boundary object” of some sort, such as a ball (REF: Star and Greisemer), or can
be encircled by physical or mediated boundaries, such as a sports field, a game
board, or an online game or virtual world.
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Caillois elaborates on Huizinga’s points within his own definition, describing
play as:
1) Free (not obligatory), 2) Separate (circumscribed within the limits of time and
space), 3) Uncertain (outcomes are not determined in advance), 4) Unproductive,
5) Governed by rules, and 6) Make-believe (a ‘second reality’ or ‘free unreality’.)
(REF, p.#)
While the universal applicability of these six qualities to all play activity is
debatable, they provide a suitable starting point for a discussion of MMOGs and
MMOWs. The exceptions that are countered by the outcomes of this study are 2,
which suggests that games must be cut off from the “real world” or indeed from
other games, and 4, the assertion that play is inherently unproductive.
As noted earlier, both Huizinga and Caillois are men of their eras in that they
tend to trivialize or even ignore female play practices. Huizinga in particular
focuses on goal-oriented, “agonistic” (or competitive) play forms. However,
Caillois mitigates this somewhat by introducing the concept of paidia, an openended play form that does not necessarily require a goal, competitive framework
or even rules. The paidia concept embraces a wider and more diverse range of
play styles than Huizinga’s narrow ludic notion of agonistic play, which is
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debate-, combat-, and legislature-heavy, thus highly androcentric. With this
caveat, these two definitions combined with Caillois’ paidia concept provide us
with a broad and adequate starting point from which to analyze both MMOGs
and MMOWs as play spaces whose primary function is to create an engaging
context for social play within an imaginary or “virtual” world.
Drawing from the aforementioned, and using a hybrid of several derivative
definitions, most games researchers seem to agree that a game is a formal system
for structured play constrained by a set of rules that prescribe the means of
achieving a specified goal. (REF: Salen & Zimmerman?, Suits, Pearce) Bernard
Suits humorously but accurately characterizes games as the most deliberately
inefficient means of performing a task. (REF: Suits 1967) From here, debate takes
over. Must a game’s goal be definitive? Must there be a state which represents
the completion of the goal? Must the outcome of gameplay produce a winner?
Must a game’s goal or even its rules be articulated at the start of play, or can they
be discovered through the process of gameplay?
These questions become particularly contentious in the context of MMOGs, most
of whose goals and rules are seldom explicitly stated up front. Moreover, the
goal of such games is typically based on the open-ended, though linear, objective
of “leveling.” This consists of increasing the numerical/statistical values
associated with a player’s experience and skills in the game, with no conclusive
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state of winning or losing, although there may be provisional micro-win/lose
states associated with a particular quest or task. Players of MMOGs, for instance,
are engaged in a constant cycle of death and resurrection, but few of these games
possess the property of “perma-death,” a permanent lose in the game. In fact,
losing or even winning are anathema to most MMOGs. Because they are
subscription-based, they rely on an economic formula that precludes the closure
that is typically associated with “winning” or “losing” in traditional games, be
they analog or digital.
MMOGs can also contain individual goals that differ from the main goals,
player- or role- or group-specific goals, as well as “one-off” missions or quests.
Players can and do often augment the prescribed goals with meta-goals of their
own, such as becoming a successful merchant or creating an über-guild. These
meta-goals can be categorized as forms of emergence.
The primary distinction between MMOGs and non-game MMOWs is that the
latter do not present the player with a prescribed overarching goal. Rather, they
provide a range of activities and options for social interaction, including games,
and often include affordances for players to contribute to building the world
itself. Thus, drawing from Huizinga and Caillois, we might define the MMOG,
goal-oriented, rule-based environment as a “ludic” world and the open-ended
MMOW or “metaverse” as a “paidiac” world. These non-rule-based, paidaic
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virtual worlds are characterized more as sandboxes, in which players engage in
open-ended unstructured play, although they typically allow for more structured
play to emerge at players’ discretion. Such MMOW sandboxes often include
structured “games” within their larger open-play framework, but due to the
absence of an overriding goal, these worlds cannot be considered games in the
formal sense.
All virtual worlds, whether they are games or not, have structures and rules.
“World rules” take the form of player constraints, as well as the world’s
properties, its physics, potentially its cosmology or world view, its “karma
system,” or causal structure, its feedback systems, its communication
mechanisms and interfaces, its economic structure and transaction mechanisms
and the like. These qualities all contribute to the sense of worldness described
earlier. World rules constrain the ways in which players can interact with the
world and the ways in which they may contribute to constructing the world;
they also dictate the parameters of social interaction and group formation.
In MMOGs, world rules may or may not be tied to the game’s goal. For instance,
the class and race structure as well as armor stats of games like World of
Warcraft are integrally tied to the game goal and dictates what skills you can
develop to aid you in your leveling process and how well you do in combat.
World rules generally manifest more broadly as player capabilities within the
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world that are not necessarily integral to game mechanics, such as transportation
modes. Is the world primarily a pedestrian environment (as most virtual worlds
are)? Can players acquire a mount, or utilize public transportation or a flying
vehicle? Can they fly unaided? Or can they obtain a teleport, either from another
player or by marking a place they’ve already visited? Can they swim in water,
walk on or under it, or will they drown if fully submerged?
Even if a virtual world has no explicit behavior constraints, the design of the
software can introduce limits to player actions, which can also have an effect on
social structures. For instance, as touched on earlier, in World of Warcraft, you
cannot fly (via rented Griffin or Bat, depending on your race) to any location that
you have not first visited on foot. At level 40, players may have access to a
mount, which they must purchase for a relatively high sum in virtual currency.
This creates a kind of class system around mobility, but also opens up the
opportunity for escort parties to help lower-level players obtain “flight points”
that enable them to travel by air.
World rules also include:

Communication protocols—Does the system allow for asynchronous
communication such as in-world email or forum?

Group formation protocols—Can I belong to more than one group?
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
Economics—Are there currencies, mechanisms for in-person or remote
trading, such as in-game auction sites? Is there a mail system that allows
me to send gifts or messages asynchronously to other players?
While both MMOGs and MMOWs have world rules that describe the world and
its properties and some constraints of player actions, MMOGs alone possess
over-arching game rules: Rules that dictate what players are supposed to do and
how they are supposed accomplish given goals or tasks.
In both cases, players engage in a high level of experimentation, exploring not
only the world but its rules and properties. It is at this intersection that we begin
to observe emergent behavior. For instance, in There.com, avatars cannot die.
Therefore, the “avie sacrifice,” where players jump off a high cliff and tumble
down a series of hills and rocks, has become a popular sport. Part of the
enjoyment of this activity is the bizarre ways that the game physics interact with
character animations as players plummet downhill. This is a classic example of
emergent behavior where players discover and subvert an aspect of world rules
for their own enjoyment.
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Play Ecosystems: Fixed Synthetic vs. Co-Created Worlds
Because the study described in this book spanned several virtual worlds of
different varieties, including MMOGs and MMOWs, it became evident that,
while helpful as a starting point, the binary distinction of game/not-game was
limited in providing deeper insight into emergent behavior within online games
and virtual worlds. Since I was primarily concerned with the ways in which
emergent behavior grew from software affordances, it became necessary to
develop language that was more specific and more nuanced.
Borrowing from terminology in complexity theory (which will be covered in
more detail in the subsequente section), we can characterize virtual worlds as
“play ecosystems” that fall along a spectrum. At one end of this spectrum are
“fixed synthetic” worlds. These worlds, while extensible and modifiable, are
defined primarily by the world’s designers, who have absolute control over
narratives, game mechanics, geographical and architectural design. They tend to
have strong themes, an over-arching storyline which comprises smaller subnarratives instantiated as quests or missions and backstory, and more or less
fixed goals. At the extreme, these worlds cannot be modified by players in any
sanctioned way, although some do allow for limited “mods” that tend to impact
the player’s individual play experience, e.g., interface, rather than affecting the
world as a whole. In the most extreme cases, avatar representation tends to be
limited by the decision you make at the start in terms of appearance and gender,
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and by the instrumental function of clothing, such as it’s armor stats. (REF:
Ludica costume play). Examples of fixed synthetic worlds include such popular
games as EverQuest (McQuaid, Clover, and Trost 1999) and World of Warcraft
(Kern, Petras, and Metzen 2003), and, to a lesser degree, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, the
primary subject of this study, since the latter has some affordances for players to
physically change the world.
At the opposite end of this spectrum is what I will call the “co-created” world,
which includes built-in affordances for players to introduce new artifacts and
behaviors into the world. At its extreme, virtually all in-world items and
activities are created by players, and one could argue that all aspects of such
worlds are emergent. These worlds typically do not have a set theme or storyline,
although they often have an aesthetic direction and a unifying metaphor, such as
Habbo Hotel’s use of a hotel as an over-arching framework. In co-created worlds,
players can typically add items, and also have some ability to alter or vary their
avatar based on aesthetic, rather than instrumental, considerations. At a more
moderate level, players may be able to introduce new artifacts in a limited way
into the environment but not to change features or add behaviors. They may be
able to introduce buildings and furnishings, for instance, but not to alter the
terrain. In other co-created worlds, players can alter terrain, build objects, modify
and extend their avatars in elaborate ways, create animations, and modify the
code of world itself through controlled and limited authoring capabilities.
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LambdaMOO is the primordial instantiation of this type of world and Second Life
is perhaps its ultimate instantiation to-date. Both of these worlds have broad
allowances for varied avatar representation, and Second Life even allows players
to change gender, form, and present as non-humanoid avatars.
FIGURE: SPECTRUM OF FIXED SYNTHETIC VS. CO-CREATED WORLDS
The fact that these “co-created” worlds have an open architecture, amenable to
player contribution, should not mislead one into thinking that they lack rules. In
fact, their rules operate in much more subtle ways than the obvious rules of fixed
synthetic worlds. As mentioned previously, simple “natural” laws, such as
simulated physics, the mortality of avatars and constraints on transportation
modes, are just as prevalent in co-created as in fixed, synthetic worlds. Cocreated worlds can also have very strict rules as to what players can and cannot
contribute to the world, and more importantly, how they are to do so. In some
cases, as with Second Life, there is very little restriction on what players can
create; however, the creation mechanism itself places significant constraints on
the types of objects and scripts that can be created. Second Life’s authoring
environment takes place primarily in-world, so it can be highly collaborative. Yet
it falls into the classic game parameter of “easy to learn, challenging to master.”
This results, on the one hand, in a lot of “stuff” in the world, much of which is of
dubious quality, while on the other, promoting a system of economic status
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around content creation skills. Conversely, in a more controlled co-created
world, such as There.com, player creation of artifacts takes place primarily out-ofworld and no new player-created content can be introduced without an official
approval from the company’s management. Thus, there is less stuff, but it is
more congruent with the world’s overall look and feel, maintaining a more
consistent quality, and perhaps a more coherent sense of worldness.
These constraints place subtle limits on what players can and cannot do as
dictated by the world’s designers, the ultimate “gods” in either type of world.
Thus, the claim that a world like Second Life is only limited by the player’s
imagination is spurious. In fact, Second Life is as limited by the imaginations of its
designers as it is of its players, although players often do things wildly outside of
what designers ever imagined, even within a set of narrow affordances and
constraints.
Conversely, we should not regard forms of emergence that take place within
fixed synthetic worlds as “less creative.” Indeed, emergence in these worlds is in
some respects far more creative because it is more constrained. The ways in
which players appropriate and subvert the environment to their own ends can be
extremely creative, and players’ inventiveness in subverting game affordances
can be a source of pride, respect and social status. Part of the skill of subversion
lies in a thorough understanding of the deep structure of the game and world
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rules and affordances, as well as their defects. Flaws in games are as much a
material for emergence as anything else, as we shall see in our case study.
One observation we can make from these examples is that “fixed synthetic”
worlds tend toward what we typically categorize as “games” with a ludic formal
structure, while more paidaic, “co-created” worlds tend to fall into the category
of MMOW or metaverse.
Key to our concerns here is that: a) emergence happens, regardless of where the
world falls along the “fixed synthetic”/”co-created” spectrum, and that b)
emergence can and does migrate between both types of worlds, as well as taking
place outside the virtual world (in other words, beyond the magic circle) into
other forms of online communication, and even into the “real world.” Each of
these worlds can be viewed as its own ecosystem of play with its own unique
characteristics. As networks of players move between these ecosystems of play,
they adapt to accommodate the ecosystem, but more importantly, in the case of
co-created worlds, the ecosystem also adapts and mutates to accommodate the
play community. The larger sphere of virtual worlds and supporting
technologies (forums, chat, voice over IP, etc.) between which players migrate
can also be viewed as a kind of meta-ecosystem, a web of complex relationships
between these more finite networked spaces. I characterize this network of play
ecosystems and supporting technologies as the “ludisphere.”
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The distinction between fixed synthetic worlds (MMOGs) and co-created worlds
(MMOWs) is made at the outset for two reasons. One is that the apparent
ambiguity and overlap between virtual worlds and online games can create
confusion and mire arguments in the question of whether something is or is not a
game. Second, the relationship between MMOGs and MMOWs is in the process
of shifting due in part to inter-world immigration patterns that cross the
game/non-game threshold, such as those explored in this study.ii
One important point is that in general, players in this study did not make a
cultural distinction between a “virtual world” and a “game,” even though they
clearly understood the difference between an open-ended play environment and
one with a clear goal-orientation. In practice, all of the environments explored in
this study were referred to among the study subjects as games. regardless of
whether they met the qualifications described above. Thus the “existential”
question of whether something is or is not a game that pervades among games
scholars and designers alike appears to have been more or less irrelevant to the
players included in this study.
Playing with Identity: The Rise of the Avatar
The atomic unit of a networked play community is the avatar. Avatar, a Hindi
term meaning a god’s embodiment on Earth, has been adopted universally in
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English to describe a player’s representation in virtual world, and increasingly,
in online games. The term is attributed to Chip Morningstar, who coined it to
describe player representations in the 2D graphical online community Habitat,
the first real graphical MMOW, which he designed with Randy Farmer for
Lucasfilm, later LucasArts. (Farmer and Morningstar 1991). Its first appearance
in print was in 1986, when it was used in an article about Habitat. (REF:
Mortabito) The term was later re-introduced independently in 1993 by science
fiction author Neal Stephenson in his cyberspace classic Snow Crash.iii (REF:
Stephenson) The more common term in MMOGs is “Player Character” or “PC,”
or, more recently “toon” (short for cartoon), which has been adopted primarily in
World of Warcraft, although avatar is increasingly coming in to use to describe
player characters in game contexts as well. In games, non-player, autonomous
characters, also known as “bots” (for robots) and “mobs” (for mobile) are
broadly referred to primarily as “NPCs.” Some NPCs are enemies (autonomous
characters that players do battle with), while others are more helper-characters
that send players on quests or serve as merchants selling gear. Although the term
“avatar” (sometimes shortened to “avie” or “avi”) can also be used to refer to
characters in a text-based MUD or MOO (usually represented only as a text
description), it is more commonly used to describe a graphical representation of
the player in a two- or three-dimensional virtual world.iv
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The relationships between players and their avatars is a complex subject that we
are only beginning to understand. As its Hindu origins suggest, most players in
this study perceived the avatar as a medium through which one’s soul, ones
deep inner persona is expressed, even though the avatar’s personality may be
quite distinct from that of the corporeal human being. Both psychologist Sherrie
Turkle and MUD-designer Richard Bartle have pointed out that inhabiting an
avatar in a virtual world can often lead to a transformational inner journey.
(REFS: Turkle, 1984, 1995; Bartle 2003.)
Among participants of the study described in this book, the terms avatar and
player are used somewhat interchangeably, although avatar is sometimes used to
distinguish things happening to the virtual “body” of the avatar itself. It is
important to note that a player is in command of the agency of an avatar,
meaning that avatars do not make decisions on their own. However, as we shall
see, the distinction between the player and his or her avatar is somewhat blurry,
and players will speak about their avatars in both the first and third person, even
describing their corporeal body in physical space as their “real-life avatar.”
Players tended to make a distinction between the “body,” whether it be “virtual”
or “real,” and the person or “persona” which is channeled through one or the
other of those bodies. As TL Taylor has pointed out, this does not mean their
personas are disembodied, rather that they are expressed through the multiple
bodies. (REF: Taylor) Most players interviewed felt that their avatars were
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expressions of their “true” selves as much if not more than their “real-life
avatars.” Players who had met each other in real life were able to hold multiple
conceptions of each other’s identities in their minds, encapsulating the personas
as expressed in both the “real-life avie” as well as the avatar in virtual space. This
multiplicity of identities is quite commonplace among people living online
lifestyles who, in addition to perceiving their own “multiple bodies/personas,”
learn to develop a unique sensibility that enables them to recognize other
members of their play community as also having multiple bodies/personas.
(Dibbell 1998; Markham 1998; Taylor 1999; Turkle 1984; Turkle 1995)
It is sometimes difficult for those unaccustomed to virtual worlds to understand
these phenomena as anything other than technologically-enabled (or even
precipitated) multiple personality disorder. However, sociologists have long
observed how people adopt or “put on” different personalities or personas in
their different real-life roles: worker, parent, friend, etc. “Performing” different
personas in different contexts is a standard part of how we adapt to social
situations. In fact, as Goffman has pointed out, the inability to “perform”
appropriately in social contexts is often an indicator of psychological disorders
(Goffman 1963). In virtual worlds, what is viewed as “appropriate” is often
significantly different from what might be considered appropriate behavior
within real-life situations or occasions. Thus players will adapt their behavior
accordingly.
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Like many aspects of virtual worlds, avatars suffer from the misconception that
they are not “real.” Avatars, by definition, are representations of “real” people;
while these people are “mediated,” they are no less “real,” and, in fact, no less
“mediated” than people we meet in the “real world.” A classic example of this
misconception can be seen in a common online training that is given to
university researchers in order to obtain approval to work with human subjects.
The training web site points out that one of the challenges of Internet research
includes, “verifying the personhood of pseudonymous entities.” (REF) The
implication here is that people are not easily distinguishable from bots or
autonomous agents. Just as players represented by avatars are no less “real” than
players represented by corporeal bodies, the communities that form between
them are no less real than communities that form between people in physical
proximity to one another. They also would seem to have special properties,
especially in the context of play, which lead to unique and deeply authentic
social bonds.
Virtual Worlds/Real Communities
Now that we understand the play ecosystem and its inhabitants , we can look at
some core concepts around the notion of “communities of play.” The
communities of networked play that concern this research exist within a variety
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of different types of virtual worlds, some of which can be characterized as
games. As we’ve established, during the time this research was conducted,
online games and virtual worlds have gone from a niche audience of computer
aficionados to a decidedly mainstream entertainment market. Although millions
of players now spend time in these environments, practices of play within virtual
worlds continue to be maligned within the mainstream culture and in particular
within the news media. Some of this has to do with a misconception of terms, so
I will provide some terminology to set the stage for the research and its
outcomes.
The term with which ethnographers and sociologists of virtual worlds grapple
with the most is the term “virtual.” The word is problematic, contested, and
continuously in flux, as illustrated by this random sampling of recent dictionary
definitions:
‘Virtual’
adj.
1. Being something in effect even if not in reality or not conforming to the
generally accepted definition of the term;
2. Used to describe a particle whose existence is suggested to explain
observed phenomena but is not proven or directly observable;
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3. Simulated by a computer for reasons of economics, convenience, or
performance;
4. Used to describe a technique of moving data between storage areas or
media to create the impression that a computer has a storage capacity
greater than it actually has.
Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation, by
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. (USA)
adj.
1. Existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or
name: the virtual extinction of the buffalo.
2. Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination. Used in
literary criticism of a text.
3. Computer Science. Created, simulated, or carried on by means of a
computer or computer network: virtual conversations in a chatroom.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth
Edition; © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company (USA).
adj.
1. (before noun) Almost a particular thing or quality:
Ten years of incompetent government had brought about the virtual collapse of
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the country's economy.
War in the region now looks like a virtual certainty.
2. Describes something that can be done or seen using a computer and
therefore without going anywhere or talking to anyone:
virtual shopping/banking
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, © Cambridge
University Press 2003 (UK).
These widely varying and inconsistent definitions do nothing to bring clarity to
our discussion. The last definition highlights the challenges in working with
terms whose official usage is still highly contested, if not entirely incorrect.
A clarification of the etymology of the expression provides a more fruitful
discussion. The term “virtual reality” in its original sense, is used to describe
high-end real-time 3D environments, generally accessed via sensory immersion
techniques such as head-mounted displays or panoramic screens, usually but not
always in single-user applications. These had their earliest applications in the
late 1970s and early 1980’s in computer-aided design and flight simulation
applications, and came into the popular culture through novels such as
Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and films such as The Lawnmower Man and Johnny
Mmemonic. Virtual reality is distinguished from other forms of computer
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animation in that it is described as “real-time 3D,” meaning that an individual
can navigate through a simulated three-dimensional space and the position and
movement of objects will change based on her orientation toward them. While
this was once an arcane and expensive enterprise, confined to corporate,
academic and military labs, the majority of today’s digital games, which involve
navigating through virtual three-dimensional environments, could be
characterized as a form of virtual reality. The term “virtual world” has come into
more recent use to refer to multiplayer, real-time 3D online environments that
are accessed via consumer-grade computer hardware over the Internet. I have
also introduced the term “extra-virtual” to describe activities that happen outside
the virtual world but index or relate back to it.
The term “virtual community” has gained popularity in common usage as a way
to describe communities whose members interact with each other via a network
(Rheingold 1993). However well-meaning, this term suggests that mediated
communities are in some way “not”—or “less than”—“real.” I would argue that
while the online worlds may be virtual in terms of the nature of their existence
being confined to a computer screen, the relationships that form between people
within these screen-based worlds are no less real than relationships that form in
the so-called real world.
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It would be easy to get side-tracked into a philosophical debate about what is
“real” and what is “virtual,” there is much philosophical analysis written about
the topic. (REFS: Heim, Beaudrillard, Klastrup, Ryan, Benedikt, Stone) Such a
debate is beyond the scope of this book, which concerns itself with the lived
practice of inhabitants of virtual worlds, and their own interpretations of the
meanings of that practice. Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff calls this “virtually
human,” pointing out that inhabiting a virtual world, far from being “posthuman” and potentially alienating, actually highlights our humanness in
interesting and unique ways. He also adds “…virtual worlds show us that, under
our very noses, our ‘real’ lives have been virtual all along. It is in being virtual
that we are human: since it is human ‘nature’ to experience life through the
prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being.” (REF Boellstorff
p.5)
For purposes of specificity, and to avoid falling into these debates, I have chosen
the term “distributed community,” and, more specifically, “play community,” to
describe groups who assemble for the purpose of social play. This mitigates the
potential impression that the individuals who inhabit virtual worlds or the
relationships that are formed within them are, themselves, virtual.
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CHAPTER 2: EMERGENCE IN CULTURES AND GAMES
Emergent Cultures
The emergent properties of real-world cultures have long been a topic of interest
to historians, economists, sociologists, anthropologists and urban planners.
Urban historian Lewis Mumford described and mapped out patterns of growth
in European cities, radiating from a central core, usually a cathedral. (Mumford
1961) Urbanist Jane Jacobs, in her famous critique of 1950s urban planning
policies, spoke about the ways in which urban, mixed-use densities promote and
hinder emergent behavior, both positive and negative. (Jacobs 1961) Thomas
Schelling described this in economic terms as “systems that lead to aggregate
results that the individual neither intends nor needs to be aware of.” (Schelling
1971) (p.145) To demonstrate how such a system might work, he created a
simplistic model of racial segregation using a rule-based, checkerboard
simulation. Individual agents of two binary types were said to more happy when
neighboring agents of their own group. Consequently, the outcome over time of
a series of proximity moves would result in increased segregation, regardless of
whether the agents were deliberately segregationist. He used this model to show
how segregation in ghettos can self-organize in an emergent, bottom-up fashion
rather than through deliberate or institutionalized exclusion.
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Contemporary approaches to human cultural and historical development have
taken a similar complex system approach, and have also reconfigured how we
think about the notion of “progress.” The now-outmoded idea of “cultural
evolution,” which suggests that some societies and “civilizations” are somehow
more evolved and hence better than others, is being challenged in various ways
by interpretations that frame society and history in terms of the dynamics of
complex systems. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared
Diamond argued for a new reading of the historical domination of some cultures
over others as an emergent process arising from the intersection of available
resources and technologies, geographical conditions, and biological processes
(such as disease), rather than an essentialist predisposition for superiority.
Diamond illustrates the role of feedback loops, such as European exposure to
and consequent immunity to disease, which served as a powerful, if inadvertent,
biological weapon against the indigenous cultures of the Americas. (REF:
Diamond)
Manuel De Landa argues for a realist philosophy of “nonlinear history” and
rejects the presupposed linear outcome of evolution, also an emergent process.
Like Diamond, he critiques the notion of the dominance of Western culture as
progressive, and looks instead at history as a possibility space that does not
necessarily produce inevitable outcomes. He describes emergence as the
“unplanned results of human agency.” (REF: p.17) And while some decisions
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made by individuals are constrained by the goals of an organization, in other
cases, “…what matters is not the planned results of decision making, but the
unintended consequences of human decisions.” (De Landa 1997, p. 17) De Landa
argues that emergent properties, which can be characterized as the whole being
greater than the sum of its parts, cannot be studied using reductive methods:
These emergent (or “synergistic”) properties belong the interactions between parts, so
it follows that a top-down analytical approach that begins with the whole and dissects
it into its constituent parts (an ecosystem into a species, a society into institutions),
is bound to miss precisely those properties. In other words, analyzing a whole into
parts and then attempting to model it by adding up the components will fail to
capture any property that emerged from complex interactions, since the effect of the
latter may be multiplicative (e.g., mutual enhancement) and not just additive.
(pp.17-18)
Historically, emergent cultures can take hundreds or even thousands of years to
develop. Yet as Diamond points out, the advent of new technology can rapidly
accelerate these processes. Guns, for instance, allowed for much more rapid
colonial expansion and accelerated the rate of genocide throughout the new
world. (Diamond 1997) Technologies of transport, as McLuhan has pointed out,
accelerated the movement of goods and people across the developing United
States. (McLuhan 1964) The Internet is just such a technology, and emergent
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social processes that might take years to play out in real life, such as the example
of inter-game immigration chronicled in this book, can happen in a matter of
months, weeks, or even days. The speed of communication enabled by the
Internet allows for a kind of snowball effect in terms of the feedback dynamics.
People tend to follow trends among their peers, not, as some might cynically
suppose because people behave like sheep, but because, as Schelling’s model
suggests, they wish to maintain a connection to a community. Thus, as with his
segregation example, we find numerous instances of humans gathering, moving
and assembling based on a desire to join or to remain proximal a community
with which they identify.
Emergent Cultures in Games
Emergent cultures in games have existed from the inception of multiplayer play
spaces. Players have been staging weddings in MUDs and MOOs and MMOWs
such as Active Worlds since the beginning. In the late 1990s the phenomenon of
“eBaying” began to emerge, in which players of Ultima Online and other
massively multiplayer games began to sell game accounts (in other words, their
avatars), virtual objects and real estate. Supported by an extra-virtual network
with a highly developed feedback system, the eBay auction site, they were able
to emergently spawn an entire real-world economy around the trade of virtual
characters, commodities and currency. This emergent phenomenon inspired
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economist Edward Castronova’s now-famous economic analysis of EverQuest, in
which he determined its imaginary universe, Norrath, to have the real world’s 77th
largest economy. (REF: Castronova 2001) By analyzing exchange rates and trade
volumes on the online black market for virtual goods and currency, he was able
to calculate a “gross domestic product” of Norrath that placed it on an economic
scale with real-world nations. Castronova’s research is itself emergent, the
outcome of emergent behavior on a large scale, precipitating emergent behavior
on a smaller scale. Castronova’s groundbreaking work has inspired a growing
interest in the economies of virtual worlds. This interest has reached as far as the
U.S. Federal Reserve, which is investigating both the tax and regulatory
ramifications of virtual economies, and the ways in which they can be used as
research contexts for the study of real economic patterns in society. (REF)
While “eBaying,” as the practice is called, is banned by most game companies,
the black market for virtual items and currency not only flourishes, but has
spawned an entire industry. In 2007, journalist Julian Dibbell, known for his
early studies of the text-based world LambdaMOO, visited a “gold farming”
factory in China. Here low-wage workers, usually young men, live and work in
barracks-style housing, spending their days playing World of Warcraft and
gathering currency, which their employers in turn then trade on the black market
for real-world profit. Dibbell noted that when these young men finish work, they
go to the facility’s cybercafé, where they enjoy their time off by playing World of
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Warcraft. This practice has also precipitated new emergent social behaviors
within the game. Players believed to be Chinese gold farmers are shunned with a
form of racism that conflates the real (Chinese) and virtual ethnicities and
identities (gold farmers, and the most common game character types used for
this purpose.) (REF: Dibbell)
Second Life has brilliantly leveraged these emergent economic trends by
sanctioning the trade of real-world money for its virtual currency, in both
directions, and has as a result attained a huge amount of publicity as players
have begun to make their real-world living through its virtual economy. This
policy precipitated the emergence of an in-world banking industry, and the
eventual collapse of one of Second Life’s leading virtual banks. As in real life
cultures, the outcome was a run on banks, to the tune of $750,000 in real-world
financial losses. All of these examples can be viewed as emergent: they were the
result of individual agency, bottom-up actions that aggregated into overall
patterns of social behavior.
While some forms of emergence in games happen as a result of an aggregate of
individual actions, others are more deliberate, and resemble real-world grassroots organizing. One example is a game-wide protest that was staged in World of
Warcraft in 2005. (REF: Castronova 2005, Taylor 2005.) Warriors of all races,
dissatisfied with what it felt were unfair statistics associated with the class,
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gathered at urban centers and even blocked a bridge to demand a change to the
very software they inhabited. In the process, they managed to down a server,
which did not have the capacity to process so many players in a single virtual
location at the same time. Game operator Blizzard, in the typically top-down
approach of governments and corporations, squelched any further uprisings by
banning players found to be involved in or planning in-world protests. In other
words, the company took the stance of a totalitarian nation by making civil
disobedience punished by virtual death. Because Blizzard is a company and not
a nation, its players/customers/citizens, however you wish to frame them, had
no rights whatsoever in this situation.
The totalitarian stance taken by Blizzard is common to MMOG companies. When
players first initiate an account, they are required to sign an end-user licensing
agreement, or EULA, that for all intents and purposes relinquishes any rights
they might enjoy in the real world as a pre-condition for becoming a citizen of a
virtual one. Most EULAs sthat the the company has full ownership of all
intellectual property generated by players. Game companies often exercise their
own IP rights by prohibiting extra-virtual practices, such as some forms of fan
fiction or the buying and selling of virtual game artifacts. Second Life is again the
exception: although the instigated a radical policy that allows player to retain all
rights to their intellectual property, the company still owns the virtual property
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that represents those ideas; in other words, they don’t own the ideas, but they
own the bits.
As a result of some of these draconian practices, ethicists and lawyers have
begun to ask: “What sorts of rights, exactly, do avatars have? And how might
these be reinforced? Do we need some kind of bill of avatar rights?” (REF) One
thing seems to be clear: again and again, people inhabiting avatars inevitably
arrive at the conclusion that they have rights, often driven by the rights they are
accustomed to enjoying in their real-world culture. American players, for
instance, expect the right to free speech as well as self-determination. These
desires and customs often come into conflict with virtual world owners, who are
more preoccupied with business concerns, such as maintaining a high profit
level, and protecting themselves legally. (REF: Taylor) Corporations that control
virtual worlds will tolerate a certain measure of emergent behavior as long as it
does not threaten their bottom line. Consequently, griefing, which harms the
enjoyability of games and the rights of players to go unmolested, is generally
tolerated to a certain extent, while mass protests and virtual currency exchange
are not.
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Games as Emergent, Complex Systems
The conception of games as complex systems with emergent properties is so
prevalent in the discourse of both game design and Game Studies that it would
be impossible to cite its origins. Descriptions of emergence can be found in a
diverse array of contexts, from books on “popular science” (Johnson 2001) to
“game design theory” (Juul 2002; Salen and Zimmerman 2004). So what,
precisely, do we mean by “emergence?”
Emergence is a phenomenon that falls under the general rubric of “complex
systems” or “complexity theory,” a set of ideas that span an unwieldy array of
fields and disciplines and as a result has become a fulcrum for interdisciplinary
research. The Santa Fe Institute, one of the preeminent centers for the study of
complex systems in the United States, encompasses fields as diverse as social
science, economics, mathematics, game theory (a branch of applied mathematics
and economics unrelated to “game studies”), ecology, evolution, neuroscience,
intelligent systems and network infrastructures. (REF: SFI web site) The Human
Complex Systems group at University of California Los Angeles embraces every
permutation of its theme, from economics to urban planning and computergenerated “synthetic cultures” to multiplayer online games. (REF: HCS web site)
The term “emergence” describes how complex, often decentralized, systems selforganize in ways that cannot be predicted by their underlying structures or rule
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sets, nor by the individual behavior of agents within the system. (Bar-Yam 1997)
Anthills, freeways, neural networks, stock markets, terrorist cells, cities, the
internet and computer games are examples used to describe emergence (Johnson
2001). These disparate systems share in common a display of collective behaviors
and even collective “intelligences” that arise out of, and yet transcend the actions
of the individual parts or elements.
According to Steven Johnson, author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants,
Brains, Cities and Software, complex systems exhibit emergence because they
…solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively (simple) elements, rather
than a single, intelligent ‘executive branch.’ They are bottom-up systems, not
top-down. They get their smarts from below. In more technical language, they
are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems,
agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above
them: ants create colonies; urbanities create neighborhoods; simple patternrecognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from
low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.
(Johnson 2001)
(REF: Page #)
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It is significant that one of the key characters Johnson features in Emergence is
Will Wright, designer of the games SimCity (Wright 1989), The Sims (Wright 2000)
and The Sims Online (Wright, Trottier, and Chalmers 2002). Even in the context of
this otherwise serious book, games make regular appearances. That games
produce emergence is a de facto assumption throughout the game studies field.
Pioneering media scholar Janet Murray has described one of the properties of
computational media as being “procedural,” or rule-based. Rule-based systems
have a greater tendency towards emergence because they have a larger
possibility space with affordances for more varied outcomes. While the rule
system itself does not have to be complex in a procedural system, simple rules
systems can produce complex, emergent outcomes. So is “Conway’s Game of
Life,” an A-Life experiment that famously illustrates this by generating several
generations of virtual organisms according to a simple rule that can result in
often complex behaviors. . The traditional Chinese game of Go is another classic
example of this.
Using examples of board games, sports, most action games and all strategy
games, “Ludologist” Jesper Juul argues that emergence is “the primordial game
structure, where a game is specified as a small number of rules that yield large
numbers of game variations, that the players must design strategies for dealing
with.” “Progression” he describes as “the historically newer structure” in which
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we find “cinematic storytelling ambitions” in this otherwise indigenously
procedural and hence emergent medium (Juul 2002; Juul 2004) (REF p#). In Rules
of Play, Salen and Zimmerman look in-depth at notions of games as complex
systems and emergence as an outcome of the interaction of rules. (Salen and
Zimmerman 2004) In my 2002 paper on emergent authorship, I describe a new
model for storytelling in which players themselves contribute to narratives in
games such as The Sims, Ultima Online and EverQuest through emergent
processes. (REF: Pearce 2002) Cindy Poremba’s Master’s thesis provided a
further analysis of the player as co-creator within the context of these emergent
story systems. (REF: Poremba thesis) These ideas build on Henry Jenkins’ notion
of “textual poaching,” in which fan cultures, such as Star Trek fans, aka
“Trekkies,” develop their own emergent narratives from the kit of parts provided
by the television series. (REF: Jenkins 1992)
So what, precisely, is emergence, and how might it be studied? In his essay for
the book Virtual Worlds: Synthetic Universes, Digital Life and Complexity, Yaneer
Bar-Yam, President of the New England Complex Systems Institute, defines
emergence as a set of “collective behaviors” in which all the parts are
“interdependent,” arguing that the more distinct and specialized the individual
interdependent behaviors, the more complex the collective behavior likely to
arise (Bar-Yam 1999). Bar-Yam describes emergence as
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1. …what parts of a system do together that they would not do by themselves;
collective behavior.
2. …what a system does by virtue of its relationship to its environment that it
would not do by itself.
3. …the act of process of becoming an emergent system.
Further:
According to (1) emergence refers to understanding how collective properties arise
from the properties of the parts. More generally, it refers to how behavior at a larger
scale of the system arises from the detailed structure, behavior and relationships at a
finer scale. In the extreme, it is about how macroscopic behavior arises from
microscopic behavior.
(REF: Page #)
In discussing methodology, Bar-Yam suggests a holistic approach to observing
the relationship between the parts and the system as a whole:
…emergent properties cannot be studied by physically taking a system apart and
looking at the parts (reductionism). They can, however, be studied by looking at
each of the parts in the context of the system as a whole. This is the nature of
emergence and an indication of how it can be studied and understood.
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(Bar-Yam 1997) (REF: page #)
To describe this process, Bar-Yam invokes the metaphor of “[seeing] the forest
and the trees at the same time... We see the ways the trees and the forest are
related to each other” (Bar-Yam 2000b). Sociologist C. Wright Mills has drawn
upon the same metaphor to describe the essential character of what he calls “the
sociological imagination” (Mills 1959).
This apt metaphor illustrates the key challenge of studying emergence in largescale social systems. This type of research necessitates a methodology that
enables one to observe and analyze phenomena at different scales
simultaneously. In other words, it must enable us to look at the behavior of
individual units in a complex system, their relationship to each other, and the
overarching patterns of the system as whole, all at the same time. We cannot, as
De Landa has pointed out, calculate the patterns within a complex system by
understanding the properties of its parts. It is also crucial to be able to observe
the system dynamics in progress as well as their outcomes. Capturing its
evidence exclusively after the fact, either through surveys or forensic evidence,
such as artifacts, will not allow a complete understanding of patterns of
emergence. In addition, we are faced with the problem of observing the
relationship between the play community and the play environment.
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As Bar-Yam points out, “One of the problems in thinking about the concepts of
complex systems is that we often assign properties to a system that are actually
properties of a relationship between the system and its environment.” (REF: p#)
This is particularly significant to the research described here, where relationships
between players, as well as the players’ relationship to the environment of the
virtual world, are central:
When parts of a system are related to each other, we talk about them as a network,
when a system is related to parts of a larger system, we talk about its ecosystem.
(Bar-Yam 2000a)
We thus arrive at the concept described earlier of framing massively multiplayer
player worlds that fall along the “fixed synthetic” and “co-created” worlds
spectrum as “play ecosystems” in which “networks” of players engage in various
emergent behaviors. This is where the distinctions between different types of
worlds becomes important: each ecosystem provides particular characteristics
and affordances which effect the emergent behavior of networks within it. As we
shall see, the group exhibits patterns of emergence that transcend any particular
world, but these are made explicit through interactions unique to the affordances
of each play ecosystem.
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One of the critical properties of complex systems is feedback. In cybernetics,
feedback is defined as a phenomenon in which some portion of the output of a
system is passed through the input. This can be used to describe machines that
utilize feedback systems, the classic example being a thermostat on a heater. The
thermostat continually reads the temperature and makes adjustments
accordingly.
Within networked social systems, feedback can be a powerful engine for largescale social emergence, and the accelerated forms of emergence seen in these
systems are a direct result of the designed affordances of the software. Examples
of this on the Internet include iTunes, MySpace and YouTube, each of which has
grown exponentially since its inception through feedback. This process,
epitomized by YouTube, can be described thus: the more people who watch, the
more people who upload videos; the more people who upload videos, the more
people who watch. Networks are particularly good at processing feedback since
many units of input can move quickly through the system and be distributed to a
large number of outputs. This research concerns the ways in which both the
social context of play and the design of the game software itself facilitate this
feedback process.
The qualities of properties of play are critical. Play can be viewed as a particular
type of engine for emergence by virtue of its feedback dynamics. Play is
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inherently spontaneous and experimental, and therefore, players will find
themselves responding to social feedback in a very different way than they might
in other contexts. The common types of emergence seen within virtual
multiplayer games and virtual worlds illustrate this point. As we’ve seen, they
include online weddings, game-wide protests, social organizations such as guilds
or social groups, various types of social and fashion trends, and extra-virtual
phenomena such as fan sites and selling of virtual characters, items or currency.
The “play frame” sets the stage for many of these phenomena, but the virtual
environments themselves also have particular properties that lend themselves to
emergence:
1. Discrete: Virtual worlds are (mostly) closed systems, discrete synthetic
environments that possess and maintain a consistent set of internal rules.
Within that closed system, we can observe classic properties of emergence,
such as feedback, and multi-generational patterns. (Bar-Yam, 1997;
Johnson, 2002) In addition, they also have a variety transactions with
worlds outside themselves, which can both influence in-world emergence
and produce extra-virtual forms of emergence.
2. Open-Ended: Both social virtual worlds and game worlds are openended. Unlike many traditional games, including most single-player
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digital games, they do not have an end state that can be considered
“winning.”
3. Persistent: They are “persistent state worlds.” This means that whatever is
done in them remains and is cumulative over time, which includes both
the individual player identity and the world as a whole. This is a vital
component to create the feedback needed to produce emergence. Firstperson shooter games, for instance, while they exhibit their own forms of
emergence, do not possess persistence of this type within the world itself.
4. Synchronous & Asynchronous: Because the game is persistent and
remains “on” at all times, players can inhabit and construct the world
asynchronously from one another, thus adding another vital ingredient
for feedback and emergence.
5. Long-Term: Engagement in multiplayer games and virtual worlds is longterm and emergent behaviors happen over time. Typical console games, as
an example, allow for anywhere from ten to forty hours of total play time.
While this provides for some emergence, the significantly higher time
commitment of MMOGs (twenty hours a week on average and sometimes
significantly more) (Seay, Jerome, Sang Lee, and Kraut 2004; Yee 2001)
(REF: Castronova?) provides for a much greater array of emergent
outcomes. It is possible for players to maintain involvement in the game
for as long as it is operating, although the “churn rate” (rate of
subscription turnover) is more typically around 18 months. (Appelcline
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2000-2006; Yee 2001) (REF: Koster?) Churn can also produce emergent
behavior, such as a mass exodus to a new game, which is common among
players of medieval fantasy games.
6. Accelerated: Social phenomena in MMOGs tends to happen at an
accelerated rate, in spite of the fact that tasks often take significantly
longer to perform than in the physical world. Basic tasks such as
communication take longer, yet players often report losing track of time
and of having the sense that “time flies.” Simultaneously, there appears to
be a phenomenon of time compression in which social processes that
would ordinarily take much longer are perceived and observed to occur at
a highly accelerated rate. Friendships and romantic relationships appear
to develop more quickly, and the growth and decline of communities
seems to progress much faster than would be the case in real world
settlements.
7. Networked: As mentioned earlier, MMOGs and MMOWs are by
definition populated. The more people, the larger the possibility space for
emergence.
8. Diverse: As Bar-Yam points out, the more specialized the units in a
complex system, the more complex the system, and the more
opportunities for emergent behaviors. In more homogenous systems,
behavior is relatively uniform, so emergence is less likely to occur, as
behaviors are less likely to diverge from their initial purpose. (REF Bar-
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Yam new article?) Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, points out
that collective intelligence emerges at a much higher level in groups that
are diverse than in groups whose individuals have uniform skills and
abilities. (REF: Surowiecki)
Based on the preceding definition of emergence and the characteristics above, the
following criteria were used to select a subject, the study of which would provide
us with deeper insights and understandings about the nature and process of
emergence in online games:
1. Events Over Time. The study had to be somewhat longitudinal (in “Internet
years”) in order to detect emergent behavior over time; eighteen months
was selected as the time frame for practical reasons. This timeframe is also
line with the “churn” figure described above, and parallels timeframes for
field studies in qualitative anthropological and sociological research, one
year being the time-frame for typical fieldwork in anthropology.
2. Scale. The group studied had to be sufficiently large to exhibit emergent
behavior patterns, yet small enough for a single researcher to feasibly
study at multiple levels of magnification. The main focus of this
investigation, The Gathering of Uru, comprised between 450 and 160
players during the course of the study. They were a subset of two larger
meta-groups, the Uru Diaspora comprising an estimated 10,000 players,
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and the inhabitants of There.com, whose exact number was unknown, but
was likely to be in the hundreds of thousands.
3. Components vs. System. By definition, emergent phenomena transcend the
life cycle of any one of the elements within the complex system. Therefore,
the emergent phenomena studied had to demonstrate recognizable
patterns across a diverse sampling of individual participants.
4. System vs. Environment. Emergent phenomena happen when a system
comes into contact with a specific environment or “ecosystem.” Earlier,
we described the game software as a “play ecosystem.” Emergent
behavior arises out of tripartite interactions between a) the individual
components of the system, b) the system as a whole, b) the ecosystem(s),
or environment(s), that the system inhabits. (Bar-Yam 2000a) In the case of
the Uru Diaspora, the individuals and the system actually traversed
through different gaming environments, giving us a glimpse into how
they adapted in an emergent fashion to each “play ecosystem.”
5. Relationship to Game’s Intent. As stated, I sought to study patterns of
behavior that fall outside of the formal structure as intended by the
game’s designers, and which exhibit bottom-up process. In other words, I
wanted to identity larger patterns that occur as a result of individual
agents in the system acting independently, or interdependently, rather
than through any central control mechanism.
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6. Method. The study had to utilize a multi-scaled method that would allow
observation of the “forest and the trees at the same time,” in other words,
it had to be possible to observe the three components, system, parts and
ecosystem, concurrently.
A methodological conundrum confronts us at this point. What tools and
methods shall we use to observe the emergent phenomena we have defined
here? There are a number of different established methods in game studies.
Quantitative methods, such as surveys, and in-game data-mining can provide us
with very useful information; they are excellent at understanding the scope of
individual’s attitudes about their gameplay experience; and, they are also
effective at getting at the larger patterns of behavior and attitudes displayed by
individuals. Quantitative methods are, however, less effective at getting at larger
patterns of interaction between individuals. Large-scale surveys help us
understand that people are spending an average of 20 hours a week in online
games, but not specifically what they are doing, who they are spending time
with, and how they interact in social contexts within the ecosystem. Data mining,
such as capturing chatlogs in a fixed location, is an excellent method for
discourse analysis in specific contexts, although it does not give us the attitudinal
data of surveys, nor measure larger cultural patterns across multiple locations.
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Social network theory, used extensively in Internet Studies and computermediated communications, branches of sociology, and organizational theory,
provides excellent methods for understanding the movement of information.
Examples are the spreading of a rumor, (REF: Rosvall) the types of connections
that occur between people, such as strong versus weak ties, or the number of
people within a group required to maintain cohesion. These are very useful for
understanding the structures of communities, but they lack two important data
types required to describe the phenomena we are concerned with here. First,
while social network analysis solves the problem of looking at the relationships
within the network in an emergent complex system, it does not provide a
mechanism for studying the relationship of the network to the ecosystem. As we’ve
learned from Bar-Yam, this is a vital component in the mix. Thus, we need a
method to observe how the network of the play community interacts with and
within the play ecosystem. Second, social network analysis does not provide the
tools we need to interpret the process of the formation of cultures. Thus we need
to identify a method that is particularly strong at analyzing and interpreting the
dynamics and formation of culture.
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CHAPTER 3: READING, WRITING AND PLAYING CULTURE
Situating Culture
What do we mean by “culture?” Some, especially lawmakers and mass media,
would assert that “game culture” is an oxymoron. Indeed, games are viewed as
so low a form of culture, at least in the United States, that some Judges have
ruled that they do not warrant the same speech protection rights as other media
because they do not qualify as a form of expression. (REF: Au, 2002) Most media
scholars would disagree. Though video games studies was marginalized (mostly
in its host institutions) it its formative years, games are now embraced within a
range of disciplines, including comparative media studies, whose foremost
scholar, MIT’s Henry Jenkins, has lauded games as “The Medium of the 21st
Century.” (REF) The fact of video games as part of the mass media landscape
can no longer be sufficiently argued against the data. According to several
reports, the number of digital game players in the U.S. has been steadily
growing, reaching about 2/3 of Americans by 2007, roughly a quarter of whom
are over 50 (about the same percentage of Baby Boomers in the overall
population). (ESA 2008; NDP 2007) In 2007, Nielson media research reported
that nearly half of American households had a game console by the fourth
quarter of 2006. (Nielson 2007) And judging by the fact that there are now
sufficient peer-review quality academic papers to justify the publication of a
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journal entitled Games and Culture, it is safe to say we have arrived at a point
where the previous debates about whether these two terms can exist in the same
phrase can be put to rest.
In the context of media, culture is usually thought of in terms of “cultural
production,” i.e., arts and entertainment, literature, etc. But to anthropologists
and sociologists, “culture” has the much broader connotation of the repertoire of
collective symbols and forms of meaning-making, including language, arts, ritual
and mythology, and everyday practices that are shared by a given group or
society. Such practices are said to be “intersubjective,” meaning that they are
constructed through interactions between people, rather than by the strict agency
of individuals. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes culture as “webs of
significance [man] himself has spun,” the analysis of which is “not an
experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of
meaning.” (pp4-5) (Geertz 1973a) Geerts sees these webs of significance as public
systems of meaning that are necessarily the collective property of a group.
Culture is both constructed and learned, is iterative, and is constantly in flux;
most importantly, culture is shared.
The concept of intersubjectivity provides a useful framework to think about the
ways culture is constructed, learned and propagated. The culture of a networked
game can be viewed a social construction of shared meanings transacted by
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designers and between players. These shared meanings are transacted with what
Luckmann called the individual’s “life-world” through everyday social or
cultural practices. (Luckmann 1983) Michael Jackson notes Joas’ notion of the
“intersubjective turn” as a particularly useful framework for studying
nonwestern cultures that allows us to move beyond the Cartesian model of the
supremacy of the individual and towards a model of collective meaning and
identity. (Jackson 1998) Sociolgist Herbert Blumer, building on Herbert Mead’s
previous work, coined the term “symbolic interactionism” to describe this shared
meaning-making dynamic. In essence, individuals interpret objects through a
lens of meaning that arises out of a process of social interaction and has the
capacity to change over time. (REF: Blumer 1969)
When we begin to look at fan culture, what we find is an intersubjective process
of appropriating and transforming meanings through use, or in this case,
through play. Thus, cultural artifacts (and by this we mean virtually any cultural
entity, whether it be a piece of architecture, literature or fashion) are produced by
their creators, but then adopted and in a sense re-produced, by their users. De
Certeau referred to this as the “practice of everyday culture,” and suggests that
“consumers” in industrial societies actually produce culture through the use of
artifacts. De Certeau thus theorizes that “consumption” is as act of production,
perhaps even an art form. (REF: De Certeau 1984) Willis has built on this notion
in describing the culture practices of “bike boys” in the UK, motorcycle gangs
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who modify and customize their motorbikes as a form of personal and creative
expression. It is through these acts of creative consumption, which I’ve described
in some of my earlier work, that “game culture” is born. (REF: Willis 1987, 2000;
Pearce 2002)
Returning to Jackson, the concept of intersubjectivity provides us with a useful
lens through which to observe the construction of culture. First, it “resonates
with the manner in which many non-Western peoples tend to emphasize identity
as ‘mutually arising’—as relational and variable—rather than assign ontological
primacy to the individual persons or objects that are implicit in any
intersubjective nexus. (…) Second, the notion of intersubjectivity helps us
elucidate a critical characteristic of preliterate thought, namely, the way it tends
to construe extrapsychic processes that we construe as intrapsychic. The
unconscious (…) is in a preliterate society more likely to be called the unknown.
(…) Finally, the notion of intersubjectivity helps us unpack the relationship
between two different but vitally connected senses of the word subject — the first
referring to the empirical person, endowed with consciousness and will, the
second, to abstract generalities such as society, class, gender, nation, structure,
history, culture, and tradition that are subjects of our thinking but not themselves
possessed of life.” (REF: Jackson 1998 , p. 7)
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The Social Construction of Virtual Reality
Another key concept in describing how cultures are formed is the notion of social
construction. Social constructionism counters a positivist view of the world and
states that there are no absolute values or truths, rather, that our perception and
understanding of the world, including what we regard as “facts,” and even the
way we determine their facthood, arises from a process of social construction.
(Berger & Luckmann, 1966) This is a key concept in science and technology
studies because it allows us to critically analyze the authority structures that
control and disseminate knowledge, and the tenets of social constructionism are
particularly compelling at a time when science and religion are engaged in handto-hand combat as “absolute” world views. These broader social issues are not
ours to tackle at this moment. However, in the case of virtual worlds, it would be
difficult to make a compelling case against their status as social constructions.
Furthermore, the sorts of worlds we are concerned with are socially constructed
in very specific, deliberate ways, and one way to view their cultures is as
dynamic discourse between their designers and their players. Designers
construct the worlds they envision; players then reconstruct those worlds
through lived practices that engage, subvert and transform the space to make it
their own. Thus they become a process of social construction and reconstruction,
a constant building, and rebuilding, the result of which is a collaboration
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between virtual world designers and the players who “live” in their worlds. The
aim of this investigation is to study that process in an attempt to understand the
relationship between the designers’ social construction—the game and the tacit
values and assumptions it embodies—and the players’ social construction of
their own play culture through lived experience and play practice. This is a
unique manifestation of de Certeau’s “practice of everyday life,” in consumption
is flipped on its head to become a creative act. (REF: de Certeau) Here, players
construct new cultures from a kit of parts handed to them by game developers,
often bending and breaking the play ecosystem well beyond the designers’
original intentions.
The notion of the situated perspective is also germane to the study of virtual
worlds. Virtual reality is, by definition, subjective, and only exists through a
particular, situated viewpoint. There is literally no “objective” reality in a virtual
world because each instantiation of it appears to a specific player. Between the
players there is only code, silicon and wires. The world itself is entirely
imaginary and completely subjective, yet at the same time, entirely
intersubjective. It is possible to obtain “objective” information about virtual
worlds through quantitative data-mining techniques, such as tracking log-ins or
player circulation through game space, but these exist as a statistical record of
past events rather than an observation of cultural practices-in-progress. Without
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the social context of meaning-making, they are merely data with no particular
subjective significance.
The social construction of a virtual world is deliminted by the concept describe
earlier of the “magic circle,” a boundary of time and space that players enter to
engage in a game. Players entering a magic circle, whether sports, board games,
or digital games, enter into a mutual agreement to abide by an alternative set of
social conventions to those of the “real world” for a fixed period. In the case of
online games and virtual worlds, this agreement is decidedly one-way as they
invariably require players to sign a literal contract, known as a EULA, or End
User Licensing Agreement, in which players agree to abide by the cultural
restrictions placed on them by game designers. As we have already seen, these
agreements tend to break down in practice, as in the case of the WoW Warriors
protest. All players sign these contracts, but few abide by all the edicts put forth
in them, and much of what we see in emergent cultural practices in virtual
worlds is the outcome of this tension between the absolute control ultimately
wielded by the world’s operators, even in worlds that are seemingly a free-forall, such as Second Life.
The “magic circle” also has some precedents in non-game cultural practices.
Anthropologist Victor Turner has made a similar distinction between the
“liminal” space of ritual, a kind of transitional gateway from one dimension or
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stage of life to another (such as between seasons or phases of life, or between the
world of the living and the dead), and the liminoid space of respite between
daily activities, especially production, characterized by leisure practices in
industrialized, Western cultures. (Turner 1982) Each of these modes provides
participants with an alternative set of social conventions by which to abide while
participating in the liminal or liminoid context. In Turner’s terms, games are
probably best characterized as liminoid space since they are secular and not
connected directly to real-life transitions; however, an argument can be made
that online games may sit somewhere between these two states. On the one
hand, they represent a “space between,” but they can also become a site of
transformation, as corroborated here and by numerous other studies of the
psychology and sociology of games. It is not an accident that the word avatar
originates from the Sanskrit term of a god’s embodiment on Earth (Farmer and
Morningstar 1991); the spiritual overtones that this implies are borne out in many
transformative avatar experiences recorded here and elsewhere. (Damer 1997;
Dibbell 1998; DiPaola 1998-2005). (REF: Turkle, Bartle, Taylor, etc.)
Virtual worlds create a particularly explicit boundary around the magic circle
through the ritual of “logging in;” however, as we shall see, the borders of the
magic circles that surround virtual worlds may be more porous than such a
formal framework might imply. In some of his early writings, Ted Castronova
made a case for maintaining the integrity of virtual worlds as “a world apart”
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from real world laws, customs and culture (Castronova 2004-2005); but he has
since rescinded this, finding that such a utopian goal is impractical and
ultimately unenforceable. (REF: Castronova, Synthetic worlds 2005) This study
illuminates in a very detailed way a number of fissures in the magic circle that
undermine the illusion of “purity” created by such worlds. In practice, because
online games take place by and large on computers (as opposed to game
consoles), they vie for attention with other PC functions such as e-mail, forums,
instant messaging and voice-over-IP, productivity software (such as Photoshop
and 3D modeling tools), as well as other games. Thus, their borders are not
impermeable; and, just as in the real world, cultures cross borders with
increasing ease, intermingling and hybridizing to create new cultural forms.
Cultural miscegenation of this sort is an inevitable outcome of emergent
behavior.
IS THIS REDUNDANT. ALSO MAYBE THE ABOVE IS THE BEST
TRANSITION TO THE NEXT SECTION?? While games may fall under the
rubric of Turner’s liminoid space, they may have also have a greater connection
to his liminal space in that they require a higher level of participation than the
other entertainment forms which exemplify his “liminoid” concept. Although,
like other entertainment forms, they are initially created in the context of an
institutionalized corporate structure, once players don their avatar personas they
begin to engage in the co-construction process described earlier, especially
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through the enactment of narratives within it, but also by adding their own
content to the world itself. (Pearce 2002a; Poremba 2003). The extent to which
players become co-creators and co-constructors of the ongoing participatory
drama that virtual worlds inevitably become is bounded and influenced by the
design of the world. Both Damer and DiPaola have looked at the ways in which
player creativity emerges in virtual worlds, especially the range of
expressiveness afforded by particular design features and social mechanics
(Damer, Gold, Marcelo, and Revi 1999; DiPaola 1998-2005). Mnookin and Dibbell
have explored the ways in which social order and democratic structures emerge
(Dibbell 1998; Mnookin 1996) while Taylor has explored in depth the role of
designer ideology and corporate governance versus players’ sense of or need for
forms of self-determination (Taylor 2002; Taylor 2003a).
The aim of this study is to examine this intersection, considering the virtual
world as designed by its creator(s) and the cybercultures that emerge among its
resident avatars. The study seeks to explore large- scale emergent group
behavior patterns and to understand the ways in which the game’s design,
narrative, structure or social mechanics influence the emergent patterns to which
they give rise.
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Methodology: Multi-Sited Cyberethnography
What research strategy could possibly collect information on unpredictable
outcomes? Social anthropology has one trick up its sleeve: the deliberate attempt
to generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection.
Anthropologists deploy open-ended, non-linear methods of data collection which
they call ethnography; I refer particularly to the nature of ethnography entailed in
anthropology's version of fieldwork (Arizpe 1996: 91). Rather than devising
research protocols that will purify the data in advance of analysis, the
anthropologist embarks on a participatory exercise which yields materials for
which analytical protocols are often devised after the fact. In the field the
ethnographer may work by indirection, creating tangents from which the
principal subject can be observed (through 'the wider social context'). But what is
tangential at one stage may become central at the next.
(Strathern 2004)
Marilyn Strathern’s description of the anthropological method, quoted by
anthropologist Tom Boellstorff in the inaugural issue of Games & Culture
(Boellstorff 2006), resonates on a variety of levels with the larger project of the
study of game cultures. In particular, her description suggests that ethnography
itself is an emergent process, and thus is uniquely suited for studying “cultures
of emergence” in online games and virtual worlds, and potentially elsewhere.
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The ludic environments of online games are characteristically open-ended, nonlinear and participatory, unpredictable and labile, and thus require an agile and
responsive approach to research. They are also characterized by lived experience,
which is one of the central concerns of ethnography. Contemporary, postcolonial, post-structuralist cultural anthropology avoids arriving at cultural
contexts with “hypotheses” or preconceived scenarios about what might occur
and what it might mean. This is a particularly useful approach in the social
studies of games because of their inherent unpredictability and emergent
qualities.
Ethnography has been widely adopted among researchers from computermediated communication, computer supported collaborative work, game
studies, and a range of other disciplines related to networked communication.
Variants of this method have been used to study various aspects of network
culture, including the World Wide Web, irc/chat, MUDs and MOOs, and blogs
(Kendall 2002; Markham 2003; Miller and Slater 2000; Mnookin 1996; Nocera
2002; Paccagnella 1997; Reed 2005; Turkle 1995) as well as networked work
environments (REFS: Dourish, Nardi, and??)
The term “virtual ethnography” is sometimes used to describe these uses of
participant observation to study networked cultures in situ. Originally
introduced by Bruce Lionel Mason, a folklorist, in 1996, (Mason 1996) it was later
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adopted and popularized by Christine Hine (Hine 1998; Hine 2000). Although I
concur with the basic tenets that both Mason and Hine present as a framework
for this style of research, I prefer the terms “cybersociology” and
“cyberethnography” rather than “virtual ethnography.” The latter, as discussed
earlier, carries with it the baggae of the term “virtual,” which implies a lack of
authenticity or veracity.
Hines describes “virtual ethnography” as being:
…particularly provocative in exploring the ways in which the designers of
technologies understand their users and the ways in which users creatively
appropriate and interpret the technologies which are made available to them.
Among the questions preoccupying workers in this field has been the extent to
which values, assumptions and even technological characteristics built into the
technologies by designers have influence on the users of technologies. A view of
technology emerges which sees it as embedded within the social relations which
make it meaningful.
(Hine 1998)
Unfortunately, many sociologists of technology are not as conscientious about
considering the design of the software they are describing, let alone the values
underlying these. Many of the articles featured in the Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, for instance, have little reference to the software or
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interfaces within which social the interaction being described takes place. Social
network analysis, similarly, often lacks the sense of context that is vital to
understanding games from a cultural perspective. Scholars of human interface
design, in particular those who study network collaborative workspace, devote
far greater attention to software design. REFS (Bardram and Czerwinski 2005;
Dourish 2001; Nardi and Kaptelinin 2006 in press). (Also add something about
Nardi’s WoW research.) There is also a significant body of writing about the
underlying values of software, (REF: Nissenbaum and others) as well as the
cultures of the environments in which software is produced, (REF: Georgina
Born, etc.) some of which pertains to games (Liz Losh, Flanagan and
Nissenbaum, etc.) There is a great deal of room for further exploration of the
game design process both in term of methods used and the socio-economic and
cultural contexts in which game design takes place.
Borrowing from Marcus’ concept of “multi-sited ethnography,” which addresses
the problem of anthropology in a global system, the method used here blends
techniques from anthropology, sociology and “virtual” ethnography” in which
can be characterized as “multi-sited cyberethnography.” Although not in its
original conception developed as a method for studying networked cultures,
Marcus anticipated its applicability to media studies, which he describes as
“among a number of interdisciplinary (in fact, ideologically antidisciplinary)
arenas” that might find utility in such a concept.
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Because of the nature of this study, concerning the migration of game
communities between virtual worlds, Marcus’ multi-sited ethnography provides
a means to, in his words, “examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects
and identities in diffuse space-time” and “…investigates and ethnographically
constructs the lifeworlds of various situated subjects…” as well as “aspects of the
system itself through the associations and connections it suggests among sites.”
(Marcus 1995)
This last point is key because Marcus sees multi-sited ethnography as a means of
understanding a “world system,” or in this case a “virtual world system,”
encompassing the totality of networked games and virtual worlds on the
Internet—what I am calling “the ludisphere.” I am also looking at a more
microscopic level at the social system within the particular group I am studying,
and the ways in which large group behavior begins to take on emergent
properties of self-organization. Marcus’ framework of the complexity of
anthropology within the world system, and especially the transmigration of
peoples, cultures and artifacts across borders, is highly applicable to the project
at-hand in which players are migrating across borders of “magic circles” in
virtual worlds. It also allows for the multi-scaled approach of looking at both the
individual players and the system as a whole, our repeating theme of looking at
the “forest and the trees concurrently.”
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Thus, in a multi-sited ethnography, comparison emerges from putting questions
to an emergent object of study whose contours, sites, and relationships are not
known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making an account that
has different, complexly connected, real-world sites of investigation.
(Marcus 1995)
In describing this method, Marcus outlines a number of approaches each of
which entails “following” some aspect of culture across borders. The two being
applied here are “follow the IP,” or intellectual property, in this case the Uru
game and its emergent fan cultures, and “follow the people,” specifically, the
migrations of players between different game worlds after the closure of the
original Uru game. I would also add to this the methods of “following up” and
“following leads,” which often entail taking on the very tangents to which
Strathern alludes above, and are particularly relevant in a play space where
much of the activity is unstructured and unscheduled. Not only do “cultures […]
not stand still for their portraits,” they constantly change their orientation to their
portraitists. (REF)
This is particularly true in ethnographies of play, where this strategy of
“following” requires a highly improvisational approach, and one which I would
characterize as opportunistic: being in the right place at the right time and “going
with the flow” of whatever is happening in the moment. Play is by nature
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spontaneous and unpredictable, requiring what Janesick describes as a
choreographic approach (Janesick 2000) that is flexible, responsive, and playful.
Playing and Performing Ethnography
All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it
isn’t are not easy to specify.
—Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959
Live in your world. Play in ours.
—Sony Computer Entertainment, Marketing Campaign
Slogan, 2003
Although sociologist Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgical” approach to sociology
(Goffman, 1959) predates the preponderance of electronic media, it also
prefigures also the current state of affairs in which the relationship between
performer and audience is increasingly blurred to create a milieu of concurrent
and dialogic co-performance. As such, in research circles, Goffman is
experiencing a bit of a renaissance: in a culture where audience and performer
increasingly conflate, his notions of everyday life as a performance takes on new
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significance I the age of MySpace, YouTube and online games and virtual
worlds.
Sociologist Norman Denzin invokes Goffman in his manifesto of “performance
ethnography” when he points out that: “We inhabit a performance-based,
dramaturgical culture. The dividing line between performer and audience blurs,
and culture itself becomes a dramatic performance.” To illustrate, Denzin draws
our attention to the “nearly invisible boundaries that separate everyday
theatrical performances from formal theatre, dance, music, MTV, video and
film.” (Denzin 2003)
Denzin’s analysis of the performative turn in culture is apt and highly
contemporary, if not prescient. Yet in enumerating the media that blur the
boundaries of performance, he somehow neglects to include the medium that
perhaps most epitomizes the world-as-stage philosophy: the Internet. With
proliferation of personal web sites, blogs, photosites and forums, as well as
online games and virtual worlds, the Internet is perhaps the largest stage in
human history. Brenda Laurel was the first of a number of digital media authors
to draw a correlation between computers and theater (Laurel 1991); however, the
advent of networks has transformed them into a much more complex discursive
performative space where every participant is both performer and audience.
Online games and virtual worlds, with their fantasy narratives and role-playing
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structures, are arguably the most dramatic instantiation of the network stage.
While all the real world may not be a stage, it can be argued that all virtual
worlds most definitely are.
Performance ethnography has been defined in two ways. The first, characterized
by the work of Turner and Schechner, entails the study and analysis of the role of
performance and ritual in cultures. (REFS) This form of anthropology has
typically embraced play and games as a subset of ritual and performance,
although generally not as its focal point. Turner and Schechner also collaborated
to pioneer the second type of performance ethnography, that which Denzin
explores, specifically, the theatrical performance of ethnographic texts and
narratives, often with audience participation (Manning 1988). Yet Denzin’s
assertion that “performance approaches to knowing insist on immediacy and
involvement” (Denzin 2003) suggests a third type of performance ethnography,
that in which the ethnographic method of participant observation is itself framed
as a performance. The study of game culture demands such an approach because
its object, play, can only be adequately understood through immediate and direct
engagement.
Virtual worlds provide a unique context for ethnographic research because they
are, by definition, performative spaces. Unlike traditional ethnography, one
cannot enter into an online game or virtual world without joining in the
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performance. There is no defined distinction between performer and audience;
they are one in the same. Goffman’s concept of the performance of everyday life
(Goffman 1959), especially in the context of public space (Goffman 1963),
provides us with a starting point for understanding network game space as a
kind of “everyday” co-performance. Thus when we talk about the phenomenon
of “seeing and being seen,” we are also implicating the importance of both having
and being an audience: the performance is only meaningful if there is someone
there to see it. In more recent research, looking at real-life costume play, I’ve
observed this phenomenon in the physical context of a fan convention. Each
costumed participant took the role of both performer and audience, constantly
shifting roles, and sometimes inhabiting both at once. (REF: Dragon*Con
research) This co-performative framework can be seen in myriad contemporary
ritual practices, from the fan conventions to Renaissance Faires to the annual
Burning Man festival, all of which blur the boundaries between Turner’s liminal
and liminoid spaces. (REFS)
Play contexts where behavior that might not be sanctioned is not only allowed
but lauded recall Goffman’s concept of “occasioned” behavior. (REF: Goffman
1963) Here, and in his essay on frame theory, Goffman points out that our roles
are constantly shifting depending on the context. (REF) In fact, he famously
pointed out that the inability to recognize socially appropriate behavior is a
hallmark of mental illness. In game space, however, within the magic circle of the
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play context, certain often subversive behaviors become sanctioned which
would, in other contexts, be considered socially unacceptable. Goffman’s
conception of the dynamics of how people perform in these occasioned spaces
was perhaps a bit too rational and premeditated. His descriptions of such
everyday performances suggest that people are highly self-conscious about their
public behavior; he may thus have underestimated the extent to which such
behavior is improvised, reflexive, and emergent. However, his overarching
concept provides a framework for better understanding the liberties that can be
taken within a game space, and the co-performative quality of the experience.
The entrée into this co-performative space is the creation the avatar, a pseudofictional character, an alter ego. The first gesture of a player entering a virtual
world is to invent a character name; this becomes the signifier of her situated
identity going forward: the marker of reputation, the vehicle of her agency, and
the representation of her cumulative actions. This character and even its
appearance may change and be transformed over time, but the name remains the
same. The player also crafts her initial visual representation in the world, given a
kit of parts provided by the designers. This creative act, much like choosing a
costume for a masquerade ball, the renaissance faire or Mardi Gras festival, is the
first performative gesture in the gaming experience, and the scaffolding on
which her future identity will be built. From this point forward, players both
play and play with their emergent identities through an intersubjective process.
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Far from being singly a creation of the individual, the avatar is a mechanism for
social agency; and the player’s identity-creation will emerge in a particular social
context through a set of interactions with a particular group of people. Avatars
do not exist in isolation, and through this intersubjective co-performative
framework players may discover sides of themselves that may not have other
avenues of expression in the other aspects of their lives, even sides of themselves
of which they may not previously have been aware. At times, these forms of
expression can be subversive, in both negative and positive ways. Part of what
this study reveals is the relationship between the emergence of individual and
group identity through the performance and practice of play.
For in practicing the ethnography of play, we are playing ourselves. The
ethnography is a mystery to be unraveled, and the identity we form in this
context is at once a scientific discipline and an art practice. Science fiction author
William Gibson characterized his vision of cyberspace (a term he coined) as a
consensual hallucination. When we enter an online game or virtual world, we
enter a space of the imagination, and we take on the task of studying a
consensual hallucination populated by real people, all of whom share in this
performance. The ethnographer is no exception, and very quickly will find that
she is drawn into the play space. Yet, she also stands outside the magic circle to
some extent. As an observer, she must play the game, but at the same time, she
plays a meta-game, the game of ethnography itself. And like her subjects, she
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never knows where this identity will take her. In spite of her objective stance, she
is not immune to the very emergent processes she seeks to understand.
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Feminist, Alternative and Experimental Ethnography
ADD SOMETHING IN THIS SECTION ABOUT POLYPHONIC TEXTS
Working with perspectives from contemporary, post-colonial, feminist
ethnography, thus study may be construed by different disciplines as
“experimental ethnography,” although the methods used are relatively
conventional within the rubric of contemporary anthropology. Traditional
anthropologists may view its subject matter, the field in which the ethnography
takes place, as experimental, although anthropologists have already begun to
embark on these shores equipped with far more ethnographic research under
their belts than I. From a game studies perspective, particularly in MMOG
studies, the subject matter is fairly conventional; but what may be construed as
experimental in this context is its framing as a performative act. Just as players
themselves are in a sense creating through consuming, the ethnographic process
here is ultimately also framed as an art practice, one which is reflexive, and
which tries to unravel some of the classic dichotomies of both ethnography and
games: what is real, and what is virtual, what is fiction and what is fact, how
does the subjectivity of the ethnographer impact the study subjects, and even
more interestingly, how do the study subjects impact the ethnographer. Just as
the magic circle is porous, this reflexive, performative approach also reveals the
porousness of the research process itself: in human matters, boundaries are never
as clear as we idealize them to be.
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At its core, this research is essentially a study of the everyday practice of popular
“fan” culture. As such it may be seen to overlap to some degree with the
concerns of ethnographers such as Paul Willis, whose interest in cultures of
subversion this research parallels. Willis’ studies of working class youth in a UK
secondary school, and of “bike boys” in a UK motorbike gang alluded to earlier,
both focus on the ways in which alternative and subversive sub-cultures serve to
both deconstruct and reinforce the status quo, and on the role that consumer
practices play in this process (Willis 1978; Willis 1981). Willis argues for an
approach to ethnography that frames the process of meaning-making in
everyday life as an art practice. Similarly, this study explores the relationship
between play and creativity, and celebrates the artistic instinct that underlies all
play practice. Because the ethnographer must also engage in the creative act of
consumption, i.e., playing the game, she is also intimately implicated in these
cultural practices.
Willis also points out the strong connection between subjective and
intersubjective processes, the social construction not only of meaning, but also of
identity:
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Cultural practices of meaning-making are intrinsically self-motivated as aspects
of identity-making and self-construction: in making our cultural worlds we
make ourselves.
(Willis 2000)
In other words, according to Willis, individual identity and the construction of
culture are in constant discourse, and each feeds the other. Far from the
Cartesian model of “I think therefore I am,” Willis suggests that individual
identity cannot be so neatly separated from culture. “Of the relationship between
social constructs and individual behavior, Willis asks: “Do we speak language, or
does it speak us?” We could easily reframe the question: “Do we play games, or
do they play us?”
It is interesting the ways in which these new forms of intersubjectivity connect
“modern” civilization to traditional indigenous cultures. This supports an
argument for drawing from post-colonial approaches to anthropology in
studying virtual worlds. Michael Jackson argues for intersubjectivity as a key
framework for understanding cultures, which, he suggests, may be particularly
appropriate conceptually when working with non-western cultures. As Jackson
points out, different cultures construct different conceptions of the relationship
between “the one and the many.” He highlights Joas’ notion of the
“intersubjective turn” (Joas 1993) in which “subjectivity has not so much been
dissolved as relocated” (Jackson 1998). The advent of digital social networks
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support this intersubjective turn, materializing the abstract notion that
theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin characterized as the “noosphere,” a kind
of shared knowledge space that Marshall McLuhan observed as being realized
through electric media (McLuhan 1964; Teilhard de Chardin 1959 (1955)).
Interestingly, though not a game scholar, Jackson begins to touch on issues
directly relevant to play culture in his notion of “playing with reality”:
If life is conceived as a game, then it slips and slides between slavish adherence to
the rules and a desire to play fast and loose with them. Play enables us to
renegotiate the given, experiment with alternatives, imagine how things might be
otherwise, and so resolve obliquely and artificially that which cannot be resolved
in the ‘real’ world.
(Jackson 1998)
Drawing from Willis and Jackson, life might be construed as both a game and an
art practice comprising both the exploration of and the bending of rules. Wills
envisions ethnography as a puzzle to be solved, a position that this project
explicitly embraces as integral to its methodology (Willis 2000). Thus
ethnography itself also becomes both a game and an art practice.
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Many of these tensions are also at the heart of feminist ethnography, which,
Kamala Visweswaran notes, has long challenged boundaries between
subjectivity and objectivity, individual and society, researcher and subject, fact
and fiction, self and other, art and science, and is frequently dismissed as
“subjective” and hence “unscientific.” (Visweswaran 1994) She points out that, as
Ruth Behar argues, taking the role of the “vulnerable observer” and accepting
emotional engagement as a legitimate part of the ethnographic process, may
ultimately lead to a deeper truth (Behar 1996).
Feminist anthropology has a significant role to play in games research. Early
anthropologists concerned themselves almost exclusively with male aspects of
culture, in a way not dissimilar from the extreme yet unstated male bias that
pervades both the game industry and, as a consequence, contemporary game
studies. Game studies might take a lead from feminist ethnographers such as
Mead and Hurston, who tried to amend this by including or even highlighting
female subjects. Visweswaran points out the ways in which female
anthropologists draw an entirely different reading from a culture by gaining
access to women’s cultural practices and perspectives, harvesting different
insights than their male counterparts. The work of Margaret Mead, Marjorie
Shostak and Hortense Powdermaker, for instance, gives us insight into female
attitudes, practices and rituals to which male ethnographers would not have
been privy. (Mead 1928; Mead 1963; Powdermaker 1966; Shostak 1981) At the
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same time, women ethnographers, viewed as “outsiders” by the cultures they
study, can also gain access to aspects of male culture that females native to that
culture cannot. Men may also find the female ethnographer less threatening, and
thus reveal different information than they would to her male counterpart. Thus,
women ethnographers may have an entirely different angle of access to the
culture overall as a result of her renegotiated gender status.
Visweswaran also describes shifts in structures of power and authority in which
subjects take the roles of collaborators, or even drive the research. Ruth Behar
was chosen by her research subject “Esperanza,” a Mexican street peddler who
adopted the ethnographer as her “comadre” because she wanted Behar to tell her
story (Behar 1993). Hortense Powdermaker describes being drawn into a dance
ritual by her Lesu subjects and “losing herself” in the experience (Powdermaker
1966). Feminist ethnographers Elenore Smith Bowen (nom de plume Laura
Bohannan) and Zora Neale Hurston blurred the boundary between fact and
fiction (Bowen 1964; Hurston 1935). Hurston’s work may be categorized as an
early example of “auto-ethnography,” as one of her study subjects was the town
where she was born. Auto-ethnography is a common methodological approach
among MMOG researchers, particularly women, who frequently select their own
play communities as a subject of study. Again, different facets of these
communities can be seen when viewed from their interiors. “In Hurston’s
ethnography,” states Visweswaran, “community is seen not merely as an object
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to be externally described, but as a realm intimately inhabited.” Likewise, the
play community may be best studied when “intimately inhabited.” And indeed,
as this study shows, such intimate inhabitation may, in fact, be the inevitable
outcome of the form of participant observation that is required in oder to study
games. Not unlike Hurston’s folklore, this research serves as an oral history
alongside the players’ own oral histories of their diasporic experience.
Even if the particular subjective position of the female ethnographer were not
privileged in this study, it would still stand as a feminist ethnography strictly on
the basis of demographics alone. The group of Uru refugees this study concerns
represent a disproportionately high percentage of women relative, exactly 50%,
as compared to other MMOG communities, and this seems to be paralleled in
Uru’s demographics overall. However, this study is very consciously
philosophically aligned with the concerns of feminist ethnography as defined by
Visweswaran as it explores a different and perhaps opposing border between
fiction and reality. (This leads more to
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Reading and Writing Cultures: Ethnography of Fictional Worlds
If we agree that one of the traditional ways to think about fiction is that it builds a
believable world, but one that the reader rejects as factual, then we can easily say
of ethnography that it, too, sets out to build a believable world but one that the
reader will accept as factual. Yet even this distinction breaks down if we consider
that ethnography, like fiction, constructs existing or possible worlds, all the while
retaining the idea of an alternative ‘made’ world.
(Visweswaran 1994)
(REF: pp.#)
What, then, of an ethnography of a fictional world? This study is not a fiction.
Rather, it sets out to create a non-fictional account of a fictional world, and
explores the emergent culture of a “fictive ethnicity,” an identity adopted around
an imaginary homeland. Proponents of Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra
might find such a notion alarming. Indeed, an appropriate subtitle for this
endeavor might be “Baudrillard’s Nightmare.” In his disdain for the synthetic,
Baudrillard failed to recognize the immediacy and reality of imagination, and the
human need for alternative modes of being (Baudrillard 1994), a fact that is welldocumented by Victor Turner and others (Schechner 1988a; Turner 1982; van
Gennep 1960 [1908]). Similar to the way in which play has been marginalized in
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Western thought, Baudrillard marginalizes the synthetic, as seen in theme parks
and virtual reality, as “fake” and “false,” rather than acknowledging the
authenticity of shared imagination. Players within virtual worlds, conversely,
might argue that in some respects, their synthetic homes are more “real” than
“reality” because they allow for the exploration of alternative realities and
identities.
Although denizens of fictional worlds, the Uru Diaspora shares characteristics in
common with real-world diasporas, commonly characterized by “experiences of
displacement, of constructing homes away from home…” and relating to such
notions as “border, creolization, transculturation, hybridity.” (Clifford 1994) In
conceiving a contemporary definition of diaspora, Clifford cites Rouse who
describes diaspora as a single community that maintains “transnational migrant
circuits” through “the continuous circulation of people, money, goods and
information.” (Rouse 1991) However, as Safran points out, some real-world
diasporas may ultimately be just as mythological as the fictive identity of the Uru
Diaspora, whose communal identity is of choice, rather than geopolitics or
genetics. This fictive identity presents us with a unique conflation of global
corporate culture and fan-based media subversion. While on the one hand, the
Uru identity is built upon an artifact of corporate media, namely the Uru game,
on the other, it provides its denizens with the freedom to build and extend their
own vision and values around a fictional identity that provides an additive
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alternative to their various real-life roles. Furthermore, Uruvians frequently
make a point of highlighting their nonviolent ludic values, as juxtaposed against
those of most other MMOGs and their players.
While this notion of a fictive ethnic identity may seem like a conundrum,
anthropology is a discipline that has long blurred the boundary between science
and art; anthropologists have written along a spectrum from a more formal style
of the ethnographic monograph to anthropologically informed works which are
baldly framed as fiction. The question of whether anthropological texts can or
should be viewed as “literature” has vexed anthropologists going back to
ethnography pioneer Malinowski, who wondered whether or not ethnographic
writings should adopt a literary style. (Malinowski 1967) At its heart, this
struggle is about the role of narrative: should anthropologists be storytellers, or
merely interpret data? To what extent is an anthropologist a folklorist, and to
what extent a scientist? Margaret Mead’s research on female adolescence in
Samoa was famous critiqued as fiction, an assertion which itself is likely to have
been fiction as well. (REF) Thus anthropological perspectives, even at their
origins, provide a theoretical context for reflexively exploring the contested
territory between “real” and “fictional” cultures, and the role of the
ethnographer in their construction.
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In large part due to its historical relationship with colonialism, contemporary
anthropology also provides us with a means to reflect on and interrogate the
relationship between the researcher and her subjects, both in the field, and in
matters of representation. Visweswaran points out that:
Since Malinowski’s time, the ‘method’ of participant-observation has enacted a
delicate balance of subjectivity and objectivity. The ethnographer’s personal
experiences, especially those of participation and empathy, are recognized as
central to the research process, but they are firmly restrained by the impersonal
standards of observation and “objective” distance. In classical ethnographies the
voice of the author was always manifest, but the conventions of textual
presentation and reading forbade too close a connection between authorial style
and the reality presented.
(Visweswaran 1994)
(REF: pp. #)
She adds: “States of serious confusion, violent feelings or acts, censorship,
important failures, changes of course, and excessive pleasures are excluded from
the published account.” (REF: pp.#) Ironically, these types of events are often the
most important and can also have significant implications on the research.
Ethnography is a messy business, and while the common practice is to present a
“cleaned up” version of events, there is also value in exposing the
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ethnographer’s process of what Edward Shils calls “learning as he stumbles.”
(REF: Shils)
I grappled with this extensively, and finally decided to address these issues in
Part III, which attempts to address some of these stumbles while avoiding
“interrupting the flow of the main ethnographic narrative” (Behar 1996) or
allowing my own narrative to eclipse that of my subjects. (Wolcott 1990) In fact,
some of the more challenging moments of rupture also yielded significant
epiphanies, precipitated a stronger relationship with the subjects, and ultimately
caused me to modify my research methods. Therefore, although these narratives
may be perceived as personal, they were germane to the research and thus
warrant inclusion in the account of the results. Indeed, far from being trivial,
they illuminate facets which a traditional “objective” account cannot revel. If this
is a polyphonic text, then in a sense, Part III is devoted to my inner voice,
reflecting upon the process. This includes both a detailed account of the methods,
tools and techniques that were used to conduct the research, as well as the
emergent quality of the ethnographic process.
In the same way that it is important to remember that the design of online games
and virtual worlds are social construction, it is equally important to remember
that any ethnography of their cultures is also socially constructed. However, the
assumption is often that the ethnographer, as “authority,” may have a larger role
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in constructing the cultures she studies than the other way around may be not
only naïve but arrogant in the extreme. Clifford and Marcus have pointed out
that “Hermeneutic philosophy in its varying styles…reminds us that the simplest
cultural accounts are intentional creations, that interpreters constantly construct
themselves through the others they study.” Thus the researcher must take a
reflective stance towards her relationship to her subjects, and acknowledge the
ways in which each constructs the other. “It has become clear that every version
of the ‘other,’ wherever found, is also a construction of the ‘self’…” (Clifford and
George E. Marcus 1986) Furthermore, they add that culture is “…contested,
temporal, and emergent. Representation and explanation—both by insiders and
outsiders—is implicated in this emergence.” Thus the representation itself also
becomes part of the cultural process. Not only is it true that “’cultures’” do not
hold still for their portraits,” but they may shift in direct relation to their
portraitists. This is particularly the case in network play culture, where cultures
are constantly shifting in a highly compressed frame of both time and space.
(Clifford and George E. Marcus 1986)
This privileging of authority, which is often coupled with an anxiety about the
biases the researcher brings to the table, overlooks the possibility that the
subjects have an active role to play not only in constructing their own accounts of
their culture, but in constructing in the ethnographer herself. Time and time
again, especially in the feminist ethnographies described above, we see that the
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researcher is as much constructed by the subjects as the other way around. Far
from being passive subjects, a mutual construction may take place that
transforms the researcher as much if not more than it does the subject. As with
anything else, the construction of ethnographic texts and their authors (and in
this I include the subjects) is an intersubjective enterprise.
While the heart of this story, both structurally and conceptually, is the story of
the Uru diaspora and specifically The Gathering of Uru, the meta-story is a larger
narrative of the relationship between researcher and subjects. As with Behar’s
study of Ezmerelda and Bohanan’s experience of “losing herself” to a dance
ritual that her subjects drew her into, the narrative of this study is as much about
the “social construction of the ethnographer” as the other way around, perhaps
moreso. While I acknowledge that my engagement with the group had an impact
on the subjects, it is clear to me that their impact on me was far greater than mine
on them.
Virtual Worlds Covered in This Study (NEED TO ADD IMAGES)
This research was conducted primarily in three virtual worlds (MMOWs), one of
which is a game and two of which are not. These worlds were traversed via the
Artemesia avatar described above, using the conventions of trans-virtual
persistent identity utilized by the study participants. These three worlds have a
number of common traits, the most obvious of which is that they all entail the
use of an avatar. Although players have ‘persistent identities’, that is, personae
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that they maintain for long periods of time, they do not have prescribed roles in
the manner typical of many online games, such as EverQuest or Star Wars
Galaxies. In all three worlds, players may create their own unique avatar names,
which cannot be changed, although their physical appearance can to varying
degrees in each world. These avatar names, which appear to all players in-world,
become the marker of persistent identity and also serve as a mechanism for
transporting identities across worlds.
Uru: Ages Beyond Myst/Until Uru (Cyan Worlds/Ubisoft, 2004)
Uru, which falls on the fixed synthetic end of the spectrum described above,
is a puzzle-based MMOG based on the best-selling Myst series. In Uru,
players solve puzzles, most of which are integrated into the designed
environment and pertain in some way to the game’s overarching story. As
will be described later in more detail, Uru was originally played in two
phases: a single-player phase, Uru Prime, and a multiplayer phase, Uru Live,
also known as Prologue. In Uru Live, players could solve puzzles together,
visit each other’s Ages (individual instantiations of each game ‘level’) or
Reltos (each players individual ‘home base’) and join ‘neighbourhoods’, or
‘hoods’ (the Uru equivalent of guilds), which also connected them to a central
gathering place also called a ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘hood’. Though players were
able to join multiple ‘hoods’ in the original Uru, most players tended to have
a ‘home’ favourite. Uru avatars are strictly humanoid, and although not
explicitly stated, it is implied that players are playing themselves as explorers
of the lost underground city of the D’ni people. Players can make minimal
changes to their avatars, including selecting from a limited, pre-set wardrobe;
they could not change their avatars gender. Uru has no economy, no currency
and no ability to collect inventory per se, although players collect ‘Linking
Books’ in their Reltos that allow them to teleport to various Ages. Like other
Myst games, Uru has no point system; rewards consist of Linking Books and
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features added to the Relto. Players can sometimes move objects around, but
other than opening up Ages in prescribed ways, they cannot alter the world
in any persistent way. Uru also has no age limit.
There.com (Makena Technologies 2003)
There.com (also known simply as ‘There’) is an example of a moderate ‘cocreated world’ in the spectrum described earlier. Though not a game,
There.com includes both games and sporting activities. It has a cartoon
aesthetic, resembling Walt Disney films set in the present day. Players can
create humanoid adult avatars within the constraints of this aesthetic; once
determined, they cannot change gender, but can make various modifications,
such as changes in skin and hair style, and changes of clothing. Players can
create new objects which they can sell for game currency on an in-game
auction site with the approval of the world’s operators, Makena, Inc. Players
must pay a developer fee to have their items approved; this is primarily to
avoid potential copyright infringement, but also to censor adult content; the
latter is especially important since There.com, like Uru, has no age limit.
Player creation of new items takes place entirely out-of-world, using a 3D
modelling tool, or modifying texture templates with Adobe Photoshop.
Players create their own spaces by configuring individual items in a
PortaZone, or PAZ, which can be popped up anywhere in-world on a
squatting basis. Until recently, players could not actually own land in
There.com, and PAZes are all owned by individuals and cannot be worked on
collaboratively. Players could, however, group PAZes together to create
larger
communities.
Newer
features
allow
players
to
purchase
‘neighbourhoods’, large tracts of land with collective ownership and building
rights. The overall ethos of There.com is that of a resort environment, a kind of
virtual ‘Club Med’ with a number of Islands where players can visit and
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settle. There.com has its own currency, Therebucks, with which players can
acquire items; Therebucks can be bought for real-world currency, but not
sold. Player-created items include vehicles, such as Dune Buggies or
Hoverboats (air bound vehicles that hold 4-8 avatars), readymade or playercreated homes, clothing, furniture, art, and accessories. The world allows for
the creation of groups, and avatars may both start and join as many of these
as they wish. Players can gain various levels of expertise, such as ‘avid’,
‘expert’, ‘legendary’, in roles such as ‘explorer’, ‘fashionista’, or ‘events host’,
sports such as ‘hoverboarding’, and games such as a digital version of the
card game ‘Spades’.
Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003)
Falling on the most extreme end of the ‘co-created’ world is Second Life, an
open-ended ‘metaverse’ in which virtually all objects, structures, animations
and avatar designs are created by players. Avatar creation is highly flexible,
with literally dozens of variables available. While avatars are biped, they can
take a variety of forms and sizes, gender can be changed at will, and a single
player identity (name) can have an unlimited number of avatar instantiations.
Avatars are free to walk or fly around the world or explore via ground or air
vehicles. Like There.com, Second Life also contains a number of games and
activities, most of which are player-created. A sophisticated set of in-world
building tools using geometric primitives (known by players as ‘prims’) and
textures allows for diverse variations of objects. Players can own and share
land and grant permissions to modify land or objects, allowing for extensive
in-world collaboration. Players can create, give away or sell their own
buildings, furniture, landscaping elements, vehicles, avatar designs, clothing,
accessories (including sex toys) and even fully functional scripts, avatar
animations and games. Second Life’s creator/operators, Linden Lab, do not
practice any type of censoring or filtering of player-created objects but
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enforce a rigorous ‘over 18 only’ membership policy. Players can also own
real estate and create their own public venues, such as malls and shops,
discos, casinos, and sex clubs (which abound). More ambitious players can
purchase entire Islands on which to create their own environments or games.
Players buy and sell objects using Lindens, the in-world currency, which they
can also exchange for real-world cash on both authorised and unauthorised
Linden Exchange sites. Unlike There.com’s auction-based commerce system,
any player-created object can be set to a mode that allows other players to
purchase or take a free copy of the object in-world; players can also buy and
sell land in a similar fashion.
In addition to these three virtual worlds, two other tools are mentioned in this
document. The first of these is an online MUD (multi-user domain or dungeon).
MUDs are virtual worlds created entirely from text, in which players navigate
through written descriptions of environments, and objects they encounter along
the way. While still popular, MUDs were more prevalent in the late 1980’s and
early 1990’s, having been supplanted by more graphical virtual worlds, many of
which still utilise some of their conventions. The second is Adobe Atmosphere,
which is used, along with 3D modelling tools, to build small, customisable
virtual worlds, and includes a server back-end for small groups.
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Yee, Nicholas. 2001. "The Norrathian Scrolls: A study of EverQuest."
—. 2001-2008. "The Daedalus Project: The Psychology of MMORPGs." SelfPublished.
Aarseth, Espen, Solveg Marie Smedstad, and Lise Sunnanå. 2003. "A Multi-Dimensional
Typology of Games." in Level Up; Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA)
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Conference Proceedings, edited by M. Copier and J. Raessens. Utrecht,
Netherlands: Universiteit Utrecht.
Damer, Bruce. 1997. Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet.
Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press.
DiPaola, Steve. 1998-2005. "Steve DiPaola: A Body of Work (Web Site)."
Morgenstern, Oskar and John von Neumann. 1944. The Theory of Games and
Economic Behavior. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Nash, John. 1950. "Equilibrium points in n-person games." Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 36:48-49.
Aarseth, Espen, Solveg Marie Smedstad, and Lise Sunnanå. 2003. "A Multi-Dimensional
Typology of Games." in Level Up; Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA)
Conference Proceedings, edited by M. Copier and J. Raessens. Utrecht,
Netherlands: Universiteit Utrecht.
Damer, Bruce. 1997. Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet.
Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press.
DiPaola, Steve. 1998-2005. "Steve DiPaola: A Body of Work (Web Site)."
Morgenstern, Oskar and John von Neumann. 1944. The Theory of Games and
Economic Behavior. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Nash, John. 1950. "Equilibrium points in n-person games." Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 36:48-49.
Pearce, Celia. 2004. "Towards a Game Theory of Game." in First Person: New
Media as Story, Performance and Game, edited by N. Wardrip-Fruin and P.
Harrigan. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Piaget, Jean. 1962. Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. New York: Norton.
This “interdiscipline” is not to be confused with game theory, a branch of applied mathematics
focused on conflict resolution and strategic decision-making, applied primarily to economics and
military strategy. Morgenstern, Oskar and John von Neumann. 1944. The Theory of Games and
Economic Behavior. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Nash, John. 1950.
"Equilibrium points in n-person games." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America 36:48-49. While game theory has some application in Game Studies, it is
generally viewed as an unrelated and separate field.
i
For an interesting taxonomy of game worlds, see Aarseth, Espen, Solveg Marie Smedstad, and
Lise Sunnanå. 2003. "A Multi-Dimensional Typology of Games." in Level Up; Digital Games
Research Association (DiGRA) Conference Proceedings, edited by M. Copier and J. Raessens. Utrecht,
Netherlands: Universiteit Utrecht.
ii
iii
According to personal accounts of the parties involved, Stephenson arrived at the usage independently of
Morningstar and Farmer.
iv
For more in-depth studies of avatars and virtual worlds, see (Damer, Bruce. 1997. Avatars!
Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet. Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press. and
DiPaola, Steve. 1998-2005. "Steve DiPaola: A Body of Work (Web Site)."
Celia Pearce & Artemesia
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