This is a paper that I sumitted for an anthropology class I took in 2007-2008. It's a paper based on an ethnographic study I did of an online community. When it came time to write the paper I realized that the scope of the project was far beyond the limitations of the assignment so the resulting paper was less than I would have liked but an interesting read nevertheless. Please excuse errors of interpretation and irregularities of style, I am an undergraduate and cannot know any better. I make no claims to ownership of copywrighted material that was discussed in the text, where the ideas and observations in my work are not mine, I don't own them.
I would like to dedicate my work to the community I studied, to the noobs and the beta vets, the "gaybies" and the "bitter old queens", and to one person specifically, even though we don't speak to each other much anymore you taught me better than anybody about emotion in online environments.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a community in an MMORPG: Routine practice and discourse in online communities
This paper is a document inspired by the nearly three months in the field I spent in a chat channel called NAME on an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) called City of Heroes/City of Villains (CoH/CoV) or more colloquially City of X (CoX). On a theoretical level it is a study of user communities of MMORPGs, on a more practical level it is the study of an LGBT community in an online game. For the non-gamer , however, it might be easiest to think of MMORPGs as “a scenic chat room with a variety of interactive tasks.”(Yee, 2006; 311) While this definition does elide a somewhat technical discussion about the digital aspects of game play it provides a good explanation of social interaction in MMORPGs. Ultimately perhaps the simplest way to imagine the Name channel is as a chat room.
I spent approximately three months in the field studying the everyday practices of an online community. During those three months I logged in to the game as often as I could. I participated in the everyday life of the name channel while also observing it. Sometimes I would team with individuals I met on the channel, and other times I did not. I also interviewed community members in order to get a better sense as to how different users perceive the game. All in all I tried to get a feel for how the community functioned on at the level of everyday interactions.
James Clifford argues that ethnographic writing is inherently allegorical, that it tells a story, and I think that this project is a story about self discovery. This study began with a need to test myself, a need to try my hand at ethnographic writing. Like many anthropologists this first attempt at ethnographic writing originates in an attempt trying to relate my lived experiences to theory. It is a project that comes from questions in my life.
This is not just my story though; it is a story about three months in the Name channel, so I have to be careful about hwhat I say. The issue of who owns my findings is serious stuff when one considers that game companies take a very proprietary interest in anything that derives from their product. This is the reason that I consulted the game company before embarking on my study. But more than that there are issues about representation at stake here too. Who am I to undertake such a project? What right do I have to represent other people?
I consulted with the members of the channel before I began my study; this is their story after all and I needed their permission before I could begin the ethnography. Throughout the process I was as transparent as I could possibly be; I had a consent form, I answered any questions as they came up; in short I made sure that I was as transparent as possible in conducting my study. Because anthropologists observe the communities they study first hand they often have access to privileged information. In order to protect their informants and the communities they work with anthropologists use pseudonyms to protect the identities of their subjects.
While I am not a fan of the veil of secrecy anthropologists tend to weave over their subjects I chose to respect the confidentiality of my subjects for several reasons. As my first foray into ethnographic writing I felt that it would be inappropriate for me to break from standard anthropological practice too greatly. But more importantly the Name channel is a public channel, one that any user can join. As a gay man I cannot deny the existence of homophobia. If Turkle (1995) is right in saying that the anonymity of virtuality can allow people to grow as individuals it also gives some people licence to behave badly.
When I interviewed members one of the themes that came up over and over again when we discussed the Name channel was that it was a place where they felt they could be open about their sexual orientation. One informant told me that the Name channel was a place where he did not have to be careful about the pronouns he used. Another member reminded me that everybody wants to socialize with like minded others. My time playing CoX has been enriched because of my participation in the Name channel and I would not wish for the channel to have to disappear. By protecting the identity of the channel and its members I hope to protect them from possible negative consequences my work could engender.
My problem with the confidentiality agreements that most anthropologists end up working with is that in practice they are not all that effective. I agree with Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2000) when she argues against protecting her informant’s identity because pseudonyms don’t really fool anyone. Furthermore the use of pseudonyms can serve to detach the anthropologist from his or her fieldwork subject mitigating his or her responsibility for the consequences of their work. Scheper-Hughes goes on to assert that the use of pseudonyms serves more to protect the anthropologist from the consequences of his or her work than it does the subjects themselves. When one publishes a work one has to be aware of the potential consequences of the work. As an anthropologist and a member of the community I studied I thought long and hard about this question. I have tried to minimize the potential harm my project could cause through the use of pseudonyms, but I am prepared to deal with the consequences of writing even though I use pseudonyms.
On a more practical note I have organized my paper into two articles; the first discusses how MMORPGs should de studies the second discusses what has already been said and how my findings fit in with extant theory. This work represents not only the three months I spent in the field but also the school year I spent thinking about the project itself. Without further ado I here present the fruit of my labour so that it can speak for itself.
Article 1: On the study of online communities
A growing body of work seems to indicate that the term MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)refers to specific a genre of game. While there is no official definition of the MMORPG available, scholars tend elaborate properties they feel define the genre. Obviously MMORPGs are online games, meaning that they are played over the internet. MMORPGs are multi-user, more than that, they allow for many users to play in a game world at the same time: Yee (2006) estimates that MMORPGs can have up to 2000 players in a game world simultaneously where Filiciak estimates a minimum of 1000 players online at the same time. Precise numbers aside all the authors I consulted agreed that large player populations (in the thousands) are characteristic of MMORPGs.
Another trait common to MMORPGs is that they are persistent worlds (PW). A virtual world is called persistent when it exists independently from its users, that is to say that interactions and events occur in the game world independent of individual users (Yee 2005). To paraphrase Heraclitus you can never log onto the same PW twice, because other players interacting with the world and each other modify it. Typically MMORPG game worlds are vast digital worlds with complex naturalistic environments (Yee, 2005). The size and complexity of the world are designed in order to keep users interested in the game.
MMORPGs are avatar based games, meaning that users create avatars described by various statistics (Filiciak 2003). Typically users are presented with a third person view of their avatar and the world, and they use some combinations keys and mouse clicks to move their avatar around the world and one of the goals of most MMORPGs is to improve one’s avatar in some way. The complexity of virtual worlds gives users the opportunity to decide how they wish to play the game (Yee, 2005). There are limits to this freedom; all MMORPGs have terms of use which remind users not refrain from unacceptable behaviours . The companies that run these games enforce their terms of use punishing users who violate them in various ways including expulsing a user from the game and not permitting him or her to log back on. On a more subtle level MMORPGs were designed for users to play together and the game encourages this by making cooperative play mutually beneficial if not absolutely necessary (Yee, 2005).
For social scientists, however, what is particularly interesting is the depth and complexity of social interactions one can find in these games. It’s not for nothing that Steinkuehler (2005) asserts that MMORPG worlds are “emergent cultures” or Filiciak (2003) claims that MMORPGs have much in common with the social-cultural scripts that govern life in industrialized countries. What I mean here is that while the setting of the game may well be entirely fictional (most MMORPGs are fantasy themed), social interactions between users cannot be so lightly dismissed. While there are different theories on what one may or may not learn about the world through MMORPGs, I feel safe in asserting that there is a complexity to the social interactions in these game worlds that cannot be denied.
For the non-gamer , however, it might be easiest to think of MMORPGs as “a scenic chat room with a variety of interactive tasks.”(Yee, 2006; 311) While this definition does elide a somewhat technical discussion about the digital aspects of game play it is a good analogy for understanding social interaction in MMORPGs. The question then is how to study them. For social scientists, the interest in studying MMORPGs is user practices (Yee). The goal has been to understand social interactions in MMORPGs from an insider’s perspective, one that the ethnographic method is uniquely suited to.
While anthropology has been hesitant to study the MMORPG, scholars from other disciplines have not hesitated to bring the ethnographic method to game studies. What is most noticeable about these discussions of the ethnographic method is their brevity. This is not to say that game studies discussions of the ethnographic method are invalid but merely that they are somewhat incomplete. Steinkuehler, for example, mentions in passing Geertz’ (1973) thick description as a necessary tool for collecting data but never really discusses what that means. This is not to say that Steinkuehler’s methodology is suspect, but that her discussion is cut short. To explore what this entails I will present Geertzian theory and then discuss later meditations on the ethnographic method before concluding with a meditation about how these debates affect practice.
Geertz defines culture as shared symbol systems that individual members draw from to make sense of daily events. Geertz essentially views human behaviour as highly symbolic and argues that culture is the shared, understood interpretations of behaviours. For Geertz culture is collectively created, shared, and disseminated; and he uses the image of culture as a text that can be read. For Geertz the role of the anthropologist is to interpret or “read” culture in the practices of people. The ethnographer must therefore not only observe his or her subjects but also interpret what he or she sees. When we are talking about MMORPG worlds, that is complex virtual spaces with fictional cultural and geographical references it seems right to view practice as having meaning outside explicit game contexts . What I mean here is to understand user actions as having meaning independent of the fictional game world, however interesting the game world itself may be.
Geertz (1973) does mention a few caveats in proposing his approach. One is that ethnographic writing becomes interpretations of interpretations in this vision of culture. Much of the interpretation involved in a Geertzian reading of culture is centered on analyzing native explanations of their practices. The danger, according to Geertz ,is that anthropologists lose sight of the cultural realities they are supposed to study. In a sense Geertz is arguing for the objective existence of culture as grounded in specific material practices, that culture exists in as much as it makes everyday actions meaningful. Ultimately the value of a work is directly dependant on the value of one’s observations. Another is that one cannot write a theory of cultural interpretation that is universally valid (Geertz 1973). Interpretation is based on intuition, either you get it or you don’t and there is no method that can make the process easier (Keesing, 1987).
While the Geertzian approach to culture is interesting it has several important flaws. In his 1987 critique of interpretive of Geertzian or symbolic anthropology Keesing argues that the Geertzian definition of culture as shared meanings overlooks the ways in which meanings are created, distributed, and understood. Essentially Keesing (1987) argues that by overlooking issues of power and authority anthropologists mystify the role of knowledge in the production of cultural meaning. An vision of culture as a collaborative creation needs to understand knowledge as distributed and controlled (Keesing 1987). To do otherwise is to ignore the diversity of knowledge, understandings, and beliefs that are typical to any group of individuals. Furthermore cultures should be understood as more than simply meanings, they are ideologies which make certain realities seem natural or right (Keesing 1987). If cultures are texts to be read who writes them? And how deeply should we read into them?
Keesing (1987) argues that like texts, cultures are deeply ambiguous and thus open to multiple readings. Anthropologists tend to emphasize the differences between their readers and the people the study interpreting their data accordingly (Keesing 1987). Texts are imminently interpretable; there are always multiple readings possible for any given text. The claim to be able to read cultures like a text is then dubious on two counts, first because that all texts contain within them multiple possible readings, and second because it is doubtful that any culture can be reduced to a single text.
Keesing (1987), however, calls attention to the problem of symbolic anthropology and traditional anthropological notions of culture without ever really proposing a solution. The problems Keesing touches upon in his article are part of what lead to the crisis of representation in the social sciences. A crisis that is still ongoing centered on the question: how can one accurately represent people both as groups and individuals? The efforts of early anthropologists tended to make their subjects seem like homogeneous groups making it seem like culture was something essential and fixed through generalizations. Geertzian emphasis on meaning tends toward generalization, assuming that because all meanings are shared that there is one commonly held system of meanings.
In her critique of traditional anthropology Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) argues that the culture concept is central to the process to the creation of the exotic other. Lughod (1991) defines culture as a way of establishing difference, a difference which is inherently unequal. Ultimately dividing practices are fraught with issues of authority and power and as a dividing practice anthropological concepts of culture come to justify inequality.
Lughod (1991) proposes then that anthropologists write against culture, that they find ways to get around the culture concept. Lughod (1991) begins by embracing practice and discourse theory. Practice theory comes from Bourdieu and it focuses on the ways in which individuals internalize larger systems of knowledge, belief, and meaning to their own ends. Discourse theory associated with Foucault is centered on the ways in which knowledge, beliefs and practices are turned into discourse and the ways in which individuals draw from discourse. Both theoretical perspectives get away from the notion of culture as bounded systems of shared meaning (Lughod 1991). Discourse and practice take into account the ways in which individual member of a social group do not necessarily share the same knowledge or understandings of the world.
Lughod (1991) also emphasizes the need to understand the larger socio-historical and geo-political contexts in which the communities they study exist. More than that, Lughod (1991) argues, anthropologists need to examine how it is that the practice of anthropology came to be, and what they are doing in the field. Anthropologists cannot consider communities as isolated units any more, if there ever was such a time, it is now truly over (Lughod 1991). Anthropologists need to look at history, geography, and politics to situate their subjects in connection to larger phenomena (Lughod 1991).
Lughod’s third strategy is in many ways the most interesting; it is a strategy for writing ethnographies that she feels effectively sidesteps generalization. Lughod (1991) argues that what is needed is a focus on the particular. The larger forces that affect the lives of people only manifest themselves locally, in times and places produced by specific individuals (Lughod 1991). Lughod (1991) argues that a closer look at the lives and lived experiences of particular individuals would give one better insight into what larger discourses can really mean. By refusing to generalize the anthropologist underlines the constructed quality of notions like ‘culture’. Furthermore a closer look at particular individuals and particular moments suggests that they are crucial to the constitution of experience, which is crucial to understanding (Lughod 1991). With that in mind, focusing on the particular means being able to more accurately reconstruct native explanations of social life; giving one keen insight into discourses (Lughod 1991).
Critiques of Geertz should not necessarily be understood as undermining his theories or his approach to culture. I would argue that reading Lughod and Keesing in conjunction with Geertz allow one to refine the approach first proposed by Geertz. In viewing Geertz’ approach as simply methodological game studies scholars disregard a debate about culture that I feel might be of value to their work. It must be said that games studies scholars bring theories from educational psychology, cultural studies, and linguistics to analyze the data they collect mitigating the lack of methodological discussion. Steinkuehler, for instance, supplements her discussion of Geertzian method with a discussion of Gee’s discourse theory. MMORPGs are complex virtual worlds with characteristics and properties unique to them and Steinkuehler (2005) is correct in her assessment of them as complex societies where individuals band together to form communities.
From my own experiences on the field I can say that the social life of MMORPGs is made up of particular interactions, in particular contexts, between particular individuals. In any given MMORPG, users construct ways of talking and thinking about the game, the game world, and their relationships with each other that are specific to a particular setting. Even terms that seem to be shared between different MMORPGs almost invariably end up referring to very different practices. For instance terms like guild, party, and gold, which are considered to be generic MMORPG terminology, are stunningly inaccurate when discussing MMORPGs that are not fantasy themed. But even looking at fantasy MMORPGs a term like guild in a study refers to specific sets of social and (virtual) material realities unique to the game in question. Furthermore individuals are attracted to play different games for a variety of reasons making the populations of MMORPGs both internally and externally diverse.
There is a need for a more rigorous examination of the ethnographic method in the field of games studies. Discussions of Geertz and thick description are a good start; however, Anthropologists have been working with the ethnographic method since before anthropology became a discipline, so perhaps there is more to be had there. If we are to even begin to account for what people do when they play MMORPGs we need to pay closer attention to what they have to say for and about themselves and this is what games studies discussions of the ethnographic method tend to emphasize, eliding some of the thornier aspects of representation. Beyond the issue of representation though there is a need for procedural norms about time on the field and universality of terminology. I spent about three months in the field and I do not feel I spent enough time in the field, yet have found scholars insisting that less time could be adequate. In conducting my study I became aware of some of the technical challenges of the work only as I faced them, in a sense I had to constitute my own method as my project progressed.
My goal here is not to write a how to manual for game studies but to further a discussion of research methods in the study of online games. I spent approximately three months in the field studying the everyday practices of an online community on an MMORPG called City of Heroes/City of Villains (CoH/CoV) or more colloquially City of X (CoX). For those three months I recorded chat logs of the game, I played CoX, I observed and participated in the channel and I interviewed some members of the community. Sometimes I would team with individuals I met on the channel and other times I would play with people I met other ways. So I observed how different individuals played the game and participated in community, with an approach somewhat influenced by Bambi B. Schieffelin's work on language socialization.
In The Give and Take of Everyday Life Schieffelin (1990) argued that it is only by studying language at the level of use that we can begin to understand its social functions. Schieffelin is interested in language socialization: how individuals become members of communities and the role of language in this process. In her work she chose to focus on the routine social interactions of a handful of children in a small community. Schieffelin’s approach has much in common with Lughod’s ethnography of the particular, because of a shared concern about the “micro-level”. Ultimately I am interested in how language use ties in to gaming practices and how those practices tie into larger real world discourses about self and society.
I argue that if we are to really understand what people do in virtual environments that the ethnographic method can be helpful. I am, however, sceptical of current uses of the ethnographic method in game studies simply because they are a bit detached from anthropological discussions of the subject. So ultimately more work needs to be done to understand how the ethnographic method can be used in virtual spaces.
Article 2: On Online Communities
Community is a concept central to the practice of anthropology because it is the basic unit of study. Anthropologists conduct ethnographies in communities and the notion of community itself implies shared culture. The details of any given community vary greatly and if the notion of an isolated community so prevalent in early anthropological work is no longer considered realistic anthropologists still study communities. But what is a community? When I spent approximately three months doing fieldwork in a community of an online game it was the question that somehow became central to my work.
In her 1995 book Life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet Dr Sherry Turkle argued that the internet serves as an object to think with about the self and reality. Turkle (1995) argued that our interactions with computers and with each other over the internet allow us to think differently about society and the self. I propose that online communities can serve as objects to think with about the notion of community, and that they instantiate Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”. Drawing scholarly work notably Anderson, Turkle, and Steinkuehler I will examine how communities create and are created by the everyday practices of its members providing examples from my time in the field.
Anderson’s (1983) thesis is that the invention of the printing press made the development of national communities possible. What we have to remember first and foremost is that written language is not affected by accents and other irregularities that can make oral communication difficult. By making the written word available on a larger scale than it ever had been before ultimately made it possible for individuals who might not speak with each other to communicate; more than that the printing press allowed for the creation of standardized languages. In Europe before the printing press language was regional and communication between people living in different villages might be unable to communicate with each other. The printing press changed that making it possible for individuals who might otherwise never understand each other to dialogue.
Benedict’s point is this, the printing press made it possible for individuals to communicate with people they did not know from a distance and thus to imagine that those other people were like them. National communities, according to Anderson, are imagined in that they exist because members imagine that other members are like them by presuming they share practices and beliefs. This is not to say that communities are imaginary or not real, that would be akin to saying that calling the bible a work of fiction means the text itself does not exist. Anderson argued that communities are at their origins imagined, based on assumptions of shared material and linguistic practices, not that they do not exist.
When I first heard of this theory I found it very interesting but it meant little to me. I do not identify with any community very strongly; I don’t even really feel like I am a part of the gay, even though I am a gay man. During my time on the field I was astonished to realize that I was a member of the community I was studying. Even now I feel like a member of the Name channel community and I know that at the root of this feeling is the assumption that every other member of the community is like me in some way. How true this is in reality, I do not know, all the members of the channel are human beings with access to a computer but beyond that I cannot really be sure of anything.
Because the Name channel community is an LGBT community I imagine that at the very limit all of its members would necessarily be LGBT friendly at the very least. I was surprised and horrified to find out that there had been incidents where individuals had joined the channel only to make homophobic remarks. I was further unsettled to find out that such an individual was a member of the channel and that only the knowledge that he or she was watched regulated their behaviour.
During my time on the name channel I found that the pride channel was a very diverse group of individuals. Many of my informants balked a bit at questions about the kind of person member of the Name channel could be. One of my informants was straight , and he was not the only straight channel member. Initially I think I felt more comfortable around him because I knew what he expected of me. This particular informant was and is very knowledgeable about the game and in our informal interviews I discussed game mechanics with him. Player1 as I will call him taught me a great deal about how the game is played once one’s avatar has reached the highest possible level.
What is particular about online communities is the way that online interactions lend themselves to projection (Turkle 1995). The disembodied anonymity of the internet encourages individuals to project thoughts and feelings onto others (Turkle 1995). This, of course, leads to the development of very powerful emotions in relatively short intervals of time (Turkle 1995). When all you see are words on a screen it is easy to become captivated by other people, after all the other becomes a blank canvas filled in to suit one’s needs (Turkle 1995). During the course of my time in the field I was taken aback by the intensity of the feelings I developed for another user . It is one thing to read about a thing it is another to actually experience it. I still recall how happy he could make me feel, how empty days not spend with him felt. Since my time on the field we have grown apart and I have taken solace in what Turkle says about intimacy online; that I am not the first to form romantic attachments online, and that it is typical of life on the screen.
Turkle is talking about interpersonal intimacy here but I think that this may play a role in the ways communities form online. There is something seductive about the feeling of belonging, and in my interviews when I asked users why they were a member of the channel many of them told me it was because they wanted to have a space where they felt they belonged. What makes online communities like the one that I studied particularly interesting is the way they depend on the willingness of members to participate in the shared (virtual) material and linguistic practices of the community. Being a member of a community comes with both privileges and responsibilities. I know I began to feel like a member of the Name channel when I was able to help newer players orient themselves in the game near the end of my time in the field. When I could demonstrate my mastery of in game discourses by teaching others, I knew I was a member of the community.
The anonymity provided by the internet makes certain individuals believe they can act in ways they never would in their real lives and if some use this freedom to share different sides of themselves others prefer to use this freedom to behave badly. There is nothing that can compel members to participate in the day to day life of the community. To be fair all communities have norms, standards, and means of enforcing them, but online communities cannot compel membership in the same way real world ones can, simply because online identities are more mutable. While there is still work to be done on the subject, scholarship has already begun to understand how individual users construct identities online.
Among the first to look at how online identities is Sherry Turkle; her book Life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet documents the lived experiences of individuals she interviewed in an attempt to better understand how virtuality has changed the ways individuals think about identity. What Turkle found was that the internet and MUDs in particular the idea of socially constructed reality more understandable. On MUDs, users were free to take on the roles and identities that suited them. In principle MUDs like MMORPGs were avatar based so the user creates an avatar to interact with the game world. MUDs however were and are textual, so instead of pixels the world and those in it described through text.
Avatars on MUDs are called personae (Turkle 1995) a term implying social mask or public face, it comes from the Latin cognates per sonae that transliterate as “the thing sound comes through”. Typically one can create many different personae and be logged on to several MUDs at a time (Turkle 1995). The personae can be very similar to its creator or very different and this is central to understanding how Turkle views MUDs. For Turkle (1995) the act of creating a persona and interacting in the MUD though this persona is role playing. MUDs are the first persistent worlds, game worlds that are always functioning. On MUDs much like elsewhere online you are who you say you are. In real life I am a man, I identify as male and am biologically male; so attempting to pass as a female in my real life would be technically complicated. In a MUD, however, I am free to create female personae and to interact with other users as if I were a female.
When users construct their personae they are in a position to explore different aspects of themselves or even different identities. When Turkle warns us that “Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk.” (Turkle 1995; 269) what she means is that individuals can both profit from and lose from their online experiences. Turkle (1995) borrows the notion of a psychosocial moratorium from psychoanalyst Erik Erikson to talk about MUDs. The moratorium is part of Erikson’s theories on adolescence and the idea is that adolescence is a time for experimentation. The idea being that adolescents experiment with their own possibilities as they interact with the world around them and that the moratorium minimizes the consequences of their actions (Turkle 1995). For instance trying to pass as female when I am not could be potentially dangerous in my real life in a way that it would not be on screen.
Being a very timid guy myself, I found that on the Name channel I felt freer to explore aspects of myself I could trouble with in my real life. In a sense my global handle @Global handle became a persona for me and He was able to experience things that Ifelt unable to partake in. My coming out was an awkward and drawn out process and in some ways is still an incomplete one. My persona was bolder and more flirtatious than I would dare to be in real life. Turkle claims that the people who have gotten the most out of their meaningful experiences were ones who tried to integrate their personae into their everyday lives, something I am still thinking about.
What is most significant in Turkle’s work is her emphasis on the social construction of reality. If reality is defined through one’s social interactions, then what one does online is real. MUDs, according to Turkle, are moratoriums in much the same way that adolescence is, they are places where individuals are free to experiment through their personae and have meaningful experiences without facing the consequences of their behaviour. In this understanding, the moratorium is no longer a rite of passage but a tool for personal development which individuals may take advantage of at any moment in their lives. Ultimately while some claim what happens online is just fun and games, Turkle argues that it is meaningful and must be studied as such.
While Turkle’s discussion of online intimacy and projection does help establish how communities form online, it is only a partial accounting of how people relate to each other online. While Turkle’s meditations on self expression online are interesting they are somewhat esoteric for my purposes. What is missing in Turkle’s work is a connection between (virtual) practices and beliefs and identity. Kelly Boudreau’s work Pixels, Parts and Pieces: Constructing Digital Identity provides a much more practice based understanding. Boudreau based her work on her time spent in Everquest, a fantasy themed MMORPG. Boudreau focused on the in-game elements that lead individuals to construct a sense of their identity and leads them to group with like minded individuals. Boudreau (2007) argued that users construct an identity in the game through four relationships, their relationship with their avatar, their relationship to the game world, relationships between avatars, and their relationships with other players.
In MMORPGs avatars interact with the world through a variety of statistics and there are often several categories of toon one may choose from. In most fantasy MMORPGs you pick the race of your character (e.g.: elf, gnome, centaur) and your class (e.g.: wizard, warrior, cleric). Race and class not only determine your avatar’s statistics, they restrict its look and determine the abilities an avatar may have. Individuals are free, however, to create the look that they want for their avatar based on templates. Much like in a MUD, gender is a choice, race is a choice, but here it is a click of a button instead of a written description.
Avatar creation allows users to create the avatars they want, and the choices that a player makes in avatar creation determine the abilities an avatar has access to and how the user will choose to play his or her avatar. As players gain experience and levels they then get to pick powers and modify the attributes of their avatars. The process of avatar creation is somewhat game specific, in that the particularities of a given game determine the way an avatar will be created. There are similarities in the way certain kinds of avatars are played but base statistics and skills are game specific. The process of creating an avatar is more then determining its look and it extends beyond the initial creation process. Once a user creates an avatar they must then figure out how to play with the avatar properly, that is use the attributes and skills of the avatar in question effectively. As a user plays the game the avatar s/he creates gains experience and attribute points and must pick new abilities for the avatar and/ or modify its attributes/equipment (Boudreau 2007).
Even avatar appearance changes the ways in which individuals imagine themselves in the game world. When I complemented the female avatar of a fellow channel member he told me very emphatically that he was not female in real life and that he did not want to be treated as such. The physical appearance of an avatar can say a lot about the user. I myself am uncomfortable playing with female avatars, I do not have many and I do not play with them often. Having spoken to many channel members about how and why they create avatars I have come to understand that the appearance of avatars is highly individual. What are less individual are discussions about how to control one’s avatar.
At the most basic level this means learning to navigate one’s avatar through the virtual world, as well as learning how to control one’s avatar using a keyboard and mouse. Game manuals typically contain only enough information to help players orient themselves in the game world. Users are expected to figure out the finer points of game play by themselves (Steinkuehler, 2005). Newer users learn how to play through experience, by asking more experienced players for help, and/or by consulting game guides written by more experienced users.
It is at this level where knowledge about the game becomes meaningful, and as players learn how to play they internalize norms, practices, and beliefs about the game that become inscribed into their avatars. In designing and navigating their avatars, users are joining the community of users and thus learning discourses about kinds of player they can or should be. Every avatar is seen as being able to fill a certain role in the team and when a user plays against type he or she may face social sanctions. Early on in my time on the field I knew that the Name channel was a place I could turn to for advice on how to play the game. The amount of knowledge that some users possessed was and still remains truly astonishing. The game and game play were major subjects in the channel and while not all users agreed on how the game should be played, some explanations of game elements seemed to me to be more accurate than others as they resonated with my experiences. In these discussions I saw the uneven distribution of knowledge in the community.
Avatars to avatar relationships involve learning how to direct one’s avatar to the best effect working with other avatars. These are relationships at their most abstract, however, but they are crucial to learning how to play the game. User relationships are more embodied, somewhat more complicated, and less spontaneous. User relations can spring from relationships between avatars but can also occur for other reasons. Looking back on my time in the field I see that my efforts to team with channel members were efforts to engage in user to user relationships. Ethnographies are based on social relationships and so there is a certain amount of trust involved in conducting one, playing and interacting with users established that trust, and I still consider many of the people I met online to be my friends.
MMORPGs are games that encourage group play and banding together with other users to play tends to be more enjoyable and more rewarding than solitary play. While it is possible to play on an MMORPG and never team up with another user this is unusual as social interactions both at the avatar level and the player level are the driving force behind MMORPGs. Boudreau argues that individuals construct identities online in relationship to social norms. If game companies theoretically give users the freedom to design and play with their avatars as they wish, game knowledge eventually becomes organized into established sets of practices and beliefs about the game that users must invariably learn.
My only issue with Boudreau’s explanation of the process by which individuals construct an identity in an online game is that she depicts user communities as monolithic. There is not one community of knowledge in any given MMO. This is where Kenneth Landon Pirius’s work on communities of practice comes into play. Communities of practice are defined as informal groups that form spontaneously around a set of practices (Pirius). What is important to understand about communities of practice is that they focus on managing and organizing knowledge. Individuals enter such communities untrained and are forced to contend with community discourses. Through shared practices individuals learn from each other, discourses are constructed and taught and eventually an identity forms. In his account of communities of practice Pirius accounts for the ways in which groups of users will band together in the game to form communities.
Boudreau and Pirius seem to agree that by playing MMORPGs users become members of communities. Boudreau argued that players enter into the community of game users. Pirius softens the notion of a user community when he asserted that is inherently multiple. Most MMORPGs are divided into game servers (copies of the game world), world zones, and avatar type. Boudreau did not deny this but by putting focusing primarily on the factors which explain how individual users situate themselves in the game she overlooked the fact that inside a generic game community are many smaller ones.
What Pirius and Boudreau argued is that the processes by which individuals come to imagine themselves as part of a wider community is an educational one. This is not entirely surprising, since they have associated becoming a competent member of a community with learning and internalizing community norms and discourses. What is missing from the theories that have been presented up to now is an account of how the in game practices that Pirius and Boudreau discuss and the non game cultural resources that Turkle is interested coincide. In her doctoral dissertation Cognition and learning in massively multiplayer inline games: A critical approach, Constance A Steinkuehler argues that MMORPGs magnify the ways in which community discourses inform and are informed by the everyday practices of members.
Drawing from Gee’s “big D Discourse” theory Steinkuehler argues that online communities are Discourse communities. Gee defines Discourse as ways in which language is integrated with non-linguistic stuff in order to make it meaningful, privileging certain interpretations over others (Gee in Steinkuehler 2005). Discourse communities thus provide members ways of interpreting their cognitive, virtual and material realities. Through their participation in a Discourse community individuals are given a perspective which makes action meaningful (Steinkuehler 2005). When one considers that a most of the social interactions in MMORPGs occur in chat it is not surprising that Steinkuehler (2005) considers communities on MMORPGs to be inherently linguistic ones. Don’t forget the community I studied was a chat room, so it was all chat.
According to Steinkuehler identity construction does not only happen at the level of in game Discourse, in fact, she maintained that users draw on all the resources at their disposal to navigates the complex social situations they may find themselves in. Basically, players adduce real world Discourses to understand online realities. This argument can be further extended to explain how online communities in MMORPGs can have a basis in real world discourse. Members of the Name channel understand themselves as forming a community not merely based on ways of talking and thinking about the game but because of assumed “sameness” from real world imagined communities. What this means in practice, however, can be somewhat tricky.
Getting at the ways in which the most insignificant practices become meaningful requires looking at specific instances and then linking them to larger contexts. Little gesture like a goodbye or a hello can be indicative of deeper understandings or also be meaningless. For instance, I spent a lot of time thinking about whether I should say hello and goodbye when I logged in and out of the game. Little gestures like this are at the core of what makes communities tick and they can lead to some big philosophical questions about the self and the other. What really marks the Name channel as an LGBT community are not the occasional LGBT themed conversation like coming out or homophobia but the little ways which mark shared, or at least the assumption of shared, shared Discourses. For example, when I once told another channel member I liked him, I had to assure him that I was not flirting with him. In this case there was miscommunication, he assumed that the affection I was expressing was motivated by other sentiments which I did not feel. Little moments like this reveal our underlying assumptions about the way we imagine the communities we are a part of. In the NAME channel it seemed pretty normal that a man could flirt with another man, because this would be normal behaviour in an LGBT community.
Ultimately I think what we can draw from this is that online communities like the one I studied are imagined communities. Members of these communities imagine that others are like them based on shared linguistic practices about the game world and real life. The anonymity of the virtual world is particularly suited to the type of projection which communities are founded on. Communities however do not form in the void they are shaped by Discourses which both inform and are informed by the everyday practices of members. There are virtual mechanisms and social practices specific to online settings that may be significant in the formation of online communities, but like real world ones online communities are imagined.
The end
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