Whereas Gee came from a linguistics, science, and pedagogy background, and Bogost came from a theoretical and programming background, Pearce seems to come from a “player” and anthropologist background. She mentions quite a bit about sociology, and the way she organizes information (as well as the structure of her paragraphs) is influenced by a different type of scholarship than we’ve read previously.
Pearce’s main concern comes from the types of effects games have on the communities involved in them. These effects come from dozens of different criteria set up by Pearce to differentiate MMOGs and MMOWs from other types of communities. Breifly, Pearce recounts a few basic arguments on in-game subjectivity, a topic which is leads to a wide assortment of muddy issues such as the rights of avatars, the differentiation between the in-game world and the “real” world, as well as the development of parallel meaning-systems in games.
For Example: because avatars are considered by many to be virtual, controlled, projections, an outsider would think it preposterous to give avatars rights. Avatars are made up of digital code, they are creations (not only of just the player, but also a product of the game’s rules) and many would say that avatars have no more justification for rights than a robot. But though she skims through them, Pearce identifies a number of ways in which this approach to rights and freedoms creates systems of oppression for certain types of identities.
Further humanizing the avatar, Pearce outlines the great complexity of social emergence in game communities. Emergence for Pearce is an unpredictable effect for the community within the game, simply because the community is so complex. The factor of emergence, because it is so unpredictable, sets up Pearce’s later discussion of her methodology, but also lends an important turn to why game communities need to be studied. Emergent behavior creates new outcomes in a way which was previously unconsidered, so that trying to build the same system synthetically would prove dysfunctional at best. Pearce’s reliance on complexity theory is both interesting and confusing at this point, but to be sure it is a different attempt at defining games than we have read in Bogost or Gee.
Pearce’s main concern comes from the types of effects games have on the communities involved in them. These effects come from dozens of different criteria set up by Pearce to differentiate MMOGs and MMOWs from other types of communities. Breifly, Pearce recounts a few basic arguments on in-game subjectivity, a topic which is leads to a wide assortment of muddy issues such as the rights of avatars, the differentiation between the in-game world and the “real” world, as well as the development of parallel meaning-systems in games.
For Example: because avatars are considered by many to be virtual, controlled, projections, an outsider would think it preposterous to give avatars rights. Avatars are made up of digital code, they are creations (not only of just the player, but also a product of the game’s rules) and many would say that avatars have no more justification for rights than a robot. But though she skims through them, Pearce identifies a number of ways in which this approach to rights and freedoms creates systems of oppression for certain types of identities.
Further humanizing the avatar, Pearce outlines the great complexity of social emergence in game communities. Emergence for Pearce is an unpredictable effect for the community within the game, simply because the community is so complex. The factor of emergence, because it is so unpredictable, sets up Pearce’s later discussion of her methodology, but also lends an important turn to why game communities need to be studied. Emergent behavior creates new outcomes in a way which was previously unconsidered, so that trying to build the same system synthetically would prove dysfunctional at best. Pearce’s reliance on complexity theory is both interesting and confusing at this point, but to be sure it is a different attempt at defining games than we have read in Bogost or Gee.
Pearce also discusses several specific aspects of game communities that lend them to emergence behavior. Virtual worlds are discrete spaces with an open ended nature. This allows for the basic parameters of the world to be created while the users are given some semblance of “freeddom.” After establishing characters or avatars, the players become bonded to the types of communities which come together in the game space, and so the culture becomes a long term bonded activity. No longer is playing a game just a hobby, or a brief reprieve from the “real” world, but it in fact becomes the players real world, since the social dynamics in the game can become much more valuable than out of it. The game cultures are also usually characterized by a form of networks to connect the players together, and a diverse range of players at that.
One of the more interesting arguments for virtual worlds as a distinctly different environment is Pearce’s argument for acceleration, in which the social phenomena in the game world is accelerated in that players often “lose track of time” and that communities are created and destroyed at a faster rate than in the real world. While Pearce is really just making a nod to an interesting dynamic factor in online communities, the idea makes sense, though perhaps not because of the usual reasons. Games allow for a new sense of physicality coupled with identity, so that while a great deal of our “real” life communities depend on things like sleep, maintenance, and outside social phenomenon, the in game world provides a static visualization, and one which has no responsibilities for its own physical maintenance. While this may seem like a micro-facet of game worlds, it takes of a large portion of our lives, and considering that avatars can bypass that aspect means they can accelerate the social process. Similarly, we might think of how other physical processes dealing with travel or communication are diminished in game play, further accelerating the social processes.
In the last section of the chapter, Pearce shows a little bit more about her ethnography, although as readers we are supposed to enjoy the forthcoming stories of the Uru, and consider the methods as an afterthought. Pearce makes claims for the need for the researcher to be a part of the online community of study, for there is no other way to observe the community. Pearce also makes arguments for the ways that the researcher gets involved with the community f study, but is also constantly playing the “meta-game” of the ethnography itself, so as to create a complex system of relationships which may not be repeatable, but are still methodologically sound.
Questions:
In what ways does our usual perspectives of subjectivity need to be altered in order to consider in game communities?
In what ways is Pearce's anthropological approach similar/different from Bogost or Gee?
How might we relate Pearce's characterization of online communities to assist us in the creation of our games?
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