I have to say I quite enjoyed section IV more than I’ve enjoyed any part of the Pearce book so far. To me, there are far more interesting things going on in Pearce’s personal account than within an imagined methodological credibility of the second major section. I understand the institutional pressures of the book, and Pearce’s role in its creation, but at the same time the privileged status of that second section irritates me a bit.
The third section of the book sets up Pearce’s rationale for her methodology, and the more interesting segments came from the way she talked about her relationship to her avatar as well as the role of the community in the study. Though both of these topic were further illuminated in the fourth section, Pearce briefly discussed how her avatar was created in the name of research, and is thus conformed to a similar set of traits across the different game environments. However, though the avatars were similar, Pearce is careful to realize that the avatar has crucial differences in each of the environments, caused by a mixture of the avatar design tools and the environment itself. Pearce also talks about the way “fieldwork” changes to meet the demands of a virtual environement. Instead of the ethnographer being in the environment for a discrete period of time, the ethnographer’s relation to the space can last for a much longer period of time, and in a different kind of way. It is also interesting to think of Pearce giving conference presentations as her avatar, and to imagine the pressures on the patience of the audience as it goes on. Merging into the fourth section we finally hear the rationale for the comments of the group that are interspersed throughout the book. The comments serve two purposes: to include the group as a way of strengthening the methodology, and as a way to help the community feel like they were involved.
Indeed, Pearce’s confrontations with the community were some of the more interesting moments of the entire book, filled with drama, conflict, and intrigue. Pearce entered into the situation with assumptions about the way ethnography is supposed to work, and with obvious hang ups in trying to prove the empirical nature of her anthropological findings. Thus, she took an approach where she tried to simply watch the community without participating. This was in order to preserve the group as a community as well as her credibility as a researcher.
The problem was that her distance was disconcerting to the group, who didn’t think she deserved or understood the information that she was gathering. All this was mostly under the surface, however, until a journalist published an article about Pearce’s study. The article was published all over the forums of TGU, and Pearce immediately felt unwelcome in the environment. After the incident, Pearce changed her approach to the study, which might be another representation of the fractured nature of the book. After the conflict, Pearce made the resolution to be involved with the group, to play games with them and interact.
This worked much better for the study, and Pearce felt not only as if she was taking from the group, but contributing to it as well. While this might be seen by some as a methodological inconsistency, I see it as a valuable moment for reflection and thinking about the way communities see outsiders to their communities. It is also a site to consider how traditional study methods are less useful than they are typically imagined to be, both in RL or virtual communities.
Through Pearce’s resolution, the story takes shape, and Pearce gets to see the shape of the community from the inside out. This allowed her to see the way the group handled the sticky issue of cross-gendered play, a function of the group she might have otherwise missed. Pearce also began to participate in online voice conversations instead of just text, which gave her even further insight to the workings of the group.
Another interesting move was when Pearce allowed someone from the community to interview her about her study, to ask her questions, and gain an understanding of her work. Pearce opened up a forum thread in which she posted her findings as well, in order to let the community see and comment on the direction of her research. This practice helped Pearce feel more comfortable with her place in the community, but it also seemed to have presented some insecurities about “going native.” It seems that the study, in it’s fractured state, tells us just as much about the process of ethnographic study as it does about TGU.
Questions:
Considering Pearce’s changed attitude and interaction with the group, how does this change our opinion of the study?
How do different communication structures (voice chat, v. text chat, v, forums, v email) change the way that the group communicates.
If lag is “like the weather” then what can we equate to a server crash?
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