Final Mini-Essay

Throughout the reading of Celia Pearce’s “Communities at Play,” she frequently alluded to a second closing of Uru, but there was not much mention of this event other than in passing throughout most of the text. In the final section “Beyond Uru: Communities of Play on Their Own Terms,” the reader is finally introduced to the full story of the second closing of Uru.

The first chapter of the last section, “Coda: Uru Resurrection—Applied Cyberethnography as Action Research,” was both a mixture of conclusion and another cyberethnographic study. Pearce took part in this aspect of Uru in two ways: first, by being part of the team that put the game back online, and second by continuing to be a player within the game. She explains that she had three tasks during this period of reopening: “The first was to help galvanize the current Uru Diaspora and bring them together to make a business case for reopening of Uru. The second was to continue my ethnographic work and monitor how that process was progressing. The third was to generate a survey to capture some demographic, play pattern, and marketing-related data the team needed for design, planning, and business development” (263-264). All of these jobs are interesting in light of the work she’d done previously within the game.

I was at first a little shocked that the Uru people would be willing to have their game re-opened for fear of losing it again (which they did, but under much less harsh circumstances). Despite this possibility, the people were very interested in re-opening the game that they’d been missing for several years. One of the main selling points I believe, which Pearce was obviously aware of in her quest to get the Uruvians interested in reopening the game, was that the Cyanists appeared in-game “as members of the D’ni Restoration Council to announce the possibility of obtaining new funding to resume its restoration efforts on the City of D’ni Ae’gura” (264). I think this is significant because the Cyanists, who before seemed like cold calculating businesspeople, were now actively taking part in this online world—acknowledging the power that it’s citizens have. I believe that this was particularly important to those who had been playing Uru when it originally shut down because they felt at the time that they were seen only as “gamers” and not people who had become invested in the game.

Next, keeping in mind Pearce’s tasks, the ethnographic study of this closing showed a much different reaction than the first. Pearce believes that this is, in part, due to the player’s transludic identities. When the original Uru shut down, the players really didn’t know if they were going to be able to stay together as a group. Eventually, taking refuge in games like There.com and Second Life as well as in message boards, the group was able to reconvene. During the second closing of Uru, these players were already comfortable with their transludic identities and continued to play within all of the virtual worlds in which they had been taking part. (This is, in part I imagine, because of the hurt they still felt over the first closing—they didn’t want that to happen again without a “backup” virtual world.) On closing day, the Cyanists continued their involvement with the group, further solidifying their acknowledgement of the Uruvians as a culture rather than just a gaming group. After this final (?) closing, the Uruvians went back to their other virtual worlds. Pearce explains that they had learned valuable lessons from the first shut down and subsequent diaspora: “After four years of creating their own emergent cultures, the Uru Diaspora had developed a sense of self-determination, autonomy, and empowerment” (269).

The third task Pearce had was to generate a demographic survey. She did this throughout her work as Uruvian ethnographer. Through the study of this emergent culture (which was, though odd in most games, almost 50% male and 50% female and made up of older adults) Pearce discovered an interesting aspect of gaming. Though the game designers have most of the power when it comes to the game, the very nature of gaming teaches the gamers to subvert the designer’s power. Furthermore, not only have the designers created groups of people that can subvert their power within  games, but the ludisphere had taken shape in such a way that the entire “global playground” is made up of players who can subvert the games and virtual worlds which have been created for them. On the other hand, as Pearce notes, the ownership of such games (of course residing with the creators of the game) calls into question the rights that players have in worlds which they have helped to build. As we’ve seen in the Uru diaspora, all that resides in the game can be taken away at any time. Pearce sums up this thought by saying that “While people may feel empowered by their new communities in the global playground, the bottom line is that their communities, their property, indeed their very bodies, are owned by corporations” (280); however, I think the Uru diaspora showed that something exists outside the property and bodies that can and does continue even after the game is over.

Questions:

1. Peace asks this question: How can we use emergence to shape the next generation of MMOGs and virtual worlds?

2. How did you respond to the re-closure of Uru?

3. How did the Uru diaspora prove that the corporations don’t have total control over the virtual worlds that have build up around their games? 

Mini-Essay Eleven

Section four of Pearce’s Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games, called “The Social Construction of the Ethnographer” was a typical anthropological journal documenting the subjective view of the ethnographer as she traversed a virtual world to which she was originally foreign. I say originally because it seems that Pearce, as many ethnographers actually do, became part of the world that she was studying. Once again, I found this section to be a little awkward to read. I suppose that is, in part, because I don’t particularly like reading journals, even ones that contain citations.

Once again, the most interesting part of this reading involved the creation of an avatar. Pearce writes that “[b]eing an avatar means exploring the self as much as it means exploring others; more specifically, it means exploring the self through others” (216). I think this is especially the case when you’re doing an active study about a culture. I found it a little unusual, however, the Pearce seemed to randomly switch into her avatar’s voice. She also seemed to be switching from Artemesia to Pearce frequently, which I thought gave the text an unusual tone. Despite the awkwardness of the read, I was interested in the idea of what Katherine Hyatt-Milton calls “cognitive haunting” which involves “thoughts that percolate in the back of your mind and return at unexpected times” (217). Pearce noted that while she was Pearce, she often thought of herself in terms of Artemesia, and vice versa. Further along into the section she also notes that during the real life gathering that she would recall the avatar of the person to whom she is speaking. This notion that an avatar, and thus a virtual world, can permeate real life in such an acute manner is interesting but still a concept with which I am unfamiliar.

A concept with which I am more familiar is that of semiotics (though I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of that topic). I found that Pearce’s discussion of semiotics was an interesting inclusion in the text and it made me recall Gee’s idea of the semiotic domain principle, which he defines as “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities to communicate distinctive types of meaning.” This notion is particularly evident in the world of Uru and the Uru Diaspora. The players communicate through a virtual world that involves speaking, text-based communication, and, of course, gestures, etc. When Pearce enters the original Uru (that has been redesigned by a few original members) she notices things that she first saw in Second Life and There.com. To the author the original world appears as the secondary world, while to the original players Second Life and There.com were either representations of Uru or a meeting place outside of their destroyed homeland. The fact that she’s looking at the worlds inversely leads Pearce to a unique understanding of the world. She notes that everything in Uru has meaning and that “[s]ome of those meanings are encoded in the game, others are a result of cultural practices created by the players” (225). She’s particularly interested in the fountain, a landmark that is extremely important to the members of the Uru Diaspora. She then asks why semioticians aren’t studying this world. This, to me, is very interesting if taken in tandem with Gee’s principles. I recall, especially, attempting to learn semiotics for the first time while reading De Saussure’s “Course on General Linguistics” and De Man’s “Semiotics and Rhetoric”. It seems as though Gee’s work on learning through play could apply even to concepts that are as abstract as semiotics. (On a side note, one of the things we’ve discussed in this class, obviously, is the difference between seriousness and play. In our theory class, we used the serious/play dichotomy to explain Derrida’s concept of differance.)

As a last note, Pearce’s brief discussion of disabilities and gameplay was interesting, and it was a topic we brought up in class. The idea is a little more fleshed out in this section. First, Pearce/Artemesia (at this point, I’m not sure who is speaking, thought obviously both are present) finds out that Lynn is handicapped and she notes that she feels this is important in understanding the group dynamic (though she didn’t realize this at first, and probably wouldn’t have realized it without some help from the group—furthering her idea that they changed her just as much as she changed them). A few sections later, in the subsection entitled “The Social Construction of the Ethnographer”, Pearce writes that “[t]he avatar is a social extension, a prosthesis of sorts . . .” (237). This is very interesting in light of the conversation we had in class Monday in which we discussed whether games could be useful to newly handicapped individuals. This quote seems to imply that yes, they can be helpful and can even, perhaps, ease the person into his or her newly handicapped “real life avatar”.

Questions:

Do you feel that the techniques Pearce used were the best techniques? What was the purpose of the personal journal?

Does one get the same “cognitive haunting” from all games (ex. First-person-shooters) or does this phenomenon seem to occur mostly in games like Second Life? (From my personal experience of 2 hours playing f-p-s, I don’t think I’d ever become attached to my avatar.)

How did you react to finding out that Raena is a man?

Mini-Essay Ten

Despite having entered into the world of gamers myself during this class, I found the second section of Celia Pearce’s “Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds” to be a little awkward. Reading of people’s deep-seated attachment with their avatars is a little beyond my understanding at this point, and Pearce’s section on “The Uru Diaspora” gave readers an inside look into the emotions that arise from gaming. Though Gee and Bogost attempted to show that games aren’t a waste of time (and Pearce, of course, agrees), I felt that this chapter showcased the types of gaming that are so often criticized by non-gamers.

Pearce writes that her primary reason behind this 18-month long study of the Uru diaspora was “to study the ways in which the design of games and online virtual worlds influences or constrains the emergent social behavior that takes place within them” (69). She discusses this throughout section two: from the way the original Uru game affected it’s players to the ways the players attempted to stay together after the game shut down, and finally during their move to new virtual worlds and even into the “real” world.

The first chapter of the second section focuses primarily on setting the scene for readers who have never played Uru. Pearce describes the different aspects of the game includes the Relto, the Nexus, the Hoods, and Ages. Her next chapter focuses on the feelings that the players felt when they found out that their game would be shut down. I think that this chapter is the one that made me most uncomfortable. I think the most uncomfortable aspect of the chapter was her description of the way the characters felt: “Players experienced what they characterized as ‘shock and catharsis’ and many described symptoms of posttraumatic stress” (89). Though I’m sure the players were deeply saddened by the loss of their game, I find that calling their feelings PTSD trivializes the disorder and could offend those that suffer from it. Anyway, this is possibly just the “non-gamer” coming out—I can’t possibly understand the way these players felt when losing their “homeland.”

Again, Pearce’s discussion of the avatars was the most interesting section of the reading. The avatar, which is the player’s primary form of expression within the game world, is a mixture of the players expression and the game designers expressions. As Pearce points out, there are set rules within the game that dictate how the avatar can look. While the player has the ability to create an avatar within this framework, it is the designers of the game who’s values are being placed onto the avatars. Pearce quotes media artist and theorist Allucquere Rosanne Stone as saying that “they [game designers] are articulating their own assumptions about bodies and sociality and projecting them onto the codes that define cyberspace systems” (111). I find this to be a fascinating aspect of gaming, and I experienced it myself in Second Life. When creating my avatar for the first time, I was given a very thin, curvy, feminine character. This would be fine for many people, but since I’m trying to begin accepting myself as I am, this wouldn’t do. I finally gave up and changed my avatar to a man (this, in itself, says something about me—perhaps I want to be able to be who I am without question, which is more often a quality allowed to men than women). I found out later (after playing the game through many class hours) that you can make your avatar fatter, but only a gamer with some higher level of skills would know this right away, and everyone is automatically given the svelte avatars; therefore, the designers of Second Life have projected their ideals onto the avatars.

One other thing I’d like to mention about avatars within the short space that I have left is Pearce’s discussion of Lynn, the woman who has a physical handicap. Pearce writes that “Lynn’s case contracts sharply with arguments that online life is disembodied. On the contrary, in Lynn’s case that avatar experience had been a case of reembodiment” (117). This, of course, directly correlates with Gee’s notion of the embodied experience, but takes it a step further. Gee doesn’t focus on the ability of the avatar to perform feats that we just assume everyone can perform—walking, for example. It’s also interesting to note that once the players met in real life, it wa as thought their avatars were the dominant personality—perhaps another type of reembodiment.  This notion of the embodied experience is, as we’ve seen, one of the most important features of gaming, especially if we are to consider gaming a useful (rather than wasteful) experience.

Questions:

Have you ever experienced such deep feelings regarding your avatar?

Do you feel that the use of ethnography was useful throughout this section?

Pearce describes “spatial literacy” as involving reading space, writing space, translating/interpreting space. Are the games we’re creating using this idea of spatial literacy? 

Mini-Essay Nine

Celia Pearce’s book “Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds” is an interesting addition to our reading. While Gee focused on the pedagogical aspects of games, and Bogost examined the procedurality of games, Pearce is particularly interested in the cultures that have evolved around digital networks (both within the digital world and in the “real” world). She begins the first section by explaining that virtual worlds can be studied anthropologically, just as “real” worlds are studied, because communities are formed in these worlds. Though these communities are formed by choice, they have similar qualities to communities that exist because of actual location, race, etc.

Because her book contains so much information in a small space, it would be impossible to touch on every aspect of gaming that she discusses, so I will focus on a general overarching theme I found within the text that, of course, includes the ideas of these communities. Gaming communities are formed among groups of avatars, which Pearce explains are “a player’s representation in a virtual world” (21). Pearce notes that these avatars are often considered to be representations of the “true self”; therefore, it seems that her study of gaming communities would lend itself to a unique insight—some people don’t act like their true selves in any given situation, and the fact that an anthropologist is watching them certainly wouldn’t help the matter.

Pearce’s third chapter “Emergence in Cultures, Games, and Virtual Worlds” is primarily interested in the fact that such virtual cultures are coming into being, especially in terms of how these communities are “spilling over” into non-virtual life. She provides the example of eBay auctions, which Gee also discussed briefly (the $2000 sell).

This first section seems to be a laying-out of the ways in which Pearce studied the virtual Uru world. The fourth chapter “Reading, Writing, and Playing Cultures” is the chapter in which I am most interested, perhaps because she explains the ways in which non-virtual studies can be grafted onto the virtual world. Pearce notes that her study of the Uru relies heavily on the idea of ethnography, or the scientific description of the customs of peoples and cultures. This is particularly interesting because her’s is a study of a virtual community—a community within a larger community, or many larger communities. This leads to what I imagine will be a very diverse culture to study. Pearce discusses this concern by listing some questions that may arise from studies such as these: “what is real, and what is virtual, what is fiction and what is fact” (54). Because this type of study is actually very different from “real-life” ethnography, Pearce explains that there is a particular type of ethnography suited to this situation: virtual ethnography; however, she prefers the term “cyberethnography” because of the baggage that “virtual” carries with it. One of the interesting aspects of cyberethnography, as Christine Hine explains, is “the ways in which users creatively appropriate and interpret the technologies which are made available to them” (56).

Pearce explains that she uses a multi-sited ethnography in her study of communities of play (this concept belongs to someone whom she refers to as Marcus, but I can’t locate this person’s first name). This multi-sited method of ethnography has three main approaches: Follow the People, Follow the Thing, and Follow the Story. Pearce notes that she will make use of all of these in her study of the Uru Diaspora.

Toward the end of this chapter, Pearce describes the performative nature of the virtual world—the nature that she will be studying because, as she notes,  “virtual worlds present us with a unique context for ethnographic research because they are inherently performative spaces” (59). This harkens back to her idea about the avatar being the true self. Players are performing their true selves; however, they are also doing that in a space that allows for “occasioned” behavior, or behavior that “might not ordinarily be sanctioned” (59). An example of this behavior, going back to her discussion of the avatar, could be the idea of trans-gender play. Men and women are allowed to paly one another in these games without the possibility of being shunned. In fact, most of these people are probably not transgender in the “real” world.

Finally, Pearce discusses the idea of feminist ethnography, which is often disregarded in “real” anthropology. However, Pearce points out that in feminist ethnography “community is seen not merely as an object to be externally described, but as a realm intimately inhabited” (61-62). This type of ethnography is particularly useful in gaming because one must take on the role (create an avatar, for example) of a gamer in order to study this virtual world. In this sense, the researcher is not only constructed by the subjects of the study, but by the entire study itself.

Questions:

1. Pearce makes a number of comments about the roles girls and women have in games. At one point she describes female armor as “kombat lingerie” and in another section she says that some games are created as a “rehearsal for motherhood”. In what ways are these ideas changing? In what ways are they staying the same?

2. On a personal note, how involved do you become with your avatars during play?

3. How do you feel about an anthropological study being done on virtual worlds? Do you think this is a good idea or a waste of time? 

Mini-Essay Eight

Throughout my reading of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, there were a number of times when I questioned the topics that Bogost discussed. There were points where I felt he was talking about videogames, but to be honest, there were other points where I felt like he was writing just for the sake of making his book longer. Despite this fact, I think that his last chapter explains the reasoning behind his writing style. It seems to me that Bogost has attempted to frame the idea of procedurality within the context of the videogame, rather than discussing the idea of procedural videogames. (This is similar, I suppose, to the way Gee discussed pedagogy through the lens of videogames.) On that note, a quote from the last page of Bogost’s book seems to sum up the motivation for his writing style. He writes that “[a]s players of videogames and other computational artifacts, we should recognize procedural rhetoric as a new way to interrogate our world, to comment on it, to disrupt and challenge it” (340). This, I think, is the context in which we should read Bogost’s book—not as a book about videogames, but a book about procedurality that can be understood a bit better through videogames.

The final section of Bogost’s book discusses learning, though I feel that these categories in which he attempted to fit his chapters are a little limiting because so much of the section seems to have little to do with learning. Anyhow, Bogost first discusses Procedural Literacy. He beings by asking “[a]re videogames educational?” (233). He then finds it necessary to explain different kinds of education, focusing primarily on behaviorism and constructivism. He defines the behaviorist view of learning by stating that “learning is about reinforcement” (233). He notes that behaviorism is often objected to because it ignores thoughts and feelings—behaviorism is all about conditioning. Constructivism, on the other hand, acknowledges the learning that is inherent in experiences. Bogost then describes the traditional classroom: one that Gee worked to correct through his game-related pedagogy. Bogost attempts to apply these two learning styles onto videogames. Behaviorist videogames “simulate the actual dynamics of the material world” (236). Opposition to videogames arise from this type of belief because one must question whether videogames are teaching positive or negative behaviors—many would, considering today’s videogames, assume that those outcomes are negative. Bogost notes, however, that there is a simulation gap or “the breach between the game’s procedural representation of a topic and the player’s interpretation of it” (238-239). Bogost then goes on to discuss Gee’s What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy in which he describes Gee’s understanding of embodied learning. Bogost says that “I do not want to suggest that Gee’s position is invalid, but rather that it is not strong enough. Videogames do not just offer situated meaning and embodied experiences of real and imagined worlds and relationships; they offer meaning and experiences of particular worlds and particular relationships” (241). I, in this case, have to disagree with Bogost. I feel that Gee’s argument for embodied experience makes much more sense. (I also disagree that rhetorical positions are particular positions and that one does not argue to express in the abstract—isn’t that exactly what Socrates did?) Bogost doesn’t agree that videogames teach abstract knowledge, but rather the processes of particular activities. I believe that played in the correct way, videogames most certainly can and do teach abstract thinking. Otherwise, it seems that educational games would be skill-and-drill just like traditional learning, and we don’t need any more of that.

Gee next discusses values and aspirations and how these can be learned and taught through videogames. Here he discusses the difference between being schooled and being educated. He notes that the way school occurs today teaches consumption rather than allowing for knowledge acquisition. Then, of course, he goes on to point out that videogames such as the Sims teach consumption as well. Perhaps the Sims could teach consumption if the player weren’t putting any thought into the game at all, but I think that is a very bleak outlook. Also, if videogames were used in educational settings, even games that taught something as “negative” as consumption could be used for learning as long as there was a facilitator there (the teacher) to ask questions that would help the students form their own opinions about such topics. Bogost writes that he “understand[s] educational games not as videogames that end up being used in schools or workplaces, but as games that use procedural rhetorics to spur consideration about the aspects of the world they represent” (264). If that’s the case (that games spur this consideration) then I think they most certainly do have a place in the classroom.

Bogost’s last section discusses exercise, which I find very unusual in a section about learning. Unfortunately, I don’t actually have the space to discuss this topic; however, I feel that the inclusion of such a topic in the learning section leads to an interesting rhetoric in itself.

Questions:

1. How does exercise and exergames fit into the section about learning?

2. I felt that these last few chapters included a lot of biases. In what ways could/do biases influence our views of videogames?

3. Who’s view of education do you most agree with: Gee or Bogost? How can the two be combined to further our understanding of education?