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?