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?
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