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?