Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

by Celia Pearce, Tom Boellstorff (Foreword), Bonnie A. Nardi (Foreword)

The odyssey of a group of “refugees” from a closed-down online game and an exploration of emergent fan cultures in virtual worlds. Play communities existed long before massively multiplayer online games; they have ranged from bridge clubs to sports leagues, from tabletop role-playing games to Civil War reenactments. With the emergence of digital networks, however, new varieties of adult play communities have appeared, most notably within online games and virtual worlds. Players in these networked worlds sometimes develop a sense of community that transcends the game itself. In Communities of Play , game researcher and designer Celia Pearce explores emergent fan cultures in networked digital worlds—actions by players that do not coincide with the intentions of the game's designers. Pearce looks in particular at the Uru Diaspora—a group of players whose game, Ages Beyond Myst, closed. These players (primarily baby boomers) immigrated into other worlds, self-identifying as “refugees”; relocated in There.com, they created a hybrid culture integrating aspects of their old world. Ostracized at first, they became community leaders. Pearce analyzes the properties of virtual worlds and looks at the ways design affects emergent behavior. She discusses the methodologies for studying online games, including a personal account of the sometimes messy process of ethnography. Pearce considers the “play turn” in culture and the advent of a participatory global playground enabled by networked digital games every bit as communal as the global village Marshall McLuhan saw united by television. Countering the ludological definition of play as unproductive and pointing to the long history of pre-digital play practices, Pearce argues that play can be a prelude to creativity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Games, Gaming, Video Games, Ebooks, Sociology, Research

327 pages, Hardcover

First published August 28, 2009

Reviews

[Mark Poulsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book detailing a very revealing study of communities of people in virtual environments. It builds on previous academic work, but also showcases new ways of thinking identity, sociality, play and culture in relation to virtual connectedness.

First part is a lot of important and intriguing theory from complexity theory to formalities of virtual environments, from play to sociology and ethnography. Second part is a detailed and captivating narrative of the Uru Diaspora community. While outdated in terms of today's examples of MMO's, this community is still a perfect example for understanding and rethinking ideas of culture and identity. The rest of the book then represents many observations and notes on the role of the ethnographer in these studies and further details about the study of Uru specifically. It ends with an account of the now dated whereabouts of the community and final conclusions concerning the future of video game design that should seek to include emergence (of culture and communities) as a design material akin to results from standard ethnography and participatory design.

Great read. The story of Uru is captivating and moving on its own.

[Ben Platt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pearce's ethnographic, feedback informed approach to understanding migratory communities of play in the "ludisphere" is a genuinely interesting and thought-provoking approach, as are smaller arguments she makes throughout the text about concepts like intersubjective flow. But overall, the majority of the book feels like a time capsule of a different Internet/ludisphere. Reading it, I felt that most of the questions proposed here are no longer living, I have some fundamental disagreements with Pearce's rhetorical/theoretical positioning with regards to concepts like diaspora, trauma, and refugee, and I have a LOT of questions about what it's like to be in this community that the text doesn't answer (for example, what sort of social pressures must exist to create repeated situations in which players reveal that their avatars do not align with their lived gender identity and this results in large-scale community discussions/scandals, discussions that dictate the players' future performance of gender in the game? How does this happen multiple times??)

[Patrick McElfresh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read like a thesis. Not a bad thing per se, but for reader not formally studying this field, it wasn't terribly engaging at times. Other times, it was interesting. Also at this point (end of 2018) somewhat dated.

[Daniel Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The curation of identify and culture across virtual worlds is hard. Inights far ahead of their time on how transplatform expression can be intentionally/unintentionally governed.

[Shinynickel]

Off this review:

Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
By Celia Pearce and Artemesia (The MIT Press)
It is a rare book that names a videogame avatar as a coauthor, but that is exactly what makes this “cyberethnography” an important read. Pearce embeds herself as “Artemesia” in a virtual world with refugees from a recently shutdown multiplayer online game, and observes and interacts with them as they try to reestablish the social circles and culture of their videogame “homeland.” For skeptics of this relatively new field, Pearce provides an excellent review of the game studies literature, but her findings support themselves as clearly relevant to understanding how cultures are formed and sustained, as well as the productive nature of play.

[Emily (Fractured Mirror Publishing) · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I initially enjoyed this book, and I am a huge fan of the whole anthropological approach to studying MMOG/MMOWs,Pearce seemed to be constantly straddling the lines between knowing what she is doing and being absolutely clueless. And, by the end, I was left with a vague feeling of disappointment--as though she wrote about this group of Uru refugees as nicely as she could because she didn't want them to be angry or hurt with her (something which had happened previously, according to the book).

I don't necessarily feel as though this is fully the fault of Pearce, but rather the fault of her lack of knowledge of both anthropological work and MMOWs in general.

[Jonathan Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent ethnographic study of a community of game players and how they responded to the sudden closing of URU, their game world. Pearce is a thoughtful and careful ethnographer whose reflections on how the method can be used to study virtual communities and digitally-mediated spaces would be a great introduction for newcomers to the field while maintaining a level of sophistication appropriate for a specialist. For my own research purposes, I will be reflecting deeply on the notion of "intersubjective flow" that Pearce offers as a modification of Csikszentmihalyi's ideas about flow, a psychological concept that Pearce deploys in other realms.