thanks Dmitri r
Folks considering questions relating to MUDs, MOOs, MMRPG, and any other sundry acronyms relating to online virtual worlds (competitive or otherwise) should point their browsers to http://terranova.blogs.com/ where they will find a vibrant blog comprised of academics and thoughtful game designers. There is also a research rolodex on the right that lists the now hundreds of researchers doing work in the area. It's a great resource. The "embedded ethnographer" would probably be one of these people, perhaps Constance Steinkhueler at Wisconsin.
And, by the way, let me plug experiments and surveys as worthwhile data collection techniques in MMRPGs. I do this, and so do two enterprising Ph.D. students, Nick Yee at Stanford and Fleming Seay at Carnegie Mellon.
It's worth noting that nearly every researcher in this area is also a player, regardless of their primary research method.
-Dmitri
I'm also interested in what people have found on this As for the young generation of mush-ers, how active and big is it? Even among my most online-active students, only a very few even know what a mud/moo/etc. is. They participate on message boards, blogs, IM, but don't mud.
From your analytical perspective would the MMPORGs (eg Sims online, World of Warcraft, Second Life and so on) be the same as MUDs? I'd say that there would be plenty of people that don't know a MUD from a MOO but are active MMPORGers.
I agree - they follow similar logics - but several players dont necessarily know this.
I think first of all we need a distinction here between MMORPG games that are ostensibly about scoring points/leveling/advancing (world of warcraft, knights of the old republic, everquest) and simulation games which don't have any of that and are more about roleplaying/performativity (second life, there). Correct me if I'm wrong Radhika, you know I don't know much about history, but this would be like the MUD/TinyMUD distinction, no? There are already several people doing research in both fields: *http://socialstudygames.com/ is a site where a bunch of ethnographers come together to post about their work *http://xirdal.lmu.de/ is a study of the quake modding subculture, which is really interesting because of his research design. *http://www.alex.golub.name/log/ Alex Golub is a UChicago PhD candidate who is working on a project in Second Life among other places and teaches a class on this topic *there's definitely at least one other anthropologist who calls herself an "embedded ethnographer" on an MMORPG but I can't remember her name.
Do you think that the non-text based and unarchived
nature of the
games might make them harder to study?
I would say you can study this - a triangulation of some particular methodologies would be useful - self-observation (actually playing and making notes), participant observation, reading manuals, and doing an observation of other players while they are playing and you are not, doing interviews...
available static text transcripts are not necessarily the best way even with text based moos really.
Of course you can study it! How do you think ethnographers work in the offline world? No, it's not any harder--in some ways as an anthropologist it's harder to have your fieldsite online because you don't have the same Going To The Field separation experience as other people do and thus you find yourself typically living life half in the field and half at school and not doing either terribly well. I agree with Radhika. Go take notes while watching people fragging IRL at cons, if what you want to study is Quake. Observe your own participation in the world. Copy and paste text from the talk channels. Hang out in the world practicing some passive skill like fishing or sitting around town so that you're a participant, yet you can focus on chat. You might also look at avatars and the way they interact through emotes, and who follows who in groups. The hard thing about studying some MMORPGs would be that most of the activity takes place within clan groups, which means that you would probably have to qualify and maintain the requirements to be in one or maybe several. This is also true of some simulation games, surprisingly.
Kathy Mancuso Department of Anthropology University of South Carolina
Dmitri Williams Assistant Professor, Speech Communication University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign _______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- Radhika Gajjala Associate Professor School of Communication Studies Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43403 http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik