Message: 2 Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 16:01:36 -0500 From: Radhika Gajjala <radhika@cyberdiva.org> Subject: Re: [Air-l] hanging out and mushes - performatively masculine still? To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <a0611042abe68da67d933@[192.168.1.101]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

...

On Mar 24, 2005, at 12:47 PM, Kendall, Lori wrote:

...

I'm also interested in what people have found on this issue. It is worth noting that the mud I studied was more male-dominated (in both numbers and culture) than many, if not most, existing at that time. That group still exists online (with some loss of original members and some new participants) and remains as male-dominated as ever. But it has never been typical.

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? Re age: I am the younger generation of which we speak. I only personally or from online know one active MOO user under 30, who is part of LambdaMOO. A quick LiveJournal search turned up only 43 communities and 173 users interested in mu*, but this only tenuously points to a possible low interest among young people. It assumes a correlation between 1) youth and livejournal use 2) livejournal use and use of other internet sites and it also assumes that people actually bother to fill out the interests thing in their profile. All those assumptions are problematic, especially #2. 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 -- "Sometimes, I get so sick of fighting. I have to slay the dragons of the myth of heterosexual European [able-bodied] male society in my dreams, then get up in the morning and be an activist . . . What if there really was a level playing field? I would love to see how far I could actually go. What if all I had to show off was my mad skills? Wouldn't I really be able to fly then?" --Margaret Cho Websites for my projects: Anthropologists and labor unions allied: http://AAAUnite.blogspot.com Orphan Films (22-26 March 2006, CFP): http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium Social software/blogging research (ask for CFP): http://del.icio.us/museumfreak SC Student Anth Conf (CFP): http://www.cas.sc.edu/Anth/events/scconference.htm USC does Britten's War Requiem: April 19, 7:30, Koger Center