18 Digital Ethnography (2) Online Gaming
This project is a digital version of participant observation involving Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG). MMORPGs involve the creation of a cultural space in the digital world that is quite separate from the everyday world. Participants can craft a persona that is unlike their own, they can perform actions that they cannot do in daily life (such as killing enemies), and they can repeat actions, or start again, when one approach fails. Your task is to document the social world of the gamer, and to note how the digital world differs from the everyday.
Learning Goals
- Experiment with participant observation in a virtual world.
- Understand the social dynamics of online gamers.
This project is another participant-observation exercise, but this time your “event” will involve a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). There are many possibilities, but there are two hard-and-fast rules. First, the group must be new to you. If you play World of Warcraft every waking moment when you are not in class, then it is off limits (much like the participant-observer provisions in Chapter 9). Second, there has to be a genuinely socially interactive component to the platform. MMORPGs could be a problem depending on which you pick.
Currently there are numerous games to choose from. The most popular are:
World of Warcraft
Eve
Final Fantasy XIV
Rift
Blade and Soul
Trove
Runescape
Star Trek Online
Albion Online
Lord of ...
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