MMO player research methods

Types of data of interest in MMO player studies:

• demographic data: country, gender, age, job, psychological traits, tech-saviness, happiness, revenue
• marketing data: how much spent on games per month, how many games bought,
• play data (applicable to all games and game genres): weekly play time, average play session duration, game and genre literacy,
• genre-specific and game-specific data: for MMOs and WoW in particular: who you play with, guild position, achievement/immersion/social motivation scores

Challenges of player studies: using tools and methods to convert data into useful information, and avoiding erroneous conclusions by crossing results obtained from various methods.

List of qualitative tools.

Methods	Qualitative	Quantitative
Data collection tools	Note taking or recording during open-ended interviews, lab studies, think aloud, or participant observation/ethnographic play. All methods gather all types of data - you just need to ask. Snowball sampling is useful to collect more people concerned by the same phenomenon (eg people from the same guild).	Questionnaires can gather multiple types of data together, but beware: what people say they do differs from what they actually do. Non-obtrusive logging of game data has the advantage of being objective, and can be done using programmable game add-ons that players need to install. It's even possible to cross game and marketing data together from the developer/publisher side (cf the EverQuest dataset from SOE).
Data analysis tools	Note tagging and affinity diagrams are methods used during the note parsing phase. Stop interviewing when respondents do not say/show anything new anymore. Preferably, do not wait to start parsing the data; parsing as notes are taken gives an immediate feedback loop useful to detect useless interview questions, and to know when to stop accumulating data.	The most popular tools to use for stat analysis are SPSS, R, and Excel. Obtaining causal relationships is usually quite hard. On the other hand, simple comparisons and correlations are often successful. Regressions can work too. Data mining/machine learning using Weka or Matlab. Clustering (PCA, LDA, and even KPCA if small dataset) can identify patterns during exploratory phases. Feature selection or decision trees to identify the most important features. Poisson process or Markov chains for temporal evolutions. Bayes, neural network, SVM, random forests, and others for classification.
Pros and cons	Deep, and useful to hint at the reasons explaining a particular phenomena, especially in MMOs, where the metagame (forums, blogs, chats) has a huge influence on the actual game. Snowball sampling in WoW brings lots of players from the same guild(s), or with similar opinions. Therefore (and also because of small sample size): poor ability to generalize. Qualitative methods can also be used as exploratory studies to help build a quantitative questionnaire with relevant questions.	Broad and useful to detect surface trends. Sample bias/representativity: it's very hard to select a representative sample of the player population. For example, selecting players from wow.com brings a lot of hardcore players (since hardcore players read forums while the most casual players don't). Very hard to explain completely a phenomenon because there's always important features missing from the dataset. Machine learning is also difficult for that same reason. It's very easy to get lost in post-hoc effects, or to simply not be able to explain a particular number because you've never played the game. Generally, demographic data can not be caused by game-specific data: it's not because people are hardcore that they're young, but rather the opposite.
Researchers	Bardzell, Bartle, Kow, Nardi, Pace, Pearce, TL Taylor	Andreasen (= quantitative Bartle test), Bateman, Ducheneaut, Seay (not working on that domain anymore?), Williams, Yee,

Human-Currency Interaction: Learning from Virtual Currency Use in China

Yang Wang and Scott Mainwaring, 
“Human-Currency Interaction”: Learning from Virtual Currency Use in China, 
CHI 2008

• 50 semi-structured interviews on the use of RMT in China during Summer 2007. Respondents of all ages, playing WoW, Mir2, MapleStory ,Second Life and others.
• Gateway currency = legally convert real money into IG time or currency: Q coin, WoW 66-hour play card. Game-specific currency = in-game gold.
• Realness: students and young professionals consider gateway and game-specific currencies as both virtual and real. For older adults, the currencies are purely and solely virtual. Virtual currencies are dishonest, they are masquerading as an innocuous, too-easy-to-spend plaything, while in fact they represent a lot.
• Trust: face-to-face cash transactions. Need to meet sellers/buyers in person to be sure they are doing their part => meet in a wang ba, both avatars and human beings face each other. Online trusted third-parties require credit card => not for kids. Face-to-face = hassle, but it's also fun to meet IRL other players.
• Account sharing: Pros = with friends, try other characters. Cons = they can steal your stuff, you give them the password you use in many other applications, including RL ones (e.g. email). How to allow account sharing without compromising player security and privacy?
• Fairness: small buyers ($10/month in RMT) find unfair that some players can spend 10-100 times more than them. Buying from other players is felt as less unfair, and seems to alter the game balance less, than buying from the game company.

[Literature] Communities of Play, book 2: The Uru Diaspora

Celia Pearce and Artemesia. 2009. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. The MIT Press.

Some notes on the second book of Communities of Play by Celia Pearce. You can also read a summary about Book 1: Play, community and emergent cultures.

Chapter 5: An imaginary homeland

Ethnography conducted in the TGU hood (the Uru version of a guild) from March 2004 to September 2005, following a method for research that serves to inform game design.

Uru is the MMOG version of the Myst series. It was developed by Cyan Worlds and published by Ubisoft in 1993. Myst was the best-selling PC game until The Sims came out in 2001, it sacrificed speed and action for visuals and audio. Most Uru players were Myst players. Hence the typical player was around 45-year old, did not really play other games but liked puzzles. Many write poems (later analyzed by the researcher). In many game communities, players may not be aware of the values and ideologies that attract them to a game. Uru could be played multiplayer connected to a server or single-player locally. In the game, players live in neighborhoods, aka hoods. The game company created artificial drama between players through paid actors. Books are used to teleport avatars between places.

Uru has several places of particular interest:

• Tutorial zone,
• Home: contains player's items, a library with books and a teleport link to the player's hood. More features are added to the home as the player progresses through the game.
• Hood: place where the hood (same name for the group of players) gathers. Contains a message board.
• City: public, shared by all players, uninhabited and in a poor state of devastation
• Ages: player-instantiated maps. Players can join other player's Age to solve the Age's puzzle collectively or chat. Seems similar to Furcadia's dreams.

Chapter 6: Identity as place

TGU was one of the biggest and most influential hoods of Uru. It formed during the beta of Uru and officially started accepting members in November 2003. At its maximum, it was so large (400+ members) its hood map required to be sharded in 3 different instances.

Invitations were sent to Myst players. A total of 10.000 players signed for the free beta and each beta cycle accepted 500 players of the waiting list, approximately every month (gating). Two clerical errors resulted in the entire beta list accepted in late December 2003 and late January 2004. Uru never made it to commercial release, it went on sale in November 2003 and the servers closed on February 2004. The last thing Uru players saw was a screen indicating an Internet error. Developer and publisher blamed the market for the lack of success of the game, players blamed the faulty technology and lack of marketing. Despite the 2.000 players who petitioned to pay a year of subscription in advance to keep the game running.

The Koalanet forum was opened by TGU members when the game closed. Members of TGU showed symptoms of posttraumatic stress, the shared trauma became a bonding experience. Poems expressed ethnic identity and diaspora. Players explored 2 alternatives: recreating Uru thanks to game development tools (eg virtools, VRML, Active Worlds, Atmosphere development environment or LSL scripts) or joining an existing ready-to-play virtual world (eg temporary text-based MUD, There.com or SL; EQ or Ryzom were considered too violent and competitive).

The hood leader joined There.com but said players could go anywhere, Koalanet would stay the main TGU hub. There.com's TGU club got up to 450 members, some not from Uru. The migration on a shard of There.com caused lag on this shard, hence griefing from indigenous. TGU became self-protective but There.com's community managers were accommodating. TGU members knew a permanent solution would be one not controlled by a corporation. Over time, TGU members integrated and some even became leaders in the There.com player culture.

One TGU player who wanted to program his own hood found that the fountain and water are attractors in public spaces. Other Uru players manage to reverse-engineer the game and were allowed by the developers to launch their own server "Until Uru". Some players did not want to come back to "Until Uru" because they wanted to move forward. Ubisoft and Cyan never attempted to intervene or interfere with any Uru player initiatives. In September 2005, the Myst franchise is retired, becoming a fan-owned and operated phenomenon.

Chapter 7: The inner lives of avatars

Avatar customization and animations matter. There provided little choice in customization, and SL animations were stiff. TGU players wanted to reproduce their Uru avatar. Avatars are intentional bodies, ie avatars' actions have been designed by the game makers (cf Taylor). If Uru avatars were humans, and not from any of the game's factions, it is because developers chose to position players as explorers, not as participants (unlike in WoW for instance). Because Uru came from Myst (a single player game), Uru avatars tended to look like an idealized version of players, hence little cross-gender (3 cross-gendered out of 450 TGU members).

The avatar was a re-embodiment for a player stuck in wheelchair. When the server shut down, players lost their virtual self and their friends. Avatars are a version of me that only exists in a particular mediated context. That part of the self expressed and projected through the avatar is as much a creation of the group as the group is the creation of the individuals within it. Avatar identity is an emergent collaboration between the individual player, the community and the designers, who present as the game and its ecosystem. UGC style and leadership of players were influenced by social feedback. A sense of social presence within the play space is more emotionally compelling to some players than a sense of physical presence.

Chapter 8: Communities and Cultures of play

A quarter of eligible (ie Myst) players signed up for the Uru beta.

Pearce challenges the Western assumption that play is a waste of time or "unproductive". She suggests that play may accelerate the process of social bonding. Uru players did not expect those bonds to happen. Disclosure of personal information was an indication of bonding. The game is virtual but connections between people are real.

Community of play: group of players who have switched from playing for the game to playing for the people. These communities share values. Intersubjective flow is the adaptation of Flow to a group of gamers. Selling user-generated content to other residents of Second Life or crafting elixirs for a WoW raiding guild are examples of intersubjective play. Intersubjective flow is an unconscious metagoal at the heart of play-based emergence. To achieve intersubjective flow, players need feedback and need to feel in a play practice, even if it's a professional activity. It can be solo play with the community in mind (eg crafting with raiding in mind).

Chapter 9: Patterns of emergence

Play styles are engines for emergence. Emergence is play beyond the original game design. Play styles can be: spatial literacy, exploration, puzzle-solving, cleverness and creativity, mastery, games within games, togetherness, wordplay and multimodal communication (ie voice + text chat), horseplay, dancing and acrobatics, spontaneous leadership, etc.

Chapter 10: Productive play: cultural production, meaning-making and agency

Productive play is creativity around play. Unlike Trekkies or cosplay, MMO fans can modify the world they come from. In the case of TGU, productive play consisted of inventing new games and practices, carrying their culture to other virtual worlds and UGC/artisans (ie creating game environments).

The Uru nostalgia increased group cohesion. Uru was also a source of creative inspiration: wherever Uru players went to, they created artifacts of their culture. Players who become versed in a game's content may [...] take possession of that content. Cyan, the owner of Uru, let players do their project. There were no pursuits for copyright infringement. Cyan was not only permissive but also supportive of fan creation. Original business models could leverage player creativity.

Chapter 11: Porous magic circles and the ludisphere

Arguably, each VW or MMOG is contained in its own magic circle. However, there are ludic leakages: TGU players carried and adapted their play style across magic circles. They had itinerant or portable identities: each person had avatars in many different online places. Intergame migration and multiworld identities could be useful for MMOG designers. Players who migrate a lot become particularly adept at spontaneously adapting new spaces to their own play requirements.

Chapter 12: Emergence as design material

The more agency players are given to design, the more emergence (and the more diverse). Emergence is an inevitable outcome of a large number of players within a network. More people means more emergence. Fixed synthetic worlds (MMOG) provide less emergence than co-created worlds (VW). Communities of play, social construction of identity, intersubjective flow, productive play and porous magic circles are contributing factors to emergence.

Addendum from Books 3 and 4

After having completed her PhD work dealing with the Uru Diaspora, Pearce was asked in Spring 2006 to do consulting for Cyan as to whether Uru could reopen. Uru later reopened in 2007, and closed again in 2008.

MMOG players have viewed their game's designers as deities of sort.

Designers should not try to step in to fix games that are already in the midst of emergent processes. The failure of The Sims Online is a prime example of a complete disconnect between designers and emergent cultures: researchers said player-made avatar skins were vital, and the designers went against it. The game industry has no such [ethnographic] research tradition, while big IT companies such as Microsoft or IBM have participatory or community design. Community managers have an important role to play in knowing the player community. Player representation can help.

Edit: PopMatters also has valuable reading notes.

Quick notes about qualitative methods in Informatics

Pick the ethnomethodological tool that answers your questions best:

• Interviews and observations (mainly), face to face > phone > online > email. Start with 3 broad questions and then get specific and dig each of them.
• informal interactions ("hanging out")
• participant observation
• focus groups
• collection of artifacts
• content analysis
• ...

Ethnomethodology is one approach of ethnography, it is oriented on accounts of people (conversation, text, video), has no theoretical stance and data collection lasts for a few hours rather than a few years. Hence do no say you are doing ethnography if it is only an observational study. The research topic should be framed to be interesting, not juicy (it is not journalism!). Use the past tense, but do not use metaphors.
Ethnography has quantitative ports but its goal is more about understanding people from their own point of view (and in general, it is hard to define categories for that). Subalterns are those not in the powerful culture. As they are not on the front scene, ethnography is very useful to get their opinion.

Beware of generalization, be conservative. Draw portraits of people, their everyday life and eventual exceptional events. Stop when you can build a solid argument from the data and/or when new participants do not seem to bring any new content. Data analysis has 2 phases:

1. take notes
2. identify patterns and outliers/exceptions (border-line cases define the border!)

List of conferences and journals

Based on the ACM library and several links, here is a list of current conferences, workshops and journals dealing with games. It is not totally complete, but covers a wide spectrum: from software engineering, databases and networking (tech) to game design (GD), sociology and anthropology (soc), game studies and humanities (hum), and arts (art). Also, some acceptance rates have been collected by professors for the areas of computational intelligence, networking, software engineering and database.

Name	Full name	Rate	Domain	Notes	Society
DIMEA	Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts	-	tech	2008, incorporated into ACE	-
DISIO	DIstributed SImulation & Online gaming	-	tech	workshop	ICST
FSE	Foundations of Software Engineering	18%	tech	also named SIGSOFT	ACM
GDC	Game Developer Conference	-	tech|GD	industry-oriented	GDC
Globe	International Conference on Data Management in Grid and P2P Systems	-	tech	-	-
ICSE	International Conference on Software Engineering	14%	tech	-	ACM/IEEE
IJCGT	International Journal of Computer Games Technology	-	tech	-	Hindawi
IMSAA	Internet Multimedia Systems Architecture and Applications	-	tech	-	IEEE
MMVE	Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments	-	tech	workshop	ACM
MMTA	Multimedia Tools and Applications	-	tech	2010, online journal	Springer
NetGames	NetGames	40%	tech	2008, 2009, 2010	ACM
NIME	Networking Issues in Multimedia Entertainment	-	tech	workshop	IEEE
NSDI	USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation	19%	tech	part of SIGCOMM	ACM
OOPSLA	renamed into SPLASH	27%	tech	see SPLASH	ACM
P2P	Peer-to-Peer (IEEE)	20%	tech	2008, 2009	IEEE
P2PNVE	Peer-to-Peer Network Virtual Environments	-	tech	2008, 2009	-
NOSSDAV	Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video	37%	tech	workshop, paper list	ACM
SIGCOMM	Special Interest Group on Data Communication	10%	tech	paper list	ACM
SIGMM	SIGMM conference on Multimedia systems	17%	tech	-	ACM
SIGMOD	Special Interest Group on Management Of Data	20%	tech	-	ACM
SPLASH	Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity	27%	tech	used to be OOPSLA	ACM
TCIAIG	Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games	-	tech	-	IEEE
TOMCAP	Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications	-	tech	-	ACM
TOIT	Transactions on Internet Technology	-	tech	-	ACM
TOSEM	Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology	-	tech	-	ACM
VLDB	Very Large DataBase	-	tech	archives	ACM
VRCAI	Virtual-Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry	-	tech	-	ACM
Name	Full name	Rate	Domain	Notes	Society
ACE	Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology	-	tech|soc	conference that gets published in CIE, EntCom and IJART incorporates NetGames and DIMEA 2007, 2008, 2010	ACM
CIE	Computers in Entertainment	-	tech|soc	journal, paper list	ACM
CIG	Computational intelligence and games	49%	tech	2010	IEEE
CGames	CGames	-	tech|soc		IEEE
EntCom	Entertainment computing	-	tech|soc	journal	Elsevier
FAG	Fun and Games	36%	tech|soc|GD	biannual	ACM
FDG	Foundations for Digital Games FDG	30%	tech|soc|GD	conference and workshop papers	ACM
GIC	Games Innovations Conference	-	tech|soc	papers	IEEE
IGIC	International Games Innovation Conference		tech|soc|GD		IEEE
ITS	Internet Technologies & Society	-	tech|soc	-	IADIS
VR	Virtual Reality	-	tech|soc	-	IEEE
Name	Full name	Rate	Domain	Notes	Society
DiGRA	Digital Games Research Association	-	soc|hum|GD	library, biannual?	DiGRA
Eludamos	Eludamos, Journal for Computer Game Culture	-	soc|hum	online journal, biannual	-
FM	First Monday	-	soc	online journal	self-pub
GAC	Games And Culture	-	soc|hum	online journal, long review process	SagePub
Game studies	the international journal of computer game research	-	soc|GD	online journal, once or twice issues per year	-
IJART	International Journal of Arts and Technology	-	art	-	Inderscience
JGVW	Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds	-	soc	online journal	Intellect
JVWR	Journal of Virtual World Research	-	soc	online journal	self-pub
Loading	Loading... the Journal of the Canadian Games Studies	-	soc|hum|GD	online journal	-
SAG	Simulation and Gaming	-	soc	online journal	SagePub

[Conf] Notes from an NSF workshop about CGVW

This workshop focused on computer games and virtual worlds (CGVW) and gathered researchers in the STEM field and arts.

Notable positions

Some interesting points from position speakers.

Speaker	Desc.
Boellstorff	WoW is not overstudied, but there is a hype cycle. Making a distinction between computer games and virtual worlds. Impossible to research the future.
Hayes	Learning is part problem solving (provided by current computer games) and part sociocultural (provided by multiuser virtual worlds).
Kesselman	WoW is not revolutionary, it is just polish and history. Limited resources for many players is a bad game mechanic, it is frustrating.
Wright	There are few social theories/framwework to explain why VW are so popular. It may be worth studying the impact of CGVW software on exclusion, relations between children and adults, cooperation and conflicts between players, and the reproduction of real-life social inequities in CGVW.
White	Scripting languages can be used by professional game designers; in that case, it is pre-architected. If it is UGC, it is certainly buggy and possibly harmful. In some cases, the system limits the design (ex: 8bit consoles, Racing the Beam from Bogost) but in others, current designs do not yet use the full potential of the systems on which they are built (ex: augmented reality is still nascent).
Wardrip-Fruin	Close-reading (in media studies) goes hand-in-hand with rapid and agile prototyping.

Working Groups

I found the 6 working groups to reflect well the domains currently implied in CGVW research. Here they are, taken from the workshop slides.

Title	Desc.
Advanced GGVW Technologies	AI, scripting, narrative and emergent systems, procedural and non-procedural content generation, avatar generation and customization, world building kits, etc.
Anthropological, Behavioral, Sociological Studies of CGVW	ethnographic studies of CGVW, work-versus-play or work-as-play or play-as-work, patterns of migration across CGVW, CGVW in complex enterprise settings, research methods for studying CGVW,
CGVW for Science, Health, Environment, Energy, Defense	CGVW as research tools or infrastructure for R&D in other scientific, industrial, or government domains, etc.
Education and Learning with CGVW	how CGVW facilitate or inhibit learning in formal or informal education settings, play as learning, CGVW for STEM and Humanities learning, etc.
CGVW Systems Technologies	multi-core and many core processors, computer graphics hardware and software, networking, databases, language design, sensors, etc.
Media, History, Culture and Art of CGVW	CGVW as media, art, literature and expressive forms of social critique; new literacies, creativity with or through CGVW, etc.

[Conf] Digital Literacy and Play in MMOs and VW for Young Children

In April, Jackie Marsh gave an account of her work with children playingClub Penguin and Barbiegirls.com. Marsh talked mostly about Club Penguin.

Club Penguin is a F2P game with real-money transactions. Some kids reported playing the DS version of Club Penguin when they could not be online. The player is granted a certain amount of the virtual currency if he/she has the DS game. Similarly, players can become VIP in Barbie Girls only if they have bought the official MP3 player. Like in many other F2P online games, players can choose to pay a monthly subscription. Marsh mentioned some kids aready rejected other players who did not subscribe. The subscription system enables players to edit the background of their avatar photo. A kid reported I don't add plain background [ie non-subscribing] players to my friends, I already got plenty. Interestingly, during the interviews with Club Penguin players, Marsh noted that girls focused mostly on products and avatar appearances. Boys, on the other hand, talked a lot about the gameplay.

Kids do not type fast. Hence they often reported they preferred clicking than typing. Some said that when they wanted to write something, their interlocutor was gone in the time they finished typing. Moreover, some kids sometimes send letters to the game moderators, and some are published in an in-game journal. Surprisingly, kids were not frustrated that their letters were not published. I wonder about the affordances kids gain when they play Club Penguin. For most of them, they have just learned to read. Does playing Club Penguin train them to read faster? To type faster? Can Club Penguin develop the communication skills of kids shy in real-life?

Some kids stopped playing because they were bored. They asked adults to collect coins for them. In fact, adults are being dragged into the world by children. Mums were the most outraged when a virtual world closed. James Bower, a founder of Whyville, went in that direction as well in October 2009. He mentioned the Whyville-Walmart partnership. Mothers learn about Whyville at Walmart. Hence they let their kids play on Whyville. On the other hand, the virtual Walmart put in Whyville invites kids to go to Walmart in real-life. A win-win strategy!

[Literature] The field site as a network

In The field site as a network: A strategy for locating ethnographic research from 2009, Burell explores a variety of strategies devised by researchers to map social research onto spatial terrain. She relies on her work in Ghana to suggest considering the field as a network rather than a traditional physical place, particularly for Internet-related studies.

Traditional anthropology in remote villages assumed that external influences were minor to the field site, and the ethnographer could discover the terrain as the study went. In contemporary ethnography, the vision of the place in which the study takes place influences the results of the study. Hence an ethnographer should ponder wisely which stance to take on the field. In doing so, the researcher simultaneously acknowledges the limitations of the study and builds the field site.

Burell mentions Marcus' paper when she explains that he (and other anthropologists) shifted from a notion of culture as essentially stationary to culture as constituted by intersection and flow. In the light of his paper, we know that Marcus mentioned the follow the people/objects/metaphor. She singles out Marcus' paper for being the only one in her survey to explain how fieldwork may be located in ethnographic studies.

Some ethnographers - such as Mitchell - argue that the Internet is not a physical place at all: profoundly antispatial... you can not say where it is … you can find things in it without knowing where they are. However, other researchers, particularly those conducting virtual ethnography, showed that some individuals experienced the Internet as profoundly spatial and social. T.L. Taylor underlined the duality of Internet users: a physical body facing a computer and an online avatar in a virtual world. Another disagreement among the ethnography community came with the question of the sharp division between offline and online spaces. Some argued the technologically-mediated rupture did not allow for connections between real- and virtual-lives. Others such as Miller and Slater, based on their Trinidad field study in 2003, put forward that Internet is continuous to other social spaces. Real configurations can influence virtual ones. The network framework proposed by Burell in her article adopts this view as it tries to escape strong offline-online divisions.

To introduce her network framework, Burell raises what she calls a logistics issue: if interactions and events relevant to the field study happen everywhere in the system, how can the researcher be sure to know anything? How and when does the ethnographer know he/she has enough data to know what is actually happening on the field? I found Marcus argued that ethnographers could validly dig only parts of the whole system provided they show which stance they take. However, he did not really explain why. Burell explains this limitation is a logistical accommodation. Indeed, Internet is too wide to be studied as a whole. Moreover, she relies on her 8-month Internet-use field study in Ghana to illustrate her point more precisely.

Ghana marketers include international into their business names to make them sound more prestigious, and at the same time pretend products are local while they come from abroad. Local and global are not meaningful or discernable as distinct categories. Moreover, she found quickly that cybercafés customers came irregularly, from many different places and for different reasons, making it difficult for her to find any satisfying result. Her dynamic network framework helped her solve this issue: the continuity (through connections) of networks let her link people, places, objects and so on.

The framework attempts to render concrete some of Marcus' suggestions for multi-sited ethnography. It describes six steps to build a proper field site.

1. Following a trail (through what she calls an entry point) brings a more meaningful social-spatial mapping than choosing people randomly for instance. Example: A is interviewed, B comes by car to pick A up. The researcher asking if B can be interviewed as well is what I call following a trail, the entry point being A.
2. The trails can be of various kinds: telecommunication, transportation, road and social networks are examples given by Burell.
3. Studying a current site does not mean not being aware of other places. For instance, in the Ghanaian Internet cafés she studied, she realized that customers communicated to people from many other countries. She saw the café as a point of intersection and in doing so, she avoided having to spend time to know what happens in those other countries.
4. The multi-sited ethnographer should react to what is said in interviews before the end of the field study. In doing so, the researcher can establish early connections between places, people or objects mentioned during those interviews and eventually investigate those while he/she is on the field.
5. When people do not know some places, they imagine them spatially: the Internet or foreign countries for example. The real-life Ghanaian popular imagination influences how they perceive the virtual spaces. Interviews can reveal such popular perceptions.
6. One simple way to determine when to stop is when time runs out. In fact, there comes a time in the fieldwork when nothing new emerges. Meaning saturation … does not rely on spatial boundaries to define the ending point of research.

[Literature] The emergence of multi-sited ethnography

The emergence of multi-sited ethnography by George Marcus is a literature survey from 1995 explaining how ethnography has moved from traditional single-site studies to recent multi-site studies. Marcus details domains that fit multi-sited ethnography and the different methods followed by multi-sited ethnography. [MMOG are perfectly suitable for this kind of methodology; in fact, I think this is the kind of methodology Celia Pearce followed in Communities of Play].

Marcus describes first the two “modes” of ethnographic research:

• Traditional single-site ethnography studies mostly colonial contexts and focuses on relationships, language and objects to show the emergence of “new cultural forms”.
• Contemporary multi-sited ethnography has no specific space- or time-frame. This is particularly suitable for migration or media studies. The author argues this method is efficient in revealing “cultural logics so much sought after in anthropology” because it consists of “following connections, relationships and associations” from one site to another.

Three possible methodological issues to multi-sited ethnography are raised by the author:

• Because ethnography is a close and local study of people, its results can not be extended to characterize the whole system. The goal of multi-sited ethnography is not to establish a global view of the system thanks to local analysis but rather to determine the connections between locales inside the whole system.
• Being in multiple sites presumably reduces the field knowledge. In fact, Marcus argues that traditional single-sited ethnography that relies on previous work in other locales are actually doing multi-sited ethnography. Mobility does not mean more shallow findings but rather the ability to appreciate movements, transitions and translations between locales.
• Ethnography relies on the power relationships in taking the subalterns (those dominated) point of view. Multi-sited ethnography does not forget this crucial aspect: it does not simply add local information out of the subaltern focus, and it does not simply compare individuals of different sites. Multi-sited ethnography associates and links individuals in different time and space situations.

Many disciplines use multi-sited ethnography. Media studies research the production by the industry of TV programs and movies but also their reception by the audience. [Games are being integrated little by little into media studies as well.] Media studies also encompass the study of indigenous media production. There are also the reproduction and reproductive technologies (feminist and medical anthropology), epidemiology, new modes of communications (Internet, mobile phones), environmentalism and biotechnology.

A multi-sited ethnographer can base his/her research methodology in focusing on the:

• People: “Stay with the movements of a particular group”. The most common style.
• Things: “tracing the circulation of a material object such as commodities, gifts, money, works of art ...”. Quite widespread in capitalist world systems.
• Metaphor: trace “associations that are most clearly alive in language use and print or visual media”.
• Plot, story or allegory: “myth analysis”
• Life or biography: “succession of narrated individual experiences”
• Conflict: mostly used in the “anthropology of law”, often about mass-media topics of interest.

[Literature] Communities of Play, book 1: Play, community and emergent cultures

Celia Pearce and Artemesia. 2009. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. The MIT Press.

Here are my notes on the first book of Communities of Play by Celia Pearce. I extensively use several acronyms: VW, MMOG and UGC. My comments stay in [brackets].

Chapter 1: Communities of play and the global playground

Gemeinshaft ("communities" in German) are association of individuals with a collective will that is enacted through individual effort. Communities of practice engage in a process of collective learning and maintain a common identity defined by a shared domain of interest or activity.

Except a few exceptions such has Solitaire, games have always been multiplayer. However, the advent of singe-player genres as the central paradigm for games is an historical aberration of digital technology. Examples of ancient games mentioned are senet, ur and mancala. [I do not remember if I read it in the book or if I thought about it while reading, but RP games contain a huge part of UGC. Players direct the story, influence each other, etc. Ideally, the GM only has to control the flow of the story.]

Tolkien (1955) + Conan (1960) + PC (1970's) = MUD in US college male heads (1980's)

Corporations do not say why a game failed, whether the game was launched or not. [Although there are some post-mortems going around about video games, I admit I have not seen many post-mortems about MMOG. But I am not sure that everything is always said in post-mortems...] Moreover, no research on players of a particular MMOG is possible when the players have left the MMOG in question. So it is really difficult to know why a MMOG really failed. The Uru Diaspora developed in this book is one of the rare case where such kind of players have been studied. After the down of the MMOG Uru, many players fled to other MMOG, but some instigated a network of player-run Uru servers to allow players to run the game after its initial closure.

Chapter 2: VW, play ecosystems and the ludisphere

Principle characteristics of VW
spatial
contiguous (mappable)
explorable
persistent
embodied persistent identities
inhabitable and participatory
consequential participation ("your presence is a part of the world")
populous (social)
worldness (coherence/consistency helping the suspension of disbelief)

The core conventions of feature films provide a consistent set of guidelines that have changed little since they were initially established in the first half of the 20th century. [Does this means once we have found our Citizen Kane game, game design will not change its basis anymore? Should we look for a Citizen Kane or for as many Citizen Kane as possible?]

Definition of play from Caillois in 1961
not obligatory	in a circumscribed time and space	no predetermined outcome	not productive [what about UGC??]	governed by rules	fictive

Virtual place	Description	[Example]
Ludic world	formal structure of objectives and constraints	MMOG with leveling or PvP
Paidaic world	offer a range of activities or choices to socialize	UGC, VW

World rules
communication protocols	group formation protocols	economics	land or home ownership	avatar creation and progression	geography, terrain and transportation

Emergence is UGC [or maybe is it the other way round?]. SL has a system of economic and social status based on technical proficiency: the scripters who can sell their pieces make money and are respected. On the other hand, subverting game affordances can be source of pride, respect and social status. [The less possible subversions, the more controlled the sources of social recognition for players?]

Chapter 3: Emergence in cultures, games and VW

Properties of VW/MMOG that lend themselves to emergence
close (ie have boundaries, making players bring content from outside)
consistent rules (players can get consistent feedback)
open-ended (no final state)
persistent (enable cumulative actions)
(a)synchronous inhabitation (enable feedback)
long-term engagement
social phenomena are accelerated
the more people, the more emergence
the more diverse the people, the more emergence

Urbanism (virtual or real) fosters (positive or negative) emergence of behavior. According to De Landa, emergence is defined as the unplanned result of human agency. Emergence is synergetic, hence a top-down approach to cultures or society can not reveal emergent behaviors [cf Bernard Weber's 1+1=3]. Internet is an emergence catalyst. Examples of emergence are

• Chinese gold farmers shunned on WoW,
• SL IG banking agencies which failed and lost a lot of real money ($750,000)
• WoW warriors IG protest caused a server overload

Corporations will tolerate a certain measure of emergent behavior as long as it does not threaten their bottom line (ie profit and legal issues) Hence grieving is tolerated, but not mass protest.

Emergent systems are bottom-up in the way that they are adaptive systems producing behaviors one scale above them. Example: ants (bottom) create colonies (up). For Bar Yam, emergence is a collective behavior (I do collectively what I would not do myself), an environmental behavior (I do this because I am in a specific environment) and the act or process of becoming an emergent system. As for the Uru group studied in the next books, it satisfies emergence criteria and is imminently studyable because:

• some behaviors were unexpected from game designers
• 18-month time frame study
• 160-450 players, manageable size for a qualitative study
• recognizable patterns across sampling of participants
• the group moved from one environment to another and adapted its behavior
• individuals, groups and environment can be observed concurrently

Studying communities of play raises two main challenges. First, the researcher has to be able to analyze a phenomenon at different scales simultaneously. Second, relationships between play communities and the play ecosystem can only be understood as a lived practice. Which methodology could best fit the study of the Uru Diaspora?

Chapter 4: Reading, writing and playing cultures

The culture of VW/MMOG is a social construction of shared meanings between designers and players. According to De Certeau, consumption in industrial society is an act of production, perhaps even an art form. Examples are given by Willis: motorcycle gangs customize their bikes. For VW and MMOG, examples are avatar customization or SL IG content buyers. Allowing creative input from players is an inevitable outcome of emergent behavior.

Because most MMOG and VW are played on computers (as opposed to game consoles) they vie for attention with other PC functions such as email, forums, IM, VoIP and productivity and creativity software as well as other games.

Ethnography, social anthropology and ground theory provide a post-facto meaning to data that could have seemed meaningless during its collection.Social network analysis often lacks the sense of context that is vital to understanding games from a cultural perspective. The methodology followed in the study of the Uru Diaspora is called mutli-sited ethnography. It was first mentioned by Marcus in 1995. [remark about ethnography in VW: at the moment, ethnographers do not join hardcore PvP/PvE guilds or guilds which average age is under 16. A self-selection bias make the researchers choose the most culturally interesting: WoW LGBT guilds or active quasi-permanent guilds. Quantitative research takes those banal guilds into account, but to the same extent as extraordinary guilds.]

Read the summary about Book 2: the Uru Diaspora.