[Air-l] Re: MUDs, MOOs, MMRPGs, etc.

[Dmitri Williams]

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