Perhaps the ending has not yet been written... so what do we do now?

Book V

The last three chapters of the entire book recount the next chapter in the Uru story with a look toward the future of not just the Uru saga, but all MMOG and MMOWs.

In an interesting twist, Pearce was given the opportunity to take an even more active role in the Uru community by becoming a ‘consultant’ of sorts in the project of resurrecting Uru, what became MOUL: Myst Online: Uru Live. Pearce was a small part of the “arguably unprecedented collaboration,” a ‘middle man’ between the corporation (“the Man”) and a small but fiercely dedicated fan community (265). She relates the marketing tactics adopted by the Uru groups in There.com and (eventually) Second Life. The signs, interactive billboards, and coordinating the reopening of Second Life’s D’ni Island (which was change to Myst Online Island) with the launching of MOUL are just three of the methods implemented by Uruvians to generate and restore excitement/ enthusiasm for the newest Myst game.

Here Pearce notices a (perhaps unexpected) trend: the first wave of Uruvians, as well as the second wave of Uru fans inspired and trained by the first wave, migrated to MOUL but remained active in the Second Life and There.com Uru instantiations. Uru refugees even began branching out into the previously too violent MMOGs like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, and Lord of the Rings Online. Pearce also briefly looks at what happens when game designers appear in their created worlds.

Chapter 16 asks game designers how they can use these patterns of emergence for their benefit, as design material. Pearce encourages creators to basically create the worlds and then allow the players to take over from there. She cites examples Star Wars: Galaxies when designers attempted to step in and “fix” the situation (redesign) and they not only failed to interest new players but alienated their existing fans. She also mentions The Sims Online and its move to EA-Land, which was another disaster, specifically the company’s decision to disregard expert advice and not allow players to move over their own created content in the 

single-player version into the multiplayer one.

She examines which “job” would be the best to help designers learn how to guide this emergence; community managers can be semi-useful but are often seen as “sent from management” and not available during typical game-play hours (managers work from 9-5 like a large number of gamers). Cyberethnographers (the job title Pearce used in her study of the Uru culture) can be as useful, if not more so, in helping understand the game community on its own terms. Cyberethnographers can act as sort of free agents; they can be confided in by players of these MMOGs and MMOWs with information that community managers for example can’t find out. (For example, Uru players revealed their hesitance for Second Life stems from a view that the world is a “virtual red-light district” (274).)

What is a global playground? Pearce focuses on global playgrounds (or global villages) in her final chapter, and how, hopefully, the global culture has begun to associate ‘play’ with a more positive connotation. Some issues that need to be addressed in this global village begin with identity. Players more and more have multiple identities, multiple lives, and multiple bodies (avatars). “Play” has moved outside the boundaries of “the game” and into other forms-YouTube, memes, etc. Games with educational purpose now become an issue.

Returning to the idea of including user-created content in multiplayer games as a way of incorporating emergence into games, Pearce states that “man the player is also man the creator” manipulating media, giving these forms of media and games new cultural meanings and goals.

In the final paragraph of the entire book, Pearce poses an important question that she seems to have been hinting at all along. “How much power do the corporations that own these networked play spaces within the ludisphere, the global playground, really have?” (280). She concludes her book with a nod to the culture she spent eighteen months not only studying, but actively participating and developing relationships in, The Gathering of Uru; Pearce echoes the Uru character Yeesha’s final words: “Perhaps the ending has not yet been written.” I’ll close here too, and ask all my nagging questions as discussion starters.

Discussion Questions

1. Is there a balance of power to be found between the corporations and players? Would games controlled, even developed, solely by the players be a good thing? Would it continue the process of emergence or take a step in a whole new direction?
2. This question is arguably an opinion question, but how do you feel about Pearce’s involvement in the reopening of the Uru game? Did it negate her study? Did it enhance her research? Did she take her participation to a level that she was unable to objectively study and make conclusions about TGU culture?
3. In addition to allowing the players to develop or bring in their own created content, how can game designers harness and use patterns of emergence? What are some examples you can think of?

Celia/Artemesia the Ethnographer

Book III

Pearce begins the next section of our reading with Book III, an explanation of the various research methods she employed in her study of this virtual culture.

One of the first steps Pearce took was to create avatars (named Artemesia) in each of the gaming platforms (Second Life, There.com, Until Uru, etc.) Artemesia/Celia the ethnographer had to embody herself within the virtual environment; she by nature of the study had to actively participate. However, her initial approach to gathering information and conducting research took an “off-hands” perspective. She “visited” the field two to four (or more) times a week, watching activities and events. She spent much of the time talking and conducting interviews, via the available chat logs and other text options. She also documented her time spent “in-world” by capturing images, taking virtual photographs, what she calls “visual anthropology” (203).

After the collection process (not a linear, but a continual process), she analyzed data for “patterns of emergence” using word searches in her database and other qualitative research methods (204). Pearce’s goal was for “crystallization” (rather than the traditional triangulation, she wanted to appropriately represent the multi-faceted, ever-changing methods to approach the world). As far as the process of writing the work (assuming she means her thesis), she settled on a narrative approach to remove the distanced stigma of gaming culture. She wanted to put “a human face on the avatar” (207). Pearce integrated direct quotes and annotations by subjects as well as players’ own writings and poetry to emphasize that although she was the primary “ethnographer” the work itself was a collaborative effort, one that involved not only Pearce and those helping her with her research study, but the group she studied (TGU or the Uruvians) as well.

It seems odd that Pearce would explain her research methods in the central book of her text, but it makes some semblance of sense when the rest of the text is laid out around it (an introduction, an in-depth look at the culture of Uru and TGU (a baptism by text and images), an explanation of her methods, an examination of how her methods and herself/avatar developed in the role of ethnographer through the study, and a conclusion that reaches “Beyond Uru”).

Book IV

This section may be the most interesting (on a personal note). Pearce states that she writes this chapter from the perspective of her avatar, Artemesia, but the interesting part is how she weaves the voice of Artemesia back and forth between the voice of Dr. Celia Pearce, intertwining “journal entries” from a past/ hindsight perspective and a present/current perspective. What I mean here gets confusing because some of the subsections seem written soon or immediately after particular encounters during her study, while others seem to look back and recollect past experiences; still other subsections appear to speak from a present (while she was writing the book) tense, with a look forward to the future reader. (If you’re even more confused, I sincerely apologize.)

Pearce describes in this section how she discovered and began her study of The Gathering of Uru, a happy accident. Artemesia was created 10 days before TGU relocated to There.com and around one month after the servers of Uru Prologue were closed. She was led from an initial interest in a group of The Sims Online “refugees” to the more “interesting” Uru people (218). Two months later, when There.com threatened to shut down as well, TGU sprang to life to save their group from being exiled once again.

Pearce recounts the memory of TGU’s shy leader Leesa’s virtual wedding to the avatar Revelation, a player she had never met (but eventually did meet and become partners with in real life). She also writes entries about obtaining the game Uru and beginning (or not wanting to begin) to play Until Uru, the player-run servers reverse engineered by “the hackers.” She felt her reluctance as strange, believing that playing the “real” game would remove the magic, the mystical view she had of this culture (yes, that pun was intended).

Since I don’t have much space left, I want to look at one event (or process), the crisis and its aftermath. First, Pearce allowed a journalist to write what became a detrimental article about her research on TGU; the players felt judged and betrayed by this “outsider” who viewed them from the sidelines but was not “participating” in the community. As a result, Pearce was forced to change anthropological tactics and engage in the community, posting on the forum, communicating with voice chat instead of text to accommodate handicapped players’ preferences (a common practice for members of this community), even becoming the ball of a Buggy Polo game. She also conducted several presentations to other groups, incorporating the game and community into her presentations.

Discussion Questions:

1. How does the explanation of her research methods benefit our class as “game developers” within a pre-designed platform (Second Life, Minecraft)? What can we learn from the dozens of games/events planned by TGU, like Buggy Polo in There.com?
2. What about her study of the people/avatars and their relationships? What can we as English/ Communication students (expert analysts of the written and spoken English word that we are) learn from her retelling of how these people interact with one another, with their environments, with their leadership, with their resident ethnographer? 
3. Her use of the game (There.com) in her conference presentations was interesting. How would using these technologies, even involving the studied culture, change the presentation (as opposed to a presentation read primarily from a text, for example)? How can we utilize this method of presentation?

Pearce-Book II "The Uru Diaspora"

Book II of Pearce’s text focuses on explaining the details of the cancelled game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (Prologue) and its loyal but displaced fan base. Features of this game included breath-taking images, simple puzzles integrated into the environment, and slow paced gameplay. These aspects attracted a certain kind of game player, one that was usually accustomed to playing alone.

Uru presented a new perspective than previous Myst games, using a third person point of view instead of a traditional first person (which fit the anonymous, mysterious feel of the Myst world and games). In fact, the first thing players were guided to do in Uru was to create/design an avatar. Pearce spends the majority of this chapter (Chapter 5) explaining steps like this and other key components of the game itself (like the six major geographical areas) to set up her conclusions and theories in later chapters.

In Chapter 6, the ‘tragic story’ of Uru’s cancellation is told; Pearce begins by setting up how the core group she studied “The Gathering” (later “The Gathering of Uru”) came into being before the servers were shut down. The group developed quickly (the entire timeline for the Uru community seems to move quickly, like six location moves in two months in There.com, but more on that later). Leesa, a self-professed loner, began by helping a newbie, a spark that spawned a group so big it needed three shards (with 138, 157 and 49 members in each respectively). This group contained several gifted leaders in different areas that helped the group remain together after the multiplayer aspect/game was discontinued.

When the game was shut down, members of this devoted community experienced real (I think the distinction here is “not virtual”) grief. A forum/chat site unofficially became the new place to communicate with other players. However, this way of continuing correspondence did not fill the need or gap left by the game of “play,” something that was emphasized in the text as important to handicapped members unable to do many of the in-game activities in reality. The group members were officially “refugees” or a “diaspora,” players dispersed (forcibly exiled) from their virtual homelands. Key group members began the search for a solution. One group ‘scouted’ out There.com, a smaller group explored the possibilities of Second Life, a solitary member (Erik) learned about 3D technologies to recreate Uru in a way (his final product is known as the Atmosphere hood), and still others, known as “hackers” reverse engineered the game’s software, contacted the company and obtained permission to reopen the game in a limited sense by offering keys to players (this was known as Until Uru). (Others investigated popular MMOGs like EverQuest, but these were deemed to violent and dissimilar to Uru.)

Pearce briefly recounts the general move to There.com, and the huge adjustment this exodus was for both Uruvians and “indigenous” Thereians. She details the conflicts and griefing that occurred, the five to six “moves” of TGU within There.com.

An interesting section of this chapter discusses the assimilation and transculturation that occurred in and between Uru players and There.com players. These two groups even adjusted to one another, with the immigrant group (Uruvians) making major contributions into their new society, and even after the servers for Until Uru were reopened and made available to them, many remained active (primarily active) in the There.com and There.com’s Uru community.

Pearce returns to the idea of avatar representation in Chapter 7, a concept I believe Emily was drawn to in class discussion. What I found striking is that often, avatars are considered the desired representation of the player by the player, but Pearce asserts that the creation of the avatar is largely dependent on the (conscious or unconscious) desires and intention of the game designers. Even the fact that avatars are shown to “breathe” (as they do in There.com) represents this. Pearce suggests too that avatar creation is a social process, not just an individual one, requiring feedback from and among the player, the community and the game designers (and the game’s ecosystem). It seems that a player’s avatar (almost independently) develops a social identity, as Pearce explains through Leesa’s example, a shy person whose avatar morphed into the leader of a 450 person group. The author also makes special mention of the unusual lack of cross-gender avatars in the Uru community (she made mention of only 3 cases in the entire study). Pearce concludes that the strong emotional bond players develop with their own avatars (as well as the strong connection have for the association between other players and their avatars) unsettles the prominence of the first person perspective within video games. Being able to see a virtual version of oneself enhances “the sense of presence, as well as the sense of embodiment” (122).

Discussion Questions

1. My husband recently completed the game Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. In this game, the player “follows around” (from a slightly raised 3^rd person camera angle much like Second Life’s) Ezio Auditore. What I think I’m trying to ask is if Pearce’s conclusion of an enhanced experience applies only to avatars created by the player, or can this kind of strong emotional bond occur between a player and an “assigned” character like Ezio? How does this happen?
2. If this “TGU” group had not had the Koalanet forum/chat site, do you think the following bonding and strengthening of the group would have occurred? Was the existence (and use) of this site the turning point in the Uru diaspora exile/immigration?
3. How can this class define “productive play?” She mentions Mardi Gras and the Burning Man festival, but this seems to me to involve work to enable play (in which case, the play itself may not be productive.) Does that make any sense? What is a relevant example in this class of “productive play”? Maybe the incident with the wolf pack?