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?