Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds

The Gathering of Uru Signature Play Styles

The ability to “read” and interpret embedded meanings in space, find hidden clues and locations, “unlock” secret places. (Figure 9.3) The satisfaction of spatial literacy is the sense of discovery that often results from finding and understanding the meaning of something. Spatial storytelling is one of the hallmarks of the Myst series, so these longtime Myst players were considerably skilled in this area.

Figure x: Myst and Uru players must learn how to “read” space to solve clues.

TGUers often identified themselves as explorers, a play style related to spatial literacy. TGUers are naturally inquisitive and love to explore, usually in groups, and particularly appreciate of scenic beauty and vistas. (Figure 9.4) Exploration is a way to relate to the virtual space, as well as another means of making new discoveries. This fits nicely with Bartle’s explorer type, who is interested primarily in interacting with and being surprised by the world (Bartle 1996). One of the best examples of the relationship between exploration and emergence is in the description given earlier of the post-closure scouting process. Because they were already skilled explorers, TGUers had both the instinct and the facility to disperse into the ludisphere in search of new play space.

Figure 9.4: Group exploring is one of the hallmark play styles of Uru.

TGUers repeatedly identified themselves in interviews as “puzzle-solvers.” This is clearly a hallmark of Uru and Myst games and also lead to some of the Uru-wide game hacking described earlier. In some way, their dislocation from Uru became a puzzle to be solved, just as reverse-engineering the Uru servers became a puzzle for the Uru hacker group that launched Until Uru. Puzzle-solving hones a certain level of skill, patience and determination at solving challenging problems that extends beyond intentional components of the game.

Cleverness and creativity, in a broad sense, are highly valued qualities and manifest through everything from inventing a new event or game to finding a clever hiding place in hide-and-seek and new ways to play with found objects. The social feedback that results is particularly critical to emergence. The social reward for cleverness and creativity serves to propagate more of the same. Cleverness does not necessary manifest in intellectual form – it can also emerge spontaneously through improvised play activity. (Figure 9.5)

Figure x: A clever hiding place in Hide-and-Seek in the Eder Kemo Garden Age of Until Uru.

Mastery of specific skills is highly valued, and examples abound of new activities being invented with mastery in mind. Perhaps the best example is the D’ni Olympics, founded by Maesi. (Figure 9.6) This Uru-wide event, inspired by the active play of a disabled member of the group, involved developing mastery at a variety of events, such as balancing on an upended pylon (traffic cone) or tightrope-walking up a tent rope, that subverted objects and environments in unusual ways. Another example of mastery is the Hairier Legion Flight Team, founded by Shaylah, with Wingman and Maesi. (Figure 9.7) Combining mastery and exploration, the Hairier Legion performs elaborate synchronized air acrobatics using There.com’s numerous company- and player-made air vehicles. In both examples, mastery also takes the form of performance as players exhibit their skills to each other. Both of these events are major spectator draws, and the Hairier Legion in particular made Yeesha Island a focal point of activity for the broader There.com community.

Figure 9.6: Uru players exhibit mastery at the D'ni Olympics tent-climbing event in Until Uru.

Figure x: The Hairier Legion Flight Team in There.com prepares to take off from one of Damanji's temples.

A notion inherited at least in part form Uru is the notion of the game-within-a-game. In Uru, the game was Heek, a five-player “rock, paper scissors” style in which players seated around a table throw up symbols in a holographic display (Figure 9.8), also replicated by players in Second Life (Figure 9.9). In There.com, Spades, based on the popular card game, has taken the place of Heek, (Figure 9.10) but Uruvians also enjoy inventing their own games and sports, such as Buggy Polo, a football-type game invented by Wingman and played with Dune Buggies and a large translucent orb driven by an avatar. An example of the impact of game design on this type of emergent behavior is that TGUers were not able to play hide-and-seek in either There.com or Second Life due to the fact that players cannot turn off their own name tags, which float over avatars’ heads. In Uru, names only appear when the cursor is rolled over the avatar, and only when it is unobstructed by another object. Thus, hide-and-seek is an invented game that players can only enjoy in Uru.

Figure x: Heek, a popular game in Uru, is rock-paper-scissors D'ni-style.

Figure x: Working Heek table designed by players in Second Life.

Figure x: Uruvian-Thereians at a typical Spades party.

TGUers tend to seek out and create opportunities for togetherness, often combining these with other play styles. This can also be challenging as gatherings of large groups can tax the servers. Togetherness can be achieved by planning events, a formal feature of There.com, as well as inventing new games. Togetherness is also a means of countering the dispersion often brought on by the Exploration style described above. Exploration tends to scatter players throughout the virtual world, and togetherness events tend to be focused around bringing them back together, particularly in the group’s home areas, such as Yeesha Island.

Figure x: TGUers exhibit togetherness by packing themselves into the tiny Egg Room in Until Uru. (The translucent figure at right is the holograph of Yeesha.)

The various modes of textual and verbal communication and the play patterns that arise out of these could comprise an entire thesis in and of themselves. In Uru, the primary communication was text chat. In Until Uru, players augmented this with voice over IP programs such as Skype and Teamspeak. There.com introduced voice shortly after TGUers arrived, a feature that was welcomed by some disabled members of the group who had trouble typing. Wordplay in both text and voice formats abounds, and in There.com there is also the added feature of the group instant-message box, often used during hoverboat jaunts or Hairier Legion events. Multimodal communication can also lead to some interesting breaches in the magic circle. The real-life milieu of players using hands-free voice systems can sometimes bleed into the virtual world, and the group can overhear phone conversations, children or dogs barking in the background. Because of the use of voice over IP programs to augment communications; there can also be occasions where a group of players in different virtual worlds on the same Skype call might be taking Book In a trans-virtual conversation.

Horseplay, a kind of highly physical, highly spontaneous rough-and tumble is probably closest to what Caillois would characterize as “ilinx,” or vertigo (Caillois 1961). Dancing in the fountain in the original Uru is an early manifestation of horseplay. However, horseplay in Uru was somewhat limited due to the game’s constraints, and this play style expanded significantly in There.com where immortal avatars can jump off tall buildings, flip buggies or crash hoverboats into the sides of buildings unharmed. The Buggy Polo game described earlier is an excellent example of horseplay (Figure 9.12), as are elaborate driving courses that allow for vehicle stunts. There.com players also brought this expanded tendency towards horseplay back into Uru by inventing Avie Bowling; this was the effect of a collision flaw in the world that allowed players to sink their avatar bodies into the floor in a certain area of the hood. They would then run quickly across the floor, using their protruding heads as bowling balls and the numerous orange traffic cones in the world as bowling pins. This also demonstrates the way emergent behavior can arise out of flaws in the system, or through repurposing of found objects.

Figure 9.12: Buggy Polo, featuring TGU's resident ethnographer in the role of the ball.

Dancing is an activity that seems to have made its way into virtually every MMOW and MMOG. Even classical medieval role-playing games usually have dance steps built in. All three of the MMOWs covered in this study included affordances for dancing. Uru provided limited dance steps, and a few more were included in add packs released by the Uru hacker group. New dance moves have also been invented by combining sideways steps, turning, spinning, etc. Depressing the Uru voice activation button (players avoided actually using voice as it crashed the servers) caused the avatar to launch into an elaborate set of hand gestures, which were combined with other steps to create dance routines. Players also tried to create coordinated dance maneuvers using a combination of existing and invented dance steps. TGUers were particularly enamored of dancing in unusual places, such as the Uru fountain and its derivatives in There.com and Second Life, on top of columns, on spades tables, etc. Second Life has perhaps the broadest array of dance steps, mostly player-created, which is one of the features that gives it the quality of an “after hours club” for some TGUers. For disabled players in particular, an occasional “night out” dancing in Second Life can be an enjoyable diversion.

The notion of “bottom-up leadership” may appear to be an oxymoron; however, as we’ve seen, the leadership structure of TGU operates in a highly emergent fashion, both in the way decisions are made, and in the identity development of the leaders themselves. Nonetheless, bottom-up management requires a great deal of work, possibly more than top-down management. The reason for this is that leaders who work in this fashion must pay more attention and spend more time with the individuals in the group. They tend lead in a more responsive fashion, intervening on an as-needed basis to avert a crisis or promote some community-oriented initiative. Many of TGU’s decisions happened in what may seem to be a backward fashion. For instance, TGU was started somewhat reluctantly and the mission statement was not written by Leesa until after people had already joined the hood. The migration took place through the initiative of individual scouts through a loosely negotiated research process rather than as a top-down dictate from leadership.

An overarching engine for emergence is what one might call the “inventive urge.” Play is by nature experimental, and experimentation can often lead to new play mechanics. In every MMOW, it appears that players invent new modes of play, new game mechanics, and new ways of interacting with the virtual world. In Uru, as well as the other game worlds described here, players were constantly subverting environmental components to create their own new forms of gameplay. This suggests that a high level of agency may result in a shift from player to designer. As with the real-life playground, players work within and sometimes against the spatial and mechanical constraints presented to them to develop new play forms indigenous to the spatial context (Opie and Opie 1969). As a result, they adapt to the play ecosystem by both mutating existing game cultures and inventing entirely new ones, always working with and against the features of the play space.