Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds
CHAPTER 4: READING, WRITING AND PLAYING CULTURE
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CHAPTER 4: READING, WRITING AND PLAYING CULTURESituating Culture What do we mean by “culture?” Some, especially lawmakers and mass media, would assert that “game culture” is an oxymoron. Indeed, games are viewed as so low a form of culture, at least in the United States, that some Judges have ruled that they do not warrant the same speech protection rights as other media because they do not qualify as a form of expression. (REF: Au, 2002) Most media scholars would disagree. Video games have been called “the medium of the twenty-first century (REF: Murray, Jenkins?) The fact that video games are part of the mass media landscape can no longer be sufficiently argued against in light of the data data. According to several reports, the number of digital game players in the U.S. has been steadily growing, reaching about 2/3 of Americans by 2007, roughly a quarter of whom are over 50 (about the same percentage of Baby Boomers in the overall population). (ESA 2008; NDP 2007) In 2007, Nielsen media research reported that nearly half of American households had a game console by the fourth quarter of 2006. (Nielson 2007) And judging by the fact that there are now sufficient peer-review quality academic papers to justify the publication of a journal entitled Games and Culture, it is safe to say we have arrived at a point where the previous debates about whether these two terms can coexist in the same phrase can be put to rest. In the context of media, culture is usually thought of in terms of “cultural production,” such as arts, entertainment and literature. But to anthropologists and sociologists, “culture” has the much broader connotation of the entire repertoire of collective symbols and forms of meaning-making, including language, arts, ritual and mythology, and everyday practices that are shared by a given group or society. Such practices are said to be “intersubjective,” meaning that they are constructed through interactions between people, rather than by the strict agency of individuals. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes culture as “webs of significance [man] himself has spun,” the analysis of which is “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.” (pp4-5) (Geertz 1973a) Geertz sees these webs of significance as public systems of meaning that are necessarily the collective property of a group. Culture is both constructed and learned, is iterative, and is constantly in flux; most importantly, culture is shared. The concept of intersubjectivity provides a useful framework to think about the ways culture is constructed, learned and propagated. The culture of a networked game can be viewed as a social construction of shared meanings between designers and players. These shared meanings are constructed with what Luckmann called the individual’s “life-world” through everyday social or cultural practices. (Luckmann 1983) Sociolgist Herbert Blumer, building on Herbert Mead’s previous work, coined the term “symbolic interactionism” to describe this shared meaning-making. In essence, individuals interpret objects through a lens of meaning that arises out of a process of social interaction and has the capacity to change over time. {Blumer, 1969 #8} Michael Jackson argues for intersubjectivity as a useful lens through which to observe the construction of culture. He notes Joas’ notion of the “intersubjective turn” {Joas, 1993 #337} in which “subjectivity has not so much been dissolved as relocated” (Jackson 1998). To Jackson, intersubjectivity helps us better understand how different cultures construct differentconceptions of the relationship between “the one and the many.” It “resonates with the manner in which many non-Western peoples tend to emphasize identity as ‘mutually arising’—as relational and variable—rather than assign ontological primacy to the individual persons or objects that are implicit in any intersubjective nexus.” It also “helps us unpack the relationship between two different but vitally connected senses of the word subject — the first referring to the empirical person, endowed with consciousness and will, the second, to abstract generalities such as society, class, gender, nation, structure, history, culture, and tradition that are subjects of our thinking but not themselves possessed of life.” (Jackson 1998 , p. 7) The advent of digital social networks serves to amplify this intersubjective turn, materializing the abstract notion of the “noosphere,” a kind of shared knowledge space described by Teilhard de Chardin (REF: Teilhard de Chardin 1959 (1955)), which Marshall McLuhan observed as being realized through electric media {McLuhan, 1964 #28}. The results of this study suggest that such networks are connecting “modern” culture to traditional, nonwestern forms and reconfiguring our sense of the relationship between “the one and the many.” At its core, this research explores everyday practices of popular “fan” culture. As such it may be seen to overlap to some degree with the concerns of ethnographers such as Paul Willis, who builds on De Certeau’s theory of “the practice of every day life,” suggesting that “consumption” in industrial societies is an act of production, perhaps even an art form {de Certeau, 1984 #233}. Willis applies this notion in describing the cultural practices of British “bike boys,” motorcycle gangs who modify and customize their motorbikes as a form of personal and creative expression {Willis, 1978 #200}. Willis argues for an approach to ethnography that frames the process of meaning-making in everyday life as an art practice. Similarly, this study explores the relationship between play and creativity, and celebrates the artistic instinct that underlies all play practice. Because the ethnographer must also engage in the creative act of consumption, in other words, playing the game, she is also intimately implicated in these cultural practices. Willis also points out the strong connection between subjective and intersubjective processes, the social construction not only of meaning, but also of identity: Cultural practices of meaning-making are intrinsically self-motivated as aspects of identity-making and self-construction: in making our cultural worlds we make ourselves. (Willis 2000) In other words, according to Willis, individual identity and the construction of culture are in constant discourse, and each feeds the other. Far from the Cartesian model of “I think therefore I am,” Willis suggests that individual identity cannot be so neatly separated from culture. “Of the relationship between social constructs and individual behavior, Willis asks: “Do we speak language, or does it speak us?” (Willis, p#) We could easily reframe the question: “Do we play games, or do they play us?” Interestingly, Jackson also touches on issues directly relevant to play culture when he speaks of “playing with reality”: If life is conceived as a game, then it slips and slides between slavish adherence to the rules and a desire to play fast and loose with them. Play enables us to renegotiate the given, experiment with alternatives, imagine how things might be otherwise, and so resolve obliquely and artificially that which cannot be resolved in the ‘real’ world. (Jackson 1998, p.#) Drawing from Willis and Jackson, life might be construed as both a game and an art practice comprising both the exploration of and the bending of rules. Wills envisions ethnography as a puzzle to be solved, a position that this project explicitly embraces as integral to its methodology (Willis 2000). Thus ethnography itself also becomes both a game and an art practice. Just as players themselves are in a sense creating through consuming, the ethnographic process here is ultimately also framed as an art practice, one which is reflexive, and which tries to unravel some of the classic dichotomies of both ethnography and games: what is real, and what is virtual, what is fiction and what is fact; how the subjectivity of the ethnographer impacts the study subjects, and even more interestingly, how the study subjects impact the ethnographer. Just as the magic circle is porous, this reflexive, performative approach also reveals the porousness of the research process itself: in human matters, boundaries are never as clear as we idealize them to be. One place that this boundary has been idealized is in attempts to enforce the “magic circle” and maintain a strong boundary between virtual worlds and the real world. Edward Castronova made a case for maintaining the integrity of virtual worlds as “a world apart” from real world laws, customs and culture (REF: Castronova 2004-2005), but has since conceded that such utopian goal is impractical and ultimately unenforceable. (REF: Castronova, Synthetic Worlds 2005) In practice, because massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds are played on computers (as opposed to game consoles), they vie for attention with other PC functions such as e-mail, forums, instant messaging and voice-over-IP, productivity and creativity software as well as other games. And because many virtual worlds are open, allowing creative input from players, as offensive as this cultural “miscengenation” may be to some MMOG purists, it is an inevitable outcome of emergent behavior. This point, along with the findings of this study, brings us to one of the main challenges we face in the study of both emergence and play: both are, by their very nature, unpredictable. When you introduce the variable of inter-game immigration, with players dispersed not only geographically but also virtually, within multiple play ecosystems, you are faced with a methodological conundrum. Addressing this challenge is part of an ongoing project shared by myself and others to identify how to best study the emergent and labile cultures of play. Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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