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

"I really like this book because I think that Celia Pearce takes the perspective of players and shows how players think about which games they play and also how they move among different game worlds. One of the interesting things she is studying in this book is how in massively multiplayer online games, as you mentioned before, there are a huge number of people and sometimes very complex communities. So she traces this diaspora of people who got very attached to one particular game [ Uru: Ages Beyond Myst ] and when that game’s servers closed they went to different gaming and online world platforms trying to recreate the sense of community that they had in the original game. “She’d heard so much about the game that actually getting to play it had this heavy meaning for her, like walking into an ancient city” She got to know these people as they were mourning the loss of this particular game world, and watched them trying to recreate it in another environment. At one point, they get access to the source code for the game and they can kind of resurrect a version of the game. She gets to walk through it. It is funny. She describes how she’d heard so much about the game that actually getting to play it had this heavy meaning for her, like walking into an ancient city. I think this book would really help somebody who is trying to understand player culture and why it’s so compelling, to get a feel for that intersection of community and virtual place, and how those things fit together. Because those players really loved the folklore of that game, and they also liked the interactions that they had in that game, and they had particular identities they formed. It is sort of like, a high school reunion kind of thing. You try to recreate these particular settings and scenarios that were so resonant for you. Yes, it’s like a communal memory palace, and it speaks for how profoundly place affects how we engage with each other. I guess that’s the thing that I think is really undervalued and not well understood when thinking about games, is how because they can create a powerful shared place, they can create community and history for people. They did. Definitely my takeaway from the book was that although it is a sad thing and a loss when these servers shutdown, there is this living organism: communities that travel from game to game."