| By looking at the virtual social spaces made available within the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) EverQuest, this study explores how new norms, rules, roles and orientations emerge in designer realities. To do so, I employed a mixed method approach bridging virtual ethnography, intensive interviewing and in situ semiotics. I aimed to capture thick descriptive detail of the everyday lives of players while also "reading" the textual environment of the virtual world and how it has shaped users' understandings of the space and the various relationships within it. In attending to how players have collectively negotiated the conditions handed down to them by the producers of the game, I have identified a dominant strategy used by gamers, the Holy Trinity camp group. Both a division of labor and a career trajectory, the dominant strategy reflects a homogenizing orientation towards efficiency, instrumentality and standardization. As it has become widely accepted, this orientation has become simply the "right" way to play. As a result, a host of other possibilities for how to use the virtual world have been marginalized, rejected or forgotten. Between gamers' ideas of how they should play and the game designers' recursive modifications of the game to reflect and refine this orientation, what has emerged is a state of play in which gamers engage in status games aimed at generating and maintaining an identity as an MMO gamer. This is role that can be seen to parallel and intersect with that of a worker in the global, information economy. At the same time, symbolically, gamers become agents of social control at the frontiers engaged in an unending war against stereotyped Others where an objectifying orientation towards everything and everyone is not only encouraged but required. As such, EverQuest offers a space in which garners engage in meaning-making activities yet within the often rigid framework of hierarchically-organized social institutions which render game play ever more work-like. In EverQuest, play has been colonized, commoditized and rendered ideologically inert. What has been lost is the potential for using these spaces to explore the ever-expanding sociocultural possibilities inherent in the virtual. |
