Facebook and FarmVille: A Digital Ritual Analysis of Social Gaming

The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society is the first encyclopedia to publish in the landmark new series The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781118767771 Editors-in-Chief: Robin Mansell and Peng Hwa Ang Associate Editors: Pieter Ballon, Sandra Braman, David J. Grimshaw, James D. Ivory, Aphra Kerr, Dorothea Kleine, Charles Steinfield, and Shenja van der Graaf This work offers critical assessments of theoretical and applied research on digitally-mediated communication, a central area of study in the 21st century.

Loading..., 2007

Introduction: The Myth of the Digital Dandy There was a time when talking and writing about all things cyber-spatial seemed relatively straightforward. With the help of cyberpunk fiction we could imagine the shared representational matrix of the Internet (chat rooms, MUDs, webpages) in spatial terms, as a parallel or alternate universe that computer users could occupy in mind if not body (via virtual reality interfaces). Digital game studies does not quite have the same legacy of metaphors as Internet studies does and to some extent we find ourselves borrowing the idea that there is the concrete material place of the user/player on the one hand and the more abstract representational space of the game on the other. If the game is online then that space (given its properties of shared visual verisimilitude, interactivity and immersion) seems in fact more cyber-spatial (in the terms described by Neal Stephenson or William Gibson) than most Internet researchers could ever imagine. It is in this sense, that massively multiplayer online games like Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies or even the Sims Online, more so than websites, MUDs or even spatially intensive games like Myst, are commonly described in terms similar to how one might describe travelling to another country. Indeed, it would seem that the more immersive the game the greater this sense of transportation becomes. While travelling is a useful trope for making sense of some aspects of online gaming it is also misleading. The traveller through digital worlds is all too often cast as a kind of cyberspatial flaneur. This figure is a digital dandy, often a geek, with the knowledge, skills and resources to uproot themselves from their workaday lives to travel the Infobahn in search of vicarious pleasures in foreign lands. As with the flaneur of Benjamin's Paris, the digital dandy is meant to be dis-embedded from social and familial responsibility so that they may remain mobile. By the same token, the flaneur owes nothing to the cultures that become the medium for their wanderings. The flaneur (as modernist mythology would have it) is meant to be the perpetual outsider, reflecting the world but not absorbing it, a rugged individual with the desire to stay forever on the cutting edge. Perhaps this is a fair portrait of some types of digital gamers. We may have met this 'hardcore' persona who consumes new games and new gaming hardware at rates unmatchable by the most innovation-obsessed corporations. This gamer tries everything, often "disappearing" for brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

Within the field of Information Systems, a good proportion of research is concerned with the work organisation and this has, to some extent, restricted the kind of application areas given consideration. Yet, it is clear that information and communication technology deployments beyond the work organisation are acquiring increased importance in our lives. With this in mind, we offer a field study of the appropriation of an online play space known as Habbo Hotel. Habbo Hotel, as a site of media convergence, incorporates social networking and digital gaming functionality. Our research highlights the ethical problems such a dual classification of technology may bring. We focus upon a particular set of activities undertaken within and facilitated by the space -scamming. Scammers dupe members with respect to their 'Furni', virtual objects that have online and offline economic value. Through our analysis we show that sometimes, online activities are bracketed off from those defined as offline and that this can be related to how the technology is classified by members -as a social networking site and/or a digital game. In turn, this may affect members' beliefs about rights and wrongs. We conclude that given increasing media convergence, the way forward is to continue the project of educating people regarding the difficulties of determining rights and wrongs, and how rights and wrongs may be acted out with respect to new technologies of play online and offline.

Games and Culture, 2010

Little is known concerning how young players learn to participate in various activities in virtual worlds. We use a new integrative approach called connective ethnography that focuses on how a gaming practice spread across a network of youth at an after school club that simultaneously participated in a virtual world, Whyville.net. To trace youth participation in online and offline social contexts, we draw on multiple sources of information: observations, interviews, videos, online tracking and chat data, and hundreds of hours of play in Whyville ourselves. One gaming practice -the throwing of projectiles and its social uses and nuances -became the focal point of our analyses. The discussions address the methodological challenges underlying the synthesis of diverse types of data that allowed us to follow youth across multiple spaces as well as initial insights into how this practice was used to negotiate relationships in multiple spaces through play.

The South Atlantic Quarterly , 2023

This article argues that, in a moment when capitalism integrates games and gamification, cultural politics are increasingly marked by the appearance of participatory forms of play that seek to re-enchant a disenchanted world. Games have played a significant role in the social, political, and technical reproduction of late capitalism, especially its digital social media platforms. This occurs at the same time that life under neoliberal capitalism feels to many like being trapped in an unwinnable game in a disenchanted world. This feeling is important to the cultural politics of our current moment. We take up the QAnon conspiracy fantasy as an significant example of the way people play “dangerous games” together in (reactionary) response to this state of affairs. We also explore some of the ways reenchantment and participatory play manifest elsewhere along the political spectrum. We conclude by previewing an experimental board game we developed, titled Clue- Anon, which is intended to provide an alternative critical intervention: a form of play that moves away from the urge to debunk and disenchant by instead engaging head-on with participatory reenchantment on its own terms.

Little is known concerning how young players learn to participate in various activities in virtual worlds. We use a new integrative approach called connective ethnography that focuses on how a gaming practice spread across a network of youth at an after school club that simultaneously participated in a virtual world, Whyville.net. To trace youth participation in online and offline social contexts, we draw on multiple sources of information: observations, interviews, videos, online tracking and chat data, and hundreds of hours of play in Whyville ourselves. One gaming practicethe throwing of projectiles and its social uses and nuancesbecame the focal point of our analyses. The discussions address the methodological challenges underlying the synthesis of diverse types of data that allowed us to follow youth across multiple spaces as well as initial insights into how this practice was used to negotiate relationships in multiple spaces through play.

2001

This paper investigates ritual in the physical world and cyberspace both in practice and metaphor. Traditionally, a tribe executes its culture inheriting in various kinds of rituals in which maturity ritual is especially important because of its functionality to empower the next generation by means of examining the necessary survival skills. However, there is neither obvious form nor proper content defined as maturity ritual for young people in more and more societies nowadays, because the essence of rapid changing in technology and cyberspace, in which more and more young people get occupied, tend to forget and ignore the physical experience. Instead of regarding rituals as vanishing, I'd rather consider rituals as performing necessary transformation to suit the novel definition in cyberspace. More and more teenagers perform a metaphor of ritual via accessing Internet, but in the mean while, we have no idea about what kind of content performing empowerment to them. As online g...

Florence Chee is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Loyola University Chicago. With training in anthropology, communication, and computer science, she combines these interests in ethnographic investigations concerning t h eg l o b a lc o n t e x t so ft e c h n o l o g ye n g a g e m e n t and experience. Her current research examines the social and ethical dimensions of our emergent digital lifestyles with a particular focus on games, social media, mobile platforms, and their efects on global labor dynamics across industrial, governmental, and academic sectors.

This chapter considers the process of online social identity construction and how it is presented in virtual worlds – environments that although carrying a solid heritage of the pure online interaction tools, such as chat rooms, are still organized around a very specific logic, portraying objectives and structural repetition dynamics inherent to the game as a system. We posit that the presence of what is called the ‘magic circle’ by Salen and Zimmerman (2004) exerts a mediating power, not only by circling, limiting the game environment, but specially by transforming social identities formations processes, attaching it not only to the dynamics built in by the contact with technology – in the form of computer-mediated communication – but also in particular to the dynamics imprinted by the game structure present in such worlds.