Abstract
Online Gaming in Context succeeds quite well at its stated goal: to compile cutting-edge perspectives on the often-ignored area of video game studies. To study online gaming is to study a multifaceted, ever changing, and impossible-to-generalize subject matter, but the editors of this collection accomplish this feat by collecting and connecting interdisciplinary scholarship around the cultural meanings of computers and gaming. Editors, however, did miss a few things—the most notable of which is a lack of focus on the subset of online gaming that occurs on consoles. While online PC gaming is certainly important and has traditionally dominated what online gaming refers to, console gaming represents ten times the actual games sales on PC, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2011 “Essential Facts” report, and it should not be overlooked as it is in this work. Still, this book succeeds nicely in advancing understanding of PC online gaming, from World of Warcraft to Facebook games like Farmville or Mafia Wars.
Online Gaming in Context is divided into four sections: editors’ contributions serve as bookends to the middle two sections, which are supplied by the contributors who hail mostly from digital media studies backgrounds with an emphasis on video games studies, leisure studies, or virtual worlds. There is a healthy interdisciplinary range from cultural studies scholars and rhetoricians, to visual culture scholars and game designers. The editors nicely introduce online gaming issues centered on interrelated ludic concerns (such as gameplay’s role in engendering interactive identities), representational concerns (such as in-game accents that frame character and culture conceptions), and communal concerns (such as social pleasures and motivations of online gaming).
The first author section titled “Production and Play” focuses on negotiated player positions over time and the magic circle, Johan Huizinga’s (1938/1955) concept of the imaginary and delineated space one enters when at “play,” as they pertain to gaming. Aphra Kerr begins this section with a brilliant deconstruction of political economic concerns surrounding online gaming, including a plea to understand value production roles of users and producers in terms of equal player and worker rights. This chapter sets up a nice flow over the next few contributions dealing with how players negotiate their identities as online gamers, including an interesting look at the relatively unknown phenomenon of unauthorized private MMORPG servers—the independently owned servers that host versions of games outside the producer/owner rules and monetization. Lin and Sun’s chapter is one of Online Gaming in Context’s must-reads for those unfamiliar with these private servers by providing a welcome deconstruction of players’ reasoning and benefits for using these servers beyond simplistic money-saving motivations. Overlooked phenomena is also important in Douglas Brown’s chapter, which focuses on the “endgame” of World of Warcraft as opposed to the often-discussed leveling up, the process of gaining power and experience in WoW. This chapter demonstrates the limitations of previous textual analyses that ignore the endgame dynamic as well as Blizzard’s unabashed appropriation of fan content to feed endgame content.
Turning back toward Huizinga’s magic circle, this section shifts considerably from the rest of the volume, joining a long-held debate about what “play” means in video games. These up-and-down chapters might have benefited from being included in its own section of the volume by advancing an understanding the complexities of the magic circle. Falcão and Ribeiro’s chapter deftly joins the magic circle debate by neither placing this concept on a pedestal nor completely tearing it down. Instead, the authors use the magic circle as a mediating concept necessary to understand continuously negotiated online gamer positions while simultaneously engaging with an ever-present ludology/narratology argument. Scholars like Jesper Juul and Mark J. P. Wolf, among many others, have long worked through the importance of gameplay versus narrative, and here Falcão and Ribeiro discuss narratives in a way that appeases both sides of the debate, calling them the “essence” necessary to provide magic circle immersion.
The volume’s next section titled “Communities and Communication” concentrates issues of representation and place. Ethnographic inquiry in this section includes an examination of identity formation in an online game community that was maintained after the game shut down. This section does a great job of coalescing important research about communities and communication—sometimes even verbal communication—in online gaming with the most important chapter being Kate E. Taylor’s about the online game Wordslinger. Taylor describes Wordslinger’s ability to aid women who have suffered from abuse by creating an “embodied narrative” that forces players to engage in an agentive mapping of their lived experiences onto computer game models.
There are two overarching criticisms of this edited work. First, several chapters seem to lack important literature that would ground this most recent contribution to scholarship: One chapter devoted to the mediated “third space” of Second Life, for instance, makes no mention of Habermas’ Public Sphere; another chapter deconstructs race and gender in EverQuest without discussing key research on race representations in other MMOs, such as World of Warcraft. Second, although the editors do a nice job enumerating the various perspectives discussed throughout the collection in the book’s final chapter and include a great list of challenges that comes along with undertaking this broad subject matter, the editors fail to include even one chapter on online console gaming despite its clear importance to gaming as a whole. Titling the collection “Online PC Gaming in Context” would have recognized this gap without detracting from a book that advances the important and often-overlooked online gaming scholarship.