Abstract
In Starworlds, William Sims Bainbridge contributes to the existing literature on the anthropology of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games’s (MMORPG). A number of these studies have been published in the last 15 years, focusing on different games such as Everquest, World of Warcraft and Second Life. What unites these works is their treatment of such games as kinds of self-contained fantasy worlds, realised through the construction of three-dimensional graphical environments. Often, the researcher treats these games as types of exotic playground for players to explore alternative identities and modes of sociality. Here, the term ‘world’ refers to a kind of shared horizon, where meaning is generated and contested through the interaction of humans via their graphical avatars.
Roleplaying as characters in different games – including Star Wars Galaxies and Star Trek Online – Bainbridge continues this trend, while also focusing on the relationship between freedom and control that players can exercise in these worlds. Here, freedom and control exist in a ‘dynamic tension’ (p. 2) mediated by the structures and rules created by the designers of these games. The book explores the themes of freedom and control by drawing upon a variety of theoretical influences, from work on games design, to behavioural psychology and cognitive science. The book’s focus on freedom and control helpfully distinguishes it from other work in the field and points towards the exciting potential for future work on the anthropology of MMORPG game worlds. This is aided by the way that Bainbridge seeks to show how the materiality of hardware and software on which these games operate are central to the kinds of world and thus sociality that are possible, even going so far as to discuss the materiality of games as a kind of ‘silicon law’ (p. 49).
However, while the book does recognise the materiality of games hardware and software as key to understanding freedom and control in games, materiality and meaning are still presented as somewhat opposed terms. This results in a gap in the analysis between, on the one hand, the meanings and experiences of players and, on the other hand, the material substrate of the games and hardware themselves. To address this gap, it would have been nice if the author had explored the connection between materiality, meaning and sociality more deeply in order to demonstrate how the materiality of the games and the settings where they were played shaped the meanings constructed. Overall, Starworlds is a good piece of anthropological scholarship that follows an established path for understanding games as worlds or horizons of shared and contested meanings, and it will be of interest to those studying games and virtual worlds more broadly.