2.2 Identity in Cyberspace
2.2.2 Massively Multiplayer Online Gamer Identity
As a site of online collaboration or social network, massively multiplayer online
games (MMOGs) have been giving clues to the authoring of identities as situated in
the virtual communities. As a matter of fact, MMOGs are not the earliest
technology-mediated environments where people pursue their desire for fantasy. Back
to 1980s, a class of virtual worlds known as Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)8 fulfilled one’s dream of playing out adventures as he/she acted in a character engaging in
fictional practices in the computational space. The character interactions in the virtual
reality are primarily text-based; players may invoke commands to direct certain texts
to appear on the screen of each other. To investigate the relationship between
role-playing and identity work through MUDs, most previous researchers (e.g. Turkle,
1994, 1995) have focused on meaning making from sociological or psychological
perspectives. The collected data based on participant observations and interviews
have shown that MUDs have evocative power in that players enter the world to think
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or work through personal concerns and different aspects of themselves. In other words,
“online identities” in studies on virtual social space of MUDs have been related to the
true identity of the players, which could even serve as a piece of evidence of the
blurred boundaries between real life and virtual space.
Along the development of technology, alternative digital worlds have been
created, where players no longer have to rely on descriptions to perform actions. From
graphical 2-D chat environments to the advent of 3-D space like EverQuest, World of
Warcraft, Lineage in the recent decade, online game worlds have held their stance as a
sizable part of the interactive entertainment industry, gradually becoming what we
commonly refer to as MMOGs today. In the fields of sociology and anthropology (or
sociolinguistics and anthropologic linguistics), aside from quantitative surveys that
have been conducted to explore play patterns (e.g. Seay, Jerome, Lee, & Kraut, 2004),
motivations for play MMOGs (e.g. Yee, 2002), and perceptions of in-game social
roles (e.g. Friedline & Collister, 2012), most research works devote themselves to
participant-observation ethnography, where conversation analyses and interviews are done to gather traces of participants’ collaborative play, player communities, and the
work of gamer identity.
In previous literature, MMOGs are constantly emphasized as a social
construction or mechanism for socialization (e.g. Ducheneaut & Moore, 2005; Seay et
al., 2004; Steinkuehler, 2004; Steinkuehler, 2008). Although bunches of conventions
about how to behave in the virtual society, such as twinking (Jakobsson & Taylor,
2003), are not intended by the online intermediaries, overall speaking MMOGs are
designed in a way that makes player collaboration essential for achieving high-end
goals and success within the game. For example, there are tasks or quests that are
difficult to accomplish if players do not team up to complement each other in terms of their characters’ “inborn” strengths and weaknesses and engage in strategic interaction
through a chat channel. In fact, most MMOGs have expansive grouping and guild systems by which players are able to create “actual” social organizations within the
virtual world. Great efforts have been made in the field to describe the emergent
culture, or more specifically, the types of social interaction on the ground of the game’s framework. According to Ducheneaut and Moore (2005), three types of social
skills are found to be vital for proving one’s competence as a player, including
self-organization into small groups, instrumental coordination with other roles (or
classes), and sociability with chatting. Nardi and Harris (2006), on the other hand,
introduce the multiplicity of collaborative play with regard to informal encounters
with strangers, more structured collaborations with friends and strangers, downtime
acts of fun, and misbehaving through spamming. Such findings normally sum up with
the notion of community where players share a collective activity of having fun and
learn to recognize community-valued goals through playing with others. In line with
this, the theory of situated learning plus community of practice (see Section 2.1.3) is one way of tapping into MMOG players’ joint participation in light of enculturation
and apprenticeship. Particularly interesting is when one considers the “newbie versus
veteran” distinction implicit in a gaming community of practice. That is, through
social learning and participation, novice players or newbies move from periphery to
the center of the virtual community (Steinkuehler, 2006). Their learning resources
may include in-game discussion with fellow players, out-game discussions on forums
and websites, observation, and in-situ teaching from more experienced players, or
veterans (Ducheneaut & Moore, 2005). As pointed out by Steinkuehler (2004),
participation in valued community practices is in this way consequential for a player’s
membership and identity in the game.
Taking MMOGs as communities, researchers have also emphasized the role
discursive interaction plays in maintaining social relationships among the members.
As pointed out by Ducheneaut and Moore (2005), players spend even more time
simply talking with others than engaging in combat. Regarding the content of talk,
Seay et al. (2004) reports that MMOG players communicate to exchange support and
advice, exercise sociability, and coordinate tasks and activities. As for the forms of
their language, it is discovered that they take on linguistic practices such as
specialized word choice and syntax, abbreviations and truncations, and typographical
and grammatical errors (Steinkuehler, 2006; Turkle, 1995). With the view that
language is a social practice particular to the players of an MMOG, prior literature has
resorted to thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of in-game communication to unveil the utterances’ social consequences in social networking. It is implied from such
examination that language is being used to construe reality of not only the game
world but also the player community, with its peculiar cultural and cognitive
structures. In this sense, the utterances in question could be seen to index the
interactants’ membership within the community. In other words, the interactants have
agency in deploying linguistic or discursive resources to present themselves on the
screen, as the kinds of people appreciated by the community or not. Another research
type focusing on virtual discourse involves the use of Conversation Analysis, with
discourse feature such as turn continuation, cohesion, and reference (e.g. Collister, 2006). The result is associated with players’ endeavor to demonstrate orientations to
each other and to the game world. Just like the community-based studies mentioned
earlier, such an analysis of conversation in MMOGs does not take identity as the
starting point or major issue to deal with in research. Particular linguistic or discursive practices are not presented as having specific connections to participants’ construction
of identities. In other words, it is still unclear how MMOG players comprehend and
act on who they are in the frame of identity theories.
Up till now, identity as an issue has been covered mostly as one’s membership in the community. There are indeed scholars who give full attention to players’
individual identities in relation to each other, instead of the collective identity as a
community member. The most cited characterization of players should be, again, the
distinction between newbie and veteran, or peripheral and central participant (in terms
of the concept of community of practice), as it directly concerns the ability to participate with other members and is the most important dimension in judging one’s
standing in the virtual community. Steinkuehler (2008) raises one such discussion on
the difference between newbies and veterans in Lineage II. Besides the continuum
that runs from newcomers and old timers, there have been great variations in
dimensions of player categorizations. Bartle (1996), for example, organizes primarily four types of players based on the question “What do people want out of a MUD?”
The four stereotypical players include achievers (who play to achieve game-related
goals), explorers (who play to explore interesting features or design of the game),
socializers (who play to socialize with others), and killers (who play to kill off others’
fun by causing their distress). Despite the classification, the study ends with a
reminder that it is the combination of the four that makes MUDs unique. Following
this work, Yee (2002) proposes five motivation factors for why people play MMOGs:
relationship (to develop relationships with others), immersion (to enjoy being
immersed in the fantasy world), grief (to enjoy the game by annoying others),
achievement (to become powerful and reach goals set by the game), and leadership
(to enjoy leadership positions within the game). Since each gamer has a score for each
factor, the research is not intended for mutually exclusive types of players but for a
clearer understanding of different facets or aspects of a person during gameplay. Still
concerning micro characterization of MMOG players, Friedline and Collister (2012)
examine the relationship between a player’s social power and his/her levels of
experience, and, furthermore, the relationship between a power role and the use of
language. Two categories of language are identified, respectively collaborative
language and aggressive language. While the former (e.g. compliment, indirect order)
is associated with inexperienced players and powerful participants who tend to
promote harmonious social interaction, the latter (e.g. threatening speech act, direct
language) is associated with domineering power roles and spammers.
As shown, MMOG player identity is still a nascent topic in the field of
sociolinguistics and anthropologic linguistics. Language has not been clearly shown
to mediate between gamer identity and the virtual community, which leaves a niche to
be filled by the present study.