Post # 12, Pearce, Part 2

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. This common adage is what came to mind when I read about The Gathering of Uru in section two. Pearce continues with her theme of play communities by pointing us to this loyal group of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst players and I found myself thinking, "If it looks like a community, and convenes like a community, and emotes like a community, then it must be a community." TGU members eagerly participated in Pearce's study of them and actively welcomed her into their fold. It sounds not unlike the documentaries on remote tribal people that frequently air on TV stations like The National Geographic Channel or The Discovery Channel. The eagerness of TGU to participate in a study of their community, as well as their hospitality to Pearce, supports the notion of online gaming worlds as "imaginary homelands." The online world that TGU participated in seems as valid a community as any. Pearce reveals that the TGU members are very diverse, ranging "in age from mid-teens to mid-seventies" (72). Another thing that I found noteworthy about this community is that they are evenly made up of male and female players. Female gamers are very much underestimated and often times underrepresented in gaming studies and I thought this was a great example of how games cross gender barriers.

In-game screenshot from L4D2

In-game screenshot from L4D2

It is interesting to note that anytime we play online, we become part of a new community. This online community need not be particularly large, nor does it need to be distinctly different from the social circles that we are a part of in our daily lives. For example, I do not play any games with a massive online community such as Myst or World of Warcraft, however, my three best friends and I play the X-Box 360 game, Left 4 Dead 2, on X-Box live from time to time. We behave pretty much the same as we do whenever we are face to face and in each other's physical presences, but something that we've all noticed before is that when we are in the L4D world, we don't refer to each other by our real names. Instead, we refer to each other by our X-Box Live gamertags (mine, for example, is AMBROCI0US). We really have no reason why we do so, except that when we log in to XBL we know we are entering a different world where we are taking on new personas--ourselves as a group of survivors in a zombie apocalypse. In a co-op survival horror game like L4D, there's no particular push to become different person, so with the exception of running into a horde of flesh-eating zombies in order to rescue each other (something I'm not sure my very potent fight-or-flight response would allow me to do in a real life zombie attack scenario) we behave much the way we do in real life.

I was not riveted by Riven

Pearce points out that Uru Myst and other MMOWs and MMORPGs influence the behavior of their players. Uru players in particular, already seemed to have a lot in common with each other prior to playing together in that world. Most were already intimately familiar with Myst and its narrative and gameplay mechanics. Most did not like or play other types of games, and they typically had a negative impression of games that included violence and killing. They were, in short, very much different from the average gamer. Myst, it seems, in being such a different kind of game, courted a very different type of gamer and I can personally attest to that. In the summer of 1998, just before I left for Marine Corps boot camp, I purchased the game, Riven, for my PSX (the original Playstation is now commonly referred to as the PSX). Riven is the sequel to Myst and it got very high reviews in gaming magazines of the time, so I purchased it based on those reviews and a very flawed assumption that it would have at least some similarities with my then-favorite RPG, Final Fantasy VIII. I would soon regret it. With the exception of games like Number Munchers and The Oregon Trail that I played in elementary school on Apple IIe computers, I'd never played a computer game. Myst (Riven) was a PC game that was ported to the PSX, and it was a very different experience than I was expecting. There was no dynamic action, no on screen character (it was completely first-person), no explosions or violence...in short, nothing that a testosterone-laden, teenage boy expected from a videogame. I was bored to tears with Riven, but this underscores Pearce's observation that game worlds attract certain gamers. I wasn't, at that time, the type of gamer that would have gravitated to Myst, and I only purchased the game for lack of proper research on my behalf. It was not a homeworld designed for me, and I would not have conformed to it the way TGU members willingly and eagerly did. That is not to say that it isn't a valid homeworld, because it is. The way the TGU members fought for their world, the way they congregated hours before their community was shutdown, and the way they migrated to new online worlds afterwards attests to the importance and validity of this digital world to its denizens.


Questions:
1) Does the experience TGU suffered by having their gaming world shutdown elicit more, less, or equal pity from you than that of real world communities that are shut down?

2) The Myst shaped and/or confined the behavior of those that participated in its online world, attracting certain people to the game. Do you think society is more or less influential on your personal behavior than a gameworld is on its players?

3) Do you think hospitals and therapy institutions should implement an online world where patients can create avatars and convene with each other in order to facilitate the healing process?