Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture - Softcover

Taylor, Tl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262512629 ISBN 13: 9780262512626

Publisher: MIT Press, 2009

Synopsis

A study of Everquest that provides a snapshot of multiplayer gaming culture, questions the truism that computer games are isolating and alienating, and offers insights into broader issues of work and play, gender identity, technology, and commercial culture. In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps-as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces. Taylor's detailed look at Everquest offers a snapshot of multiplayer culture. Drawing on her own experience as an Everquest player (as a female Gnome Necromancer)-including her attendance at an Everquest Fan Faire, with its blurring of online-and offline life-and extensive research, Taylor not only shows us something about games but raises broader cultural issues. She considers "power gamers," who play in ways that seem closer to work, and examines our underlying notions of what constitutes play-and why play sometimes feels like work and may even be painful, repetitive, and boring. She looks at the women who play Everquest and finds they don't fit the narrow stereotype of women gamers, which may cast into doubt our standardized and preconceived ideas of femininity. And she explores the questions of who owns game space-what happens when emergent player culture confronts the major corporation behind the game.

About this title

Product Description:

Title: Play Between Worlds <>Binding: Paperback <>Author: T L Taylor <>Publisher: University Press Group Ltd

Review:

A fascinating peek into the formal and social architecture that undergirds and shapes the cultural phenomena that is EverQuest.

--Jane C. Park, New Media and Society

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0262512629
• ISBN 13: 9780262512626
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206