Field report

2009-06-06T04:17:00.000-07:00

Introduction.

Doing feildwork on the internet has been a challenge; as I am convinced any fieldwork is, and part of my intention has been to test wether the classical ethnographic methods I was taught during my study, can prepare me for working in a virtual field.

Computer games has always been one of my hobbies, and I have played World of Warcraft before. I quitted playing, as I thought it was bad as a computer game. The social world existing in the game had caught my attention, and that was what brought me back to the game to do my fieldwork.

World of Warcraft is amongst people familiar with the game called WoW, which I am doing in this report as well. Likewise I am referring to the guild Home of the Ghost Lords as HotGL. These shortings are part of the chat-language that has been created around WoW. I will not touch morer upon the language in the game, and there are other circumstances I will not be getting in to, or will only mention briefly. To make the field as easy to understand as posssible, for people unfamiliar with the game, I am simplifying some expressions. For example I am calling both questing and doing instances for doing assignments, despite the fact that it for players are quite different things.

The research question I started out with, was to identify the value-spheres that exists in the game universe, and identify the values that groups defines themselves from. By doing this I aimed to understand how online socialising was influenced by offline values.

In my problem statement I am talking about the primary and secondary world. I have later chosen not to use these terms. Instead I am talking about the offline and online. The terms primary and secondary er inspired by the ludological approach to gamestudies, that I was inspired by during both my problem statement and my fieldwork. The ludological approach encourages researchers to understand computergames as play, and as play-universes that exists both within and outside the everyday life.

The report is buildt up so that the first part ”A field in many parts” presents the field and its different sites. I am giving an introduction to the field that will be explored during the report.
”When am I in the field?” is second part, which explains some of the challenges that arises when working in an online field, where time, place and identities behave differently than offline. My field access is mentioned in the chapter ”Divided Identities”, as it relates to this topic.

The part ”Ethnographer and Member” discusses my presence as ethnographer in the field and which thoughts and concerns I have had about my own place in it.

In the last part ”From Barth to children” I present some of the findings I made and explains how my focus moved from my initial problem statement to the results I have now.

A field in many parts.

Prior to starting the fieldwork, I got aqauinted with the term ”multisitet ethnography” that George E. Marcus (1998) advices to use as research imaginary for understanding new fields in the ethnography. I was prepared to research in different sites, that was connected through meaning. In my problem statement I describe three sites; the game universe, homepages connected to the game, and offline meetings with players. During my four and a half month of fieldwork, the field showed to be more multisitet than first assumed.

Offline.

Geographical there was no members of HotGL near me when I started my fieldwork, which made me reconsider min decision about making offline interviews and observation. I resonated that the offline saparation was one of the conditions of the field. Therefore I chose not to use the offline site, but instead focus on the available means of communication that was part of the field. It was a wake up call to think about the field, without forcing it in to an offline framing. Since my research questions was about how the offline influences the online game universe, it was important for me not to bring my own oppinions about it in to the field. Hine writes:

”Rather than asking whether Internet interactions are authentic, or whether people really are who they say they are, the ethnographer aims to assess how the culture is organised and experienced on its own terms.” (2000:118)

To remove my oppinion that the online had to be supported by the offline to be valid, was a necessity to even begin to do ethnography. I started using the terms offline and online, instead of primary and secondary world. My reason was that the terms offline and online is more neutral towards each other, while primary and secondary mirrored an inbuildt value in accordance to each other that I tried to escape from having. This meant I moved away from the ludological approach, but I returned to it later with a new understanding of it, which I will explain further in ”From Barth to children”.

An offline meeting was arranged for the guild members halfway through my fieldwork. This lead to part of my fieldwork being done in an offline site anyway, but this time lead to it by following social interactions in the online field, and from the same conditions for it as the informants. The arranged part of the meeting was in a pub in London, where everyone interested could join. Some knew each other before the meeting, while others had never met offline.

Prior to the arranged meeting, I was offered to visit one of my key informants, Jaxxerathi, in his home. I stayed with him for four days. His wife is a member of HotGL, and he works with three others from the guild, of whom I had the chance to meet two. In London I stayed on the same hotel as them for the weekend, as well as a few others who had chosen to stay there.

The chance of meeting offline with serveral people from the guild, was not something I had counted on getting the opportunity to do. However it offered an unique opportunity to use participant observation to understand how the fields online relations connects to the offline. Despite choosing to focus my fieldwork on the online community, the invitation to an offline meeting showed that the community of the informants was not limited to an online setting.

The game universe.

At the beginning of the fieldwork I decided to use one of my former figures, and thereby I chose some game divisions that had an impact on what my field looked like. I was on an european server with english as the main language, and where the main goal is solving game assigments, called PvE.

A figure is created by choosing between ten different races and tehn different classes. The race determines how your character looks, while the class determines what the figur can do. There are not many possibilities of personalising the figure (Hagström:2008). As the class determines what the figure can do, it also determines which possibilities you have, when you are playing with others in a group. Most figures are oriented towards dps, damage per second, and is aimed at doing damage. A smaller amount of classes has the possibility of taking a role as tank or healer. The tank is supposed to take damage, while the healer can help itself and others survive.

Dps-classes are well suited for playing alone, which makes them attractive for the many game assignments that are based on solo-playing. When it comes to group assignments, it is often necessary to have tanks and healers. Tanks and healers can have a hard time playing on their own, but they are in high demand for group assigments, where the dps-classes are depending on them to be able to make it. Many assigments in the game is relying on having contacts to fill out the different and necessary roles in a group.

All figures, except the hero class death knights, start at level 1. By solving game assigmnets they are earning experience and gaining levels. The maximal level is 80, and after reaching this level it is through better equipment that the figure can become better. It is necessary to have well organised and functioning groups to get a hold of the best equipment. The cooperation aspect of the game is thus becoming very important at level eighty, where you are depending on other players to get as far as possible yourself. I will in the last part of the report ouch more upon how the game necessities and division can create a tension between off- and online values, and the social and game values.

WoW has an extensive economy, changing with supply and demand, and partially controlled by the game producers decision. To identify the value-spheres in the game was a project I had to abandon to focus on other theories that could bring me closer to understanding the relationship between offline and online. Castronova (2005) have written a book that explains game-economies and their connection to online economy. Value-spheres can help shed a light on off- and onlines connection and relation to each other, but to fully understand the economy of the game, was more than I felt I had time for during my fieldwork.

The guild.

A guild is a way of organising in to established groupings within the game universe. Many guilds define themselves through game goals, their approach to the game and expected behavior within it. Membership in a guild is a way to try and find equalminded players to work with. Many guilds use the exact same phrases in their decription, which made the group-definition approach troubblesome. HotGL does not use much time to categorise other guilds. The focus was more on defining itself internally than defining it against other groups.

The guild Home of the Ghost Lords, called HotGL, was the main focus of my study. The guild has a chat-channel in the game, that is only available for members. Likewise the game offers access to a list of all figures in the guild, and you can see who is online, as well as different status indicators such as level, rank and where in the game universe a figure is. This serves to connect the guild members through visibility, despite the game figurs being seperated in the game universe. All figurs in the game is represented with their guild name written above their heads.

HotGL has in addition to the games communication possibilities a homepage. The homepage is divided in different areas, with for example an introduction of the guild and its purposes and a calendar where group assigments can be planned. In addition to this there is a forum where ideas and disagreements can be discussed and where anything from the members life can be brought up.

The voice-chat Ventrilo also has a part in the guild communication but is primarily used for solving hard assigments that demands fast communication. At times it is used for easier assignments. I have not experienced people asking me to log in to the voice chat just to talk, but sometimes people stay on it after an assignment to chat about other things.

The social room of the guild is buildt by people who knows each other ofline and have brought the relation in to the online, as well as people who have met online.Many members have family or friendship ties outside the guild. When I found Jenkins' (1997&2000) theories about group-identification unable to open up my understanding of values in the social room, I tried to understand the values through networktheory.
To clarify who plays with who, who is in family and such relational connections, helped to a certain extend to understand values in the field. Time acts differently online though, as I will talk about in the chapter ”Time”, and most of the persons I placed in the center of my first network overview, has later left the guild. Network drawing helped show me that relations started offline and online, depending on the situation, could invoke equal loyality and frequency of playing together. Networktheory outlined the complexity of the field, where offline and online relations exists side by side.

All the rest...

As I got more aqauinted with the informants, I discovered that some establish their relations outside the game universe and guild homepage. MSN Live Messenger, Facebook and Twitter have therefore all gotten included as minor sites in my fieldwork, through following the interactions of the field. These sites are closer to the offline than the game universe and guild homepage. You do not have a selfmade name on these sites, but is shown with your offline name or an email adress.

This form of midway-communication serves as a way of confirming and validating de relations that have been build in the game. For persons, who are socially engaged in each other online, the confirmation of the others identity is a way to strenghten the trust. I myself felt more safe visiting Jaxxerathi in England, because I had seen his facebook-profile. Had I not had this validation of him as an offline person, I would have had a harder time meeting up with him offline. Through my own experiences and talks with the informants, it is my conviction that contact through non-gamerelated medias is a readymaking for offline contact. Wether offline contact actually happens is irrelevant, but these medias serve to open up the possibility.

To use these sites was to go beyond the boundaries I had defined for the field in my problem statement. With Marcus' research imaginary about multisitet ethnography these places are connected and min movement to them helped me understand my feld.

”In short, within a multi-sited research imaginary, tracing and describing the connections and relationships among sites previously thought incommensurate is ethnography's way of making arguments and provide its own contexts of significance.” (Marcus:1998:14)

The same approach is found with Hine (2000:152) who suggest to think about cyberspace as a series of sociale rooms side by side, that exists by the interactions of the participants. By following the interactions of the informants, a broarder understanding of the relationship between offline and online opened up. It became clear that it did not make sense to talk about either off- or online, but that it was a continuum between the two, where something could be more or less online.

When am I in the field?

Methodological the internet was a challenge. Time and space acts differently on the internet, while simultaneously relating to the offline understanding of time and space (Hine:2000:chapter5). The challenges I encountered by working in a field where most sites were online, has made my reflect a lot about the field. Even though I ended up close to where I started, it is with a completely different understanding of the terms that I use in my problem statement. I will present some of the conditions that is inherent in the online field. My understanding of these have highly affected the results of my study.

Where is the field?

Ideally the internet is accesible from anywhere but it requires a computer and an internet connection. To run WoW there are also demands to both. If the field is online, the technology is a gatekeeper.

To run the game on a reasonable connection, most of my fieldwork was done from the physical place of my own home. That meant that I could be in the field, walk out in my kitchen to make a cup of coffee, and be back in the field ten minutes later. It means that my time spend in the field is not clear, as the boundary between being in the field and being home is blurred. I know that I for four months spend around 25-30 hours a week logged in to the game, but time spend checking homepages, forums, facebook-profiles or chatting with informants, are not clearly seperated from my normal doings. The experience of being in the field and still present in my own everyday life made me insecure in the beginning of the fieldwork. Tjørnhøj-Thomsen writes:

”The mythological status of the fieldwork is closely related to the field term. The field was a place that the anthropologist travelled to meet the different – the strange culture – while home was the place for analysis and representation (Clifford 1997)” (2003:97)

Needless to say the myth of the field as abroard, as opposed to home, created an insecurity about the validation of the field, when it was within my home.

Being ”doubble present” was one of the conditions of my field. As ethnographer it feels strange, but as WoW player it is natural to be present both within your everyday life and take part in gamerelated socialising or playing. Hence daytimes are the most active on WoW related forums, as people can log in during workhours and keep updated. Players walking to and from the game with explanations such as ”Going to the store, back in ten minutes” is common, just as cross-overs between game language and offline, such as ”wife-aggro”. Aggro is a term within the game that is used to indicate that something intends to attack you. To relate this term to the wife, is a way to use the game terms to describe the offline event of the wife being angry.

When the field is consisting of informants that are both present in their every day life and in the game universe, or game related socialising, it is relevant as participant observing ethnographer to also be ”doubble present”.

All these crosses between the offline and online, both in language and interactions, convinced me that the game universe did exists both within and seperate from the offline world and that gaming is indeed playing between worlds (Walther:2003&taylor:2006). It is not solely the offline that has an impact on the online game universe, it is likewise the online that is withdraw to the offline setting. My research question about how offline values infected online socialising showed to be rather one sided. It seemed more interesting to ask how socialising exists through a continuum between online and offline.

Time.

Along with the ”doubble presence” participants in the online sociale room is part of a different timeline than offline. Not a seperate timeline, as it exists within the offline chronological timeline, but the time in the online social room behaves differently (Hine:2000:85).

”On the Internet, it is said, you can be intimate with people who are not yet there anymore, or who have yet to arrive” (Hine:2000:84)

As the quote says, the interaction through written media like emails and homepages is not shared in time. A message can be written with an intention, but the receiving is not simultaneous with the sending. Message and intention can thus ”wait” on being recieved, without being changed. Hine calls it ”timeless time” (Ibid.:85).

This timeless time existed in my field in some sites, like the guild homepage, through emails and on facebook. On the HotGL forum, where intentions are often directed towards many recievers, the time of communication is often drawn out compared to offline time. Discussion tend to strech over serveral weeks, and would end with the topic loosing its relevance, or by someone taking control with the time and enforcing an end time.

Guimarães Jr. explains another posibility of time online, that he experienced in his study of a chat-forum:

”Another peculiarity of online social life is the pace that seems to be rather 'speeded-up' if compared with the rhytm of offline life. Relationships that could take weeks or months to mature offline can reach great levels of intimacy in a few days online” (2005:152)

The experience of time going faster online, I recognised in the site of the gameuniverse. The fact that the members of the guild changed remarkably during my fieldwork, as mentioned in ”The Guild”, is an expression of this faster passing time. It meant, that my attempt at making a network overview was under constant revision and updating, as the relations between guild members was changing constantly as some joined and others dissapeared. The network throry served to open up the field, but I felt a need to use some other theory to be able to find an answer to my new question about socialising across the continuum of off- and online. Network analysis meant a lot of effort put in to updating, rather than bringing me further forward.

Divided identities.

I applied for membership in the guild HotGL which was chosen from different parameters, such as having existed for a while, having a medium membership number, having a community-based understanding of themselves but still trying to solve hard game assignments.

Being accepted as a member in HotGL did not mean I had full access. Tjørnhøj-Thomsen writes:

”Access is negotiated throughout the whole fieldwork and is thus an integrated part of the social relations and exchangeforms that the anthropologist takes part in to gain insight.” (2003:104)

Formally me access was secured, but to get actual access to informants required new work. In particular in a moving field where the social actors were changing in a rapid pace. As Tjørnhøj-Thomsen points to, the continious acces gaining is part of any fieldwork, but in a multisitet online field, I could feel how it was not only abaout gaining access to a certain site or a certain informant, but about gaining access to informants on different sites.

Where some researchers claim that the internet is a place for identity play, others argue that most persons online has a coherent identity throughout different online sites and through off- and online (Hine:2000:118-119). I tend to agree with both sides, but think it is a natural result of the internet being divided in time and space. I experienced the informants as having a coherent identity overall, but having their identity represented different in different sites.

An example on how online identity can change representation is Tarquin. When I started my fieldwork, tarquin was a member of HotGL. He makes visible another figure he plays, Vordyn, which is a member of another guild. I know that tarquin and Vordyn is the same, but later Tarquin writes a post on the guild forum, explaining he has removed the figure Tarquin from the guild and given it to another person. He is still a member of the guild, but now with Vordyn. Shortly after, ”the new tarquin” applies to the guild and is accepted as member. His homepage name is Snowman and despite playing the figure Tarquin, many calls him Snow.

As I will talk about in the chapter ”Visibility” it is important to be visibel in the online sociale room, as it is visibility that helps gain access to activities and information. As ethnographer online, you cannot be certain to gain access to every informants different representations of their identity. Access is an ongoing process in the online field, where the informants can choose to make different representations of their identity visible and available for you. I had to accept that there are distant informants where I could not even combine their homepage representation with their game universe representation. As above example shows, the identities are floating and can change representation over time and space.

Ethnographer and Member.

The qualitative participant observation is closely linked with ethnographic knowledge production. Precisely how participant observation is performed, is situationally determined and there are no absolute description on what participant observation looks like. The method is often debated but there is broard agreement that participant observation is done by observing the researched culture and to participate in it to as full an extend as possible (Wadel:Tjørnhøj-Thomsen:Hine).

Roles.

When I write that participant observation is situational, it is because it is depending on the ethnographer as a person and the background that you step in to the field with. With background I refer both to the method and theory chosen and the personal background. Likewise the informants in the field is a factor for how the participant observation can be done. The relation between the people being studied, and the studying ethnographer, sets the frames for what the participant observation can look like. (Tjørnhøj-Thomsen:2003).

Because you step in to the field, not only as an observing camera, but as a participating individual, it is necessary as Wadel says to be ”sociologist on yourself” (1991:chapter3). To do this you have to be aware which roles you take, or is given, when entering the field.

Choosing a figure to represent me in the game meant setting some boundaries as to which roles I had the possibility of taking. By choosing an old figure at a high level at the beginning of the fieldwork, I lost the chance of taken on an apprentice role, because my representation indicated a certain knowledge about the game universe.

The level of my figure and my many hours spend logged in to the game, opened a chance of another role, ”the helper”. First of all I could participate in raids, which helped the guild solving some of the harder game assignments that requires larger groups of players. It helps people getting better equipment, which again helps solve harder assignments. Second I could help other players who were making levels, or who wanted to solve assignments that took more than one figure.

These things helped me take upon me a role of someone who is willing to help others and it gave me the possibility to participate in activities and to talk with different guildmembers, as the possibility of field conversation is increased by doing something together.

Another thing I used was multiple figurs, It is normal to have alternative figures, called alts, when playing and wanting to do something else than playing your normal figure. On my main figure I was often active participant in the field which can decrease the ability to observe (Wadel:1991:49). On the alt-figure I was more left to myself, giving a better chance for observing. I could not observe activities directly, as I did not take part on the alt, but I could observe which activities was happening.

The others were aware that it was me who was logged in to the game no matter what figure I was on. Still the difference in engagement with activities from each gave me a possibility of doing different things from them. In regard to what I wrote in ”divided identities” I was doing some sort of identity play. I was not taking on a different identity, but i was using different presentations of my identity in a different way.

On the HotGL forum, I chose to support my active involvment in guild game activities with active participation in the forum activities. It meant that I became visible within the guild, and some of the reactions I got was that I ”seem honest”, ”is not afarid to state my oppinion” and ”should not underestimate my influence”. I will later discuss how the role as someone with oppinions influenced me in the field.

A last thing I was very attentive of during my fieldwork, was my sex. It is normal for male players to have female figures and as a result the sex of figures are not counted as identity markers. For unfamiliar players a female figure can represent both a male and female player, and is actually often expected to be a male, unless the player mentions her offline sex herself (Rheingold:2000:171).

Through interaction, by my presentation on the guild forum and by talking on the voice chat, my offline sex was clear to many of the guild members. I even chose deliberatly to bring the fact that I am female to attention, as I am convinced that female WoW players get a lot of positive attention. In a conversation greyman said ”I am not sure it is easier being a woman, I just think it is the fact that 80% of the players are heterosexual males”. Eigthy percent is not the oficial number, but the point is, that the number of female players is lower than the number of males. That makes it easier to remember female players, which help me make myself visible through my sex.

Visibility.

As mentioned in ”Roles”, my active participation in play activities, participation on the guild forum and marking myself as a female and helping player, all made me a very visible person within my own field. The informants saw me as a person with oppinions, and with that someone who had some sort of influence on things being discussed. This troubbled me since I, as ethnographer, should be participating in the field on the fields own premise. I had my doubts whether my own activities created influences on the field that would not have existed if I was not there. I was wondering if I was comitting an offence against the field by my participation in it.

My level of visibility was a consious choice from my side. In internet language there is a term called ”lurker”. The lurker is a person who observes interactions on the internet, but who does not participate or make himself visible in them. Even though the lurker is ”present” in the social room, they are not actually a part of it. Because it is not possible to relate to the lurker as a person, they become a ”non-person” in the online room, allthough they are offline persons. Their offline identity is not carried with them in to the online social room (Hine:2000:25).

In the online world you are not anyone unless you are visible. In WoW people are representet by standardised figures, that looks similar and where only the names are unique. On HotGL's forum a name, a picture, and a few pieces of information is what represents you. Unless you activily look at someones profile, these representations only occur when a post is made on the forum and you therby make yourself visible. It is my conviction that on the internet you are what you do and what you write. Unless you do or write something that makes it possible for other persons to interact with you and identify you as a person, you are not really a person or participant in the sociale room.

In the beginning of my fieldwork I was playing on my alt figure when one of the other players offered to ”boost” me. That means that he, with a higher level figure, takes me through an area that I would not have been able to go through myself. That gains experience for my figure and I can be lucky to get some equipment that is a lot better than what I could have gotten on my own.

Since boosting is a relaxing and easy activity for the one doing it, I found out that boosts was a good time for field conversation. During it you are in a two man group with a group chat channel and you are not so involved in the game that you cannot focus on other things.
As we were running around I learned a lot about Theolandras earlier game history and also some things about his offline life. During this conversation he then asked ”So how about you?”. In my head my job as ethnographer was to find out things about the informants life and therefore I could not think of anything to answer, as it seemed irrelavant to me to tell anything about myself. After an avoiding answer about what went on with me, the rest of the boost passed in silence.

Afterwards it occured to me that by refusing to be a person I had removed the possibility of interacting with me. Through this episode, and similar situations, I found out that to gain access to the informants, and make in depth interaction possible, I had to be a visible identity in the social room that makes up the guild.

The online identity play is, as mentioned earlier, seldom about people luying about their identity, but it is not necessarily all sides of a persons offline identity that is given expression in the online setting. To have an identity that made it possible to relate to me it was necessary that I did and said things that indicated who I am and made it possible for others to relate to me as a person.

One thing that was less visible was my researcher status. I tried bringing it to attention on multiple occasions, and by different means, but to most of the informants it has not meant that much. Allthough serveral remembered that I was doing a project on WoW, they thought of me more as a member of the guild than as ”the stranger” who tried to understand their habbits. Even though participant observation tells you to participate to as full an extend as possible, full participation on equal ground as the members themselves creates an uncertainty. If I am as much a member as the members themselves, can I also be an ethnographer?
The internet is a field that can bring this question up, since full participation in online communities is possible for ethnographers, who will have the same possibilities of participation as any other member. To keep from full participation is thus a boundary the ethnographers has to set themselves, and whioch will not be visible to others unless they choose to bring it to attention.

Despite being thought of as a member with oppinions and therefore having some influence on the guild, I did hold back. I tried only to discuss things that was already brought up by someone else rather than being the one who started things. Looking back I have become more certain that full participation and membership in my field have not been holding me back but have rather been a help in my study. It helped place me in the centre of the guild, as I will touch upon later, and that gave me access to persons and activities. As we cannot avoid going in to the field as a person, the important things is as previously mentioned to be sociologists on ourselves. Hine writes:

”Virtual ethnography can usefully draw on ethnograoher as informant and embrace the reflexive dimension.” (2000:65).

To do ethnography is not about being invisible in the field or keep from relating to informants as persons. On the contrary ethnography is about going in to the field as a person, but as a reflexive person. It is not in participation that the distance of science is placed; it is not untill we redraw from the field, ”go home”, and start analysing our collected data, that we aim for objectivity. Gammeltoft quotes Buber for writing ”Not untill I step out of the relation, do I start to experience.”(2003:285) in her article about how fieldwork is a dobbelt movement between relation and distance.

To be a member of my field was less problematic for my ethnography than I had first feared. The book ”Digital Culture, Play and Identity” has a series of articles from different researchers who have worked with WoW and the introduction says:

”The articles collcted in this book are all based on first-hand experience of being a resident of Azeroth as well as data gathered and interpreted by the authors themselves.”

(Cornelliussen&Rettberg:2008:2).

It is the distance I take to the field when I write my ethnography, along with my ability to be reflexive enough to use myself as informant amongst other informants, that ends up making my results objective. It is not in the data collection that the ethnographer is an invisible non-person, but in the data analysis. My own experiences of being ”dobbelt present”, having an identity that was represented differently throughout the continuum between offline and online, taking upon me a certain visibility to gain access, and all together being in a field where off- and online was something I constantly had to reflect about and revise, all helped me reaching the result I stand with at the end of the fieldwork.

From barth to children.

Who can take part?

For a while it has been hard to gather enough figures to solve the

assignments in a raid, but the situation is starting to be the opposite.

There are more people who wants to participate than the number the

game producers have put as the limit.

This result in a discussion on the HotGL membership forum about who

we shall take in as new members in the guild. On one hand there is a

tradition for easier acceptance for friends and family of existing

guildmembers. On the other hand it is harder to make good and

well-balanced twentyfive man groups for raids if it is not considered

what members you already have, and what roles they fill out in a

game group, when accepting new members.

The discussion has many participants, allthough not all guild members

voice their oppinion on the topic. No one wants to accept new members

solely based on the game role they can fill out, but there are difference

in oppinions on whether you can decline membership from the same

criteria; that the possible role an applicant can fill in the game is

undesirable for the guild.

Through voting it is decided that people with relations to a guildmember

should be judged on what they can add to the guild, but that the most

weight is still put on the personality rather than game considerations. The

vote is 61% for this priority, while 39% vote for putting equal weight on

what an applicant can offer gamewise as socially.

The discussion in this case shows how the internal definition is the main focus of attention, rather than how the guild compares to other guilds. Even though the network analysis helped clarify some of the internal relations between members of the guild, and showed how offline and online relations existed side by side, the constant change in members of the guild made it hard to use that to get closer to answering my new question about how socialising happens across the offline and online sites. What came to my awareness, and what the case illustrates, was that offline and online values was judged differently between the members.

Communicreation.

My start in the ludological approach was to understand the game universe as a place that at the same time referred to and distanced itself from the offline world, much the same as play and gaming does (Walther:2003), but first and foremost it is an approach that encourages to understand computergames from play theory (Konzack:2003:point16). As my focus was moved to the groups internal definition this was the way of thinking I returned to. The constant negotiation was often about who could participate in a certain setting and who could not, just as in the case. As play is a field that is traditionally related to children (Konzack:2003), it seemed obvious to look in to studies of childrens play to see if that could help me understand my field. It was my hope that play theory could help me get closer to the values across off- and online in a field where the informants themselves had different evaluations of them

Eva Gulløv have done a fieldwork in a kindergarden. In her introduction she states that the difference between children and grown ups are the experiences they have (1999:14). Where as there are conditions in her field that binds itself directly to being a child, a lot of her findings have helped me understand my own field. Gulløv writes about the kindergarden:

”The children come with each their experiences, brings them in to the community, meet with the understandings of others and is possibly corrected. They negotiate with children, who are differently placed in the social room, they build up relations and alliances and through this they construct new meanings and changes their foundation of experience. The community that exists is buildt on negotiation of differences.” (1999:221).

Exchange the word children with guild members and it is a good description of my own field. The social room in the guild HotGL is not a common understanding, but what Gulløv calls ”communicreation”. It is through own experiences and interactions with others in the social room that the guild members try to find their own role and identity in the community.

Allthough the guild members are grown ups with many experiences, the online social room is still an uncertain thing, that they in a process with others try to understand. It is not only researchers who are occupied with finding out how the online sociale room connects to the offline. It is qually a concern for the people who are part of the social room to find out how they should relate to it and incorporate both the online and offline in their life and understanding of themselves.

A community buildt on negotiation is, if we follow Gulløv, an assymetrical community. Control with activities, and the possibility of participating in them, is constantly decided by the social positions posessed by those present and the relations between them. In chapter three of Gulløv's book she explains how the community is made up by a centre and a border. The children often move from the border towards the centre over time as their social experience in the community is increased. It is however not all who will make this movement as experience with social dealings is not the same as knowing how to do it actively (Gulløv:1999:96-140).

This movement is also happening in the online community where some members gets positions where their control with, and natural participation in, different activities is recognised by the guilds other members. Others, the members closer to the border, can have a hard time getting support to their suggestions and must use other methods to be part of activities.

The discussion in the case is not a singular example, and even though it is decided by vote, there is still some different social positions visible in it. For example it is recognised that the person starting the vote can do this. Likewise there is a difference in how much weight is put on arguments by different members in the discussion and it is not all members who participates in the discussion and the voting.

The consequences of posessing different positions, and the possible actions that comes along with them, I recognised from the kindergarden and to the guild, but I will not touch more upon that here.

Off- and online.

The discussion mentioned in Who can take part? Has three elements that Gulløv was attentive to in her study of children, and which she found a connection between. The three elements are negotiation, domination and refrence to the outside world. Gulløv describes the connection as follow:

”Negotiation is clarifying what is right and wrong; and domination is an attempt on getting

others to support that understanding of yourself and interpretation of the sorroundings. The

use of refrences can be seen as a way torelate to, and in community build an understanding of, how the world is and how you act in it.” (1999:13).

The discussion that started with the vote in the case was a negotiation where the participants tried to convince others to follow their ippinion and vote like themselves. It was also a discussion of how game values should be seen in regard to offline values.

During the offline guildmeeting in London many guildmembers expressed a feeling of knowing the people they had interacted with online. Likewise most people answered on a questionaire that their biggest achievement in the game was to meet the people they had. Online relations was something that was generally talked about as something real and in the online social room loyalty could be just as big towards online aqauintances as towards offline aqauintances in the online site. On the other hand the language in the game world is still to call the offline for reality and sentences like ”get a life” and ”it is just a game” is often seen in the game universe or homepages connected to it.

When HotGL in so many ways looks like the kindergarden Gulløv describes, I do not think it is just because both children and gamers play. The members of HotGL are trying not only to understand their relations and positions internally in the guild, but also to understand how the relation between their online experiences and offline lives can be connected in a meaningful way. They try through their interactions to find a way to do online social dealings that balances their own experiences with the values of the offline community, and which gives their online identity meaning.

In HotGL serveral members have developed loyalty and friendshipties to online aqauintances. The tendency of describing online socialising as unreal is however still the most dominant and the stronger an online relation becomes, the stronger a need the persons involved feel for bringing it towards the offline end of the continuum and thereby legitimising it.

Conslusion.

The data I managed to collect during my fieldwork has been determined by a lot of factors. Being as consience as possible of as many of them as possible, and of my own position in the field, has led me to some results that tells something about how socialising happens across the continuum from the online social room connected to World of warcraft® and to the offline world. My question developed in to being about the mutual exchange of values between offline and online rather than just looking at the offline influence on online socialising because the interactions of the informants moved back and forth between both sites.

My own constant need of reflecting on my own role and the different representations of identity I chose to make visible for my informants is not a coincidence when looking at the premise of the field. Identity in the online social room is divided in time and space and acts different than offline. As a consequence of that it is natural to question identity.

In addition to that there is a constant negotiation taking place that tries to give online identity meaning; not just in itself but also in accordance with the offline world. The social position you have in the guild determines which actions is possible in the social room and to get to the centre it is necessary to be visible and be a person that people can interact with and have relations to. Without stepping in to relations it is not possible to be placed within the social room.

There is a discrepancy between the experience of building real and true connections to others online and the offline charictaristica of itself as something more real and true than the online. The attempt to balance these two things are part of the negotiations taking place, as WoW players try to understand their experiences by comparing to others and to the broarder offline community.

The informants in the guild that made up my field are still in a process of trying to figure out offline and online values in accordance to each other. By looking at how children play I found out how the community was a communicreation and negotiation of differences. This discovery opens the possibility of recognising different social positions and thereby understand how some values become dominant. Online relations are valued lower than offline but there is an ongoing negotiation about these values and interaction is happening across the continuum between offline and online in a mutual influence.

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The Gaming Life of an Anthropologist

Field report