Law & Games Seminar

Relevant to this week’s topics is an article by Constance Steinkuehler and Dmitri Williams, Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places” which concludes that:

MMOs are new (albeit virtual) “third places” for informal sociability that are particularly well suited to the formation of bridging social capital.
It is worth noting, however, that as gamers become more involved in long-term social networks such as guilds and their activities become more “hardcore” (e.g., marked by participation in large-scale collaborative problem-solving endeavors such as “raids” into difficult territories or castle sieges), the function of MMOs as “third places” begins to wane. Not all MMO players make this transition, but those who do are likely to experience relationships closer to bonding ones than bridging ones. It may be, then, that the structure and function of MMOs as third places is one part of the “life cycle” for some gamers in a given title. As complex, long-term collaborative activities become increasingly prevalent, the game becomes increasingly more entangling, time-consuming, and work-like. Some guilds maintain a relatively militaristic culture during such events in which the MMOs become less conducive to third place phenomena and more like intense sports competitions. Across all four titles, when large player organizations develop the in-group hierarchies necessary for such activity, the function of MMOs as “neutral grounds” begins to break down. For some, this is accepted as a reasonable tradeoff for access to more complex collaborative gameplay. In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a “community” nonetheless.

Found via this discussion at Womengamers.com.