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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 Fare, 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 looks 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.
T. L. Taylor is Associate Professor in
the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication at
the IT University of Copenhagen.
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