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Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds by Celia Pearce
benplatt's review against another edition
2.0
Pearce's ethnographic, feedback informed approach to understanding migratory communities of play in the "ludisphere" is a genuinely interesting and thought-provoking approach, as are smaller arguments she makes throughout the text about concepts like intersubjective flow. But overall, the majority of the book feels like a time capsule of a different Internet/ludisphere. Reading it, I felt that most of the questions proposed here are no longer living, I have some fundamental disagreements with Pearce's rhetorical/theoretical positioning with regards to concepts like diaspora, trauma, and refugee, and I have a LOT of questions about what it's like to be in this community that the text doesn't answer (for example, what sort of social pressures must exist to create repeated situations in which players reveal that their avatars do not align with their lived gender identity and this results in large-scale community discussions/scandals, discussions that dictate the players' future performance of gender in the game? How does this happen multiple times??)
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