People in Virtual Places
In Tom Boellstorff’s words (2008), virtual world ethnography presupposes that “virtual worlds are places”, and thus “fieldsites [...] making an ethnographic approach conceivable” (p. 91). At heart, and bracketing its many variations and the discussions surrounding it, ethnography is about entering a place and staying in that place long enough to get a sense of its culture from the inside. The ethnographic approach is, however, not the only approach to studying virtual worlds, and this section gives a brief overview of how ethnography is situated in recent virtual worlds research.
Annette N. Markham (1998) offers three categories for the ways in which users can conceptualise an online community: as tool, as place, and as way of being. Based on Markham’s work on (and in) text-based, online communities, the categories are meant to be a rough starting point for thinking about the myriad ways users approach such communities. The categories are also useful when surveying recent work on avatar-based, 3D virtual worlds such as “Second Life”. Markham stresses that the three concepts are not used exclusively and that they form a continuum. On a day when it seems to blend seamlessly into everyday life, a user might think of the virtual world as a way of being. Perhaps on the following day, the user thinks of it more as a place to be visited.
The tool approach is, e.g., employed by psychologist Nick Yee (2007) who have documented how the main tool for engagement with a virtual world, the avatar, influences not only how one is perceived by other users but also self-perception.
The notion of place is constantly present in Howard Rheingold’s early book (1993) on “The WELL” (a text-based world preceding the World Wide Web with almost a decade). Place also makes itself present in Lisbeth Klastrup’s work (2003) on “EverQuest” (SOE, 1999) in which she brings examples of how changes to virtual places radically alter social practices. A more recent article by Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp (2009) goes into detail with the social construction of place in “EverQuest”.
The notion of the virtual world as a way of being underlies work focusing on the blurred boundary between online and offline. Examples are Mário J. L. Guimarães, Jr.’s ethnographic study of “The Palace” (2005), a 2D precursor to contemporary virtual worlds (Time Warner Interactive, 1995), and T. L. Taylor’s ethnography (2006) of “EverQuest”, tellingly titled “Play Between Worlds”. In a sense, work focusing on blurred boundaries are a variant of the place approach, since there would not be a boundary, blurred or not, if the virtual world was not a place in its own right.
Based in the notion of place, ethnographic approaches have been used for text-based and two-dimensional virtual worlds. But the virtual world is, arguably, a place in a stronger sense when it is three-dimensional and engaged with through an avatar.