 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | 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 Faire, 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 feels 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. |
Average Customer Rating:   Interesting exploration of virtual worlds...well just EverQuest Author T. L. Taylor is an academic with MUD and MMORPG experience. This is important, because Taylor examines how real life and gaming interact in Play Between Worlds, using EverQuest as her primary source. Through interviews with players and her own experience, Taylor fleshes out what it means to "live" in EverQuest and outside of it, identifying a gaming culture that permeates both membranes. In some cases, there's not much of a membrane at all, as when EverQuest players dress up as their characters at gaming conventions.
Taylor's book is filled with gaming jargon with little explanation. This book is written for people who understand MMORPGs and EverQuest in particular, which unfortunately limits its audience somewhat. That's a shame, because buried in the exposition of gnomes and necromancers are some important revelations.
A large section of the book is devoted to gender issues. Taylor's female gender matters, both in her approach to EverQuest and the roles she chooses to play within it. The hypersexualization of female characters is a real problem in fantasy gaming and it's what led Taylor to pick the unsexy gnome racial archetype.
Taylor also defends "roll-players." She rails against the stereotype of Achiever-style players as incompetent, unintelligent, and aggressive. Taylor takes pains to show how this archetype is unfounded and that achievers are actually highly competent, organized, and bright. What Taylor doesn't address is that this play style is destructive to other play styles. It's not that achievement-oriented players are bad for games - indeed, Taylor stresses that they actually improve games by breaking them - but that other less goal-oriented players are driven away by their dominance.
Taylor comes to a conclusion that is perhaps not surprising given her experience with MUDs: many of massive multiplayers' problems stem from their sheer size. She's absolutely right; the Dungeons & Dragons'-style of leveling up and killing monsters was never really structured for millions of players killing millions of monsters, leveling up infinitely.
I was ready to dislike Play Between Worlds, but Taylor's conclusion matched up with my own decade of experience with online multiplayer games. Worth reading if you're interested in how MUDs and MMORPGs compare or EverQuest. Those with broader interests in virtual communities or gaming in general will find it a little too narrowly focused.
A book that can't decide what it wants to be While I appreciate the sentiment behind Taylor's urge to explain the specifics of virtual worlds to the possibly uninitiated reader (e.g. explaining what mobs are, what buffs are, what leveling is, etc.), I was quite thrown by the dissonance between such writing, which takes up the first 60 pages, and is interspersed throughout the rest of the book, and the *extremely* jargon-riddled approach to otherwise fascinating issues. This combination left me alternately bored and irritated (maybe this is just a pet peeve when it comes to words like problematize, constitute, complicate, etc.).
Needlessly vague, abstract, and technical language aside, I think Taylor brings up very interesting points: about women gamers, about game-content ownership, about emergent game-culture, about the effects of game structure on that game-culture, and many others. Taylor summarizes her arguments when she writes "My call then is for nondichotomous models." This idea rears its head repeatedly in her explorations of distinctions such as game/social, real/virtual, play/work, user/producer, consumer/citizen, and in her broad argument that there are a variety of different activities that constitute "play."
The one distinction I think she gets wrong is the one between the real world and the virtual world. She questions other scholars who worry about the potentially deleterious effects of the 'real world' on the 'virtual world,' calling into question the separation between the two. I don't think other scholars believe in a hard line between the two; I think they make a good point by recognizing that, for instance, if bill-boards for Wal-Mart start popping up in fantasy realms, this is going to ruin the atmosphere and the game. Taylor, at times, stays at too abstract a level of engagement to see these points.
Otherwise, an interesting book, though I would hardly call it "ethnographic" as other reviewers have. Yes she played Everquest, but the book is not really about her experiences. For an ethonographic work check out Julian Dibbell's Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. Fantastic ethnographic approach to MMORPGs In her book on the MMO gaming world, Taylor brings an ethnographic approach to the game Everquest. Through interviews and personal experience, she gives an insight into the gaming world that portrays it for the rich, complex, social world that it is. A gamer herself, Taylor does an excellent job shining new light on the "frowned upon" gaming world. She also goes beyond the gaming world to show how things are connected through the internet and "in real life" to things within the game.
As far as this being too "basic" in covering the genre - this wasn't aimed to be a book only for advanced gamers. For those of the academic world, who have no experience whatsoever with games, the chapters provide sufficient information about the games to allow understanding. The summary/analysis is as comprehensive as it is rich. There are parts that she could have gone further and I do hope she does write a second book (although she does have articles on this topic as well).
All in all, this is an absolutely fantastic book for academics (or just interested people) who want an ethnographic approach to the gaming world that treats it not as a deviant, subersive "alternate" reality. Gamers and academics alike can appreciate it. Think Jenkins' Textual Poachers (written about the fan world) for gamers.
I sincerely hope this is the tip of the iceberg for this serious academic research into the community, social aspects of MMOs. Could have gone further I would term the first few chapters of this book to be MMOs for dummies. They were fairly redundant filled with the basics of the genre. I realize that to a certain extent she had to write about this sort of stuff to ground the book for non-genre players, it went on for a little to long I think. If you took away the stuff that explained how the genre worked, this book may very well have been about 75 pages.
Once you got past this point, the book was fairly good. I especially like Taylor's insight into the ownership rights in online games as I think this subject is currently of major concern to players. The women in MMO section was also fairly good, but again fairly redundant at the same time.
I would like to point out that Taylor is a woman and not a man as a previous reviewer implies. A point she makes quite clear early in the book, and a point which I do think offers a fresh perspective on the genre considering much of what has already been written has come from a male-centric point of view.
Overall, the read is pretty good. I think it would work best for those who are not familiar with online gaming, and maybe even someone who hasn't yet started really reading material on the culture of online gaming. As someone who has both been an MMO gamer for over a decade and someone who has read a number of theories and books on the genre I didn't really feel that this book brought much new to the table which was too bad. For clarification TL Taylor is a brilliant woman, and the thoughtfulness and scientific rigor of her research shine through in this book. |  |
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