I should of course have been upstairs listening to Bernadette Flynn, Mark McGuire and Stefan Greuter, but instead I am here, feeling guilty but already overwhelmed. The first three long papers this morning were directly relevant to my work, particularly those of Mikael Jakobsson and T.L. Taylor and Lisbeth Klastrup, who all spoke of their experiences in EverQuest.
Jakobsson and Taylor spoke of the socialisation processes in the games and compared that to Sopranos, where the guilds were "The Family". I agree, it's comparable, but I think there is an even better and more obvious comparison simply by comparing game guilds and real guilds. Historically, guilds have functioned exactly as Jakobsson and Taylor describe, sponsorship, specialisation, socialisation and all.
Lisbeth Klastrup spoke of a poetics of Virtual Worlds, and hurried through her presentation quicker than I could take notes. She had some interesting points on online games, but her final statement, that her methodology can be used on any other type of computer-mediated texts, such as hypertext literature, was not really convincingly founded in her presentation. After the way she dwelled on the aspects of EverQuest that were social, game-related and motivated by the need to interact with others, the leap to include hypertext literature was quite sudden.
Anyway - change of sessions, and I don't want to miss Mary Flanagan's presentation... I didn't recognize her right way earlier today, and I am still embarassed with my bad face-recognition skills.
Posted by at May 19, 2003 12:30 PM