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emknott

Digital Practices in History and Ethnography IG - 0 views

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    The Interest Group for Digital Practices in History and Ethnography will address the data concerns of history as a research domain and those of the ethnographic disciplines (including cultural anthropology, folklore studies, ethnomusicology, interpretive sociology, and science and technology studies). This group proposes to build a medium sized tent (smaller than the whole of the digital humanities or of the social sciences, larger than a particular discipline) to explore strategies and frameworks for the collaborative care and use of research data of diverse types.
younsong lee

A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies - 2 views

http://gac.sagepub.com/content/1/1/29.abstract This article was helpful for me to think about why digital ethnography is necessary for conducting a research on gaming culture. The author states th...

started by younsong lee on 14 May 14 no follow-up yet
Mara Williams

Do 'the Risky Thing' in Digital Humanities - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 1 views

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    On taking risks in digital humanities.
Staci Tucker

A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies - 2 views

http://gac.sagepub.com/content/1/1/29.abstract

ethnography video games research anthroplogy

started by Staci Tucker on 04 Jun 12 no follow-up yet
David Martin

Sociology in Fantasia - Reason.com - 0 views

  • Players tend to reproduce many offline behaviors online, no matter how fantastic, imaginative, and unearthly the game world might be. Sometimes the results are pretty bleak. "Instead of an escape from the drudgeries of the physical world," Yee writes, "many online gamers describe their gameplay as an unpaid second job."
  • Some put in extensive hours at often unrewarding work ("grinding" being the well-suited in-game descriptor of choice), submitting themselves to "increasing amounts of centralized command, discipline, and obedience," Yee notes in a chapter with the sad title of "The Labor of Fun." While individual players may explore in a leisurely, ludic way, an MMO's complexity, challenges, and rewards elicit demanding practices from those who would take the game more seriously.
  • Racism is another grim import from the real world. Online gaming has seen the rise of "gold farming," whereby users rapidly play a game to a successful level in order to sell the results to other players not willing to invest the time. In short, players outsource the grinding. A skilled gold farmer can simultaneously take a game character to a very high level on one computer while churning out valuable magic items on another. Proteus Paradox doesn't dwell on the economics of gold farming, but notes that most gold farmers are Chinese-and also that other players tend to dislike them. Anti-Chinese racism surfaces in hostile in-game interactions and in YouTube rants.
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  • And then there are the ever-elusive lady gamers. Proteus outlines how male players denigrate, harass, and drive off female players.
  • But Yee offers two twists to this sadly familiar story. First, women report wanting to play for many of the same reasons men do-achievement, social interaction, and immersion-going against essentialist expectations of gender behavior difference. And second, MMOs offer a pedagogical benefit of sorts to male gamers who play under female avatars.
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    For those interesting in online communities, gaming or otherwise, you may find this article and the related book interesting.
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