Periscopic Play is a somewhat bitter accounting of the state of ethnographic works in the MMOG field. The title refers to the idea that what is being produced is high-level, surface accounts of how games are played and not truths about the people who play them. Taylor feels there is too much presentation of the facts and too little interpretation.
I am of two minds regarding this. I agree there is too little interpretation but I also believe this is the stage academia is in. Games - and the idea of a game culture - are still new to academics and until a firm grasp of the mechanics is made there can be no interpretation.
At the same time I agree that to produce the same "how" of games as the person before without some insight is a lost opportunity. Taylor laments the loss of the participant and the effect of the participant in the literature; I feel the participant is too present; the observed is subsumed in the experience of the "I."
However, we are in agreement that the "game" exists beyond the confines of the server; players are still "playing" when they log off and check bulletin boards, attend fan faires, etc. What needs to be studied is the players, not the investigator. Mr. Taylor seems to want to argue that this can be done without playing the games themselves, something I whole-heartedly disagree with. What I believe needs to occur is that the ethnographer needs to be a pre-existing gamer so that the tendency to be awed by the game and its culture is left behind and a study of a particular game can be made.
Taylor, N. (2008). Periscopic Play: Re-positioning "the field" in MMO studies. Loading … the Official Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association. 2(3).
I agree the argument has overtones of the emic/etic perspectives I believe in this instance there is a difference. When one leaves to study a culture in Cameroon, one can become "awed" by the culture but never become part of that Cameroonian society.
Where games are concerned, the ethnographer /does/ become a gamer. But that journey so often becomes the focus that the study of the culture of gamers/gaming seems to be lost in translation.
I am of two minds regarding this. I agree there is too little interpretation but I also believe this is the stage academia is in. Games - and the idea of a game culture - are still new to academics and until a firm grasp of the mechanics is made there can be no interpretation.
At the same time I agree that to produce the same "how" of games as the person before without some insight is a lost opportunity. Taylor laments the loss of the participant and the effect of the participant in the literature; I feel the participant is too present; the observed is subsumed in the experience of the "I."
However, we are in agreement that the "game" exists beyond the confines of the server; players are still "playing" when they log off and check bulletin boards, attend fan faires, etc. What needs to be studied is the players, not the investigator. Mr. Taylor seems to want to argue that this can be done without playing the games themselves, something I whole-heartedly disagree with. What I believe needs to occur is that the ethnographer needs to be a pre-existing gamer so that the tendency to be awed by the game and its culture is left behind and a study of a particular game can be made.
Taylor, N. (2008). Periscopic Play: Re-positioning "the field" in MMO studies. Loading … the Official Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association. 2(3).
Where games are concerned, the ethnographer /does/ become a gamer. But that journey so often becomes the focus that the study of the culture of gamers/gaming seems to be lost in translation.
JMTC