Click to go to Ducheneaut's PARC information page.

Nic Ducheneaut completed his PhD in 2003 at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

He works as a senior researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He primarily studies online game communities.

You can find a summary of his current projects here, and an extensive list of publications here.

He has a LinkedIn account and a Twitter feed. However, his Twitter stream is locked from general view.

Click the image to go to Moore's MySpace page.

Robert J. Moore formerly worked at Xerox PARC, and has also worked extensively as a game designer. Clicking the image will take you to his MySpace page, which seems to be his primary web-presence.

Summary

Ducheneaut and Moore present an ethnographic study of social interactions within Everquest Online Adventures for the PS2. They use participant observation to observe players at work within an online space, exploring the ways players socially interact to complete game tasks, as well as develop peer bonds within groups. Their essential thesis is that MMORPGs can highlight ways that games can be used to teach social interaction. They explore this idea by focusing on three factors:

Player self-organization

Players learn to organize themselves into groups to accomplish game-based tasks and establish community. The game’s design demands that players learn to cooperate and coordinate their actions in order to achieve goals. Players cannot play as individuals.

Instrumental interactions

Players must take on a role, learn its function, and master its tools to be useful to a group. In addition, these interactions provide the player with a certain amount of social capital that can then be spent in other ways.

Sociability

Players acclimate themselves to the social conventions of the game community. They adopt an identity and role, build reputation, and establish effective peer bonds with other players.

In-game text chat allows players to communicate more effectively, sometimes tailoring preset chat commands to relay more detailed information as players seek out social connection and to accomplish tasks.

Ducheneaut and Moore conclude that MMOs provide excellent examples of social learning that can then be used for actual teaching and pedagogy.

Discussion

The article provides a thoroughly detailed case-study that is an excellent example of ethnographic methods as they can be applied to online communities. Games provide specific social contexts around which players construct identities and relationships. They are already constructed frameworks that can establish community quickly and easily. The social nature of gameplay in MMOs provides a rich data set for researchers to explore.

Click image to go to Rutter's CRIC homepage.

Links**

Rutter’s page @ Center for Research on Innovation and Competition. He’s a researcher for the Manchester Institute of Innovative Research.

RCCS book review of Virtual Methods (2007)

Rutter’s Digiplay Initiative, focusing on games studies.

Digiplay Twitter

Introductory Chapter of Understanding Digital Games (2006), edited by Rutter and Bryson.

**I could find virtually no web presence for Gregory W. H. Smith outside of references to this article and a book titled Analyzing Visual Data (1992).

Summary

This book chapter grows from a paper presented in 2002, and is available in Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet (2005), edited by Christine Hine (preview available on Google Books; also available here). Rutter and Smith discuss ethnographic research methods as they might apply to online communities and the researchers who examine them. In this chapter specifically, they studied newsgroup discussion lists. In their words, they wanted to understand “how sociability is discursively constructed in a text-based environment” (p. 81-82). To that end, they archived and catalogued messages exchanged between participants, as well as conducted F2F interviews with some of the newsgroup’s members. They also examined the available web-presence of some members. Rutter and Smith describe their work as “participant observation” working with “thick description.”

In their research, they faced several major questions about defining the community they were studying, as well as their roles as researchers within that community.

What is this place?

The authors state plainly that “online ethnography describes places that are not spaces” (p. 84). As a result, much of the research process they describe can be carried out “at researchers’ own office” and can be automated with the right software (p. 84). The lack of explicit spatiality means they do not engage with the community online that often. Instead, they work with text itself, noting patterns of usage and content. One reason for this is the “asynchronous nature” of the communication within such a system.

The messages had no natural “link” to the time and space in which they were created, only to the times and spaces in which they were consumed. The ordering, timing and association with other messages was not uniformly constructed within the newsgroup and the virtual space created for it by the participants, but in their own everyday use of these texts. (p. 85)

Rutter and Smith go on to suggest that “we need to be very cautious about the where” researchers focus upon (p. 85).

Inclusion of research outside of the office

Though they suggest they primarily focused their data collection upon the text generated within the newsgroup, the authors did supplement their research with interviews and with attendance to the newsgroup’s face-to-face convention, RumRendezvous. While the researchers wished to share their findings with the group, they had to counter-balance such a desire with the need to maintain anonymity for the newsgroup users (even though some wished to be openly identified in publication.

Ethical concerns

Any ethnographic researcher faces critical ethical questions about their research practices. The need for studying and understanding the culture is important, but so is maintaining confidentiality and privacy of the research subjects. Researchers should often participate in the culture, but they must answer how and when they should do so. Rutter and Smith explore the limits of “participant observation” within online communities.

It is very difficult for the online ethnographer to maintain a stable presence in a virtual environment when people cannot see that you are there. This is made worse with the constantly changing composition of many virtual environments as new people arrive and others leave – mostly unannounced. Ethically, how are we supposed to negotiate informed consent? Do we opt for maintaining the letter of the law with regular postings that announce our research identities and our presence as researchers or do we, after a general announcement of our presence, slip into a more naturalistic mode? (p. 89)

What role should the researcher play within the community? How does working online complicate this question further? The authors note that they never completely extricated themselves from the community. It’s availability online make the community both persistent and easily accessible.

This persistence also raises a question of how to deal with online communications that are openly accessible for public viewing. Does this also mean that those communications are public in a social sense? Or does their context make them something else? Rutter and Smith argue that they should be treated closer to private communications.

Connections to other readings

Obviously, Rutter and Smith connect with many of our readings for the semester. They explore questions of methods and methodology central to the work of Baym, and more implicitly, Rheingold.

Limits and questions

Though the article makes mention of methods that are deeply entrenched in the need to articulate and understand the contexts of social practices, it doesn’t offer much concerning how the researchers connected their offline research with patterns they saw in online communication and communities.

How do they see participants in these communities? Individuals fulfilling individual needs? Or community members playing specific roles?

How does offline context affect online practice?

How do users understand spatiality within online communities?