Customer Reviews

Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture

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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.

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.

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 the non-academic: a well-written, detailed accounting of a digital world, giving the reader a strong grasp of the unique culture and sensibilities. Taylor helps illustrate where the real and the virtual connect and where they stay distinct, as well as raising up potential issues while arguing away others.

For the academic: shallow, meandering, without really any big argument - pure ethnography. If you play games, you already know all this and have likely read books/articles that attack the subject better. If you don't, you should probably ask a student or a professor who does and they'll steer you in a better direction.

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.

For those who wonder what on earth online gaming is about, Taylor furnishes an education. He covers the history of how it sprang from the MUDs [Multi User Dungeons] and MOOs [MUDs with object orientation] of the 80s. When those were of necessity primarily text based. Then, in the 90s, with the advent of the Web and faster bandwidth and more powerful personal computers, multiuser online games emerged. Notably EverQuest, which is well documented here. Other games are also mentioned.

Taylor himself took part as a player in one of these. Partly of his own recreational interest. But also as background research for this book. He shows that these games became virtual worlds. Where players could build up their personas and environments. Even to the extent of trading these assets in the real world. Some players took these on as "jobs", building up characters that they would subsequently sell on eBay. Amazing indeed.

Important issues are aired. Like what rights, if any, do players have to sell these personas? Much of the value in a persona arises out of the creativity of its owner. Much more than just the passive watching of a film. Or even of playing a twitch game like Quake, which is not really about character development. The book reaches no definitive conclusion. Which is a good assessment of how things stand now, anyways.

TL Taylor is a brilliant woman, and the thoughtfulness and scientific rigor of her research shine through in this book.