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T. L. Taylor

Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press) Hardcover – February 24, 2006

by T. L. Taylor (Author)

3.9 16 ratings

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A study of Everquest that provides a snapshot of multiplayer gaming culture, questions the truism that computer games are isolating and alienating, and offers insights into broader issues of work and play, gender identity, technology, and commercial culture.

In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps―as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces.

Taylor's detailed look at Everquest offers a snapshot of multiplayer culture. Drawing on her own experience as an Everquest player (as a female Gnome Necromancer)―including her attendance at an Everquest Fan Faire, with its blurring of online―and offline life―and extensive research, Taylor not only shows us something about games but raises broader cultural issues. She considers "power gamers," who play in ways that seem closer to work, and examines our underlying notions of what constitutes play―and why play sometimes feels like work and may even be painful, repetitive, and boring. She looks at the women who play Everquest and finds they don't fit the narrow stereotype of women gamers, which may cast into doubt our standardized and preconceived ideas of femininity. And she explores the questions of who owns game space―what happens when emergent player culture confronts the major corporation behind the game.

Print length

206 pages
Language

English
Publisher

The MIT Press
Publication date

February 24, 2006
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0262201631
ISBN-13

978-0262201636
See all details

Celia Pearce
11
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Refuting the idea that playing video games is an act of isolation undertaken by teenaged boys in dark basement rooms, Taylor presents the world of online gaming as a thriving social scene where players create friendships that transcend the digital domain. In playing EverQuest, (an MMOG, or massively multiplayer online game), Taylor travels through the digital fantasyland, slays other players, builds up her character's inventory and skills and, most importantly, shows how playing creates a huge network of people, many of whom take an almost job-like approach to gaming. She even meets up with fellow gamers and notes how "Recounting fights is a common topic of conversation among players." Also insightful are her thoughts on women and gaming, an underreported topic to which she dedicates a chapter. Taylor is, however, an academic, and tends to make simple concepts overcomplicated. So, sentences like: "There is no culture, there is no game, without the labor of the players. Whether designers want to acknowledge it fully or not, MMOGs already are participatory spaces (if only partially realized) by their very nature as social and cultural spaces" are far from uncommon. Save the moments of impenetrable jargon, Taylor's immersion into the online gaming world is a fascinating one that proves video games aren't just for the geeky neighbor kid anymore.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

A fascinating peek into the formal and social architecture that undergirds and shapes the cultural phenomena that is EverQuest.

(Jane C. Park New Media and Society)

Reading Play Between Worlds is anything but grinding. Taylor has long been one of the most nuanced scholars of life in the massively multiplayer game world, someone who knows her orc from her dark elves, who understands the complex intertwining of online and offline identities, and who has interesting things to teach us about the ethics of power gaming. At the same time, she is someone who asks big questions about the relationship between work and play, about the debates surrounding gender and games, and about issues of online governance and intellectual property which will shape the future interactions between gamers and game companies. Each of the book's chapters could be read and taught on its own terms; taken as a whole, they add up to a vivid picture of a world where many of us are spending lots of time these days.

(Henry Jenkins , Director of Comparative Media Studies, MIT)

An articulate and thoroughly researched work, Play Between Worlds is an intriguing look behind the curtain of the world's hottest entertainment phenomenon: virtual-world gaming. Unlike other academics who merely play tourist in these games, Taylor spent four years in one world and became part of the community. You get to reap the benefits of her close association with the people who make these worlds exciting: the players.

(Jessica Mulligan, coauthor of Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide)

From the Inside Flap

Endorsements "T. L. Taylor's book takes the reader on a full-immersion tour of a virtual world, coupling solid academic discussion with vivid descriptions. A must-read for anyone interested in the ways in which this fascinating medium has developed and will continue to grow." --Raph Koster, Chief Creative Officer, Sony Online Entertainment

"An articulate and thoroughly researched work, Play Between Worlds is an intriguing look behind the curtain of the world's hottest entertainment phenomenon: virtual-world gaming. Unlike other academics who merely play tourist in these games, Taylor spent four years in one world and became part of the community. You get to reap the benefits of her close association with the people who make these worlds exciting: the players." --Jessica Mulligan, coauthor of Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide

"Reading Play Between Worlds is anything but grinding. Taylor has long been one of the most nuanced scholars of life in the massively multiplayer game world--someone who knows her orc from her dark elves, who understands the complex intertwining of online and offline identities, and who has interesting things to teach us about the ethics of power gaming. At the same time, she is someone who asks big questions about the relationship between work and play, about the debates surrounding gender and games, and about issues of online governance and intellectual property which will shape the future interactions between gamers and game companies. Each of the book's chapters could be read and taught on its own terms; taken as a whole, they add up to a vivid picture of a world where many of us are spending lots of time these days." --Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies, MIT

"Taylor's well-researched book provides a lively and engaging explanation of the social significance of online gaming. Play Between Worlds is essential, not just for scholars of gaming and computer-mediated communication, but for anyone interested in popular culture, social organization, and the relationships between leisure, socializing, and work in everyday life." --Lori Kendall, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub

About the Author

T. L. Taylor is Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She is the author of Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press).

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press; 1st edition (February 24, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 206 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262201631
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262201636
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,704,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #585 in Computer & Video Game Design
- #1,745 in Game Programming
- #10,120 in Communication & Media Studies

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3.9 16 ratings

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T. L. Taylor

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T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT.

She is a qualitative sociologist working in the fields of internet and game studies. Her work focuses on the interrelation between culture and technology in online leisure environments.

Full information about her work can be found at her website - tltaylor.com

[Photo credit: Bryce Vickmark, http://vickmark.com]

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C. Lee-Egan

depends on what you want out of it

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 13, 2011

Verified Purchase

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.

5 people found this helpful

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Maelen Moonsinger

Suitable

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 20, 2015

Verified Purchase

Written in a somewhat uninspired style, but solid.

Helpful

Interesting exploration of virtual worlds...well just EverQuest

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 12, 2010

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.

4 people found this helpful

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M. Redovan

A book that can't decide what it wants to be

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 16, 2008

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 .

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