Pearce Section II- Shared Trauma and Identity

Section II

Section II of Pearce’s Communities of Play tells a more complete history of the group, referred to as TGU, the Myst game series, and the later dispersion of the group to a variety of new MMOW’s. She also examines how the construction of the game made it more attractive to certain personality types. The group that formed within the online world was made up of like-minded people who had certain traits that made their group quite strong and caused them to band together for support after their online world ended.

Shared Trauma

There were two major concepts that I found to be most intriguing. The first is the concept of shared trauma as a unifying agent. Upon hearing of the inevitable shutdown of the game, the players did not simply move on to another game or quit playing all together. They immediately began searching for ways to prevent the shutdown as well as options for how to function after the shutdown occurred. They were not willing to give up the relationships that had been created between players within the game. She presents the loss of the play/social space, as an expulsion from their “homeland” similar to the experiences of real-world refugees. They were losing a “place” that had brought together a group of real-world “loners” and allowed them to meet and bond with others like themselves. There were specific traits that were highly valued due to the construction of the game, and these values had a direct impact on the response of the players to losing their space. When the shutdown was announced, the players’ explorer qualities, which were a key to successful progress within the game, led them to seek out other MMOW’s where they could continue to gather as a group and to also set up a text based forum to keep the group united until the search was completed.

Pearce describes the day of the shutdown and how the players reacted during the game’s final few hours. They gathered “in-world” and “talked, told each other stories, and played hide-and-seek” (88). Then just minutes before the scheduled shutdown, “they moved into a circular configuration close enough so that their avatars would appear to be holding hands” (88). This is a very similar reaction to the way people respond to a real-world disaster or crisis. The players then “spontaneously” “regrouped in the chat area of the Koalanet forum” (89). They were able to share their feelings of grief and maintain those relationships created within the game. Many players “continue to cite this shared trauma as a factor in their deep emotional connection to one another” (89). Pearce even describes the players being protective of one another in other MMOW’s due to their shared experience.  

Identity Construction  

The second concept I found most interesting is the idea of identity construction as a joining of avatar (visual representation), individual personality and traits, and social feedback. Pearce describes the act of creating an avatar within the game Uru as not being “tied in any way to point values or game mechanics” (112). This allowed the players much more freedom to design avatars that were “modified versions of themselves” (115) and could be used as “a form of expression” (114). For some disabled players, the creation of an avatar allowed for embodied actions which may not be physically possible for them in the real-world. One player referred to losing the server, and thereby her avatar and her friends, as “a kind of death” (119). This statement shows the level of connection most players felt toward their avatar. In addition, many group members also became “attached” to the avatars of others within their group. One example of this was the male who played a female avatar, including using a female voice, and who eventually revealed to the group that he was actually a male. By this point, so many of the other players “had become attached to the female character,” (120) that “he returned to the female avatar as his primary in-game character” (121). He even decided to continue speaking in the female voice knowing the “other players were now aware that he was male” (121). This shows the role that social interaction and feedback play in the establishment and evolution of identity. Pearce terms this as “intersubjective accomplishment,” which is defined as “the product of an ongoing and dynamic set of social transactions and feedback” (119). The player decides which skills or traits are valued over others and bases future character behavior on the feedback from the group. The more positive feedback received from the group, the more the desired behavior is exhibited.

This section really highlighted the idea that virtual identity is strongly connected to real-world identity, even though the two personas can be quite different. The group’s reference to themselves as refugees gives great insight into how strongly they connected to their virtual identity within that specific world, but also to the motivation to maintain that identity when entering other worlds.

Discussion Questions:

1.      Are the impacts of the social interactions on identity more or less influential than the person’s own sense of self? Can positive feedback bring out abilities or strengths in people that would not have come to light on their own?

2.      Does the shared trauma experienced by the players in the virtual world have effect their choices in real-world situations? For example, make them less trusting of corporations or their guarantees?

3.      Could the use of avatars in virtual worlds help NEWLY disabled people cope with their real-world restrictions, or would it serve to emphasize their new limitations?