Researching Virtual Worlds

Methodologies for Studying Emergent Practices

Louise Phillips, Ursula Plesner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415624442
• eBook ISBN: 9781136250507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume presents a wide range of methodological strategies that are designed to take into account the complex, emergent, and continually shifting character of virtual worlds. It interrogates how virtual worlds emerge as objects of study through the development and application of various methodological strategies. Virtual worlds are not considered objects that exist as entities with fixed attributes independent of our continuous engagement with them and interpretation of them. Instead, they are conceived of as complex ensembles of technology, humans, symbols, discourses, and economic structures, ensembles that emerge in ongoing practices and specific situations.

A broad spectrum of perspectives and methodologies is presented: Actor-Network-Theory and post-Actor-Network-Theory, performativity theory, ethnography, discourse analysis, Sense-Making Methodology, visual ethnography, multi-sited ethnography, and Social Network Analysis.

1
Introduction

Approaching the Study of Virtual Worlds

Ursula Plesner and Louise Phillips

A field of practice and scholarship has developed over the last ten years around “virtual worlds”; initially it was mostly concerned with defining what the information technological platforms known as virtual worlds were or could become (e.g., Bainbridge 2009; Heudin 2004), but it has increasingly focused on their role in practice and the complex socio-technical arrangements to which they belong (e.g., Heider 2009; Sonvilla-Weiss 2009). The present book engages in discussions of how we may understand emergent practices in and around virtual worlds with a focus on the crafting of methodologies that pinpoint the connections between technological elements and affordances, peoples’ engagement and sense-making, and discursive patterns and visions. A central point of the book is that if we recognize how methods perform (Law and Urry 2004), it is necessary to pay attention to how the methods we use in the study of virtual worlds contribute to enacting them as particular phenomena. This book about methodology, then, is not about what virtual worlds are, or how particular methods are best suited to study them, but about how virtual worlds emerge as objects of study through the development and application of various methodological strategies. When virtual worlds are not considered objects that exist as entities with fixed attributes independent of our continuous engagement with them and interpretation of them, a possible consequence is to work with a very open approach to virtual worlds. In this introductory chapter, virtual worlds are referred to as complex ensembles of technology, humans, symbols, discourses, and economic structures, ensembles that emerge in ongoing practices and specific situations. Such a formulation is less a definition of virtual worlds than it is an approach to an amorphous field. This entails that engagement in research on virtual worlds can be expected to address a large variety of empirical phenomena relating to virtual worlds, going beyond how they are built, what takes place “inside” them, or how people use them.

The more fixed definitions of virtual worlds that can be found in the virtual worlds literature have direct implications for how it is conceivable to approach a study of them and which elements it seems relevant to focus on. This follows from highlighting specific characteristics of the IT platform. For instance, virtual worlds have been defined as “crafted places inside computers that are designed to accommodate large numbers of people” (Castronova 2004, 4), a wording that points to the “placeness” of those worlds and to their potential social uses. They have also been conceptualized as “[a] synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers” (Bell 2008, 2), a definition which highlights the individuals engaged in social interaction. Both these definitions resonate with the idea of “virtual worlds as places of human culture realized by computer programs through the Internet” (Boellstorff 2010, 126). Yet another attempt at pinning down the meaning of virtual worlds defines them as “[I]nternet-based simulated environments that emulate the real world and are intended for users to inhabit and interact within them through avatars” (Hua and Haughton 2008, 889). This definition points to the mirrorlike aspects of virtual worlds and hints at the potential correspondence between phenomena inside and outside virtual worlds. Finally, a common way of defining virtual worlds is to enlist several characteristics that must be fulfilled in order for us to identify something as a virtual world:

The online journal Virtual Worlds Review defines a virtual world as ‘an interactive simulated environment accessed by multiple users through an online interface.’ Six essential features are prescribed: shared space (multiple users), a graphical user interface, immediacy (“interaction takes place in real time”), interactivity (“the world allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content”), persistence (“the world’s existence continues regardless of whether individual users are logged in”), and socialization, or a sense of community. (McDonough et al. 2010, 9).

All these definitions point to relevant aspects of the IT platforms labeled “virtual worlds,” and to their specific affordances (Gibson 1986; Hutchby 2001). However, rather than aiming to contribute to refining definitions of virtual worlds—that is, what virtual worlds are—the aim of this book is to offer methodological strategies for capturing the situated practices in and around virtual worlds and hence treat virtual worlds as phenomena that are constituted in situations and practices and that emerge as particular objects of analysis in the research process.

Situations and Practices of Engaging with Virtual Worlds

Some of the IT platforms central to the empirical investigations in the chapters of this book are Second Life, Habbo Hotel, City of Heroes, and the OpenSimulator Developer community. But the chapters are not simply studies of the characteristics of these platforms and the activities they afford. Instead, they share the assumption that, as an object of analysis, any virtual world is a moving target, and our knowledge about them is highly dependent on the work we put in to defining and delineating them. As a consequence, all chapters direct their attention to the processes of researching virtual worlds in a continuous interplay with the actors and technological elements that co-constitute these worlds. The chapters aim to open up the concept of virtual worlds by examining how they are made and remade through specific practices where technological affordances, symbolic entities, and social and interpretive processes become intertwined. Although the chapters develop different methodologies and thus different vocabularies, many of them articulate this ambition. For instance, in Chapter 7, Reinhard and Dervin ask what happens when the agency of the person engages with the structures of the virtual world. And in Chapter 3, Strand insists that we refrain from starting with a fixed definition of the technology in question (virtual worlds, three-dimensional [3D] Internet, or the Metaverse); rather, we should begin our empirical investigations by looking at the very practices, situations, and events in which a particular phenomenon occurs, asking openly what appears and what emerges.

The aim of this book is to make a distinct contribution to methodological discussions in the field of virtual worlds research—and studies of new media technologies more generally. It is not to add to the large number of books on virtual worlds that seek to explain virtual world technologies and practices and to apply various theoretical perspectives to capture the specificity of virtual worlds. Most of these books pay relatively little attention to methodologies for the study of virtual worlds. There are notable exceptions to this—for instance, a volume by Boellstorff et al. (2012) on the use of ethnographic methods in virtual worlds, and the extensive review of methods in which Bainbridge (2009) discusses a range of methods that can be applied within virtual worlds. For instance, Bainbridge details how experimental methods can be used to test reactions of people acting through their avatars to scenarios such as environmental catastrophes, conflict resolution in war zones, and so on. He also describes how observations can be used to study collaboration, the social consequences of bad behavior, or the implications of experimental architecture. To take a third example, he outlines how quantitative methods can be used to measure social dynamics in-world. In all these cases, what is presented are methodologies for studying practices within virtual worlds, whereby the researcher is “inside” them, for instance, embodied in an avatar. In contrast, the chapters of this book seek to engage methodologically with both online and offline phenomena and practices. This ties into the authors’ shared approach to virtual worlds as elusive objects of analysis that are co-constituted through actors’ and researchers’ engagement with one another and with particular situations and practices relating to virtual worlds.

Researching Virtual Worlds as Ensembles of Technology, Humans, Symbols, and Discourses

The distinction drawn above, between online and offline, may be a way of talking about particular empirical domains in focus, but no sharp distinction between the two is upheld in the methodological contributions of this book. Few virtual world researchers operate with an understanding of ‘the virtual’ and ‘the real’ as two different domains. Virtual worlds, it is argued, are both virtual and real (Schroeder 2002, 2012) and the virtual is not the opposite of real. As Schultze (Chapter 4) states, such a distinction belongs to a representational view of reality. In her view, the online/offline distinction is out of sync with empirical observations of experiences of entanglement. Thus, to understand empirical phenomena in and around virtual worlds, we should avoid distinguishing a priori between physical and digital materiality. Although this type of methodological ambition is discussed to varying degrees in the following chapters, the whole book can be seen as part of a tendency to dissolve the in-world/out-world dichotomy in the study of virtual worlds (see also Plesner, Chapter 2), both on a theoretical and a methodological level (Lehdonvirta 2010; Taylor 2006). The contribution of Ruckenstein (Chapter 5) in this endeavour is to interrogate the question of how virtual worlds are interwoven with economic value pursued in corporate practices by ethnographically studying uses of a virtual world along with studying the technological development processes in the company behind that virtual world. Yetis and colleagues (Chapter 8) have a similar interest in how a virtual world is developed by stakeholders with various affiliations, with a focus on the resources they bring to the development work and the particular parts of the virtual world that are cultivated by them.

The book’s contribution does not consist in reiterating the obvious, that a dichotomous way of understanding virtual worlds may be problematic—but in presenting specific methodologies that can be used to generate multi-faceted accounts of the situations and practices that bring virtual worlds into being. To make this contribution, several chapters construct virtual worlds as complex ensembles of technology, humans, symbols, discourses, and other elements and devise methodologies that capture the interwovenness of these elements. Thus, they seek to address the challenges described by Lehdonvirta (2010) who criticizes much scholarship on virtual worlds for holding onto an image of virtual worlds as independent “mini-societies”. As he writes, “[t]hus far, the typical strategy for authors (myself included) to deal with this has been to treat the caveats as links or interaction between the real world and the virtual world. This strategy attempts to address the issues while still clinging on to the dichotomous model.” Many chapters of the present book transcend the online/offline, virtual/real divide through multi-sited and multimodal research strategies, which move between sites relating to the creation and recreation of virtual worlds, focusing on practices in specific situations. In this way, they try to capture how technology, humans, symbols, and discourses are linked together in practice.

Research Methodologies for Capturing Emergent Practices

“To capture” how technology, humans, symbols and discourses are linked together in practice and to describe these practices as “emergent” are of course not straightforward, neutral operations. In this book, we do not consider the previously described ensembles in and around virtual worlds as phenomena that are “out there,” waiting to be captured, and we do not consider the phenomena “as emergent” in and of themselves. Rather, we conceive of virtual worlds as emerging phenomena insofar as they are co-constructed, such as in the practices under study. When this book engages with the theme of emergence, it is not to take the dynamics of emergence as a given (Corradini and O’Connor 2010). Rather, it is to focus on how objects are brought into being and transformed in co-construction processes in social interaction, including in our research practices. Across all the chapters, methodologies are presented that provide analytical lenses for studying how objects and social categories—such as virtual worlds, presence, and virtual worlds architecture—emerge from, and are reproduced and transformed in, processes of researching, designing, engaging in, and communicating in and about virtual worlds. The underpinning interpretative—and broadly social constructivist—assumption behind the book is that objects emerge from the situated and context-dependent co-production of meanings among the participating actors in social interaction. Adopted here is a postfoundational perspective on knowledge production, positing that the subjectivities of researchers and researched, research objects and research-based knowledge also emerge out of those meaning-making practices (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Finlay 2002; Law 2004). This perspective leads to a common interest across chapters in how subjects and objects of research mutually constitute one another. It also lies behind the collaborative approach to research taken in several chapters, whereby practitioners in virtual worlds are engaged as partners with scholars in the co-production of knowledge.

With this book, we aim to present a range of methodologies for use in research on virtual worlds and other phenomena that could be constructed as “emergent practices.” To this end, each chapter illustrates the use of one or more methodologies, reflecting, among other things, on the following: the interplay among metatheory, theory, methodology, method, and empirical case; the co-constitution of methodological approach and object of study; the specific methods for data production and analysis; the strategies applied to investigate emergent practices in a variety of situations relating to virtual worlds; and the strengths and limitations of the methodology or methodologies as approaches to studying virtual worlds and other complex, emergent phenomena. And, taken together, the chapters provide scholars and students with thorough discussions of the advantages and weaknesses of different methodological approaches to studying virtual worlds as socio-technical ensembles emerging in ongoing practices and specific situations.

It has been argued that emerging phenomena require new methods. For instance, the Book of Emergent Methods by Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2008) asserts that researchers increasingly find themselves looking beyond conventional methods to address complex research questions, and describes alternative uses of traditional quantitative and qualitative tools, innovative hybrid or mixed methods, and new techniques facilitated by technological advances. It is tempting to approach a relatively new media platform like virtual worlds as a phenomenon demanding new methods. As Williams, Rice, and Rogers write, “Although we consider possible research methods for new media as mainly extensions of existing methods, we propose that the new media researcher should consider alternative methods, or even multiple methods, and to attempt a triangulation of methods” (1988, 15). It seems sensible to remain open to the possibility of mixing more traditional and more experimental methods, but basically, the contributions of this book do not construct virtual worlds as an entirely new frontier in research methodology. Virtual worlds do have specific affordances, but much of what takes place in and around them is integrated with other technological elements and platforms, and remediates objects, practices, and events from other domains. Therefore, they can be said to present us with well-known types of methodological issues in new ways. Jensen’s chapter offers an example of how methods inspired by visual anthropology and video interaction analysis can be combined to capture the situated practices and sense-making in relation to particular projects in virtual worlds. The author integrates considerations of both the visual, the situational, the interpretive and the material in her development of the video interview method, because “the video interview method presupposes that the experience and sense of being there is constitutive to human engagement with virtual being. This sense, and the actual and situated realization of it, is a phenomenon hard to explore through retrospective methods such as qualitative interviews or to capture in video observational studies of action and interaction, if applied separately […] In video observational studies, in contrast, we can follow some of these actions from an external perspective” (chapter 6, 158). In this way, the chapter addresses some of the new affordances of virtual worlds, drawing on well-established methods in combinations tailored to new types of empirical phenomena.

A discourse of change, newness, innovation, and emergence surrounds new media platforms such as virtual worlds in both research and practice, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Approaching the Study of Virtual Worlds
• 2 Virtual Worlds as Emerging Cyber-Hybrids: Accounting for the Travel between Research Sites with Actor-Network-Theory
• 3 Presence in Virtual Worlds: Mediating a Distributed, Assembled and Emergent Object of Study
• 4 Understanding Cyborgism: Using Photo-Diary Interviews to Study Performative Identity in Second Life
• 5 Designing Childhoods: Ethnographic Engagements in and around Virtual Worlds
• 6 A Situated Video Interview Method: Understanding the Interplay between Human Engagement and the Power of Scripted Animations of a Virtual World
• 7 Comparing Novice Users’ Sense-Making Processes in Virtual Worlds: An Application of Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology
• 8 Exploring Stakeholders of Open-Source Virtual Worlds through a Multimethod Approach
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index