FFXI and cyberanthropology.

Alan Meade has been gathering data on player attitudes for two years as part of his dissertation research. Among the interesting findings: the regional differences in median player age (17 in Norway; 22 in the US; 27 in Japan.) In general, players from East Asian countries are older than those in the Americas and Europe.

There are a number of possible explanations for this: that there are differences in the structure of free/leisure time in different countries (due to differences in educational and work systems); there are differences in access to the platforms, etc. My own interest is drawn to the possibility of distinct canonical players in different national markets. Manga, for example, is considered a "young person's" medium in the West, but is ubiquitous as a format for popular non-fiction and fiction alike for a wide variety of demographics in Japan. While I don't think that video and computer games are "unmarked" as a medium--that is, the canonical player is not the canonical subject, and playership marks the player as a particular, rather than general, kind of consumer--there may be a wider distribution, and less particular marking, for the game player there.

I also wonder if the differences in age are as responsible for the in-game conflicts between North American and Japanese players as "culture" is. (I put "culture" in scare-quotes, partially out of skepticism of the privileging of national identity as the boundary-line of culture.) Discussions with the game producers revealed that the complaints made by Japanese players of American players included those associated with maturity: deficits in planning, foresight, and consideration, in particular. The differences in median age between the two groups, interestingly enough, distinguishes those who may have significant adult work experience from those who may just be finishing their education. Insofar as the Final Fantasy XI group-play experience resembles a real-world work-team, the differences in player experience could be significant.

Alan's dissertation should be available soon.

Introduction.

I've made this blog to create a space for shared research and reflection on a specific massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG): Final Fantasy XI. There do exist blogs that discuss theoretical and practical concerns about MMORPG design, and sites which study the sociology of MMORPGs, but to date there's been less work (though by no means none) on MMORPGs as cultural artifacts, as texts, and as aesthetic spaces. I'm interested on both sides of the production/consumption divide: how MMORPGs are designed and developed (usually collectively and iteratively), and how they are played, perceived, navigated, documented, discussed, and re-interpreted by the player-audience.

Starting from the perspective of the artifact itself motivates a kind of interdisciplinarity, even a hybrid approach which crosses boundaries between visual culture and media studies, anthropology and sociology, and even a certain amount of cognitive science and human-computer interface theory.

Though initially I suspect that I'll be posting ideas-in-progress here, I'm hoping to open this up to contributors.