Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name...

If you've got quite a bit of time to kill and aren't frightened by a lot of big, scary words, you might want to check this out: Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places". This paper focuses less on the "tank, kill, grind, ding!" aspect of MMOGs and more on the social, discussing whether or not the social atmosphere can really turn games into virtual "third places" in the physical sense--replacing a pub/local bar, coffee shop, etc.

In what ways might MMOs function as new third places for informal sociability? By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace (or school) and home, such virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts. MMOs are social environments in that successful play often requires collaboration, albeit not uniformly: Recent evidence suggests that some people enjoy playing alone or in a "pseudo-social" fashion (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, 2006). Therefore, in this section we analyze the structural form of MMOs that warrants this "third place" assertion. With this argument in place, we then unpack the function of such spaces in terms of social capital in the next section. To begin, we compare the properties of MMOs to Oldenburg's (1999) eight defining characteristics of third places (see Table 1), and discuss how such virtual spaces satisfy each of the eight criteria in turn.

Thanks to Blue's News for bringing this to our attention.