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Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture

Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture T.L. Taylor MIT Press, 2006

Multiplayer gaming life as it’s lived on the borders, in the gaps, as players slip in and out of complex social networks crossing online and offline space.

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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.

T.L. Taylor
Written by
T.L. Taylor

T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and Director of the MIT Game Lab. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on the interrelations between culture and technology in online environments for over thirty years. Her work sits at the intersection of sociology, critical internet and game studies, and science and technology studies.

Her book about game live streaming, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton University Press, 2018), was the first of its kind to chronicle the emerging media space of online game broadcasting and won the American Sociological Association’s CITAMS book award. She is also the author of Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, 2012) which explored the rise of esports and Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006), an ethnography of the massively multiplayer online game EverQuest. She is also co-author of, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton, 2012) which focuses on conducting ethnographic and qualitative research in online environments.

Dr. Taylor is a highly sought after speaker and consultant. Both the White House and the International Olympics Committee have invited her to special summits focused on gaming. Journalists for the New York Times, PBS, the Los Angeles Times, BBC, CBC, and many others often reach out to Dr. Taylor for her expertise and she also regularly serves as a consultant to industry and civic sector initiatives.

She currently serves as a member of Twitch’s Safety Advisory Council, co-founded the non-profit AnyKey, and sits on the editorial boards of Social Media & Society, Games and Culture, American Journal of Play, and ROMChip.

For more information about Dr. Taylor visit tltaylor.com.

T.L. Taylor Written by T.L. Taylor