Louise Phillips - Researching Virtual Worlds: Methodologies for Studying Emergent Practices

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 worlds 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 worldsthat 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.