I didn’t get to post a response to the readings for Tuesday before class, but I think writing through my thoughts on two virtual ethnographies here, in relation to Leonard’s article, will be helpful. While reading the Gray piece for Thursday, I was glad to see far more attention devoted to methodology than Delwiche provided. As pretty much everyone pointed out on Tuesday, Delwiche had some major issues with framing “safety,” but I also thought it was problematic to consider observing two semester-long classes ethnographic work, and I ultimately wasn’t convinced by student self-reflections as the primary form of evidence to support Delwiche’s claims. In addition to that, I wondered about issues of transfer from video games to other contexts. That is, there’s work to support that video games are educational and can be used effectively as instructional technologies. What I’ve encountered less of (which is not to say it doesn’t exist, rather that I’ve not seen it yet) is scholarship that addresses issues of transfer. For example, students might learn how to conduct ethnographic research effectively within a game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can identify or successfully carry out ethnographic research in a different context. Delwiche addresses this question to some extent on pages 162 and 163, writing, “The next step is to link student engagement in the game world to engagement in an overlapping knowledge community that is connected to the theoretical concerns of the course in which the MMO is being used. Once students are highly engaged in the process of role-playing and information seeking, it is relatively easy to convince them to role-play as apprentice participants within a higher-level theoretical community. The students can also be encouraged to make the critical leap into meta-reflection about the similar learning processes embedded in both domains.” I’m curious to see what this looks like, or how Delwiche conceptualizes that next step.

Gray, by comparison, takes a methodologically stronger approach, although her results are a little disappointing/unsurprising. At first, I thought, “This is going to be really interesting! I didn’t even know clans like Conscious Daughters or PuertoReekanKillaz exist.” But, I say the results weren’t surprising in that the clans’ methods weren’t successful. When I regularly played COD, I muted all other players at the beginning of every match out of habit, because it was inevitably distracting or irritating to hear people swearing, slurring, and generally making annoying sounds with their mics. Even as a white male, I assumed that whenever I played using a mic (usually only when I was in a match with a friend), every other player muted me (except the friend). Anyone teamkilling, AFK, or generally disrupting the game was undoubtedly reported or blocked. And while this is problematic, in that far fewer players were reported (or blocked) for having racist screennames or generally being assholes, the failure to get people to listen in this context seems to have more to do with how games are defined than people not caring about the experience of other players. To clarify, if someone streaks on a football field, there’s a pretty rehearsed and expected response. Streaker runs around, eventually gets tackled, is ejected, and the game resumes. But if players shout racial slurs at each other on the field, the game doesn’t stop. Which is not to say that this is right, or justified, but it’s generally disruptive for an individual player, and doesn’t procedurally jeapordize the operation of the game (although it does discourage/exclude players and has a broader impact) in the same way that streaking or teamkilling does. I would be curious to see how an approach that played within the rules of the game, while still bringing attention to an issue, would work (I’m guessing not any better, unfortunately), or what that would look like. At the same time though, this circles back to the issue that Leonard, quoting Collins, so eloquently brings up:

“Beyond the fact that ‘the largely white male elite owners…derive wealth from the circulation’ of racist and sexist imagery, virtual reality and its inscription of controlling images ‘makes racism, sexism and poverty appear to be natural, normal and inevitable part of everyday life’ (Collins, 2000, p. 68). As argued by Mark Anthony Neal (2005), ‘The fact that these images are then used to inform public policy around domestic images that adversely affect and [sic] black and brown people’–the war on terror, policing the border, welfare reform, the military industrial complex, global imperialism, the existence of the welfare state, the prison industrial complex, unemployment, and so on–‘further complicates what is at stake’ for game studies (p. 51)” (87).

That is, the fact that griefing is normalized, and the response so mechanical, while issues of race, gender, and sexuality are systematically ignored, are major issues. But they’re not issues local to the game itself. They’re societal/social issues recreated through the games and enforcement of rules. But I’m also not sure it’s this simple, or if there’s any way to draw a line between a game as virtual space and any other constructed space. I don’t think I’ve done a good job of articulating why the tactics Gray discusses weren’t effective, and why that they didn’t succeed seemed obvious to me, but I think it has to do with differences between playing a game disruptively, disrupting a game, and not playing at all.