Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Second Life (Game) --- Shared virtual environments --- Computer games --- Business anthropology --- Corporate culture --- Second Life (Jeu) --- Environnements virtuels partagés --- Jeux d'ordinateur --- Affaires --- Culture d'entreprise --- Social aspects --- Aspect social --- Aspect anthropologique --- Linden Lab (Firm) --- Design --- Social aspects. --- Linden Lab (Firm). --- Environnements virtuels partagés --- Video games

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online. Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created. Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? "Lindens"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions. Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.

Corporate culture --- Business anthropology --- Computer games --- Shared virtual environments --- Second Life (Game) --- Culture, Corporate --- Institutional culture --- Organizational culture --- Corporations --- Organizational behavior --- Business --- Corporate anthropology --- Industrial anthropology --- Management anthropology --- Private sector anthropology --- Public sector anthropology --- Anthropology --- Application software --- Electronic games --- Immersive virtual environments --- IVEs (Immersive virtual environments) --- Multi-user distributed virtual environments --- Multi-user virtual environments --- MUVEs (Multi-user virtual environments) --- Shared VEs (Shared virtual environments) --- SVEs (Shared virtual environments) --- Virtual reality --- Design --- Social aspects --- Social aspects. --- Sociological aspects --- Anthropological aspects --- Linden Lab (Firm) --- Linden Research, Inc. --- Video games --- Internet games --- Television games --- Videogames --- Games

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This chapter is a consideration of how we may approach the question of remediation in digital games, suggesting that we recognize how digital game remediation incorporates what are often more obvious elements from analogue game design into the more implicit infrastructure of digital contexts. Additionally, such remediation often exhibits "hypomediacy," the denial of game design mediation, with important consequences for how useful digital games have become for institutional projects and their claims about reality. Anthropological treatments of ritual, and specifically how the engagement of audiences with ambiguous performances produces the real for participants, point toward important implications for digital games, where the infrastructural game elements may underwrite a similar process of reality construction through player performance. My overall suggestion is that when we give the cultural form of game its due (as we have for ritual and bureaucracy) - that is, when we incorporate a robust consideration of game features into our analyses - we will be in a better position to illuminate the ways in which our engagement with digital infrastructure is fraught with claims about the real.

Education --- Video games. --- Educational games. --- Computer-assisted instruction.