Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A study of Everquest that provides a snapshot of multiplayer gaming culture, questions the truism that computer games are isolating and alienating, and offers insights into broader issues of work and play, gender identity, technology, and commercial culture.

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. vii)
• 1 Finding New Worlds (p. 1)
• 2 Gaming Lifeworlds: Social Play in Persistent Environments (p. 21)
• 3 Beyond Fun: Instrumental Play and Power Gamers (p. 67)
• 4 Where the Women Are (p. 93)
• 5 Whose Game Is This Anyway? (p. 125)
• 6 The Future of Persistent Worlds and Critical Game Studies (p. 151)
• Glossary (p. 163)
• Notes (p. 165)
• References (p. 177)
• Index (p. 193)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Refuting the idea that playing video games is an act of isolation undertaken by teenaged boys in dark basement rooms, Taylor presents the world of online gaming as a thriving social scene where players create friendships that transcend the digital domain. In playing EverQuest, (an MMOG, or massively multiplayer online game), Taylor travels through the digital fantasyland, slays other players, builds up her character?s inventory and skills and, most importantly, shows how playing creates a huge network of people, many of whom take an almost job-like approach to gaming. She even meets up with fellow gamers and notes how ?Recounting fights is a common topic of conversation among players.? Also insightful are her thoughts on women and gaming, an underreported topic to which she dedicates a chapter. Taylor is, however, an academic, and tends to make simple concepts overcomplicated. So, sentences like: ?There is no culture, there is no game, without the labor of the players. Whether designers want to acknowledge it fully or not, MMOGs already are participatory spaces (if only partially realized) by their very nature as social and cultural spaces? are far from uncommon. Save the moments of impenetrable jargon, Taylor?s immersion into the online gaming world is a fascinating one that proves video games aren?t just for the geeky neighbor kid anymore. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

CHOICE Review

Taylor (digital aesthetics and communication, IT Univ. of Copenhagen) offers an excellent ethnographic study of EverQuest, a highly popular, massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). The author immersed herself in the game and the online gaming culture; in doing so she discovered who these MMORPGers really are, and in these pages she destroys many stereotypes about the gamers. Taylor's style is frank, and the first-person narrative voice is helpful in explaining the EverQuest worlds (both real and virtual) to those who have never experienced the game. Of particular interest is Taylor's detailed discussion of the buying and selling of EverQuest characters through eBay and Yahoo! auctions. Sony Online Entertainment's crackdown on this practice in 2000 caused a rift between Sony and the game's players, who took the stance that their characters were their property, not the software developer's. This is a model study of one MMORPG and its online and offline community, but one must ask whether Taylor's conclusions apply to other MMORPGs--not least because EverQuest has dramatically declined in popularity and been supplanted by World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and other games. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. R. C. Adams Kansas State University