PUBLIC MARKS from bcpbcp with tags social & mmog

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.

"Academics and other students of the Internet have known for decades that even typed communication can reveal such non-verbal aspects of an online user, but it still comes as a surprise when discrimination emerges in an online game."