Uru, the fourth game in the popular Myst series, allows players to explore the virtual abandoned world of a fictional ancient civilization, Pearce said. It was the first game of in the series to allow users to create an avatar -- a visible body on screen -- in place of the first-person view of its predecessors.
"Contrary to what you might think, players actually felt more immersed when they could see themselves in this space," Pearce said.
Pearce studied a group comprised mostly of people between the ages of 50 and 60 that was exactly half female, a ratio virtually unheard of in studies of online gaming, she said. Gameplay in Uru was completely cooperative, she said, with no competition, levels or points. Users were given a series of tasks to complete and puzzles to solve, most of which required working in teams with other users.
"Mostly what players did during the game was hang out," she said. "They would sit around and talk for hours on end."
This sense of community and equality among players made some users consider Uru their "homeland," she said, a notion which made it especially hard for players when the Uru test network was shut down in winter 2004.
"They were very traumatized by this," she said. "Many of them cried in interviews with me."
A large group of participants then moved to another virtual community, There.com, Pearce said. Players called themselves "Urufugees," a reference to their former world, as they navigated There.com and tried to replicate familiar Uru locations in their new world.
"The idea of the homeland doesn't really exist until it goes away," she said. "Once they had created this fictive Uru ethnicity, they tried to keep the same identities and recreate their avatars in the new world."
To track the identities users created for themselves within the game, Pearce created an avatar for herself, and entered the virtual world.
"I positioned myself as the anthropologist in their world," she said. "I became a member of the group by being their ethnographer, so I had this kind of interesting insider-outsider status."
Avatars can allow users to assume traits and abilities they lack in the real world, Pearce explained, using the deputy mayor of her There.com virtual community as an example. The avatar's creator, a woman named Linda, suffered from a degenerative spine disease and had lost the use of most of her body, besides her hands and face.
"She was able to have this agency in the virtual world that she had lost in the real world," Pearce said.
Avatars can also offer users an alternate identity accepted within the context of the game, Pearce said, citing a male user who masqueraded as a female avatar for almost three years. When the game's text-based communication switched to speech, though, the user had to reveal his sex. Instead of switching to a male avatar, Pearce said, the user kept his female virtual identity, to the great relief of the other players.
"He had this identity that was socially constructed and accepted in the community," she said. "The players just acknowledged the fact that he was actually a man and said that if he changed avatars, his original one would be missed."
When an audience member asked Pearce how she could justify calling participation in a game an "ethnicity," given that people cannot change or escape their ethnicity in the real world, Pearce said that creating a virtual identity does not replace a player's real one.
"None of these people say, 'I'm not a white person because I'm an Uruvian,'" she said. "This is an alternative persona that they only use within the magic circle of play."
Pearce has compiled her research into a book, "Communities of Play: Emergent Behavior on Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds," which will be published by MIT Press this fall.
The Digital Arts and Humanities Lecture Series is sponsored by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, a longtime benefactor of the College founded by inventor Sherman Fairchild in 1971.
