A recent essay by David Myers, a sociologist who studies MMOGs( online games like World of Warcraft) has raised a flurry of controversy about the ethics of his research. What he attempted to do was play a character," Twixt" who would singlemindedly use tactics allowed by the game but frowned upon by most players.
He obviously didn't reveal to those he played against that he wanted to see what happened when he breached the socially normative rules of the online community involved. Responses online included verbal abuse and death threats.
In considering the ethics of this research, it seems that one notion has not been explicitly discussed. That notion is that the community of players do not consider the game as a virtual space, but rather another space like one's living room, or a public park. The dichotomy between Myer's using the game as he would as a real space rather than a laboratory, but then standing back in his defense of his methods, as if he hadn't really gone out into the real world strikes me as an important paradox. Not in so much as he did not acknowledge this but in that different spaces can be felt contrived by some - "It's just a game", "it's just an art installation" - while others form a community heavily invested in the space in question and so perceive their digital space as authentic.
What is the difference between a digital space and an art installation? Is the different purely socially constructed, with those emotionally invested saying yes, it is our space, and other's having more equivocal relationships to the given space?
Are online games more real than gallery installations? More people play games than visit galleries, and when people stop visiting a space, then in Lefebvrian terms, it ceases to be a space. So does one vote, one visit activate a space to where a researcher must exact the same care as say doing ethnographic research in a livingroom?
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