Where everybody knows your (screen) name: online games as third places

The paper that took Oldenburg's eight rules and tested them against a massively multiplayer game.

Steinkuehler & Williams (2006). Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(4), 885–909. Read it.

Primary reading — read it before the lecture that sets it.

Steinkuehler and Williams go through Oldenburg’s characteristics one at a time against fieldwork in Lineage and Asheron’s Call, and find that the games satisfy most of them — neutral ground, levelling, regulars, conversation as the main activity — while producing mostly bridging rather than bonding capital.

Week 9 is the guild hall, and you do the fieldwork inside a game. This reading is the template for that: a place gets held against the eight rules and scored. Where it matters most is where the fit fails, so pay attention to the parts they concede. A room you can leave by closing a laptop is not neutral ground in quite the way a pub is.