Week 9 Round: Fieldwork inside a game

A Round held in a virtual room. You score a persistent online space against the eight rules and write up where the scoring sheet breaks.

29 April 2027

Pick a persistent shared space: an MMO zone, a game’s social hub, a long-running server, a regular voice channel. It has to persist between your visits and it has to contain people who are not your friends.

Two sittings, an hour each, at different times of day. The composition of an online room changes with timezone in a way a pub’s does not, and one sitting will mislead you about who the regulars are.

Score all eight, with evidence. Not a tick — a sentence, and the thing you saw that justifies it. “A leveller: a level 60 spent twenty minutes helping someone who could not repay it, and nobody remarked on it.”

Then find the one that breaks. Every online space will have at least one characteristic where Oldenburg’s question does not quite apply, and the interesting answer is not pass or fail but the question is wrong here. Say what the right question would be.

Cost of entry. Money, yes, but also the hardware, the hours needed to be competent enough to be welcome, and the fluency in how people talk there. Week 3 asked who a place keeps out. This room keeps people out with a skill floor and a graphics card, and it does it without a door.

Bring your scoring sheet. We put several side by side, and the disagreements about the same characteristic in different games are where the seminar goes.