Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

The odyssey of a group of “refugees” from a closed-down online game and an exploration of emergent fan cultures in virtual worlds.

Play communities existed long before massively multiplayer online games; they have ranged from bridge clubs to sports leagues, from tabletop role-playing games to Civil War reenactments. With the emergence of digital networks, however, new varieties of adult play communities have appeared, most notably within online games and virtual worlds. Players in these netw...