Article Published about Tactical Gamer

[E-Male]

Published in the online journal INTERN:

'Virtual Video Ethnography: Towards a New Field of Internet Cultural Studies.'
Michael Strangelove,
University of Ottawa

Abstract:

"With the recent development of virtual worlds, human action within cyberspace is rapidly expanding into new media forms such as online interactive gaming. As Internet users created virtual communities anthropologists followed along into these new frontiers and thus the field of virtual ethnography was born in the late 1980s. This paper introduces a new technique for exploring Internet culture – virtual video ethnography – the recording of human interaction from within virtual realms such as online war games, fantasy roleplaying games, and virtual social networking games. Virtual video ethnography is used to capture an apparently violent incident within a popular warfare simulation game known as Battlefield 2. This footage is then used to explore violence and hegemonic meanings within video games and demonstrate the utility of virtual video ethnography for cultural analysis. It is argued that action within the virtual realm cannot be collapsed into the same category as action within the ‘real’ world."

[Kerostasis]

Am I just using an obsolete program to read PDF files, or did you actually use bulletin board style [url=] and [/url] tags in that, which didn't function correctly in PDF format?

[TheBigC]

I had no issues with the links in PDF.


Now for the article:

Originally Posted by E-Male

Yet the gamers themselves are clearly capable of maintaining
their critical capacities, and many do indeed reject the current war on terror and find reallife
violence odious.

Thanks for taking the time to recognize that we are not some mindless horde of people that are oblivious to their surroundings. With a community that has adult gamers, we are capable of distinguishing between reality and a cyber life. We do know that this (online gaming) is not some conspiracy to create some militant state, based on the gaming biases you mentioned.

Overall it was a great read. You did however mention in your conclusion that there may tendencies “then analysis risks being reduced to an exercise in self-validation and uncritical celebration”, as you so put. Is that the case? What is the motivation for the article? Not that it is a bad thing, but did the community slant your perspective prior to this paper or the idea for the paper being written?

Nice work!!

[War.mongeR1]

Good read. I hope it gets some recognition amongst "experts" who are the ones telling the media how bad video games are. You just earned some street cred here with me.

[Acreo Aeneas]

Err, Intern is a Brazillian site? I think I read Spanish in the nav links.

Hmm interesting. Hopefully one day, the media will quote you instead of their so-called experts on the video games industry.

[CingularDuality]

That site is called Interin, not Intern.

[Grunt 70]

Bravo Emale...nice piece. Its nice to see all the ideas you've been floating about tied into a single piece.

Will this work be part of your new book?

[E-Male]

Originally Posted by Grunt 70

Will this work be part of your new book?

The book I am finish up now (for University of Toronto Press) looks at the American online political conversation via examining how Americans mutually exchange accusations of anti-American(ism) in online fora.

Always thinking ahead to the next book, I would like to pursue the subject of virtual culture via a broad survey of online social contexts, such as first person shooters and role playing games.

Here is a tidbit from the current manuscript: "Wilfred McClay’s suggestion (following on Henry Adams) that ‘politics is the systematic organization of hatreds’ is fully supported by the current state of America’s online political conversation. The Internet has allowed Americans to neatly oganize their binary hatreds into ideologically-aligned groups and left versus right gatherings."

[ednos]

Originally Posted by E-Male

Yet the gamers themselves are clearly capable of maintaining their critical capacities, and many do indeed reject the current war on terror and find reallife violence odious.

Jack Thompson already hates you. E-Male ftw!

[AMosely]

Congratulations on the publication, Emale. I know that in your field, each published work means more potential dollars, or at least reputation. Perhaps most interestingly, most of your readers are not gamers.