As such, they can be studied in ways analogous to those of public places in the physical world. Because they simulate 3D spaces and contain thousands of people who do not know each other, MMOs constitute public spaces, although virtual ones. What distinguishes MMOs from other Internet media is that they take face-toface conversation as their primary metaphor for user interaction, rather than, say, the page or the bulletin board. Massively multiplayer online (MMO) environments are an emerging computer technology that makes possible new kinds of distributed communities and online sociability. We discuss the role online games can play in the formation and maintenance of social capital, what they can teach us about the evolution of sociability in an increasingly digitally connected social world, and what could be done to make such games better social spaces. Based on several months of ethnographic observations and computerized data collection, we use Oldenburg’s notion of ‘‘third places’’ to evaluate whether or not the social spaces of this virtual world fit existing definitions of sociable environments. In order to shed light on this issue, we critically examine player-to-player interactions in a popular MMOG (Star Wars Galaxies).
The sociable nature of these online spaces is often used to explain their success: unlike previous video games, MMOGs require players to exchange information and collaborate in real-time to progress in the game. Today Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are extensive, persistent online 3D environments that are populated by hundreds of thousands of players at any given moment. But while Simmel and Oldenburg describe activities and public spaces in the physical world, their concepts may apply as well to virtual or online worlds. Later Ray Oldenburg extended Simmel’s work by focusing on a certain class of public settings, or ‘‘third places,’’ in which sociability tends to occur, such as, bars, coffee shops, general stores, etc. Georg Simmel is widely credited as the first scholar to have seriously examined sociability – ‘‘the sheer pleasure of the company of others’’ and the central ingredient in many social forms of recreation and play.
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