ABSTRACT
A field of practice and scholarship has developed over the last ten years around “virtual worlds”; initially it was mostly concerned with defining what the information technological platforms known as virtual worlds were or could become (e.g., Bainbridge 2009; Heudin 2004), but it has increasingly focused on their role in practice and the complex socio-technical arrangements to which they belong (e.g., Heider 2009; Sonvilla-Weiss 2009). The present book engages in discussions of how we may understand emergent practices in and around virtual worlds with a focus on the crafting of methodologies that pinpoint the connections between technological elements and affordances, peoples’ engagement and sense-making, and discursive patterns and visions. A central point of the book is that if we recognize how methods perform (Law and Urry 2004), it is necessary to pay attention to how the methods we use in the study of virtual worlds contribute to enacting them as particular phenomena. This book about methodology, then, is not about what virtual worlds are, or how particular methods are best suited to study them, but about how virtual worlds emerge as objects of study through the development and application of various methodological strategies. When virtual worlds are not considered objects that exist as entities with fixed attributes independent of our continuous engagement with them and interpretation of them, a possible consequence is to work with a very open approach to virtual worlds. In this introductory chapter, virtual worlds are referred to as complex ensembles of technology, humans, symbols, discourses, and economic structures, ensembles that emerge in ongoing practices and specific situations. Such a formulation is less a definition of virtual worlds than it is an approach to an amorphous field. This entails that engagement in research on virtual worlds can be expected to address a large variety of empirical phenomena relating to virtual worlds, going beyond how they are built, what takes place “inside” them, or how people use them.
