Interactions , Delegations and Online Digital Games Players in Communities of Practice [ 1 ]

Claims around the blurring of producer and consumer categories and user-creativity are now commonplace in the so called age of Web 2.0. Within digital gaming specifically, efforts to enable players to participate in a cultural economy of user-creativity have become a dominant form of innovation in the industry. Sceptical to some of these broader claims, this paper draws on Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) research and on participant observation study within a MMOG to explore the specificities of “producers” and “consumers” in interaction. The adopted ‘communities of practice’ framework used to underpin the exploration is introduced and the paper suggests the framework helps to reveal how player actions are carefully scripted and enrolled within developer’s aims of embedding ‘particular users’ (Taylor, 2006). The paper concludes with some methodological observations on researcher and player boundaries and how the ‘communities of practice’ framework offers a place for the researcher within the “field”.