Tribes or diasporas?

I recently read a piece at Gamasutra entitled “The Academics Speak Out: Is There Life After Worlds of Warcraft”:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1675/the_academics_speak_is_there_life_.php. It features both wiley veterams such as Henry Jenkins and Edward Castronova and up-and-comers like Florence Chee and Jeff McNeill attempting to predict the future of MMOGs. Your mileage may vary on this piece — a lot of the answers are variations on “who knows?” — but I was struck that two of the five authors described gamers as being organized into “tribes”. Although Chee at least credits the idea of a “retribalization” of gamers to McLuhan, I was struck that this term was used, since it has such a long and troublesome genealogy in kinship studies.

What struck me as more sensible was Jenkins’s description of MMOG players as a “diasporic community” — a much more interesting image. We’ve known users of a computer network aren’t in the same place at the same time, but I never thought about comparing Warcraft with, say, Samoa, and my living room as, say, Auckland. But perhaps someone has already drawn out these metaphorical associations more clearly?