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?

Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org