MovableBlog: Addiction, Community Building and Everquest
April 24, 2003
A friend of mine has written a paper about addiction as community building, using Everquest as her example. I happened to be on campus when she presented, so I stopped by, but didn't get a chance to comment on it then. She sees Everquest as a tool for people to negotiate roles for themselves they might not necessarily play in real life.
I emailed her links to two articles, Caring for Your Introvert by Jonathan Rauch and a K5 article, The Net: A Cause of Social Disconnect, and asked her to comment on how they related to her project, but evidently she would need to write a whole paper on that too, so I let her off the hook. Also related is Social Software and the Politics of Groups by Clay Shirky, which I very much enjoyed, but that's only because my degree was in Political Science.