Documenting virtual world cultures. Memory-making and documentary practices in the City of Heroes community
| Published date | 09 March 2015 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2013-0146 |
| Pages | 294-316 |
| Date | 09 March 2015 |
| Author | Olle Sköld |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management |
Documenting virtual world
cultures
Memory-making and documentary practices
in the City of Heroes community
Olle Sköld
Department of ALM (Archival Studies,
Library and Information Science and Museums and Cultural Heritage Studies),
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to explore how virtual world communities employ new
media as a repository to record information about their past.
Design/methodology/approach –Using the notions of documentary practice and memory-making
as a framework, a case study of MMORPG City of Heroes’(CoH) virtual community on Reddit
discussion board “/r/cityofheroes”was conducted. The study consists of an interpretative analysis
of posts, comments, images, and other materials submitted to /r/cityofheroes during a period of
approximately seven months.
Findings –The principal finding of the study is that the CoH community, with varying levels of
intentionality, documented a range of pasts on /r/cityofheroes, relating to CoH as a game world, a site
of personal experience, a product, a nexus of narratives, and a game. The analysis also lays bare the
community’s memory-making processes, in which the documented conceptions of CoH’s past were
put to work in the present, informing community action and viewpoints.
Originality/value –Games and gaming practices are increasingly prevalent in leisure and
professional settings. This trend, which makes virtual environments and online media proxies for
or augmentations of “real life”, makes it necessary for information scholars to understand how the full
range of human information behaviours, including documenting, and memory-making, emerge or
are replicated online. Additionally, few studies have examined the interplay between new media
affordances, documentary practices, and memory-making in the context of virtual world communities.
Keywords Virtual community, Documents, Memory, Leisure activities, Documentation,
Documentary practice
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault famously states that the archive dictates
what can be said, thought, and known in a social system at a certain time and place
(Foucault, 1982/1969). Taken generally, Foucault’s assertion illuminates how the doings
and workings of the present are inextricably linked to how the past is remembered.
Remembrances of the past are, in this view, enabled and structured by the range of
documented information kept available in archives and other repositories of various
kinds. A significant portion of more recent research in this vein has been informed by a
sociomaterial perspective: the triumvirate of present doings and workings, memory,
and information about the past (documentation, recall, use) are increasingly viewed as
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 71 No. 2, 2015
pp. 294-316
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-11-2013-0146
Received 11 November 2013
Revised 6 March 2014
Accepted 7 March 2014
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments, suggestions, and
criticisms helped to greatly improve this paper. Furthermore, the author is grateful to Infer-
nalHibiscus, DjinnNJuice, and Jo_Nah for consenting to publish their screenshots.
294
JDOC
71,2
reciprocally entangled with the sociocultural practices and affordances of the
information repositories of the context under study (e.g. Latour, 1987; Berg, 1996;
Brown and Duguid, 1996, 2000; Frohmann, 2004). Studies on how the documented past
interacts with, and is put to use in, the dealings of the present have also been conducted
in areas such as law enforcement (Trace, 2002), gourmet cooking (Hartel, 2010), theatre
production (Davies, 2008), and healthcare (Berg, 1996; Heath and Luff, 1996; Berg and
Bowker, 1997; Østerlund, 2007).
There is, however, a significant gap in this research front regarding virtual worlds.
Despite being the object of study in a wide array of inquiries (e.g. Taylor, 2006;
Boellstorff, 2008; Pearce, 2009), little analytical attention has been paid to virtual world
community memory-making and recording of things past. Virtual communities are
widespread and highly distributed social formations of importance on the present-day
internet. Virtual worlds are here understood as ”interactable computer-facilitated
representations of space”(Sköld, 2013, para. 4). Prominent instantiations of virtual
worlds are online multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, free-form online social
spaces like Second Life, and single-player offline games.
The aim of the present study is to explore how virtual world communities use new
media as repositories to record information about their past. Such documentary
practices are examined as a central feature of the virtual communities’collective
memory-making processes (as per Halbwachs, 1992/1941/1952). The analysis is based
on an interpretative case study of documentary practices in the massively multiplayer
online role-playing game (MMORPG)[1] City of Heroes (CoH) virtual community.
The site of inquiry is the community’s discussion board “/r/cityofheroes”on Reddit.
Starting on the same day as CoH closure was announced, the study encompasses a
period of approximately seven months. The study draws theoretical inspiration from
Bowker’s work on memory and memory practices (Bowker, 2005), document-focused
organisation studies (e.g. Berg, 1996; Harper, 1998), practice theory (e.g. Schatzki, 1996),
and new document theory along with its associated works (e.g. Frohmann, 2004; Lund,
2009; Hartel, 2010; McKenzie and Davies, 2010; Turner, 2010).
The present study contributes to the understanding of virtual communities by
offering insight into the memory-making interplay between how virtual communities
document their past in new media environments, and how such documentation informs
present action and perception within the community. The study furthermore sheds
light on how the material substrate of community memory is jointly shaped
by community documentary practices and the affordances of new media (see Geig er
and Ribes, 2011; Sköld, 2013). Lastly, the study furthers documentary practice research
by indicating virtual communities as a field of study alongside the currently
predominant workplace and natural science settings (e.g. Berg, 1996; Heath and Luff,
1996; Frohmann, 2004).
In its attempt to shift research on documentary practices and memory-making
toward MMORPGs and virtual world communities, this study aligns itself with
LIS inquiry into “serious leisure”as suggested by Hartel (2003) and pursued by Kari
and Hartel (2007), Lee and Trace (2009), Hartel (2010), and others. Gaming is an
important part of contemporary culture and a cherished leisure activity; it is
additionally a catalyst for meaningful experiences of joint learning, collaboration, and
social interaction for many people. To investigate memory-making and documentary
practices in virtual world communities is hence to make a relevant contribution in
the field of information studies research on the “pleasurable and [the] profound”
(Kari and Hartel, 2007, p. 1133).
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Documenting
virtual world
cultures
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