During the lecture there was some discussion about MMO-games and communities in online spaces. How does one's group identity form in these online societies and how it can be developed?
Yusuf Pisan studied the formation of group identity in guilds (social communities inside an MMO), in World Of Warcraft MMO. He based his research on group-identity theory, which consists of three components:
- Cognitive component, which represents person response to his own identity and how he categorizes himself as a part of a group.
- Affective component, which represents the group's attractiveness from the person's viewpoint and the group's ability to help the person to reach his goals.
- Behavioral component, which represents the group's dependancy on each other and it's ability to coordinate activities towards common goal.
Pisan's research showed that of these three the most important in the formation of a guild's group identity was the affective component, in other words, how much the members of a guild liked each other's company. It should be noted though that all three components were highly dependant on one another, so there wouldn't be a case were affective component was very low but cognitive component was very high, meaning that people wouldn't like each other but still wanted to feel part of the same group.
The importance of the affective component strengthens the idea that virtual worlds act as social spaces in which people socialize with each other just as they would in a coffee shop or a bar. Dmitri Williams, Scott Caplan and Li Xiong found in their research that the use of voice in communication in online spaces had highly positive effects on people's relationships. The relationships grew a lot deeper and the trust between people increased when they moved from text-only communication to voice communication using VoIP-services.
This leads us to the conclusion the online spaces which allow people to use voice communication as a part of everyday communication, would be the ones which also develop the greatest feeling of group identity in the communities.
References:
[Pisan, 2007] Yusuf Pisan, My guild, my people: role of guilds in massively multiplayer
online games. Proceedings of the 4th Australasian conference on Interactive
entertainment, RMIT University, 2007, Article No. 20.
[Williams et al., 2007] Dmitri Williams, Scott Caplan, Li Xiong, Can you her me
now? The impact of voice in an online gaming community. Human Communication
research (Volume 33, Issue 4), International communication association,
2007, 427-449.
Quite a conclution. Remember that voice communication has challenges of it's own (when it comes to space and communication bethween people). Therefore it's only a possibility but there is so many other factors to note that I simply can't agree the conclution part!
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