Knowing and throwing mudballs, hearts, pies, and flowers: A connective ethnography of gaming practices

Abstract

Little is known how young players learn to participate in various activities in virtual worlds. We use a new integrative approach called connective ethnography that focuses on how gaming expertise spreads across a network of youth at an after school club that simultaneously participates in a virtual world Whyville.net. To trace youth participation in online and offline social contexts, we draw on multiple sources of information: observations, interviews, video recordings, online tracking and chat data, and hundreds of hours of play in Whyville ourselves. One particular game practice - the throwing of projectiles and its social uses and nuances - became the focal point of our analyses. The discussions address methodological challenges underlying the synthesis of diverse types of data that allowed us to follow youth across multiple spaces and times as well as initial insights into how this practice was used to negotiate relationships in multiple spaces through play.