Worlds Apart, Together: Discovering Players' Placemaking Priorities in Cooperative Terraforming Games

Abstract

As more people take to networked technologies as primary sites of relationship deepening, it becomes increasingly important to examine how we design these technologies for connection over a distance. This article presents a pilot study looking at how players build homes together in video game environments. Drawing on phenomenological studies of architecture and geography, we observe and analyse how remote players cooperate to build a virtual place of dwelling in the game Terraria. Via observational and focus group data, we consider how players negotiate their priorities and social relationships throughout the process of creating a shared place of habitation. From this data, we extend Tyler Quiring's three themes of virtual placemaking into five virtual placemaking priorities - Making more precise; Establishing a centre; Cultivating fields of care; Communality, and; Building as dialogue - to describe how cooperative space configuration activities function to anchor both player-player and player-place relationships. Our findings shed light on how video games can uniquely support placemaking as a means of achieving meaningful co-presence over a distance, offering valuable insights for future design and research into virtual worlds.