Refraining Online Games

Abstract

Massively-multiplayer online games, or "synthetic worlds," represent a rapidly-growing industry with far-reaching social, technical, and economic implications. In this position paper, we draw on literature from anthropology, sociology, and film to challenge long-standing misconceptions of "games" and "work" and of "virtuality" and "reality" as dualisms that have obscured synthetic worlds from serious consideration by IS scholars. Building on this work and recent reports of businesses, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and educational institutions incorporating synthetic worlds into their day-to-day practices, we argue that synthetic worlds represent a legitimate arena for IS research. We begin by offering a framework for characterizing the nature and structure of the social activity occurring in the diverse array of synthetic worlds currently available. Then we illustrate our position by considering synthetic worlds from the perspective of organizational communication, a substantive area with a rich tradition in IS research. Employing a genre lens as an illustrative example, we identify phenomena and raise research questions the IS community is uniquely positioned to explore. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.