<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Hi everyone,</span></font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Trebor asked me to introduce myself. I confess that I've been lurking on the list for some time and enjoying many of the discussions immensely, especially those concerning play and the nature of labor in a digital age.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">I am a cultural anthropologist and my research is on the relationships between games, institutions, and indeterminacy. My most recent work was on Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, where I spent 2005 doing ethnographic research, online and offline. In my book about it which came out this June (Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life, Cornell U Press - </span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://is.gd/3zovG">http://is.gd/3zovG</a></span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">) I explored how the Lindens (employees of Linden Lab) inscribed certain assumptions about the human into their software, assumptions which shaped the nature of labor and value in Second Life (though not in any way wholly determining them). The forms of capital which accumulate in Second Life (the material, the cultural, the social) rely not only on that world's persistence but also upon its contrived open-endedness (owing much to computer game design), which allows for performative failure and therefore meaningfully distinct outcomes of social processes. This architecture reflected Linden Lab's picture of the human as driven essentially by a desire to express creatively through technology and to reject vertical authority, or, indeed, constraint in any form.</span></font></span></span></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">What is more, Linden Lab sought to govern themselves according to the same, as I call them, "technoliberal" ideals, and again reached for techniques from game design in order to shape their own organizational labor and generate legitimate decisions about what to do next. Games, I argue, are the latest cultural form to become an object of institutional desire, in part because of how digital technology makes such applications of game-like forms over a wide domain of action possible. </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Looking forward to more great iDC discussions, and to meeting folks at the Digital Labor conference in November.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Thomas</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div></div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Thomas M. Malaby, Ph.D.<br>Associate Professor of Anthropology<br>University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee<br>P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201<br><br>web: <a href="http://thomasmalaby.com">http://thomasmalaby.com</a><br><br>"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone<br>else when we're uncool." - Lester Bangs in "Almost Famous"</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div></div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div></span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span></font> </div><br></body></html>