Bridget M. Blodgett
ABSTRACT
Protest has made the jump between the offline and the online spaces and is frequently used in most virtual worlds available today. Despite the frequency of these protest actions in virtual worlds, and their similarities to offline protest actions, further research is needed to see how the adaptation to a virtual environment changes the protest. This research uses case studies to examine several major protest actions that have occurred in several different virtual worlds over the last 10 years. The author finds that the use of the technology in virtual world enables very different methods of protest. She makes the argument that these differences are large enough that they require a deeper exploration and grounding in theoretical models for the field to grow into its potential.
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Index Terms
- And the ringleaders were banned: an examination of protest in virtual worlds
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Reviews
William Edward Mihalo
Blodgett examines three protest situations that took place in virtual worlds. The first involved a stress test and demo in Ultima Online . An invincible character, Lord British, representing the head of Ultima Online , was given a tour of the online world while the site was being beta tested. A character in the crowd of onlookers had disguised himself as a chicken and managed to steal a fire field spell from one of the onlookers. The chicken then tossed the spell in the direction of Lord British. The spell missed, but the person who was controlling Lord British decided to walk into the fire field to show his invincibility. Unfortunately, the person controlling Lord British forgot to reset the invincibility flag and the character died instantly when he entered the fire field. A week after the assassination, the person who disguised himself as a chicken was banned from the game for failing to report the ability to change into a chicken. The second involved a real-world labor strike that was taken into Second Life . The strike appeared in Second Life along with counter-protesters from a union watchdog group. The strike was successful for the labor union that implemented it in Second Life . There was little retribution against the people involved in the strike. Rather, retribution went against the people in management who allowed the strike to reach the point where it went into Second Life . The third involved online corruption within the EVE Online environment. The dispute escalated to a point where it was picked up by The New York Times . Although Blodgett's paper is interesting and humorous, it is difficult to follow, due to some weak editing. There are numerous grammatical and typographical errors, which should have been corrected prior to publication. Online Computing Reviews Service
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