Copyright by Calvin Thomas Johns 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Calvin Thomas Johns Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Social Poetics of Analog Virtual Worlds: Toying With Alternate Realities Committee: Kathleen Stewart, Supervisor John Hartigan Craig Campbell Paul Kockelman Patrick Jagoda The Social Poetics of Analog Virtual Worlds: Toying With Alternate Realities by Calvin Thomas Johns, B.A.; M.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Dedication For Carlee, who is always lovely, and for my father, who may one day value all this pedantic sophistry as something more—or not. Acknowledgements This dissertation was raised, as any healthy baby, by a village. My supervisor, Katie Stewart, provided timely and patient support throughout the beginning, the middle, and the end of this process. Early coursework with Katie made way for years of conversation, salon workshops, and writing retreats that opened avenues of new thinking and new working. My other core advisors at the University of Texas, John Hartigan and Craig Campbell, both provided formal and informal discussions over the years that have incalculably nudged, informed, and matured my thinking and writing. Paul Kockelman and Patrick Jagoda were kind and trusting enough to join my committee in the final two years of writing, and their influences have been manifold. Paul’s careful and detailed feedback on my work in semiosis has proven invaluable, and will hopefully continue to do so as I develop a more confident stride in the territories of linguistic anthropology. Patrick included me in professional opportunities that have already invigorated my writing and my research. In summary, the committee made any of the accomplishments of this dissertation possible. Early research into tabletop role-playing games and large-scale alternate reality gaming, which equipped me to begin the design projects that would turn into Fantaji and Fancy Bang, was funded by the Social Science Research Council in a fellowship led by Tom Boellstorff and Doug Thomas. I have touched base with Tom a handful of times in the last five years, participating in conferences and small colloquia with him, and no v moment in our extended conversation of virtual worlds has passed without influencing the ideas I have put forth here. On the personal side of things, I would like to acknowledge the support and encouragement of my family and dearest friends. Despite growing up in sub-rural Michigan, I had two parents who had both attended college and who never stifled my willful and oftentimes messy pursuit of knowledge in all its forms. Without this atmosphere of inquiry and creativity, I would not have taken on the production of scientific knowledge as a profession; thank you to Carolyn Frost and Greg Johns for such a childhood. Beyond the initial inspirations of family, countless friends and colleagues have supported me during the research and writing phases of this dissertation. Much like raising a baby, it seems that writing a dissertation can oftentimes pull one away from the very friends who can make the arduous—albeit rewarding—process less painful. Thank you to those friends and new family members who did not let me slip through the cracks and who continued to support me even after it seemed I had been swallowed up: Aurora Armada, Rob Ware, Susan Quesal, Sultana Vest, Iain Frost, and Carlee Daniel. vi The Social Poetics of Analog Virtual Worlds: Toying With Alternate Realities Calvin Thomas Johns, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Kathleen Stewart While online virtual worlds draw increasingly wider audiences of players and scholars alike, offline games continue to evolve into more complex and socially layered forms as well. This dissertation argues that virtual worlds need not exist as online, digital environments alone and probes three genres of non-digital gaming for evidence of the virtual: tabletop role-playing games, murder-mystery events, and localized alternate reality games. More broadly, then, this dissertation is about deliberate make-belief: practiced by adults, taken seriously by participants, engaged with for long hours at a time, performed in public, and integrated into everyday social relationships. Drawing on scholars who study games as social activities (McGonigal 2006, Montola 2012) and social institutions (Goffman 1974, Searle 1995), I present three ethnographic case studies that illustrate how complex forms of social gaming can conjure and sustain environments best understood as analog virtual worlds. Through the widespread use of mobile technologies and the concerted efforts of innovators, game spaces are increasingly permeating our everyday lives on- and offline. This dissolving boundary demands anthropologists to revisit questions of how, where, and with whom we play games. Dovetailing Martin Heidegger’s notions vii of worlding and poiesis to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, this dissertation investigates how new forms of social gaming demonstrate the same qualities of shared intentionality, intersubjectivity, and performance essential to the production of new social meaning and cultural forms. Following, I situate the bold ethnographic case studies of make-belief in dialogue with scholars who figure exclusively online virtual worlds (Castronova 2005, Taylor 2006, Boellstorff 2008) and argue that analyzing both on- and offline virtual worlds together can help scholars better understand the fundamental nature of social interaction and shared intentionality, those everyday mechanisms that both sustain personal relationships on the one hand and maintain our broadest and most serious social institutions on the other. viii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 I. The Play Element of Culture ....................................................................... 1 Introduction of Study ............................................................................ 1 Ethnography of Virtual Worlds .................................................... 2 Taking Play Seriously .................................................................. 4 The Nature of Play ................................................................................ 5 Play as Freedom ........................................................................... 5 Play as Contest & Presentation .................................................... 7 Non-Representational Interventions ...................................................... 7 II. Context For Study ...................................................................................... 8 Games as Social Institutions ...................................................... 10 III. Exegesis of Title: Glossary .................................................................... 11 Social Poetics ...................................................................................... 11 Analog ................................................................................................. 12 Virtual .................................................................................................. 13 Virtual Worlds ............................................................................ 15 Toying ................................................................................................. 16 Alternate Realities ............................................................................... 16 Tabletop Role-Playing ................................................................ 17 Alternate Reality Games ............................................................ 18 IV. Questions & Methods ............................................................................. 18 Hypotheses & Research Questions ..................................................... 18 Research Strategy & Methods ............................................................. 20 Fantasy Role-playing .................................................................. 20 Small-Group Alternate Reality Games: Murder-Mystery Events21 Localized Alternate Reality Games ............................................ 21 ix Analysis ............................................................................................... 22 Peircean Semiotics ..................................................................... 22 Frame Analysis ........................................................................... 22 V. Outline of Chapters ................................................................................. 24 The Setup ............................................................................................. 24 The Pivot ............................................................................................. 24 The Payoff ........................................................................................... 25 VI. The End of The Beginning ..................................................................... 26 By Way of Foreword ........................................................................... 27 Chapter 2: Literature Review ................................................................................ 28 I. Contra Cognitivism ................................................................................... 29 The Extended