Thomas Malaby

Bio

Thomas Malaby is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Thomas has published numerous works on virtual worlds, games, and indeterminacy. He is continually interested by the ever-changing relationships among institutions, unpredictability, and technology, especially as they are realized through games and game-like processes. His newly published book, Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (2009, Cornell University Press), is an ethnographic examination of Linden Lab and its relationship to its creation, Second Life. He is also a featured author at the blog Terra Nova.

Abstract

Performing Value: Labor and Contingency in Virtual Worlds

Massively multiplayer online games and worlds (MMOs, or virtual worlds) have exploded onto the cultural landscape, and exploded in size as well. They clearly generate cash, connections, competencies, and credentials for their participants, and we can now begin to ask why this is possible at all. What are the fundamental features of these digital domains that account for the accumulation in them of human labor into these various forms of capital, and how is the character of labor itself transformed in them? Most obviously, their persistence allows the labor of their participants to have durable, cumulative effects. But persistence alone cannot account for these emergent and consequential phenomena. This is because the effects of digital labor cannot be meaningful without an element of contingency. That is, the possibilities of failure, of accident, and of unintended consequences are essential to understanding why virtual worlds can generate these real stakes. The multi-layered and implicit contingency of MMOs is, importantly, an architected feature that owes a great deal to game design, and it enables them to begin to approach the texture of the everyday. In this presentation I discuss virtual worlds as landscapes of possibility, and explore the performative and other contingencies that together constitute the rich horizon for failure (and success) within virtual worlds. Based on ethnographic research at a site of virtual world production, Linden Lab (makers of Second Life), I chart how these contingencies lie at the heart of digital labor within them.