Ethnography as Play•T. L. Taylor

The author argues that ethnography is a kindred of play. Based on her
research of play in digital gaming environments, she draws several parallels
between the practices of ethnography and the practices of play. She explores
the complexities of play in games and expands our understanding of thework of ethnography as play. Key words: ethnography; fieldwork; games;
play; research

Playing EthnographyIbegan thinking about play as a lens for ethnographic practice years ago
in conjunction with a workshop entitled “In the Game: Ethnographic Relationships, Mediation, and Knowledge” at the Association of Internet Researchers
conference. In an intensive inquiry, the workshop participants investigated digital environments. We reflected on prior fieldwork each of us had done with a
special eye on such topics as contiguity, accountability, affect, embodiment, andscholarly practices. As I revisited my field notes on massively multiplayer-online
games and high-level raiding (i.e., coordinated group action in these spaces),
I was struck by the moments my research process seemed similar to playing agame. I began to consider the features that the practices of play in these spaces
and the practices of ethnography broadly shared.
I should point out that massively multiplayer-online gaming strongly influences my notion of play for the purposes of this article. Although I do see
important connections to what we might call free-form play, my argument draws
primarily on the experience of play within a semistructured digital environment
rooted in a multiplayer frame with collective action and meaning making. Theremay be fruitful ways to consider broader gaming genres in relation to ethnography, but they lay outside my scope here.
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Contact T. L. Taylor at tl@tltaylor.com

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Navigating entry processes and learning to inhabit a space, puzzling out
how the system works and its forms of discovery, intensely enjoying the experience despite its many frustrations and failures, moving through it all in embodied and affective ways, grappling with unknowns, and eventually setting theexperience aside and moving onto something new are common moments inboth ethnography and play. Stances of inquiry, engagement, and reflection speak
to a resonance between the activities. I began to think about how they may bekindred spirits, how we move into and inhabit each in often similar ways. I
thought about how my own research practices contoured alongside play, as well
as about moments where that companionship broke down. And I wondered if
one of the reasons ethnographic work has been so generative in online gaming
spaces and virtual worlds broadly is its resonance with play.
I am certainly not alone in thinking about how ethnography might befruitfully illuminated by comparison to other forms of expression and inquiry(Marcus and Fischer 1986). Throughout this article, I use the language of ethnography not simply to denote the writing up of fieldwork and the ensuingmonograph but also the assemblage of research practices and techniques ethnographers undertake. My own training is in sociology, not anthropology, andthe tradition of qualitative research I associate with ethnographic work is linked
to that training. My notion of ethnography as play also leans on other explorations of fieldwork and researcher experience, approaches that offer another wayof looking at the subjectivity of the researcher and how the work is undertaken,
helping reframe the practice of ethnography.
Manning (1983), for example, asked what might happen if we understood
the anthropologist not as priest (“guardian, interpreter, and evangelist”) but
instead as a clown. As he noted, “A good clown is like a good anthropologist.
He or she observes the social world as a participant but is clumsily integrated
into the surroundings and thus ironically detached.” Even religious clowns, henotes, “exemplify liminality, license, creativity and potentiality, essential attributes of play” (12). Though in this article I speak to a more accountable formof participation with our field sites, the spirit Manning invokes resonates withmy argument, one which hails an embodied playful subject.
In a different vein, Turner (1982) has proposed “the ‘playing’ of ethnography” through its performance as a way both to enliven the teaching ofanthropology and to “catch up the readers and spectators fully into the culture’s
motivational web” (84). He asks, “How could we turn ethnography into script,
then enact that script, then think about it, then go back to fuller ethnography,Ethnography as Playthen make a new script, then act it again? This interpretive circulation between
data, praxis, theory, and more data—a kind of hermeneutical Catherine wheel,
if you like—provides a merciless critique of ethnography” (94, emphasis his).
I admit I find enacting fieldnotes as dramas risky in terms of producing false
empathy and identity tourism (Nakamura 1995), but when I have had students
in class read snippets of in-game dialogue from my own fieldnotes as a way
making the material come alive, it has usually proved a powerful exercise. Thus,
despite the “playing” in Turner’s formulation being more linked to drama, I findhis expression of process, particularly around exploration, trials, and iteration,
resonant with some of the playful stances I detail.
It is also not unusual for those thinking about the threads weaving together
ethnography and gaming to turn for inspiration to Geertz’s classic on deep play
and the Balinese cockfight. Geertz (1972) takes seriously the cultural work of the
cockfight and argues that by focusing on such an event, a type so often set off tothe side as “only a game,” the anthropologist might find rich material for study.
As he writes, “Quartets, still lifes, and cockfights are not merely reflections of apreexisting sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in thecreation and maintenance of such a sensibility” (28). For scholars of games andplay, this can feel like a lifeline, an argument for the value of looking at what isoften set aside in traditional scholarship (see O’Donnell 2014 for more about
deep play in games). Yet for my consideration here, I find a different aspect ofGeertz’s essay evocative and resonant—the opening vignette, where the author
is running.
Early in the recounting, Geertz writes of struggling to connect with theBalinese villagers among whom he and his wife were living. He notes the difficulties, the distance, and the indifference with which they all grappled. “For them,and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters, invisible men” (1).
One night when they both attended an illicit cockfight along with hundreds ofothers, the police descended on the crowd, and everyone, including Geertz andhis wife, frantically sprinted from the scene. Following on the heels of anotherattendee they found themselves eventually “tumbling into [a] courtyard” where
the wife of the man they were running with “whipped out a table, a tablecloth,
three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any explicit communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to compose
ourselves” as policemen shortly came looking for them (4). The scene is practically comedic with the image of their running away almost without thought,with the tumbling, and with their bluffing to the police that nothing was amiss.

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were we no longer invisible, we were suddenly the center of attention, the objectof a great outpouring of warmth, interest, and, most especially, amusement”(4). The retelling and mimicry, the laughter, the shared experience and solidarity, offered an entrée for Geertz and his wife. The vignette also points to theembodiment, the affective qualities, and the improvisations we so often findin ethnographic work. It reveals qualities of ethnographic practice that are noteasily distilled to work that looks serious, or planned, or controlled.
This experience is, I suspect, deeply resonant with those who have usedethnographic approaches in their study of play. For myself and a number ofother researchers, it has been an incredible tool for studying game culture andonline environments, allowing us to explore so many rich digital spaces (Boellstorff 2010; Chen 2011; Copier 2007; Kendall 2002; Nardi 2010; Pearce 2011;
Steinkuehler 2006; Sunden and Sveningsson 2012; Taylor 2006). Ethnographers
working in this branch of media have—by actively inhabiting and playing alongside participants—offered rich analysis of everything from online presence toforms of collective action. By engaging in tried-and-true ethnographic techniques (such as in-depth engagement over time with participants, conversationand learning, and building up a set of practices to inhabit the space), ethnographers of these worlds have offered important insights into life in digital spaces.
But these ethnographers have not only given us glimpses into emerging
domains, they have also highlighted the conceptual turn I want to prompt—not
simply thinking about how ethnography can be used in play spaces but how the
work of ethnography can look like the work of play. I deploy Geertz’s piece here
not merely to advocate for the study of games (as valuable as I think that is)but also for what it shows us about the playful nature of ethnographic practice.
Ethnography has been so generative in early game and virtual world studies
because it is a kindred of play.
The concept of play can, of course, be tricky to pin down (Sutton-Smith
1997). For some it means a specific form of activity, for others it is a disposition (Barnett 1991), a process of unfolding contingency (Malaby 2007), a stateof experience (Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett 1971), or located within a playframe (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974; Deterding 2009, 2018). Rather than reify
a distinction between play and game (where play stands in for nonrule-based
activity and gaming is bounded by rules), I will move back and forth between
these terms.
When we talk about play and games the term “fun” commonly appears. The

Ethnography as Playnotion is a powerful one, often meant to evoke a sense of unhindered pleasure.
Yet as Malaby (2009) notes, the growth of research on games has increasingly
shown that “it has also become more difficult to sustain claims that play isessentially about ‘fun,’ ‘pleasure,’ or other positively charged sentiments” (205).
Disrupting a one-to-one correspondence between fun and play opens up theterrain to consider domains we do not traditionally think of as intersecting play.
Play, even the childhood play that is often the imagined referent point,
is deeply linked to something more than any discrete gaming experience. Byturns it can be serious, purposeful, contentious, and painful. Even in the facesof children at play, we can watch them move through joy, intensity and focus,
frustration, struggle, spontaneity, and experimentation (Hughes 1983; SuttonSmith 1997; Thorne 1993). We have also long understood the role play takes inboth refracting and creating society, that play runs along and through circuitsof power. Reducing play, at an analytic level, to a notion of fun causes us to lose
the complexity of the activity and experience within it.
We might do a similar flip in our thinking about the “work” of ethnography. There is a conversation point to be had here between my pairing of playand ethnography with Goslinga and Frank’s (2007) foreword to In the Shadowsin which they ask, “Must we accept the dichotomy of ‘life’ and ‘work’ that constitutes, yet also confounds, the experience of fieldwork?” (xii). As a number of
ethnographers of play have proposed, overly dichotomous models that pitch playon one side of our lives and work on the other miss the much more nuanced andcomplex entanglement present in everyday experience (Malaby 2009; Stevens
1978; Taylor 2006, 2012). How might testing that dichotomization also offer a
new way of looking at the work of ethnography?
Certainly, our research process is serious; it calls to mind labor, exertion,and tough challenges (mental, social, and at times physical). It is, for mostacademics, laden with consequence—from professional standing or scientificadvance to personal satisfactions. And yet ethnography is deeply linked to thepleasures of knowing and experience—to delight in others and discovery, toexpanded horizons and joyful moments. Deep ethnographic moments are often
experienced as embodied, meaningful, and resonant. As with play, reducing
ethnography simply to a method of work may flatten it, hiding many of its
important, even valuable, qualities.
In this article, I trace themes that cross both play and ethnography—entry,
experimentation and discovery, pleasure, embodiment and affect, frustrationand failure, transformation and transgression, analytic puzzling, myths and the

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Beginning Play, Beginning Fieldwork
Our paths to a game come in a variety of ways. Perhaps we are fans of a genre ora developer and watch for new titles. Maybe we have read about a game, heard
about it in a podcast, or seen it advertised. Sometimes friends encourage us topick up a title or even suggest that we play with them. The ways we find games
are as diverse as the people playing them. But somehow we begin. And once westart playing (well, if we stay with it), we embark on a complex course of discovery and negotiation, not only with the game but just as often with its location
in a particular social and cultural milieu. The choices matter: Will we reside ona player versus player or role-play server? Will it be set in North America or
Europe? Will we be in a guild with friends or not? All these small forks in thegaming road shape how our specific experience, our play, unfolds.
It is also the case that, though our play can be complex and often fraught,
it has some connection with our identities. Multiuser spaces often prompt theconversation to turn to notions of “identity play” where we perhaps take on
different persona in a gaming space (Turkle 1995), and while that is certainly
worth considering, I mean something quite different. When we play, we confront
evaluators—both deeply personal and internal but also external and social—that
weigh in on whether an activity fits our sense of ourselves, on who we can bein our leisure time, and on what is socially acceptable for someone “like us” toengage in (Taylor 2008; Wearing 1998).
Our choices, and the possibilities for enacting them, are tied to our identities, constituted not only in private and personal ways but also refracted throughour social contexts. We do not encounter play spaces with unbounded freedom.
They come with a context that strongly informs—and at times limits or circumscribes—our play. And our sense of ourselves as embodied players can shapewhat we choose to engage with. Do we want to take on a physical game using a
motion controller, perhaps play in a public setting, or would that feel awkward?
Do we know a range of game genres and can pick one that suits our tastes? Do
we have the financial resources to purchase and play a game? Do we have theright technology we need to play the game we want (or do we even have accessEthnography as Playto it)? Do we have the technological or game literacy to play?
Of course, at times we either push ourselves out of our comfort zone, or
we are afforded an opportunity to explore without penalty. We pick up a game
we might not otherwise play. We challenge ourselves to wander about in a gameaisle in which we do not usually spend time, peeking at other platforms andofferings. We experiment with a new genre or brave entering a new game community. But no matter, these choices are refracted through a complex mix offactors that includes everything from gender to economics.
Ethnography at its beginning moment is not so different. Our interests,
dispositions, and questions lead us into research projects. Sometimes structural,social, or institutional pressures take us there. Looking back at my own fieldwork
sites, I find it hard always to trace a clear path in. It is often filled with advice,
happenstance, some intentionality, but, as often as not, serendipity, even luck.
Just as we are aware that play enlists our identities, bodies, and specific
lived contexts—and, in turn, shapes our possibilities and experiences—ethnographers are all too aware of how we are never blank slates that simply encounter the field. We similarly confront issues of entry and participation. Can we
get access to the site we want to visit and to the people with whom we want toengage? Do we know a gatekeeper or valued confidant—or can we persuade
one—to assist us? Is the field site out of reach or something we can work ourway into?
We also deal with issues of identity, body, and power, usually less articulated
access moments but nonetheless deeply felt and important for the possibilities of
our work. Are we able to inhabit, as an embodied researcher, a stance that feels
comfortable enough for us to proceed with our inquiry and also one that works
for the field? Does our embodied subjectivity afford or restrict our fieldwork?
Certainly, one of the more important aspects of ethnographic research involves
the negotiation of identity in field sites. This often takes several forms, fromissues about self-presentation to how our very immersion in a space prompts
us to think about our own sense of self, values, and ways of being.
There is a second component to beginnings worth our consideration—
how we understand the bounds of the site we are entering. When you take up agame, you embark on a new experience and enter a domain, whether an abstractsystem or a rich virtual environment. The language I have deployed of a “pathin” seems to suggest a “there” you step into, and this language often applies tofieldwork as well.
Without a doubt, there is some experiential truth here. The very moment

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shifting into something else, something new, though perhaps not always entirely
unfamiliar. In the classic formulation of fieldwork, ethnographers leave theireveryday world and move, literally, to a new one. Making a jump to thinking
about the “magic circle” we so often hear about in game studies—that spacewith its own special rules, a space “consequence free,” one that does not touch
our nonplay lives—is all too easy (Huizinga 1955; Salen and Zimmerman 2003).
While it may be tempting to slip into this conceptual frame, we should resist
doing so. It is a frame that has been critiqued in both game studies and anthropology. Models of bounded objects and sites at a remove are actually ill suited
to describing how play and ethnography actually unfold in daily life. Whether
we recognize that structural factors regularly impinge on romanticized modelsof travel to a field site or reflect more deeply the mythos evoked by that kindof imagined boundary crossing, thinking about ethnographic spaces as magic
circles holds up neither empirically nor conceptually. We might also interrogate
the ethical frame that would allow a notion of consequence-free engagement
to be entertained by the ethnographer. Such a position is never afforded to ourparticipants.
Rather than thinking about clearly bounded spaces, we might instead consider bricolage and co-constituting flows. I have argued elsewhere that gaming
is best understood as assemblage (Taylor 2009). Though it is easy to focus on
the game artifact as an imagined center, in practice the actual instantiation of
any play moment results from a complex mix of actors and sites knit together
in deeply contextual ways. These include material artifacts (computers, monitors, desks, chairs), sites (forums, webpages, communication platforms, inperson gaming groups), networks (of technology, of people, of organizations),
policies, governance, and law. Actors, human and non, abound, and they are
woven together to produce particular instances of play. The configuration of thisassemblage is local, contingent, emerging, and contested. Porousness dominates.
Understanding the flows that make up this network—and how it cannot everhold a singular bounded form for its entirety—proves key to understanding
digital play. Although the notion of a magic circle may enjoy evocative power,
it falls short as an analytic tool for the sociological understanding of actual play.
Our ethnographic field sites (especially for those doing work online) have
similarly porous borders. Many of us recognize multi-sited ethnography as simply a constant component to our research (Marcus 1995). We regularly follow
our participants to spaces (online or off) that we do not originally see as at theEthnography as Playheart of our field site. The research space is also an assemblage in which weintersect with and observe everything from people to materials to structures andorganizations. We pay attention to bodies, practices, artifacts, and varying actors.
Like gamers, we use—and often wrestle with—technologies (our recorders, ourdatabases, our cameras, our notebooks). We piece together a provisional, contingent whole—both in our fieldwork and our publications—from a collectionof moments, experiences, and data points.
As for the portability of the magic circle, rarely have I experienced fieldwork as anything approaching the magical. Although, like play, fieldwork
can have enchanted moments, it is more deeply rooted in the everyday andmundane—and in the ongoing work of engagement. In both domains, there
exists a flow to our experience and activity, one that inhabits seemingly bounded
space . . . until it does not. We may make ludic or analytic boundaries for the
purposes of sustaining our engagement (be it play or ethnography), but ourpractical experience often proves much messier.

Discovery and Experimentation
These beginning paths lead us deeper into the game or field site. As players weare constantly learning about the system, both its inherent formal structures
and those the community has generated. We learn how to play our characterand how to act in the world. While sometimes official game manuals are helpful(though more and more frequently they are not even included in releases), we
often find ourselves stumbling upon techniques, skills, and tactics that surprise
us in delightful ways when they work. As Malaby (2009) notes, “The disposition of play is marked by a readiness to improvise” (211). We not only play thegame but play with the game, testing and developing our knowledge about how
it works. We discover the contours of the system, the mechanics of its space,its structures.
At the same time we learn how to be a player of the game in the general
sense, we are also acculturated into what it means to be a player on a specificserver, in a specific guild, in a specific culture. To riff on Simone de Beauvoir,
we are not born a player, but become one, and this is a core principle of gaming (Taylor 2006). While we learn the general mechanics of game play, we are
simultaneously embedded in a context that always informs our actions. People
give advice, scold, offer corrections, and generally socialize us to act in particular

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member), our speech, our ways of understanding, are all subject to deep socialization processes.
We constantly move between axes of control from the game, ourselves,
other players, group structures, and true spontaneity. Most of the time, ourgaming lives are filled with controlled risk. Constant movement occurs between
discovery, replication, and repetition. As players, we work hard to figure out
the system, the rules, the norms, the habits, the shape of the thing. Sometimes
we lean on what the game teaches us, sometimes on what we learn from others(either directly via players or via online resources), sometimes we fumble andexperiment. All of this experimentation and discovery gets transformed into
habit. We learn tactics then endlessly repeat and refine them. Over time wesystematize what we know about how our character works, how it interacts withthe world, how it functions in a group.
As ethnographers, our time in the field also becomes filled with learning,
surprise, and discovery. Indeed, the entire process involves taking in so muchthat you can adequately interpret it—that is, understand the site and those whohave been living there. We are always being educated about how the culture
works, discovering new patterns or meanings. We are attentive to socialization
processes and seek to uncover the specificities of a particular culture and set ofpractices. Like gamers, we learn specialized, insider language. Making sense oflanguage, symbols, and meanings is key to our work. We come to understandthe internal logics and workings of the domain; we strive to get at the emic.
Although the closest analogue to a game manual—prior literature—can provide
way points to guide us, we are just as often trying to track something not yet
documented or framed.
In the same way that gamers query each other on tips and tricks or test
hypotheses about how something works, ethnographers often try out ideas withtrusted informants and colleagues. Sometimes we are lucky and can even run our
analyses by those in the field, asking them to reflect critically on our interpretation or theory. We risk the dumb—or in gaming parlance, “newbie”—question.
But what about the issue of experimentation? Trying out different strategies,
pushing at the bounds of the game world, tweaking instrumental action, andreplaying a different way for a different experience, are all common in gaming.
An experimental approach is not unusual in play. Is there an equivalent in ethnography? There are a couple of ways to slice this question. From the moment weenter the field, we explore various stances to negotiate it. We comport ourselvesEthnography as Playin ways that secure our entry into the space. We constantly manage our selfpresentation (smiling, laughing, being silent, being inquisitive). We experiment,leverage, and contend with the ways the categories we inhabit around gender,
race, ethnicity, age, class, and sexuality all shape our field time and our interactions with the people there. We certainly adopt a kind of investigative stance as
we try on what it means to really live in that domain alongside our informants.
Over the course of a project, we refine, we hone in, but it always originates with akind of flexibility, a stance of “experimental engagement” (Boellstorff et al. 2012).
A second angle to the question of experimentation, however, seems to be
one of the more risky propositions in this comparison between play and ethnography because it skirts uncomfortably close to ethical violations or corrupting thedata. What about intentionally experimenting with the conditions of the worldor the people within it? There is certainly a long history in the social sciencesof researchers setting up “breech experiments” to prompt inquiry into norms(Garfinkel 1967). Some even see experimentation as the most productive way
to reveal the true nature of complex processes.
The experimental stance has become particularly worrisome as researchers
turn toward games and virtual worlds. Experimentation is central to play, butwhen we port it over to the social sciences for imagined online laboratories, it
becomes fraught. This dream tends to be one of creating artificial societies withvariables that can be manipulated by the researcher. Although this formulationof experimentation clearly falls outside ethnographic practice, weaker versions
are regularly considered. Approaches in which the researcher simply fades into
the background, something Nick Taylor (2008) has dubbed “periscopic play,”
have been pursued. Gender swapping for the purposes of testing individual
reactions or “griefing” to provoke experimental disruptions have tempted some
(Myers 2008). Especially attractive to inexperienced researchers, the idea ofintervening experimentally and tweaking the conditions of the space—and inturn the experience of the world and that of the participants—often appears inonline spaces.
Yet, precisely here the values of play and experimentation most directly
counter the ethical values ethnographers strive to uphold. We may take anexperimental stance in our negotiation of field sites or try out hypothesis or
explanations in conversation with our participants, but as ethnographers we
do not consider field sites to be labs with variables and levers for our scientificbidding. I am not calling for a naïve approach that imagines we have no impact,
but one that recognizes the strengths of our work lay in understanding sites on

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processes, and structures in specific historical moments. And while we acknowledge the constructed nature of the stories we then tell, we nonetheless find value
in chronicling, if even for that moment, life as lived in situ.

Analytic Puzzling
In-field discovery is crucial to ethnography, but so too is puzzle solving. Thisapproach methodically pieces together data to form a total picture, to break
down and solve a problem, to master a conundrum. It speaks to the ways we donot simply record or collect information but work extensively with the material
we encounter.
In games analytic players may consult a myriad of sources to tackle thespace: making notes, testing hypotheses, maybe even running some hard
numbers or simulations (“theorycrafting” in gaming parlance) (Choontanom
and Nardi 2012; Paul 2011; Taylor 2006). Players interrogate underlying gamemechanics and structures, comparing these to advice and actual practices ofplay (Steinkhueler and Duncan 2008).
Ethnographic work is strongly rooted in this tendency as well. In the field,
we try to keep an eye on structure and processes even as we pay keen attention
to everyday practice and culture. We puzzle explanations as we go, watchingfor counterexamples, testing and talking through ideas. Sometimes we draw on
key informants to help us untangle a thorny issue. Certainly, at the stage where
we sit with stacks of notes and hours upon hours of interviews and transcripts,
puzzling through the pieces, shuffling data around, cutting and pasting thematic
bits, reviewing images and snippets of conversation, we are assuming a stancevery similar to the players who bring all of their experience, as well as a broad
range of collective knowledge, to bear on their game.
Probably one of the more interesting tensions in both play and ethnography involves the way each moves between moments of discovery and difficult
analytic challenges. In each we are deeply present, but we always enjoy a secondary consciousness that does the heavier cognitive processing, teasing out
the complexities of the system and its relations. Both gaming and ethnographythen share a fascinating and complex relationship to our experience of time andEthnography as Playprocess. We play or research in the moment, but flow between that immediacyand our analytic experience and reflection. In the same way, we can be between
worlds in online games, we can experience this flow in our ethnographic practice.

Transgression and Transformation
Boundary work is a constant modality in both play and ethnography. As we
explore games, we often find ourselves bumping against their edges or limitations, sometimes discovering a tactic that seems almost too good to be true. We
encounter things like “pathing” bugs (or software errors) that force monsters
to take longer routes to reach us, thereby giving us extra time to cast spells onthem or to find a sweet spot to stand in that allows us extra protection. We may
consult guides that lead us through exact explanations of how to carry out aquest, thereby bypassing all the exploration, discovery, and learning opportunities the designers intended. In some games, we can install additional softwarethat helps with our play. At times user-interface modifications (mods) provide
additional information, facilitate routine action, or offer crucial help to anotherwise complex task. Third-party programs even exist that completely automate our play or give us information the designers do not want us to possess.
When we add in software bits or innovative forms of engagement, our play canoften be radically transformed. We can find ourselves experiencing the gameworld quite differently from others who do not share our socio-technical configurations (Taylor 2009).
Ultimately, we make decisions about what we think constitutes an ethicalboundary of fair play and cheating, for ourselves and for others. Gamers havecomplex value systems that guide their assessments (Consalvo 2007). Specificgame communities also draw their own lines of acceptable behavior for theirmembers. Particular guilds may have firm rules about what they disallow andmay kick out those who do not comply. For example, some groups do not allow
their members to use buggy parts of a game to kill a monster or install particular
add-ons that they feel disrupt the preferred mode of game play. Game designers and companies also have their own ideas about the actions they consider
legitimate. Breaking particular terms of use can cause a player to be banned fromthe game entirely. Playing a game inevitably leads to moments of transgression
or, at the minimum, decision points about whether a player will violate norms.
The choices we make in how we proceed, as well as the ways we intervene

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communities, through the norms and emergent practices they generate, transform the game software from a designed product to a lived play experience. They
fill in gaps, patch over bumpy spots, or mutate game activities in the serviceof their own notions of fair, beautiful, or pleasurable play. Often they generate
pieces of software, the mods, that change the game space or the user interface.
As players and communities work on the games in which they are invested, theytransform them. Increasingly, these interventions get looped back into formal
development processes, altering later official releases that are themselves thenmodified. Gaming, in practice, is a cyclic process between formal developers
and players.
So, the issue becomes: As ethnographers are we similarly engaged in transgression? In transformation? At a very basic level, the activity we undertake is
deeply informed by living constantly on the edge of boundaries or limits. We
can seem odd or curious to our informants. Even when they are supportive of
our work, they may find it strange that we are so interested in mundane details
or things to which they never give a second thought. In many ways, our stanceis quite unnatural. Who would subject themselves to this outsider experience(and repeatedly so over the course of a scholarly life)? We push everyday experience to a level of analysis and critique it might not otherwise undergo. We canunwittingly break rules or norms and then, rather than simply doing a quick
repair, spend time with our participants to understand and unpack the meaningof this transgression.
We also do strange things that may be quite foreign to our field site—
including collecting, logging, documenting, photographing, archiving, and scribbling notes. Often our observations lead us to explore boundary spaces, the lines
between normal practice and misbehavior that the group draws. Understanding
the nature of transgression in a space can be incredibly productive in making
sense of the social world. But generally, any transgression we provoke is a softform, a by-product of the practice of ethnography. As I have discussed, quite
rarely do we consciously do something to shake things up. Though we may findinstances, especially in online spaces, where the playfulness of the environment
allows us to push more at this boundary (and deal with the ethical dilemmas that
may come), in general our commitments lay in understanding people, practices,and spaces as they are.
And as for transformation, it is almost too clear. An ethnographer’s presence undoubtedly alters what happens in the space, and it certainly shapes theEthnography as Playdata as it filters back. We are, of course, subjects ourselves who cocreate interactions with participants. As we write things up, we shape and create stories,
trying to tease out themes. We write histories and accounts that might not haveexisted otherwise, and sometimes those in the community we have studied
may find themselves wrestling with our interpretations and accounts. Indeed,
there is often no single homogeneous community to which we can orient, andour accounts may travel in diverse ways across different pockets of our fieldsite. Our stories also shape future researchers as they enter into similar spaces,
influencing what they look for, see, investigate. Ultimately our work presents
to a larger culture an interpretation of our field site and thus becomes part of abroader conversation and form of understanding.
But there is another side to the transformation question—how we arechanged by our work. Perhaps we find our values clarified or strongly challenged,
or we find a new side of life we enjoy. Maybe we learn about some personal
strength we did not realize we had or—just as often—confront our own flaws
and weaknesses. We rarely come away from a field site unchanged, and indeed
if we did, it might say something about the quality of the work. Transformation
is an inherent part of ethnography.

Pleasure
Discovery, experimentation, and learning are core parts of gaming. Rather than
thinking of fun, the notion of pleasure lends itself more dynamically to the rangeof experience. Playful pleasure can be woven through with joy, delight, satisfaction, and affect. Players find pleasure in mastering aspects of the game having
worked strenuously to improve skills or tackle a challenge, often repeatedly tillthey succeed. Play is not antithetical to hard work, pain, or even suffering. At
times they are wound closely together. The pleasures of play operate emotionally and as an embodied experience. In the best of moments, eyes, hands, brain,
hearing, and reflexes all function in synch with the game as a kind of dance.
If we are playing with others, that special quality of social delight can kick in,
powerfully connecting us. Gamers regularly talk about the communal pleasuresof creating shared experiences, histories, stories, and myths.
For ethnographers, our time in the field can certainly have these qualities.
We delight in finally understanding some aspect of the site we are exploring.
There are the enjoyable conversations, interactions, and observations that fill

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P L AYup our field books. We have moments in which we smile at someone offeringa poignant quotable quote (clear, sharp articulations from our participants) ordelight in being present for a compelling incident. These pleasures are both ofthe moment and, often, laden with future promise where we catch a glimpse of
their place in the written work. At other times, we seem to break across the barrier and find ourselves in a group, in a situation, where we are quasi members,
participating and responsible to the others with whom moments of mutuality
arise. We find satisfaction and joy in interpretive, breakthrough flashes. We
struggle with hurdles and challenges, often experiencing the pleasurable headiness that comes with success. We can become happy at mastering some aspectof everyday life that allows us to inhabit a space more easily, whether learning
how to use a technology in the field or becoming naturalized to a language useor practice of the community. Ethnography is filled with complex pleasures.

Embodied and Affective
As I have suggested, no matter how much the computer mediates our experience, our bodies remain a powerful part of the circuit of play. This expresses
itself in several ways. Gaming skills and tactics operate at a very base level via
hands, eyes, ears, and reflexes. We also develop a kind of ludic instinct, andwith more experience come responses and actions that seem nearly intuitive.
Knowledge of how to play takes hold in our bodies, and—without consciously
thinking—we fall into routine patterns of action. Keystroke timings and mouse
movements, visual acuity, the subconscious awareness of the sound of the digitalworld all powerfully shape action in this space. Materiality occupies a crucialrole in our play as we deal with machines, screens, even tables and chairs. Lag,a kind of ephemeral actor, looms large in online play. Sometimes we manage arhythm with it to keep playing; other times it brings the whole moment crashingdown. Play, even in the digital realm, is a profoundly material and embodied
act (Bayliss 2007; Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Lahti 2003; Simon 2007; Taylor
2012; Witkowski 2012).
And play is simultaneously affective. As Seigworth and Gregg (2010) so
helpfully note, affect has been defined in numerous ways over the years, from thepsychoanalytic to postphenomenological. I find Sara Ahmed’s (2010) reflections
on the weavings between affect, embodiment, and relationality particularly powerful when thinking about ethnography. She writes, problematizing any notion

Ethnography as Playof the autonomy of affect: “Instead, I would begin with the messiness of theexperiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency,
how we are touched by what we are near” (30). To introduce the notion of affectis not only to try to reinsert emotion, embodied experience, the unarticulatablefeeling, or passing of energy, but their often relational nature. For my purposes,
I highlight how affect operates across a range of modalities and bodies, fromadrenaline rushes to feelings of elation and defeat to sublime aesthetic experience or powerful moments of collective action.
Of course—and it almost seems too obvious to say—when we play we are
active. We engage in the space. Certainly there are varying forms and degrees.
Sometimes play takes over our entire attention, and the rest of the world gets
blocked out. Sometimes play is meditative, more repetitive action than conscious
thought. Sometimes it is absentminded, and the player is simply passing timeand can even hold conversations during it. Yet in all versions players perform,take on the part of players, and act through their bodies and in relation to others
and the artifacts of play.
And in ethnography? Certainly. Fieldwork is a deeply material practice,with all this entails. We are the research instruments. We not only engage inthe world, but our experience of it becomes woven through with our embodiment and sensory lives (Pink 2009; Wacquant 2004). In the field, we regularly
flow between being a fly on the wall and deeply present. We participate (eat thefood, go to the event, talk to people). We struggle with being exhausted but alsoenergized by our encounters. Sometimes we are put in physically challenging
situations. We sense the world, sometimes following our hunches or just as often
ignoring instinct and diving into areas we might not otherwise. Our engaged,
embodied presence is a core tool in the ethnographic method. It is a strength.
People we encounter in the field also deal with us as embodied researchers,
ones who by our very physicality are encoded, are read, in a myriad of ways.
In the moments of reflection about our subjectivity and embodied self, we canspot both the possibilities and limitations that come with ourselves as research
instruments. Throughout my own work, I have written about the varying ways
my gender, age, race, class, and sexuality have shaped my fieldwork, sometimes
opening up possibilities, sometimes closing them down. Nick Taylor (2018) has
also discussed on “researching while straight, white, and male” in gaming, andWitkowski’s (2018) consideration of “sensuous proximity” in both gaming andresearch speaks to the complexity of embodied subjectivity in the field. Our
own materiality shapes not only personal experience but the very nature of our

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P L AYdata. As such, we always contend with the ways embodiment intervenes andcoconstructs our research, for good, bad, or otherwise.
The embodied, affective character of our work and our emplacement in
the field typically leads us to reflect carefully on the ethics of our research,something all ethnographers reconcile in their own ways for each project. The
intensely participatory component of observation has long led ethnographers
to consider forms of accountability, responsibility, reciprocity, and “giving back”
to the communities they study (Lather 1986; Weems 2006). Maybe we are asked
to lend a hand with something or be present at an important event. Sometimes
we are requested to explain a field site to a curious public or to lend expertise.
The position of accountable participant researcher is a complex one, but it canbe deeply generative.
For me, the experience of being simultaneously an ethnographer and ateam member in a game brought this into sharp relief. In many game activities,
there is no outside position to assume. If you are on the team you are counted,
ethnographer or not. Not unlike playing a group sport, as a member of the team
you are regularly expected to carry your own weight, look out for the good of thegroup, and understand your actions through a collective framing. You not only
engage but are responsible in a meaningful way. You come to embody a part ofthe collective. There is no safety net, and holding yourself apart from the groupin terms of action rarely succeeds. For those of us who have done ethnographic
work in games, we may as researchers at times feel a lurking sense of distance,
but at the level of the game, the system makes no such distinction. As a result,
I have found myself more regularly asking if and how we are responsible andaccountable to participants in the field (Chen 2011). Such a position—that ofwhat I would call radical reciprocity—is a provocation (in the best sense) for
ethnography.

Frustration and Failure
And yet. . . . Amidst the discovery, the pleasure, the mastery, both play and ethnography are often hard work and are filled with failure. As a player, time in agame is spent just as often scratching your head at what went wrong and trying
to sort it out. Sometimes players wander the game world defeated. Sometimes
we cannot find the help needed to finish something. Sometimes we realize agoal is actually out of reach, either due to a lack of skills or access. I have heard

Ethnography as Play

people wonder if computer games will ever reach the level of sophistication to
make a player cry, as movies can. They question a game’s ability to draw us inemotionally. In my experience, if you still wonder about that, you have likely
never talked to an actual player. While I have not cried (yet) at the dire stateof something in the game, I—and many players—have felt anger, frustration,a racing heart, helplessness, and failure. Of course, in games failure is a crucialcomponent of learning and perfecting play. Frustration, at either our own skills
or at the game, can often push us to mastery like nothing else. But play can bepainful, and quite a few players log off in frustration and anger (so-called “ragequit”) at a space they otherwise love.
Ethnography likewise can be riddled with failures, frustrations, and missteps, and we do not talk about this enough. Over time we, as researchers,
become adept at turning these moments around or making them part of thestory. And, indeed, they are productive, just as in games. They can highlight for
us the gaps between what we know and what we do not, what we aspire to haveinsight into and what we are seemingly utterly locked out of. Our failures andthe moments in which we do not understand something or are frustrated canpush us into areas we might not have explored otherwise (Nairn, Munro, andSmith 2005).
Such instances are a powerful counterbalance to the joy we experience inthe field. Sometimes we misspeak with informants, we miss an opportunity welater kick ourselves over, our recorder runs out of power. At times we misread
events or practices. Perhaps we even make someone angry. We can struggle with
our own insecurities and desire to know but not be exposed ourselves. We may
feel conflicted in our enthusiasm for a field site and struggle with our distaste for(or even anger at) attitudes we encounter there. Especially in the early stages of
ethnographic work, we live in a double state, one of constant discovery, but one
often shaded by the struggle to catch a break, to find a good confidant, to gain
access, to get some crucial interpretive handles through which to make sense ofsomething. Failure, in both games and ethnography, is normal and productive.

Myth and the Unknowable
For all this exploration, discovery, and analysis, gaming is still filled with stories
handed down, unverified but widely believed, or lore about how somethingworks. Players sometimes create elaborate hypotheses about how the game

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P L AYworks, and—though never verified—the folklore passes on from player to player
to researcher. Gamers often theorize causal relations in imaginative and unverifiable ways and—whether we believe them or not—we sometimes find ourselves
adopting practices that embody these myths. The stories and theories handed
down are, though unverifiable, productive. They become another place in which
the game community constructs itself through folklore. Being socialized into
the mythos of a world can be a powerful part of becoming a player.
There may also be significant parts of a game world (for example, a highlevel dungeon) that one never sees, never gets access to, never even understands
in terms of mechanics or system. Players sometimes miss out on parts of a game
due to a lack of skill or conditions of play. Though the starting point for many
games fosters a dream of completion and success, as often as not, parts of thegame elude us. A game can be left unfinished. The game experience is made up
of constantly adding to a compendium of knowledge, but it is (in most cases),
always incomplete.
This is certainly also the case with ethnography. The lore and myths of
our field sites are often as important to know as any facts. The stories told, thestaged performances, are productive (Monahan and Fisher 2010). Myths are also
moments where the field site constructs, presents, and refines itself. Despite all
our hard work of discovery, analysis, and interpretation, there will also always
remain the nooks that are out of our reach. We sometimes are left with questions that we are unable to answer or to which we find hazy lines of causation.
During our research, we may know that there are places to which we simply
will never gain access or places we will never even glimpse (Gusterson 1998).
Our field sites may hold secrets and absences, or perhaps we even create themin the process of writing (Rappert 2010). Just as often, we see in retrospect anangle that we kick ourselves for not capturing. While a guiding ethic of trying
to pay due, to triangulate, to give a holistic picture of a world informs much of
our work, at the end we are always left with a degree of incompleteness. Thisis unavoidable. The social world is never fully capturable. It often resists thesystemization we seek to impose on it. We are, as we know, only ever left withpartial truths (Clifford 1986).

Leaving
At some point, players find themselves drifting away from a game—or at leastEthnography as Playwanting to. Social ties often keep people playing long after the attraction to thespace has faded. They no longer have moments of discovery or learning, thepleasures of mastery have faded, things just seem to get old and perhaps a bitboring or routine. Sometimes people set aside a game but pop back to play it
once in a while, sort of checking in. They may stop playing but still occasionally read favorite forums and websites, eventually trailing off in how frequently
they do so. If they have really invested in a game, they may archive the experience somehow through a saved play file, screenshots, notes, or perhaps evenmaintaining an account so as not to lose a character. At some point though, thegame is finally set aside.
In ethnography, if there are no outside constraints (finances requiring us
to return home, work obligations, and things like these), we can also stage ourdeparture gradually. We may begin to see the patterns repeat, we know andanticipate practices and meanings, we may have a feeling of saturation. Oursense of discovery becomes replaced with deep familiarity. We may find ourselves
become bored or restless with a field site. We begin to sense that our leaving isaround the corner and to tie up loose ends. Once gone, we may still check in with
our participants, following them when and how we can (often online). Perhaps
we have collected artifacts and objects from our time in the field that anchor
our memories. But, ultimately, we leave. Eventually like the player moving onto the next game, we go through the process of writing it all up (a kind of “savefile”). We find our next project and begin the cycle again.

Conclusion
For me the comparison of the two domains of game play and ethnography
yields some interesting overlaps and a few divergences, ones which return us tolong-standing conversations, as in the case of transgression or reciprocity. There
are a couple final points worth making about what the two domains seem toshare. Games and ethnography both rely substantially on a web of diverse actors(human and nonhuman), practices, and sometimes contentious meanings. Eachis constituted by assemblage. There is no easy whole that we capture, but instead
we insert ourselves into a complex circuit of actions, agents, and structures.
In gaming players are not only engaged with the actual software of the gameitself, but such experiences are coconstructed in relation to everything from thetechnology involved to the arrangement of play space to personal histories and

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P L AYcontexts around leisure. As ethnographers we track not only material practices
but meaning making, language use, norms, institutional actors, even policy andlaw. Any given game, and any given field site, will enlist a specific configurationof actors, materials, and practices to which we have to become attuned. Play andethnography are both assemblages and deeply situated ones at that.
In both play and ethnography we must also accept that there are always
unanticipated consequences. Sometimes these turn out to be delightful moments
and possibilities for discovery; other times they carry heavier ramifications andconsequences. At their heart, games are spaces in which our actions carry import
and, in concert with the system, experience unfolds. They are not simply environments for success or failure but processes with divergent paths. As Malaby(2007) notes, they are fundamentally spaces of contingency. While some offer
more open-ended possibilities, because they are sites of cultural work and assemblage, none is ever entirely predetermined.
Ethnography is similar. Our worlds are a complex mix of patterns andnorms alongside change and emergent transformations. We make choices, personal and methodological, that move us through the field in a variety of ways.
The communities, institutions, structures, and people we encounter profoundly
shape our experience often unexpectedly. Our time flows across varying trajectories, and as ethnographers we traverse paths and forks constantly, oftenwith unpredictable outcomes. Just as importantly, once we write up the work,
it comes to have a life of its own—well beyond our control. In both games andethnography, we are never on a static field of play but in a dynamic and emergent
space of possibility.
The qualities of play and ethnography speak to their relationship as kindreds. In the same spirit, many of us have been exploring the complexity andrichness of play. Here I have sought to use some of those rubrics to reflect backon methods, hopefully illuminating some aspects not typically discussed. My
aim is not only to push at the simplistic dichotomies of play and work or theflattening of play to fun, but to offer ethnographers an opportunity to think
about their own practices in potentially new ways, ones informed by the growing area of game studies.

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