Virtual Video Ethnography: Towards a New Field of Internet Cultural Studies

Resumo

With the recent development of virtual worlds, human action within cyberspace is rapidly expanding into new media forms such as online interactive gaming. As Internet users created virtual communities anthropologists followed along into these new frontiers and thus the field of virtual ethnography was born in the late 1980s. This paper introduces a new technique for exploring Internet culture – virtual video ethnography – the recording of human interaction from within virtual realms such as online war games, fantasy roleplaying games, and virtual social networking games. Virtual video ethnography is used to capture an apparently violent incident within a popular warfare simulation game known as Battlefield 2. This footage is then used to explore violence and hegemonic meanings within video games and demonstrate the utility of virtual video ethnography for cultural analysis. It is argued that action within the virtual realm cannot be collapsed into the same category as action within the ‘real’ world.