Congrats to Oskar Milik for passing his PhD viva!

Huge congrats to our PhD student Oskar Milik for passing his PhD viva last week. Oskar's thesis is titled "Protecting Face in Virtual Life: Identity and Interaction in Online Digital Games" and he was supervised by Associate Professor Aogan Mulcahy. Below is a summary of his project.

Title: Protecting Face in Virtual Life: Identity and Interaction in Online Digital Games

This project looks at heavily invested players in Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games in order to see what aspects of self are projected through the computer screen, and what is left anonymous. It takes the form of a dramaturgical and ethnomethodological analysis of self-declared “hardcore” players and organizations in the online digital MMO games World of Warcraft and EVE Online. Drawing on the works of sociologists and game researchers, this project focuses specifically on the most invested players in order to see how the virtuality of their online interactions causes changes in the way the individual projects and maintains identity as well as how social control mechanisms are formed. Data was collected over a period of five years from 2011-2016 with primary sources of data being recordings taken of organizational events and speeches as well as ethnographic notes taken through participant observation.

The analysis of this data leads to three distinct outcomes that are valuable for the discipline of sociology as well as research in digital games. First, it shows that by focusing on either character-based interactions in-game or on out-of-game personality features of the player, studies performed on digital games have either studied physical-world respondent information or online linguistic interaction. In response, it presents the concept of persona to try to unify the anonymity of character-based interaction with the permanence of player-based traits. Second, this project shows how systems of social control are created and maintained through complex player-designed systems using both in-game and out-of-game resources to provide a meta-game reputation for players interested in “hardcore” play. Finally, this project highlights the challenges that in-game leaders face, and their efforts to overcome these, in trying to construct and maintain social order and social structures in a virtual environment.