how to assemble your ethnography

Please note that you must read all the instructions below or you will fail the paper, and the course, with no remedy and no possibility of appeal. By submitting a paper you agree to these conditions.
Some free advice: Generally how you get a good grade is to think, but mostly show me you care.Imagine that I am not chained to the wall and not required to read this paper, and that the grade you get is based on when I get bored by your indifferent writing and put it down. If you assume I have to want toread your paper, you will write better, if you assume only that I have to read it, you will write the worst paper imaginable.
LENGTH: The paper will be a longish one, a minimum of 15 pages double-spaced 12 point san serif font (Times New Roman, for example), or 4500 words, whichever is more (pictures won’t help you). It can be longer (no limit) and must be significantly longer if you want to do better than a Pass.That’s the minimum, absolute, achieving this minimum means you will probably get a pass, you must exceed it in some way to hope for a better grade. Note that most of the paper will be composed of your battle reports that have been edited, pieced together into a single long narrative, and to which has been added a second layer of theoretical reflection from the readings. If you have been doinbg your battle reports every week, and your readings, this will not be very hard.
First, Technical considerations: You may want to use screenshots/images in your final paper and they must be able to fit in the single document you submit. There is no problem doing this but you should bulk reformat them so they are a reasonable size! You can do this individually with free programs like Irfanview or in bulk using programs like formatfactory. The point is, the practical art of learning to manage your media files in this way is very much part of what you need to learn in doing ethnography. So, yes, you need to use images where appropriate to augment your narrative, and you need to resize them to make the document sendable.
Secondly, some of you have not found a game you can play: this is your problem. If that is the case, you need to figure out the solution, I have done as much as I can to solve this problem, I can give you no specific advice, there are too many variables, but just because I put no specific requirements (like downloading a game) does not mean you don’t have to do it if that is the only way to solve the problem. If I could, I would advise everyone to own a PC computer with a reasonable graphics card. If anyone asks me what they should do, I will advise them to do this.
TOPIC: Your paper will be an ‘auto-ethnography’: it will be an ethnographic narrative centered on your own gaming experiences. If you want to know what an ethnography looks like, look at the first chapter of Nardi’s book. Start by telling the story, start concrete, and then insert theoretical observations or asides into your ‘gaming diary’. Alternately, you can divide up your stories and frame them according to the theoretical theme they deal with (World, Interface, Avataretc).
YOUR STORY: The auto-ethnography of a newbie gamer. Just like an ethnographer plunked down in a distant unfamiliar place doing a traditional ethnography, you first beging from the perspective of a stranger commenting on the strange world of the games you are in and how you adjusted to them and learned their ways. You must talk about your life as a gamer, so that invites you to reflect empirically and theoretically on the differences of different games you have played both as games and as narratives (i.e. what ‘narrative potentials’ they have and how they were as games. The easiest way to organize the whole thing is, like Nardi, to organize it autobiographically like a ‘diary’ of a newbie gamer.
WORLDNESS: an obligatory subsection.You must also devote an entire section of at least 3-4 pages (that’s 900-1200 words, not including images) to reflecting on virtual world you have played most in, and talk explicitly about the ‘worldness’ of that world in relation to a general model of ‘worldness’, note that there are several thinkers who have discussed this, one of which is Klastrup, but also Jenkins, Nardi, Taylor and others. You must be as thorough as possible in finding all the thinkers who have talked about worldness and summarize them and cite them and compare their observations to your own. This section should be a separable labeled sub-part with its own intro and conclusion. This section can go wherever you like
OTHER THEMES: You must find other themes that your stories address: how you told the stories is is significant (narrative), the in game versus out of game worlds the players inhabit are significant, the interface, the tenor of interaction with other players: in short, some observation and some theorist from each week of the readings should be in evidence, minimum, and productive use of these observations need to be made in relation to the stories you are telling. You can make these observations along the way in telling one long story, arranged much like a diary, or you can divide up your episodes and tell the stories according to the themes theyillustrate (i.e. asection on your troubles with the interface, a section on the avatar, a section on this ort that).
For extra points, do some additional research on your own, go into detail on a single topic, etc.
References. You should cite people you quote or draw ideas from using the standard anthropological method (LAST NAME YEAR: PAGE). You should fill in whatever information you know and look it up if you don’t as best you can. You should provide references that look like this at the end, these are not the standard but these are one of many models I will accept,
Article looks lik e Last Name, First Name. YEAR.Title.Journal name, issue number, pages
Book looks like Last Name, First Name. YEAR.Title.Place of publication: Publisher
Book chapter looks like Last Name, First Name. YEAR.Title.In Book Title, pages.
Electronic pub looks like Last Name, First Name. YEAR.Title.URL

How to assemble it.You have taken notes on theoretical readings and you have a range of notes of battle reports from a number of games. The idea is to combine them into an ethnography of your life as a gamer, your encounter with the games and the worlds, what you learned from this encounter in both personal, ethnographic and theoretical terms. It is NOT a voyage of self-discovery, not a place to moralize or engage in meanderings about things completely unrelated, or pieties, homilies and truisms. Any statement that humans are basically alike all over the world is false, and will lead to immediate failure, similarly, any allegation that humans have always been the same since the dawn of time will also lead to failure. God is in the details. You must tell detailed, lively, ethnographic stories based on your participation and observations and draw out interesting and perceptive generalizations and theoretical conlcusions based on these, relating them to the theoretical readings. Not all the details you tell need to be justified by theory, but at least some of them in each section do. The idea that theory can be separated from data or experience is deeply stupid, do not bore me with it: you must make them speak to each other. An ethnography involves BOTH theoretical reflection and a first person narrative based on participant-observation, combined in such a way that the theoretical perspectives from the weekly readings informs your personal observations drawn from your battle reports, which in turn allow you to reflect back on, illustrate, build on, or critique the theoretical perspectives. A common sense approach that proposes that there is some value in narrative separate from theory is stupid and will lead to a flunking grade. What you must do is find a way to make your ethnographic observations speak to theory
In 1922 the ethnographer Malinowski defined the avenues of ethnography this ways
The goal of ethnographic field-work must be approached through three avenues:
• 1. The organization of the tribe, and the anatomy of its culture must be recorded in firm, clear outline. The method of concrete, statistical documentation is the means through which such an outline has to be given. (I wouldn’t say statistics are relevant here, but certain a broad overview of a phenomenon in general, the observed regularities, and so forth)
• 2. Within this frame, the imponderabilia of actual life, and the type of behavior have to be filled in. They have to be collected through minute, detailed observations, in the form of some sort of ethnographic diary, made possible by close contact with native life. (your battle reports and day to day narratives of play)
• 3. A collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus inscriptionum, as documents (i.e. things like chatlogs, actual images and quotations from your fellow players, remember to provde them with pseudonyms. Here also would be materials drawn from forums, machinima, and so on)
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