Second Life residents can buy land, build homes, exercise property rights, enjoy a vibrant urban nightlife, attend live concerts and lectures, establish businesses that engage in real commerce with actual currency, practice monogamy, or engage in open sexual relations. ![]() World of Warcraft players join clans and guilds, buy and sell supplies, and must cooperate to complete group quests that may involve dozens of participants. What differentiates such multiplayer environments from the older genre of single-player shooter games are not only the fantastic landscapes or thrill of adventure and competition, but the opportunities to socially interact on-screen and in real time with other players, to converse by text or voice, and to form gameworld relationships and communities that endure over time. The virtual world of Second Life boasts more than a million registered "residents" of whom tens of thousands are simultaneously online at any given time. The leading game, World of Warcraft, alone tops 10 million players including more than 5.5 million in Asia, 2.5 million in North America, and 2 million in Europe (Woodcock 2008). With an estimated 16 million subscribers worldwide-a number expected to double after 2012-massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are fast-growing venues for intercultural communication encounters. Keywords: cross-cultural adaptation, immigrant acculturation, identity negotiation and management, intercultural communication, schema theory, massively multiplayer online games ![]() After reviewing theories of cross-cultural adaptation-including Nishida’s schema theory and Kim’s integrative theory-and what they predict regarding the intercultural communication strategies of sojourners, this article shows how game studies research confirms that new MMOG players deploy communication in the predicted manner to achieve As such, new players may be viewed as sojourners who employ communication to acculturate themselves into the society of the gameworld, accommodate the cultural Others they encounter, and negotiate viable identities. Could these theories be employed to study the acculturation of newcomers into the virtual cultures of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs)? These gameworlds are inhabited by millions of people worldwide and have emerged as societies with their own cultural myths, schemata, argot, and communication practices. Only in recent years have formal theories of immigrant and sojourner acculturation been developed. To Multiplayer Online Games as Cross-Cultural Adaptations Mark Ward To Multiplayer Online Games as Cross-Cultural Adaptations Avatars and Sojourners: Explaining the Acculturation of Newcomers Avatars and Sojourners: Explaining the Acculturation of Newcomers
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