Facebook and FarmVille: A Digital Ritual Analysis of Social Gaming

Games and Culture http://gac.sagepub.com/ Facebook and FarmVille: A Digital Ritual Analysis of Social Gaming Benjamin Burroughs Games and Culture 2014 9: 151 DOI: 10.1177/1555412014535663 The online version of this article can be found at: http://gac.sagepub.com/content/9/3/151 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Games and Culture can be found at: Email Alerts: http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://gac.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Jun 19, 2014 What is This? Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 Article Facebook and FarmVille: A Digital Ritual Analysis of Social Gaming Games and Culture 2014, Vol. 9(3) 151-166 ª The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1555412014535663 gac.sagepub.com Benjamin Burroughs1 Abstract This article seeks to build a digital ritual framework for the analysis of social gaming and social networking. The architectural design that intertwines Facebook and FarmVille is heightened by the formal and informal participation in ritual practices, which we theorize as digital rituals. Facebook and FarmVille provide a substantive case study that delves into the topical blurring of lines around the game space or magic circle. Through digital ethnographic methodologies the article identifies a number of digital ritual engagements that fit well with Grant McCracken’s (1986) four different kinds of consumer rituals: exchange rituals, possession rituals, grooming rituals, and divestment rituals. Social gaming is contextualized as the extension of digital third places complicating distinctions between social network and social networking sites. Beyond simply phatic communication or decompression, FarmVille and Facebook through digital ritual participation are increasingly the manifestation of our networked interests, communities, and lives. Keywords Facebook, FarmVille, social gaming, digital ritual, social media, social networking sites, social games, ritual, magic circle, digital ethnography, digital anthropology 1 University of Iowa, Coralville, IA, USA Corresponding Author: Benjamin Burroughs, University of Iowa, 700 19th Ave B4, Coralville, IA 52241, USA. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 152 Games and Culture 9(3) I woke up this morning, got some orange juice and a bagel and sat down to plow my fields, plant some seeds, and move my brand new red tractor out of the shed I built last week. I checked my Facebook messages to find that my neighbors had already fertilized my crops for me the night before. ‘‘That sure was nice of them,’’ I mused. ‘‘I had better start helping out more in the neighborhood before everyone thinks I’m a jerk or something.’’ I also received a message that told me that ‘Susan’ had achieved a crop mastery of tomatoes. Now she is going to have a cool tomato sign posted on her farm symbolizing her mastery. ‘‘I have got to get me one of those.’’ I click on her message to get the coin bonus, leave a ‘congrats’ on her wall and navigate back to my own farm. Being from Hawaii but living in California and Iowa I have chosen to plant pineapples. I planted them a day ago and thanks to my friends fertilization they should be nice and juicy this evening when I plan to harvest them. They seem to be doing well. This has taken ten minutes—I feel productive. I won’t be on ‘til later but as usual, I’ll probably sneak in a few peeks between work and classes on my cell phone. I leave my tractor out to show off to my neighbor. ‘‘He’s been wanting one of these,’’ I chuckle to myself. With the rise of social networking has come the parallel growth of social gaming as an extension or appendage to a main platform such as Facebook. Facebook and FarmVille provide a substantive case study analysis that delves into the topical blurring of lines around the game space. Facebook and other social networking platforms have provided a space for the presenting and sharing of information but also for connecting users, friends, long lost friends, family, neighbors, and communities—facilitating social interaction and conversation. As an application, FarmVille provides another space for that social cohesion to evolve. Despite being categorized as mind-numbing inculcation of repetitive behavior (Liszkiewicz, 2010), Farmvillers derive a great deal of pleasure from the activities associated with farming but also with the pattern of sociality that is architecturally driven into the game space where ‘‘code is law’’ (Lessig, 1999) . The architectural design that intertwines Facebook and FarmVille is heightened by the formal and informal participation in ritual practices, which we theorize as digital rituals. We believe that by identifying an underlying ritual structure in social gaming, we can better understand how these ritualistic practices sustain levels of engagement and social solidarity. In 2009, FarmVille boasted more monthly active users than all of Twitter, with a daily player count of 26.5 million, up significantly from 11 million just 3 months prior, peaking at 85 million users (Dybwad, 2009). Although these numbers may be contested and FarmVille has declined in its popularity, it remains that FarmVille and social gaming as a form of online game-play has become a part of the collective cultural conscious of the digital age. FarmVille is a Zynga game where you purchase seeds, trees, animals, buildings, decorations, and vehicles in exchange for coins earned by selling crops and amassing experience points (xp) by purchasing items, plowing, planting, and harvesting crops. You are encouraged to invite your friends, family, and entire social network to join you as you build your own neighborhoods. In a highly influential article on social networking, Boyd and Ellison (2007) lay out a Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 153 Burroughs definition for social network sites as ‘‘web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system’’ (p. 2) which they distinguish from ‘‘social networking sites.’’ For Boyd and Ellison, the use of the term ‘‘networking’’ emphasizes ‘‘relationship initiation, often between strangers. While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them’’ (p. 2). Beer (2008), however, critiques this distinction saying that the term ‘‘social network sites’’ is too broad and doesn’t account for the specificity of sites where networking is the primary motivation. ‘‘In short, the motivation to form expanding networks, the practice of ‘networking’ as described by Boyd and Ellison, that defines social networking sites should be the grounds for separating out different types of site (along with other established differences). It seems a shame to adjust our classifications so that they no longer account for this nuance’’ (Beer, 2008, p. 518). In following Beer, we might ask what classification does a website like Facebook and a social game application like FarmVille receive according to Boyd and Ellison. Where does social gaming fit into these definitions? Is it a social network site, a social networking site, or might we choose to expand and nuance our existing vernacular to account for the complexities of social gaming. Facebook can be used as both a social network and a social networking site. However, when ‘‘friends’’ lists reach into the hundreds, if not thousands, Facebook can become less about networking and more about broadcasting. The content stream aggregated from your network can be a form of mass communication, where ‘‘likes,’’ comments, and posts serve to circulate content. Facebook can also be used much more interpersonally through groups, targeted messages, and invitations to resemble more of Beer’s (2008) criteria for a social networking site. In the same Facebook browse, a user may maneuver the platform as both social network and social networking site. Social gaming architecturally focuses on a smaller group of users to form a social network within a social network. Understanding how digital rituals are constructing engagement and sociality can increase our awareness of social networks and social networking. We begin with a review of the ‘‘magic circle’’ to better contextualize the blurring of game and the real-world spaces, followed by a working definition of digital ritual. We then explore how this relates to the concept of third spaces before moving on to an explanation and justification of ethnographic methodologies and discussion of results, social gaming, and ritual participation. Literature Review: The Magic of Circles The term magic circle derives originally from the work of Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens (1949) that draws a distinction between the space of gameplay and the norms of everyday life. The inside of the magic circle has its own set of rules, norms, and practices that are entered into upon crossing the threshold of the Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 154 Games and Culture 9(3) barrier. It is important to conceptualize that barrier of the magic circle as a social construction that is negotiated around game time and space. An example of the difference in rules in norms is displayed by the physical punching of another person. If done in the context of a boxing ring, the act of punching is encouraged and often glorified, but when that same action is performed outside the boxing ring, a different set of societal norms are enforced, sometimes resulting in prison (Lastowka, 2009, Williams, Kennedy, & Moore, 2011). Following the work of Huzinga, Salen and Zimmerman (2004) applied the concept of the magic circle, which they described as the theoretical structure for all game designs. Salen and Zimmerman are concerned with questions of how open or closed is the chalk line of the magic circle. The chalk line represents the thin boundary between the game world and the world outside the game. Within the chalk line, there are three main ways to understand the framework of that game-play: rules, play, and culture. The rules are the formal restrictions of the player in the game that have closed systems, while play is defined as the human interactions that take place in the space that can be opened or closed. Culture is the relation to cultural tropes present in the game that result for Salen and Zimmerman in widely open systems. The focus then is on the magic circle as a frame that carves out the time and space of the game world. Recent scholarship has called into question the magic circle—asking if it has gone ‘‘rusty.’’ With an increase in blurring around the boundaries of the chalk line, the apparent utility of the metaphor has been diminished. Copier (2005) calls for a revised reading of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens in its original Dutch form. Copier believes a closer reading will point to a superior interpretation of the magic circle. ‘‘We have to take a closer look at the context of the citation where he introduces the magic circle. Huizinga’s use of the magic circle was more than an example. He refers to the magic circle as a ‘ritual space’’’ (p. 6). This paradigm shift suggests a new conceptualization of social gaming from a ritual perspective. For Huizinga, ritual is play and play is ritual, but Copier wants to tease this out further. She includes analog and digital role-playing as ‘‘collections of performances of ritual acts, in which players are connecting worlds while constructing the game/play space, identities, and meaning’’ (p. 8). What Copier fails to advance is a working definition of ritual in a digital age beyond the general labels as performative or bricolage (Turner, 1969). The section given subsequently provides a working definition of ritual that attempts to move past the generalizations of performance and bricolage and will serve as a foundation for interpreting the ethnographic observations to follow. Defining Ritual The appearance of media anthropology has grown a renewed interest in the epistemological soul of the conceptual tool—ritual, theorizing digital rituals as a type of media ritual. In the landmark publication on ritual and media entitled Media Rituals, Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 155 Burroughs Nick Couldry (2003) incorporates the work of Bourdieu (1991) and Bloch (1989) in an analysis of power. Couldry proposes an emphasis ‘‘on the process of social construction that underlies the apparent fit with modern societies of Durkheim or neo-Durkheimian analyses of ritual’’ (Couldry, 2003, p. 7, original emphasis). This particular reading of Durkheim challenges conventionally held ideals of the functionalist tradition and neo-Durkheimian model, stating instead ‘‘that media rituals should not be interpreted as subservient to an existing society, but as active constructors of social order’’ (Reijnders, 2007, p. 225). This active social order can be understood as the ritualized space of the magic circle. Put in another way Couldry, drawing from Bloch (1989, p. 130) as well as Barthes’ turnstile metaphor of myth, claims that it is the nature of rituals’ ambiguity, ‘‘rituals’ oscillation between timeless history and contingent adaptation that allows us to believe in their overriding ‘truth’’’ (Couldry, 2003, p. 28). The enacting of mediated rituals helps to legitimate that myth and instigate its accompanying symbolic power. Ritual becomes an active process of engagement and meaning making. In framing our specific analysis of media rituals in social gaming, it will first be important to understand that we will not be viewing digital rituals as dogmatic extensions of a preexisting social order but as tools that enable ritual performances that help construct and coconfigure new possibilities of social order. Second, we need to recognize a nuanced interpretation of that social order. Members of social networks enacting ritual scripts through mediated technology, who then feel a sense of belonging or social cohesion through that behavioral action, enact a real sense of belonging that operates like a myth to make the collective seem real. We follow the Chicago School maxim: If people take something as real, it is real in its consequences (although there is a tendency within the academy to devalue socially constructed ‘‘reality’’ as a less ‘‘real’’ reality, Peters & Rothenbuhler, 1989). In this way, the ritual enactments in social networking casual games meld the real world outside the chalk line with the game space in new and meaningful ways. We now turn to formulating our respective ritual definition that will provide us with enough theoretical capital to traverse the complexity of ritual. Ritual has been compared to art in that one authoritative definition does not exist to objectively, concretely define its boundaries or substance (Lewis, 1980). Rather than giving into this conundrum or trying to totally reinvent the wheel we will provide a few key definitions in the literature and then drawing from this literature point ourselves in the direction of engaging the underlying complexity of ritual functions in a social game such as Farmville. However, we must add to this Couldry’s revision of anthropology and communication theory that he believes centers on three basic definitions of ritual: 1. ‘‘habitual action (any habit or repeated pattern, whether or not it has a particular meaning); 2. formalised action (for example, the regular and meaningful pattern by which a table is laid for food in a particular culture); Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 156 Games and Culture 9(3) 3. action involving transcendent values (such as the Holy Communion, which in Christian contexts is understood as embodying a sense of direct contact with the ultimate value, God).’’ (Couldry, 2003 p. 3). 3 2 1 Figure 1. Basic definitions of ritual. Couldry favors the later definition, calling the first definition of habitual action uninteresting and wanting to discuss it no further (Couldry, 2005). He also sees the second and third definitions having some overlap but favors a definition that directs us to values rather than purely forms of action. I want to use the potential of all of these forms of ritual to facilitate a more robust conception of ritual. To do this, I propose that these definitions be viewed as gradations (Figure 1). Passing from one definition of ritual to the next only deepens the ritual involvement and its potency for enacting social cohesion. A habit cannot be written off as unimportant just because it is not on its own transcendental. Habitual actions can reinforce and deepen the larger ritual experience. Throughout my ethnographic research, I found myself constantly checking on my farm. I understand this as part of the game-play and game mechanics but still cannot help but go online every day. Today, I set the lofty goal for myself to write five pages of this article, but the first thing I did was to go directly online to my usual browsing routines that can take up to an hour a day. It is a habit. This in and of itself may not be very interesting, but when put in the larger contextualization of ritual, my daily pilgrimage online leads me to enhance other formalized ritual actions and reminds me of my linkage to the transcendental values such as family and community, to which I place considerable value. This time delay in FarmVille game-play, which leads to a constant need for players to return to the game platform and monitor their play, is now a regular feature in many social games (in fact, if we were to organize social games into different categories, this particular type of time lapse game design would certainly be one of those). Isolated habitual actions may prove largely meaningless, but if we conceive ritual in stages or processes of gradation, then we acquire a richer understanding of the constitution of ritual practice. Even something as mundane as a pick-up Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 157 Burroughs basketball game can have these degrees of ritual involvement. The habitual would be the weekly meeting to play the game, while the formalized ritual could be the running of the same offensive plays, 2–3 zone defenses, or the wearing of the same color shirt to demarcate players each game. The transcendental is approached when the formalized team in a league is representative of a community. When the players play for the community, a value larger than the individual, deeper formulations of ritual cohesion are enacted. By extending Couldry’s definition to express the gradations of ritual, with each passing gradation producing a stronger, more compelling articulation of ritual, we now have a definition of ritual that can be applied to our investigation of ritual enactments in social gaming, specifically FarmVille. Another noteworthy point to review in the literature is the concept of third places, especially the importance of virtual third places. Media scholarship has long endeavored to gauge the positive or negative impacts of new media and technology on society. From the printing press to the book, from television to the Internet, media research has often focused on these perceived threats or moral panics to individuals and communities. Robert Putnam’s (2000) classic book Bowling Alone argues that we have seen a decline in community and civic engagement in late modernity. Traditional media such as television began displacing time normally spent in third places, spaces such as bars and coffee shops. This harks back to a Habermasian conception of the public sphere, a communal space for public reason and critical discussion. Third places, however, are conceptualized as the ‘‘agora of the common man’’ built on neutral grounds, where playful conversation is one of the main characteristics (Oldenburg, 1999). Turning Putnam’s arguments on their head, Steinkuehler and Williams (2006) advocate for massively multiplayer online (MMO) games to be categorized as third places as well. These online games exhibit the same traits as the local bar or pub because they allow for a mediated informal sociability that can potentially bridge social capitol and forge emotional bonds among players. This mediated ‘‘home away from home’’ functions as a leveler, has ‘‘regulars,’’ and with increased use of voice and video chat allows for multiple levels and degrees of conversation. The natural extension of this argument is to contextualize Facebook and social networks (Rao, 2008) as a salient example of digital third places. Through the manipulation of the Facebook canvas and its tools, everything from public walls, pictures, posts, groups, or status messages, users become further intertwined in the act and art of conversation. It is our observation that the addition of FarmVille serves to further augment the position of Facebook as a third place in the lives of its users. We must then pose the question; can the activities associated with social gaming in third places be conceptualized within a ritual framework? To answer this question we seek to understand the attitudes and activities of the community through ethnographic methodologies. Participant Observation and Ethnographic Methodology I chose for this ethnography to employ the usage of full participant observation. This means that I wanted to be as deeply embedded into the FarmVille culture, practice, Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 158 Games and Culture 9(3) and community (neighborhood) as possible. A full engagement in participant observation of the community meant not only observing but also joining FarmVille as a user. In order to maintain anonymity (the potential skewing of data from the use of my personal Facebook page was deemed too great), I logged just over 200 hr of game-play through one of my main informant’s farm and neighborhood. This permitted me to freely navigate and communicate with members of the neighborhood, in addition to planting, plowing, and customizing my own plot of farmland.1 The research question demands an in-depth, ‘‘thick description’’ of the lives of people who identify themselves as Farmvillers.2 Despite the restraints of being immersed in the single community, great care was taken to observe and interview a broader swath of FarmVille users, particular attention was paid to the interactions and exchanges that took place between community members and subsequently between game platforms. Time was spent both in FarmVille and in Facebook (already the colloquial use of ‘in’ for FarmVille and ‘on’ for Facebook is telling), to better comprehend the architectural interplay enmeshing the two spaces.3 This type of digital ethnography has been called many names such as online or virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000; Miller & Slater, 2000), netnography (Kozinets, 2010), or an entire subdiscipline of media anthropology (Rothenbuhler & Coman, 2005). Miller (2012) advocates that digital ethnography should not be understood as some academic ‘‘gimmick’’ but that ‘‘the impacts of digital technologies are likely to be among the most significant changes that we will encounter as ethnographic fieldworkers over the next generation’’ (pp. 385–386). This article seeks to push this nexus of anthropology, communication studies, game studies, and technology into the social networking and social gaming sphere.4 To compliment the ethnographic participant observation and to ensure a measure of self-reflexivity, in-depth interviews were performed with key informants to further flesh out the user’s experience. These interviews proved invaluable for deepening my understanding of the rich social ties and reciprocity of performing in FarmVille.5 Ethics and Consent This ethnography was based primarily on public FarmVille behavior and specific individuals were not identified; accordingly, specific permissions were not obtained. However, those within the neighborhood where I participated as a community member were informed of my ethnographic research and data collection on the community. Key informants were told the purposes of the ethnographic interviews and informally gave their permission. Names have been changed to protect the anonymity of informants. Results Through my ethnographic research I have extracted a number of ritual engagements that fit well with Grant McCracken’s (1986) four different kinds of consumer rituals: Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 159 Burroughs exchange rituals, possession rituals, grooming rituals, and divestment rituals. In the same way that ‘‘the consumer system supplies individuals with the cultural materials to realize their various and changing ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman, middle-aged or elderly, a parent, a citizen, or a professional’’ (p. 88), the FarmVille game space embeds these meaningful exchanges architecturally into the ritualized transfer of social identity and sociality. Liszkiewicz (2010) succinctly explains basic game mechanics: Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop . . . Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again (para. 14). Where Liszkiewicz sees nothing but repetition, in a gift economy (Hyde, 1983), the transfer of goods is inspired through social reciprocity rather than pure economics. In FarmVille, the cultural materials and consumer rituals structure the game-play. We begin with exchange rituals to flesh-out how users are participating in social gaming rituals. Exchange rituals are the most obvious of the ritual involvement in FarmVille. When we select a gift for someone at Christmas or birthdays, we are aware of the reasons as to why we are giving the gift. We imbue the gift with some meaning, as value and worth are transferred through the exchange. In FarmVille, we literally exchange (digital) labor to produce a crop. Plowing and fertilizing the field makes one more invested in the outcome of the planting of the seeds. More important, however, is the exchange of labor you perform for a friend or a neighbor. Consider the following quote left by FarmVille (authorized by Sandra) as a message to Sandra’s entire neighborhood: Sandra came to their farm only to discover that some wonderful friends and neighbors had already stopped by to fertilize their crops! When a community member clicks on the message, they are given a reward for the action and sent to Sandra’s farm. Social cohesion is formed, as these exchange rituals bind communities together through a system of reciprocity. You are rewarded in the game-play by being a more active participant and social member of your group. The more labor you exchange, the more reciprocity you can expect. In following with our gradations of ritual, the habitual act of checking FarmVille and clicking on crops is intensified when it is formalized into performing the exchange of labor for a neighbor’s field and when that act is published on the Facebook wall. We begin to see how FarmVille and Facebook coalesce to blur the game space of the magic circle. The Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 160 Games and Culture 9(3) transcendental is approached when this social reciprocity results in stronger feelings of closeness and friendship among players of FarmVille. Informants repeatedly pointed to their deep level of engagement being attributed to the pleasure they found in daily exchanges of gifts from FarmVille but also the leaving of messages and the communication it sparked between friends and family. Digging a bit further, informants felt they were learning about and experiencing these often long held social relations in new and meaningful ways through the combination of the game space with the social network platform. This renewal of family and community bonds turns Facebook into a social networking site for this kind of social gaming. The second category of consumer rituals is rituals of possession. Once a consumer receives a good, McCracken says they spend a fair amount of time affirming their personal ownership over the good and ascribing meaning. Consumers are performing their ownership by ‘‘cleaning, discussing, comparing, reflecting, showing off and even photographing many of their new possessions’’ (p. 85). These are all main components of Farmville game-play. In FarmVille, you are given a plot of land that you are able to manipulate. Although the graphics may be somewhat rudimentary compared to console gaming or some MMOs, there is a great degree of liberty allotted for spatial customization of a farm. This altering of space is a highly visible and social activity because of the sharing of neighborhoods and game spaces. Personalization happens when goods are altered to better express the personalities of their owners. I have seen farmers who have everything lined up diagonally, for example, or who only own cows and this fluidity allows for enhanced personalized possession of the space. One reward in the game is achieved when a player takes a photograph of his or her farm and sends it to his or her Facebook friends. Here, we see another example of a possession ritual embedded into the game mechanics. Discussion of goods and performances are built into game-play but also the discussion of specific achievements. Sammy just earned the ‘High Roller’ blue ribbon in FarmVille! In publicly acknowledging and comparing awards garnered in FarmVille, a player is publicly declaring his or her performance and involvement in the FarmVille world. This serves to sanction the activity to the larger Facebook community. On September 29, 2009, FarmVille added another possession ritual, where players could obtain ‘‘Crop Mastery’’ over specific crops. This led to a desire to achieve but also fueled a culture of comparison and customization. In the first vignette, I described how Susan had become a master of tomato farming. Along with that title she also gets to post a sign that denotes her tomato-growing abilities but that also connotes her investment in the game and the FarmVille community. It further personalizes the space, as she has the ability to display the mastery of the crops she felt personally compelled to grow. My distance from Hawaii has led me to grow pineapples, but I also want to display that mastery by achieving a ‘‘Pineapple Crop Mastery’’ sign I will proudly post on my farm. Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 161 Burroughs Next, we have grooming rituals where consumers extract value out of the good by repetitive practices. For some goods, their meaning is literally perishable and there is the need to have specific repeated practices to maintain their intrinsic value. It is in this repetition that consumers are able to transfer symbolic meaning. Grooming is most often associated with hygiene and personal grooming or in the grooming of goods and objects themselves. In FarmVille, repetitive actions are the basis of game-play. The low level of entry and the monotonous, remedial nature of the farming tasks such as planting, plowing, and fertilizing may very well be categorized as grooming rituals. By participating in the habitual grooming of crops and trees, players become invested more deeply in the game. They watch as their repetitive efforts come to life for them. Inherent in the process is a time delay depending on the type of crop that can last a couple of hours or a couple of days. This time delay often makes players feel compelled to sporadically check-in on their crops. Repetitious ‘‘checking-in’’ further connects a player to the game space accessed through Facebook. The mutual grooming of public character profiles in Facebook coupled with the grooming of crops and neighborhoods as Farmvillers seek to extend their communities and rewards with further invites, all lend to the extraction of value and meaning from the combined game/third space. Finally, we have rituals of divestment that are performed when we want to exorcise the imprint of a previous owner so that the good can more fully be appreciated as one’s own. Also, divestment rituals are important in the regifting of an object where a stripping away of emotional connection is executed to ease the transition. In FarmVille, you raise crops but you can also raise animals. Every now and then you are given a stray animal that can be given up for adoption. Sammy found a sad, lonely black kitten on their farm. Oh no! Sammy was farming when a sad, lonely black kitten wandered onto their farm in FarmVille. She’s been searching for her lost friend who likes to hide inside of Jack-OLanterns. She feels very sad and could use a new home and help finding her friend. This gifting of stray animals to members of the community instills a system of reciprocity. Not only are you helping other farm members through exchanges of labor but you give up animals for adoption with the understanding that a reciprocal relationship exists between members of the community. Discussion Through the course of the ethnographic research, two main points began to arise that helped frame the emergence of FarmVille in social networking. After discussing the architectural blurring of the magic circle and the connection to third places, we look at these spaces as liminalities, finishing with some limitations and suggestions for further research. Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 162 Games and Culture 9(3) The combining of a social networking platform with the FarmVille game space has further blurred the chalk line of Huizanga’s magic circle. FarmVille’s game mechanics and architectural design promote this further blurring. We can conceptualize this blurred space as a vibrant third place that exists between the spaces. The game exists on the walls, comments, and discussions of Facebook, and the social interactions structured and influenced by Facebook exist in Farmville. Brian got a big ol’ reward for being such a great farmer and wants to share their success with you! Blaine wants to send a big ‘THANK YOU!’ to their generous friends in FarmVille! The deeper this shared space moves beyond the habitual and formalized ritual and into transcendental ritual practice, the greater the participation in FarmVille can heighten social cohesion. If my play in FarmVille, for example, will help me feel more connected to my family, then I am more likely to be invested. As games seek to inextricably connect a person’s social network within the gaming space, that third space becomes all the more inviting. Victor Turner (1969) extensively describes the liminal phase as a ritual state of transition or threshold. Liminal periods are moments of rupture in the normality of time and space. They serve as these times of transition where identities become malleable as the in-between space becomes meaningful for stepping outside the structures of power and constructing social bonds. This becomes a desirable period that is then repeated. Through the course of my interviews, my informants continually said they played Facebook as a ‘‘time waster.’’ When I pressed them to explain what that really meant, they systematically described something along the lines of decompressing from the day or stepping outside of routine. Most game-play is also limited to 10- to 15-min increments combined with Facebook browsing. The combined space of Facebook and FarmVille is perhaps best described then as a liminal space where players engage with a low level of entry for the purposes of decompressing and transitioning from the complexities of modernity. Just as turning on the television after a busy day at work serves to transition many from their work space to their home life, the ritualized play on FarmVille is creating new and meaningful ways for players to decompress wherever they may be. This seems to suggest that FarmVille acts as a form of phatic communication that extends from the Facebook platform for its participants. Rather than simply denigrating FarmVille as a waste of time, we may think of this game-play and game space as serving a productive role in network sociality and communication. With the rise of Smartphone technology, iPads, tablets, and mobile gaming devices, social games are an increasing part of our culture. This research is limited to FarmVille and a particular moment in its history. FarmVille has decreased in popularity, being replaced by other social games such as MafiaWars, DrawSomething, or CandyCrush (undoubtedly these game titles will also Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 163 Burroughs wane in popularity), but this digital ritual phenomenon as an architectural component of game-play persists. Audiences engage with the flow between Facebook and social gaming at different levels, some are more passive consumers of the aggregated content while others in the prosumer mold are actively engaged in a participatory flow where they are contributors to social networks. Although there are different levels of reading and engagement, we all contribute by being parts of social networks even if that only is by lurking or clicking. There also exists a broader cultural flow that can be read through these cultural strips that are animated through online viewing of content. Social networking sites no longer constitute simply third spaces, but Facebook is the method through which we inhabit and enter the Internet. We experience the flow of the Internet and popular culture through social networking and gaming. We often think of this spread as being either the result of interpersonal relations or as the result of some direct marketing, top-down communication; however, this can be theorized as a form of both interpersonal and mass communication. The feed is a hybrid state betwixt and between the interpersonal and mass (Burroughs, 2013). Facebook might be a social networking site, but it is comprised of multiple layers of social networks, and social gaming is one of those primary networks that imbues the platform with play. It is comprised of interpersonal sharing of messages that is distinct and unique for the individual consumer but also is a new form of mass-mediated communication, as the feed is a type of manifestation of broader societal culture. FarmVille is both play and labor (plabor), consumption and circulation collapsing into each other in this hybrid space. We cannot discount advertising revenue, questions of unpaid labor, and the average revenue per user (ARPU) that is generated by corporate power, but in the same way, we cannot completely discount the digital rituals that structure social relations and global flows of communication and information that concomitantly structure media and technology practices. As we return to Huizinga’s magic circle and the digital rituals of FarmVille, we can view this larger cultural flow at work, as the content works through feeds that comprise what Raymond Williams (1974) once identified as televisual flow we might better call technovisual flow to reflect the feeds and flows of digital spaces. The term techno is used to acknowledge the affordances of platforms that contribute, along with the interpersonal networks of sharing communities, to this broader technovisual flow or feed. Beyond simply phatic communication or decompression, FarmVille and Facebook through digital ritual participation are increasingly the manifestation of our networked interests, communities, and lives. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014 164 Games and Culture 9(3) Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Notes 1. A detailed journal of field notes was kept to catalog my daily observations and activities. 2. In the classic essay ‘‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,’’ Clifford Geertz (1973) describes the Balinese cockfight as a symbolic public performance that contextualizes what the Balinese ‘‘culture’s ethos and his private sensibility look like when spelled out externally in a collective text.’’ It is this level of ‘‘deep reading’’ that our mediated ethnography aspires to undertake. 3. Although quantitative data and methods have their utility in the social sciences, there seems to be some limits to measuring highly complex social processes such as culture, identity, and ritual when put in a mediated context. Ethnographic research provides an alternative for the studying of ritual and cultural practices online. Ethnography ‘‘permits the theoretically informed observation of the social practices of cultural production’’ (Schlesinger, 1987, p. xxxi) through a long-term engagement among people. 4. 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He received a double master’s degree from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the London School of Economics and Political Science, both in global media and in communication. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. His current research interests include streaming culture digital rituals, and media anthropology. Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com by guest on June 20, 2014