Virtual 3rd Spaces and Online Games

What is a 3rd place?

The concept of the third place has been around for some time, going back to the turn of the 20th century, coined by Ray Oldenburg to describe the ways in which people engage with the world between their home and work/school, “the core settings of informal public life” in 1989 (16). However, 1989 was a while back, and since then the main vectors for public life and changed as the ways in which people engage with each other publicly have changed, especially when we consider the publicity of things like social media. However, it’s important to note, that the third place is based around “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work” (Oldenburg 16).

Steinkuehler and Williams, in 2006, broaden the idea of the third place as they look into the similarities between Oldenburg’s theory and the ways in which players engage with Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs – to use the more popular acronym.

Alright, an aside to cover the common tropes of the MMO game, and the MMORPG since that is what these scholars are using to study digital third spaces – specifically Asheron’s Call I (Turbine, 1999-2017) and II (Turbine, 2002-2017). These are games that typically involve the player making an avatar and engaging in quests to gain power and explore more of the world that is blocked by enemy level or progression through an overarching story that all the players participate in, combining games that are played with a multitude of other players with the tropes common in roleplaying games (RPGs) thus leading to the acronym MMORPG.

Anyways, they start by studying the ways in which people engage socially in online space beyond just simple tasks, concluding that “by providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new ‘third place’ for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old” referring back to the crux of Oldenburg’s third place examples (Steinkuehler and Williams 889). However, they do not see the relationships formed among people in online environments to be as rich as those cultivated in in person spaces (something that we will return to later).

In 2016 John McArthur and Ashleigh White write about twitter chats as potential example of the third place in digital space, though unlike the world of the MMO this is more of a metaphorical space than a navigable one. However, what they conclude is that the ambient tweet and engagement cycle of the social network is not enough, third space being built “In the Twitter chat, the synchronicity of and volume of concurrent tweets establishes the shared patterns, practices, and rituals of the community over a period of weeks, months, and even years in succession” (McArthur and White 7). They also note, building on the work Soukup – another scholar working on Third Spaces – that a key part of being in a third space is being observable even when one is by oneself, something that social media spaces lack that the MMO possesses being as it is a rendering of an interactable environment.

Now, it may be fairly pointed out that the games mentioned above, along with the studies, are on the older side. Especially since the servers that allowed players to play Asheron’s Call shut down in 2017 and are no longer (at time of writing) accessible. However, it is necessary to see where these discussions began, since there are still very popular MMOs that were launched many years ago, and yet are still very active to this day. Two of the most famous examples being World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004) with an average player base between 8 and 10 million players and Final Fantasy XIV (Square Enix, 2010) which has an average player base between 15 and 20 million players.

Suffice to say these games pushing 21 and 15 years of age are still very active spaces. Since these games launched so far back, some do not consider them novel enough to continue studying, but nevertheless start a chain reaction that leads to online gaming social engagement as we see it today.

Players and Engagement

Now that we have an idea of what a third place/space looks like and the ways in which the theory has been adapted to digital environments, let’s jump ahead a few years to what this kind of engagement has come to look like in the years since. How have players been engaging with their digital third places?

In 2008, T. L. Taylor took a look at practices developed by players over the 4 years since the launch of World of Warcraft and found the stark difference in engagement with the social space on a server that caters to Player versus Player (PvP) gameplay. She looked at the ways in which players used mods to track theirs and others performance to determine what optimal gameplay looks like (Taylor 195). This push towards gameplay optimization through social pressure is not unfamiliar, consider bowling allies or golf courses for example as other third places that do this, nor does it end with World of Warcraft. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux, in their book Metagaming (2017) also discuss this competitive-social angle that online multiplayer games possess, as well their affective power outside of the bounds of the screens and servers. They point specifically to an instance from the 2012 DotA (Blizzard, 2003) international tournament, where the competition became so heated that the audience acts in a way that would seem more applicable to an audience in a sports bar rather than just watching several people sitting at desks clicking mice furiously (Boluk and Lemieux 216).

Beyond the competitive, Bengtsson et al. (2021) look to the ways teenagers in Denmark used online games to remain socially active during the COVID-19 pandemic, when physical third spaces were inaccessible. They found that “Rather than just facilitating talking with one’s friends, gaming served as a shared activity—something to do together. Playing and having fun together in an online space differentiates gaming from other forms of online interaction, including activities on social media” (Bengtsson et al 73). In 2023, Vítor Blanco-Fernández and Jose A. Moreno also explore the ways in which gaming acts as a third place when traditional third places become less- or nonexistent. Looking at Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo, 2020) they analyze how the game acts as a gathering space for LGBTQ+ players.

Author's Animal Crossing Villager

Since it’s exigent launch in 2020, the game was used to host Pride events and act generally as a meeting place for players during times of limited social interaction in physical space (Blanco- Fernández and Moreno, 14). This is especially interesting as a consideration for the use of games for socialization by marginalized groups with fewer physical-space third places to speak of or are otherwise isolated from larger community gatherings.

Even outside of COVID-based use of these spaces, which really represents when this usage becomes interesting to a wider community, as we see with World of Warcraft online social gathering practices were happening in online games well before the pandemic. Zwift (Zwift Inc., 2014), a bike riding sim set in virtual environments, also acts as a kind of digital third place, though the emphasis is more on the physical activity that is necessary to engage with the courses provided. Much like the other digital third places that I’ve mentioned, the platform provides social engagement and a shared environment in which players can be observed even if not interacting with each other (Reed et al 190). Unlike

other more traditional MMOs though, Zwift comes with a slightly pricier cost for entry, requiring a bike or their proprietary stationary bike along with the space for said bike and traditional MMO subscription-payment system that still lingers in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. Ultimately, though they struggle with considering Zwift through multiple different theoretical lenses, Reed et al suggest that the platform is a “space for leisure, and that virtual environments, where both the physical and virtual fuse to generate an interreality, are ripe for further examination within the fields of leisure studies” pointing toward how much more there is to study when we consider virtual space as leisure in the academic sense along with the social and spatial aspects.

Theorization and the Future

Beyond the players and the ways in which they engage with these spaces, they’re ripe for theorists and fertile ground for inquiry into the increasingly globalized and interconnected social structure we find ourselves in. Something that I feel it is important to keep in mind as well regarding third places, gaming, and the people who do it comes well-articulated by Elise DeFusco in her professional

A map of Azeroth, the world of World of Warcraft

doctoral thesis Experiencing Azeroth: “It is trivializing and inaccurate to assume that every person is playing for the same reason. Furthermore, more than one of my participants used language that would suggest they see their own gaming habits as addicted or unhealthy, even though there was little evidence to suggest their lives were impacted negatively” (143). This particular statement serves as an important reminder that just like physical world third places, where people spend varieties of time for varieties of reasons, digital third places are more than anything points of gathering in a virtual space. There is no one-size-fits-all for gamers in terms of gaming habits.

And to this point of differences in engagement within these digital third places, Di Filippo suggested

a term to help describe these spaces: locally realized worlds which include “acts of production, the materiality of the media, and its receptions. . .Each manifestation of the world must then be considered through the way it expresses the imaginary world, makes it tangible and opens it to interpretation. . . Playing is therefore not the only way of experiencing locally realized worlds” (Di Filippo, 235). As we have already seen, the benefit of the third place is its placeness, and with that comes the speculation: What about the metaverse as a digital 3rd space?

Russell Belk discusses the metaverse in his article “the digital frontier as a liminal space” and covers a wide range of topics in relatively quick succession, but his discussion of the spatiality of the metaverse is especially interesting: “If Second Life is any example, avatars can instantly teleport to anywhere in the world. With limitless potential space in the Metaverse, this is essential. . . beyond the apparent virtual reality of a given moment, there is no space in metaspace” (168). For all the time spent on spatiality and that distinguishing point between the world of an MMO versus social media spaces and chatrooms, this may seem disjointed. However, juxtaposing an emphasis on spatiality with the statement that metaspace is only apparent space points to something interesting about what makes these third places impactful.

Speaking and speculating personally, it seems as though through my research the third place, whether digital or physical (I have avoided using the word “real” on purpose), the power of the third place is in the way it appears. For the lone person to be seen within the third place, the place must be navigable, and for there to be navigable space that space must be inhabited by an avatar or a body of some kind, and there is, ideally, something in the space to talk about. How the medium we use to achieve these activities mediates interaction would be a fascinating area for future research, as would an emphasis on these spaces for leisure versus work. Does the leisurely engagement with World of Warcraft become less of a leisure activity for the Twitch streamer who has turned it into their job thus turning it into a 2nd place combined with the 1st place of the home? The potentials for research and development within this area is still important today as discussion of digital lives and digital socialization become more nuanced and more encompassing.

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Belk, Russell. “The Digital Frontier as a Liminal Space.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 34, no. 1 (2024): 167–73.

Bengtsson, Tea T., Louise H. Bom, and Lars Fynbo. “Playing Apart Together: Young People’s Online Gaming during the COVID-19 Lockdown.” YOUNG 29, no. 4 (July 29, 2021): 65–80.

Blanco-Fernández, Vítor, and Jose A. Moreno. “‘Video Games Were My First Safe Space’: Queer Gaming in the Animal Crossing New Horizons LGBTIQA+ Community.” Games and Culture, October 5, 2023, 1–21.

Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick Lemieux. “The Turn of the Tide: International E-Sports and the Undercurrency in DotA 2.” In Metagaming : Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames, 207–73. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

DeFusco, Elise K. “Experiencing Azeroth: A Narrative Inquiry into Playing the Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (Mmorpg) World of Warcraft.” Professional Doctorate, 2020.

Di Filippo, Laurent . “MMORPG as Locally Realized Worlds of Action.” In World Building. Transmedia, Fans, Industries., edited by Marta Boni, 231–50. Amsterdam University Press, 2017.

McArthur, John A., and Ashleigh Farley White. “Twitter Chats as Third Places: Conceptualizing a Digital Gathering Site.” Social Media + Society 2, no. 3 (September 2016): 1–9.

Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 1989.

Reed, Jack, Catherine Dunn, Simon Beames, and Paul Stonehouse. “E‘Ride On!’: The Zwift Platform as a Space for Virtual Leisure.” Leisure Studies 42, no. 2 (2023): 188–202.

Steinkuehler, Constance A., and Dmitri Williams. “Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as ‘Third Places.’” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11, no. 4 (July 2006): 885–909.

Taylor, T. L. “Does World of Warcraft Change Everything? How a PvP Server, Multinational Playerbase, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause.” In Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, 187–201. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008.