Second Life is an MMORPG with ~17,000 users, which represents only 0.6 percent of the ~2.75 million total MMOG active users as of November 2004. With a population that rivals Chicago's, the overall MMOG community is plenty large enough to have its own set of Discourses. As a newbie, I need to learn enough of it to understand its members, and to be understood by them.
I've been interested in, and used computers since our family bought an Apple IIe in 1983 when I was a junior in high school. My father, as the treasurer of his church, still uses it to print checks. Since then I have used IBM PCs running DOS, the earliest Macintoshes, PCs for Windows 3.0 and 95, and the latest Macs -- where I prefer to stay despite current responsibilities supporting Macs and PCs. Because I have funded most of my college education providing computer technical support, one might think I would be familiar with the Discourse of at least "computer games" -- if not all video -type games altogether. This is not a sure-bet. I still need to periodically Google "MMOG" and "MOORPG" and find the wikipedia entry in order to remember what they stand for.
Unlike some, I do not yet have a working knowledge of the Discourse of MMOGs, let alone a mastery of it, but I feel I have enough of a computer background and familiarity to learn enough of it fairly fast to become conversant in it if I immerse myself in that Discourse for a month this Winter.
Until I have time for that immersion, I have very recently begun exploring online worlds from the outside, and looking at MMORPG blogs -- especially those of Second Life reporters like Wagner James Au's New World News and Second Edition.
I'll be showing my ignorance here, as I am a "newbie" (not n00b) in the subject matter I am interested in researching. In some ways, being a newbie is not always a bad thing. Newbies can often see things that members entrenched in the discourse might not notice, or might no longer notice. Of course, because they do not know the discourse as well as entrenched members, they miss a lot too. By not knowing what the Discourse says they should pay attention to, they can sometimes see things that the Discourse thinks are unimportant , but that are very revealing about the discourse.
This is not a sure-bet.
