Celia Pearce, "Identity-as-Place: Fictive Ethnicities in Online and Virtual Worlds"
b'This talk, with Celia Pearce, Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explored the connection of identity to virtual place, referencing in particular anthropology, humanist and socio-geography and Internet studies to look at the construction and performance of \\u201cfictive ethnicity\\u201d tied to a specific, though virtual and fictional, locality. To illustrate, Pearce used the example of the \\u201cUru Diaspora,\\u201d a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of \\u201cUru Refugees,\\u201d and referring to Uru as their \\u201chomeland.\\u201d'