Thomas Malaby | University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (original) (raw)
Books by Thomas Malaby
Playful Participatory Practices: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections, 2020
Papers by Thomas Malaby
Anthropological Quarterly, 2010
Social Science Research Network, 2006
... the project sought to transcend? Similar issues play out on a larger and more unintended way ... more ... the project sought to transcend? Similar issues play out on a larger and more unintended way in the case of the virtual world Second Life, considered by Thomas Malaby. By controlling the world's code, but turning ... 1-22. Page 18. Introduction - 18 Malaby, Thomas. (2003). ...
Social Science Research Network, 2008
Social Analysis, Sep 1, 2019
Routledge eBooks, Sep 16, 2022
The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader, 2022
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2002
Medical anthropology's cogent rethinking of conventional biomedical categories has largely ov... more Medical anthropology's cogent rethinking of conventional biomedical categories has largely overlooked the core problems of one key concept of both biomedical and social scientific analysis: risk. In particular, the use of the term in medical anthropology (and the social sciences more generally) frequently rests on two assumptions: (1) that contingency necessarily constitutes a threat to individual experience or social order; and (2) that a risk management paradigm that relies on a model of statistical probability is the ontologically preeminent way of engaging chance. Other approaches which do not take risk as the starting point for understanding contingency also have problems; they too assume that contingency is necessarily cause for crisis. These problematic root assumptions lead social analysts to miss how individual actors and local communities variously engage, rather than minimize, contingency. I suggest a new approach that instead aims to treat contingency as normatively ...
Perspektiven der Game Studies, 2020
This essay aims to exert some pressure on the concept of participation in game research and the c... more This essay aims to exert some pressure on the concept of participation in game research and the commitments it often implies, so as to open up room for the sustained recognition of the participation of institutions in what games, as continuously unfolding processes, have become. I suggest that, in counterpoint to current and valuable interest in the user/player and their participation and agency, we should attend to institutions and their projects surrounding games, although without sliding into a simple oppositional characterization of the relationship between players and institutions. To illustrate this I sketch the cultural forms of ritual and game and how they are variously used by modern institutions. This focus on institutional involvement brings to the fore a vital issue: processes of legitimation. In their processual nature—that is, that they are always in the process of becoming, and exist only in their playing—games are always the subject of ongoing processes of legitimation, and to recognize this is to widen our view of participation. What kinds of approaches to playing a game, or outcomes that it can generate, are taken as legitimate (or illegitimate), by whom, and why? What role do institutions play in the establishment of legitimacy claims? In other words, alongside examining inscriptions and appropriations in and around games, this essay suggests that we add “legitimation” as an additional object of methodological consideration as we seek to understand games as participatory.
Digital Anthropology, 2020
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013
The projects of governance at the heart of state and other institutional control under the contex... more The projects of governance at the heart of state and other institutional control under the context of modernity have been marked by a heavy reliance on two cultural forms, ritual and bureaucracy, each of which organizes action and meaning through distinctive invocations of order. The steady rise of liberal thought and practice, particularly in the economic realm (following, if partially, Adam Smith) has gradually challenged the efficacy of these cultural forms, with open-ended systems (more or less contrived – from elections to the “free” market) exerting more and more influence both on policy and in other areas of cultural production. It is in this context that games are becoming the potent site for new kinds of institutional projects today, whether in Google’s use for some time of its Image Labeler Game to bring text searchability to its image collection, or in the University of Washington’s successful deployment of the game Fold-It to find promising “folds” of proteins for research on anti-retroviral vaccines.But even as they are so used, we can see how these contrived, open-ended mechanisms create new challenges to the structure of the very modern institutions which would seek to domesticate and deploy them. While a longstanding example would be Hitler’s unsuccessful use of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games’ results as part of his project of political legitimization, digital networking technology is making new and more complex gambits of this sort possible today. Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world Second Life, found itself in a state of organizational contradiction as it sought to architect, from the top-down, a game-like space premised (and sold) on a playful ideal of user freedom and control. Google’s recent and reluctant turn to curators for certain search terms also reflects the limits of their previous attempts to continually refine their algorithms so as to let search results reflect perfectly the aggregate actions of web users. In all of these cases we see that a turn toward open-ended, game-derived mechanisms (which often mirror the market) generate paradoxes for those who sought to leverage the potency of games for generating meaningful outcomes.In this process digital technology has played an important role as well, making the use of games possible at a scale vast in both scope and complexity, while subtly changing even what a useful conception of games would be that could account for the game-like elements now proliferating in much of our increasingly digital lives. From this twenty-first century vantage point, what may we learn by setting the cultural form of game against these other cultural forms, with attention to their shared and distinctive features? By considering what has changed to make the domestication (as it were) of games possible, and also reflecting on how these other forms have been put to work by institutions, we can begin to chart the landscape ahead for games and institutions under the context of modernity and ask key questions about what issues of policy and ethics it raises.
Social Analysis, 2003
Page 1. The Currency of Proof: Euro Competence and the Refiguring of Value in Greece [Published i... more Page 1. The Currency of Proof: Euro Competence and the Refiguring of Value in Greece [Published in Social Analysis, Spring 2003, 47(1):42-51] Thomas M. Malaby University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Abstract: The rollout of ...
New Literary History, 2009
Games and Culture, 2006
Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virt... more Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds and across the boundary that appears to separate them from the rest of users' lives. To tie these two threads together and account for the use of these environments for the development of expertise and credentials, the author proposes adding a third form, cultural capital, to the mix and outlines a model for understanding capital in all its manifestations: material, social, and cultural. This model will make it possible to explore how actors within synthetic worlds transform, or parlay, these forms from one into the other and how these forms are used across all the domains wherein users act, blurring any qualitative distinction between virtual and real worlds.
Anthropological Quarterly, 2010
American Ethnologist, 2005
Page 1. RLI NO I . Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City HOMAS M. MALABY Page 2. Page 3. Page 4.... more Page 1. RLI NO I . Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City HOMAS M. MALABY Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City THOMAS M. MALABY The only ethnography devoted to the practice of gambling ...
Playful Participatory Practices: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections, 2020
Anthropological Quarterly, 2010
Social Science Research Network, 2006
... the project sought to transcend? Similar issues play out on a larger and more unintended way ... more ... the project sought to transcend? Similar issues play out on a larger and more unintended way in the case of the virtual world Second Life, considered by Thomas Malaby. By controlling the world's code, but turning ... 1-22. Page 18. Introduction - 18 Malaby, Thomas. (2003). ...
Social Science Research Network, 2008
Social Analysis, Sep 1, 2019
Routledge eBooks, Sep 16, 2022
The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader, 2022
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2002
Medical anthropology's cogent rethinking of conventional biomedical categories has largely ov... more Medical anthropology's cogent rethinking of conventional biomedical categories has largely overlooked the core problems of one key concept of both biomedical and social scientific analysis: risk. In particular, the use of the term in medical anthropology (and the social sciences more generally) frequently rests on two assumptions: (1) that contingency necessarily constitutes a threat to individual experience or social order; and (2) that a risk management paradigm that relies on a model of statistical probability is the ontologically preeminent way of engaging chance. Other approaches which do not take risk as the starting point for understanding contingency also have problems; they too assume that contingency is necessarily cause for crisis. These problematic root assumptions lead social analysts to miss how individual actors and local communities variously engage, rather than minimize, contingency. I suggest a new approach that instead aims to treat contingency as normatively ...
Perspektiven der Game Studies, 2020
This essay aims to exert some pressure on the concept of participation in game research and the c... more This essay aims to exert some pressure on the concept of participation in game research and the commitments it often implies, so as to open up room for the sustained recognition of the participation of institutions in what games, as continuously unfolding processes, have become. I suggest that, in counterpoint to current and valuable interest in the user/player and their participation and agency, we should attend to institutions and their projects surrounding games, although without sliding into a simple oppositional characterization of the relationship between players and institutions. To illustrate this I sketch the cultural forms of ritual and game and how they are variously used by modern institutions. This focus on institutional involvement brings to the fore a vital issue: processes of legitimation. In their processual nature—that is, that they are always in the process of becoming, and exist only in their playing—games are always the subject of ongoing processes of legitimation, and to recognize this is to widen our view of participation. What kinds of approaches to playing a game, or outcomes that it can generate, are taken as legitimate (or illegitimate), by whom, and why? What role do institutions play in the establishment of legitimacy claims? In other words, alongside examining inscriptions and appropriations in and around games, this essay suggests that we add “legitimation” as an additional object of methodological consideration as we seek to understand games as participatory.
Digital Anthropology, 2020
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013
The projects of governance at the heart of state and other institutional control under the contex... more The projects of governance at the heart of state and other institutional control under the context of modernity have been marked by a heavy reliance on two cultural forms, ritual and bureaucracy, each of which organizes action and meaning through distinctive invocations of order. The steady rise of liberal thought and practice, particularly in the economic realm (following, if partially, Adam Smith) has gradually challenged the efficacy of these cultural forms, with open-ended systems (more or less contrived – from elections to the “free” market) exerting more and more influence both on policy and in other areas of cultural production. It is in this context that games are becoming the potent site for new kinds of institutional projects today, whether in Google’s use for some time of its Image Labeler Game to bring text searchability to its image collection, or in the University of Washington’s successful deployment of the game Fold-It to find promising “folds” of proteins for research on anti-retroviral vaccines.But even as they are so used, we can see how these contrived, open-ended mechanisms create new challenges to the structure of the very modern institutions which would seek to domesticate and deploy them. While a longstanding example would be Hitler’s unsuccessful use of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games’ results as part of his project of political legitimization, digital networking technology is making new and more complex gambits of this sort possible today. Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world Second Life, found itself in a state of organizational contradiction as it sought to architect, from the top-down, a game-like space premised (and sold) on a playful ideal of user freedom and control. Google’s recent and reluctant turn to curators for certain search terms also reflects the limits of their previous attempts to continually refine their algorithms so as to let search results reflect perfectly the aggregate actions of web users. In all of these cases we see that a turn toward open-ended, game-derived mechanisms (which often mirror the market) generate paradoxes for those who sought to leverage the potency of games for generating meaningful outcomes.In this process digital technology has played an important role as well, making the use of games possible at a scale vast in both scope and complexity, while subtly changing even what a useful conception of games would be that could account for the game-like elements now proliferating in much of our increasingly digital lives. From this twenty-first century vantage point, what may we learn by setting the cultural form of game against these other cultural forms, with attention to their shared and distinctive features? By considering what has changed to make the domestication (as it were) of games possible, and also reflecting on how these other forms have been put to work by institutions, we can begin to chart the landscape ahead for games and institutions under the context of modernity and ask key questions about what issues of policy and ethics it raises.
Social Analysis, 2003
Page 1. The Currency of Proof: Euro Competence and the Refiguring of Value in Greece [Published i... more Page 1. The Currency of Proof: Euro Competence and the Refiguring of Value in Greece [Published in Social Analysis, Spring 2003, 47(1):42-51] Thomas M. Malaby University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Abstract: The rollout of ...
New Literary History, 2009
Games and Culture, 2006
Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virt... more Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds and across the boundary that appears to separate them from the rest of users' lives. To tie these two threads together and account for the use of these environments for the development of expertise and credentials, the author proposes adding a third form, cultural capital, to the mix and outlines a model for understanding capital in all its manifestations: material, social, and cultural. This model will make it possible to explore how actors within synthetic worlds transform, or parlay, these forms from one into the other and how these forms are used across all the domains wherein users act, blurring any qualitative distinction between virtual and real worlds.
Anthropological Quarterly, 2010
American Ethnologist, 2005
Page 1. RLI NO I . Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City HOMAS M. MALABY Page 2. Page 3. Page 4.... more Page 1. RLI NO I . Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City HOMAS M. MALABY Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City THOMAS M. MALABY The only ethnography devoted to the practice of gambling ...
Logos, 2019
Anthropology is turning toward a new engagement with a central question of Weber: how do people c... more Anthropology is turning toward a new engagement with a central question of Weber: how do people come to understand the distribution of fortune in the world? Our discipline’s recent examination of the uses of the past prompts us to ask how stances toward the future are both the product of cultural logics and the target of institutional interests. In this article, I trace the engagement with contingency in anthropology and social thought, and then compare the nonchalant stance toward the future found in Greek society with the different disposition of individual gaming mastery in the digital domain, such as in Second Life, but also in the longest-running Greek state-sponsored game: Pro-Po. These examples illustrate how games are increasingly the sites for institutional efforts both to appropriate creativity and to generate distinctive subjectivities.
Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virt... more Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds and across the boundary that appears to separate them from the rest of users’ lives. To tie these two threads together and account for the use of these environments for the development of expertise and credentials, the author proposes adding a third form, cultural capital, to the mix and outlines a model for understanding capital in all its manifestations: material, social, and cultural. This model will make it possible to explore how actors within synthetic worlds transform, or parlay, these forms from one into the other and how these forms are used across all the domains wherein users act, blurring any qualitative distinction between virtual and real worlds.
