Avast: Social Networking and Complex Economies On the High Seas

This paper examines the activities and economies of YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates. YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates is an online role-playing game that draws upon puzzle-orientated gameplay to construct a social world. This paper addresses the important issue of social networking in information systems. It is a theoretical exploration of the deeper issues and implications that social networking has for business models in organizations. The paper explores how technology as a communications medium can present a continuous series of events centred on the exchange and manipulation of technologically constructed objects. Very little academic research in the Information Systems field has considered the interplay and mutual interdependence of spectacular events with the routines of everyday life. Discussion of organisational activities often overlooks the fact that the labour aspects of everyday life are repetitive and mundane and instead prefer to discuss environmental context and the social networks of the most readily identified users. By offering the gameplay of roleplaying and puzzle games coupled with the opportunities to create social networking bonds in roughly equal proportions YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates introduces complexity through its economic structure and the need for a range of different social interactions. Rather than being a disincentive to the participants the free market and complex economy of the game is, in fact, its central attraction. This fully articulated economy provides a sophistication that enables a variety of 'everyday' activities and social distinctions to be embedded into the environment including notions of mundane labour, the shifting foibles of fashion and social hierarchies of authority and power Examination and interpretation of YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates offers insight, as a social laboratory, into the interplay of events, labour and power within a complex economy. This, in turn, provides an alternative perspective to existing Information Systems work regarding the relationship of individuals to systems.