From bridge clubs to sports leagues, from tabletop role-playing games to Civil War reenactments, play communities have long been part of culture. Digital networks have brought about new varieties of adult play communities, most notably online games and virtual worlds. It is these new communities of play that Celia Pearce defines in her book "Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (MIT Press, 2009).

A game researcher, designer, and Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Pearce became fascinated when observing how players in networked worlds sometimes developed a sense of community that transcended the game itself and acted in ways that didn't coincide with the intentions of the game's designers. In "Communities of Play" she set out to analyze play and community and to contextualize games and virtual worlds.

Pearce focuses on the Uru Diaspora""a group of players whose game, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, closed. Identifying themselves as "refugees," these players "immigrated" into other online game worlds. In There.com. they created a hybrid culture integrating aspects of their old world with their newfound home. Ostracized at first, they eventually became community leaders.

Using the Uru Diaspora as her lens, Pearce analyzes the properties of virtual worlds and looks at the ways design affects emergent behavior. Countering the ludological definition of play as unproductive and pointing to the long history of pre-digital play practices, Pearce argues that play can be a prelude, indeed a call, to creativity. She discusses the methodologies for studying online games, including a personal account of the "sometimes messy" process of ethnography.

Pearce considers the "play turn" in culture, as epitomized by such trends as cosplay, alternate reality games that take place in the real world, ritual play events such as Burning Man and DragonCon, games on "non-gaming" platforms such as the iPhone, Facebook and other emerging platforms, and an overall increase in playfulness across all media. She describes the advent of a participatory global playground enabled by networked social media that, notes Pearce, "is every bit as communal as the global village Marshall McLuhan saw united by television."