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Sites

There are two sites of this project. The first one is the islands in the game Animal Crossing: New Horizon, owned by my participants. The other one is a Wechat group called Nintendo Pacific Rim General Agency. It is a group chat created especially for the game, and the group members are from the same university who know each other well.

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Research questions

Based on material collected from these two sites, this project aims to access and understand neighborhood in different layers: the virtual neighborhood shared by individual players and the non-player characters, the online neighborhood created by players in the group chat, and the offline neighborhood where my participants stayed during their college life.

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My research questions are addressed as follows:

1. What is the typical feature and innovation of the virtual neighborhood and the online neighborhood compared with the traditional one?

2. What role does the digital technology play during the forming and running of each neighborhood?

3. How does these three layers of neighborhood interact with each other during each group communication? What is the tension and connection behind the switching of different platforms?

4. How is identity or persona represented in the game? Does the sharing identity/taste of neighborhood exist in the online and virtual ones too?