EverQuest II

The EverQuest Speech Community

Susana Tosca's study argues that the EverQuest player base constitutes a genuine speech community, despite earlier doubts about whether the concept of community can apply to online spaces.

• Susana Tosca argues EverQuest's player base is a genuine speech community, applying Erickson's six criteria (membership, relationships, commitment, shared values, collective goods, duration) and Hymes's SPEAKING framework to text-based in-game interaction.
• The game studied had roughly 98,000 peak concurrent users and about 400,000 players, and was treated as a stable, context-bound community whose linguistic norms are shaped by its fictional gameworld.
• Field research found most players were "powerplayers" focused on character advancement rather than roleplay, so the performative speech the framework anticipated largely failed to materialize.