Thoughts on the ‘n00b’ perspective

I know one or more groups are doing their ethnography on what the nature of ‘noobiness’ is across games. Just a thought: If you are a noob, then won’t everything you do in any MMO be seen through a noob lens? Any aspect of a game you choose to study will inevitably carry with it the personal (contextual) indices of being a noob. What you could do then is (as my group is doing) simply say from the outset that we are all noobs at our respective games and therefore we see the world as noobs and then just let the reader decide how to apply that to his or her experience of the ethnography. You can kill to birds with one stone in this regard. You can study an anthropologically relevant aspect of the game all the while wrestling with how a n00b perspective alters or shapes the way you experience the game. You can engage your topic and be critically reflexive at the same time.