All is fair in web and play : building ethical self in gameworlds through the word of others

This paper is a result of a doctoral study on an Alternate Reality Game, “Urgent Evoke”, conducted in 2010. The discussion presented here specifically focuses on the appearance of “borrowing” from the web, which occurred as part of a game play. The paper describes one of the research participant’s sudden change from writing about and giving examples from his own personal experiences to copying and pasting sections from various pages on the web. It attempts to make sense of his behaviour and of the reactions of other players in the game, raising a question about understanding plagiarism in the context of cross-cultural interpretations.