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Category Archives: MMORPG
Guilded
Last month, I finally joined a guild in World of Warcraft: Bound by Blood. Actually, that’s not quite it: ßøuñ∂ ߥ ßløø∂.
Guilds are like that. But in this case, typographical idiosyncrasies aside, it’s been a rewarding adventure so far, and I’ve learned a lot from it. Take, for instance, the character [...]
Joyride: NASA MMO and the Rhetoric of the Military Industrial Complex
How much “fun” will NASA’s much-touted Unreal 3-based MMO be when it is released next year? If the captions to still images released on developer Project Whitecard’s website are any indication, not much.
Here’s how they describe the Regolith Grinder (aka “The Taurus”):
“Contructed from an advanced smelting process and lunar factory, it is a general-purpose [...]
Against the Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism
At the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, a behavioral sciences professor from Northwestern University has called into question the idealism of much of our rhetoric on the potential diversity of human networks in MMORPGs.
“Social Drivers for Organizing Networks in Communities” appeared as part of a panel called “Analyzing Virtual Worlds: [...]
The Good, the Bad, and the Silly
Trying to discover a little bit more about ethics and the nature of malevolence in MMORPGs, I rolled a new Horde character: Badflower. I’ve made it to level 8, and this much is clear: In Warcraft, there are the Good, the “bad,” and the silly.
WoW’s two factions are the Alliance and the Horde: [...]
The News from Nielsen
For December, among American gamers who play Warcraft, Nielsen finds it played on average over 11 hours / week.
Years ago, I was a “Nielsen family.” The unwieldy set-top box, hard-wired into the TV and the Cable Box, was a mysterious, exciting presence, and leant an air of authority to my cable TV watching choices (however [...]
Warcraft population
According to a recent press release, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft now boasts 11.5 million subscribers world-wide.
Subscriptions and virtual-world populations are a frequent topic of discussion in game studies, but the facts are notoriously hard to come by, since population density — often perceived as an index of popularity — is a selling point, and therefore [...]
Unwrapping a Warcraft Christmas
Contrary to the oversimplified characterization of a “magic circle” of bounded, inviolable game activity, gamic activity — and video game-play especially — always unfolds over otherwise rigid boundaries. Video game-play makes simultaneous and unbridled use of multiple media, unfurls across imbricated (and frequently exclusive) narratives and procedural norms, and often challenges the player to [...]
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Forthcoming in Journal of Virtual Worlds Research