Category Archives: MMORPG

Forthcoming in Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Dr. D. Linda Gar­cia and I are excited about a paper we recently sub­mit­ted to the Jour­nal of Vir­tual Worlds Research, enti­tled “Syn­thetic Excel­lence: Stan­dards, Play, and Unin­tended Out­comes.” As the first co-authored paper I’ve ever par­tic­i­pated in, it was a chal­leng­ing paper to write. The paper’s inter­dis­ci­pli­nary approach made for a [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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: [...]
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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: [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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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