In anticipation of its soon-to-be-released next-gen MMO, GuildWars 2, Seattle-based ArenaNet has published this short promo video that characterizes the company and its employees in all the right ways: They are portrayed as intensely collaborative, resolutely non-hierarchical, game-oriented, fun-loving geeks who believe in the power of digital community. I have no way of knowing whether [...] Read more – ‘ArenaNet’s First Ten Years’.
Posit the first: Virtual goods have real value. Posit the second: When a virtual good is destroyed, so is its value. Demonstration: This video, from the MMORPG EVE Online, depicts the destruction of approximately US$15,000 worth of virtual goods. Via Kotaku Read more – ‘The Real Cost of War’.
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 lot of great [...] Read more – ‘Forthcoming in Journal of Virtual Worlds Research’.
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 of in-game guild [...] Read more – ‘Guilded’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘Joyride: NASA MMO and the Rhetoric of the Military Industrial Complex’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘Against the Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism’.
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: Your [...] Read more – ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Silly’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘The News from Nielsen’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘Warcraft population’.
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 gauge [...] Read more – ‘Unwrapping a Warcraft Christmas’.
