Tag Archives: MMORPG

Joyride: NASA MMO and the Rhetoric of the Military Industrial Complex

By Garrison | Published: February 21, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in MMORPG, Rhetoric | Also tagged , , | 2 Comments

Against the Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism

By Garrison | Published: February 17, 2009
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: [...]
Posted in MMORPG, Reports | Also tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Good, the Bad, and the Silly

By Garrison | Published: February 15, 2009
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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Warcraft population

By Garrison | Published: December 28, 2008
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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