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A hybrid cultural ecology: world of warcraft in China

Published: 08 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We analyze online gaming as a site of collaboration in a digital-physical hybrid. We ground our analysis in findings from an ethnographic study of the online game World of Warcraft in China. We examine the interplay of collaborative practices across the physical environment of China's Internet cafes and the virtual game space of World of Warcraft. Our findings suggest that it may be fruitful to broaden existing notions of physical-digital hybridity by considering the nuanced interplay between the digital and physical as a multi-dimensional environment or "ecology". We illustrate how socio-economics, government regulations and cultural value systems shaped a hybrid cultural ecology of online gaming in China.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
    November 2008
    752 pages
    ISBN:9781605580074
    DOI:10.1145/1460563
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 08 November 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. ethnography
    2. games
    3. hybrid ecology
    4. mixed reality
    5. virtual worlds
    6. world of warcraft

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    November 8 - 12, 2008
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    • (2021)Living in a City, Living a Rural LifeACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/344897928:3(1-29)Online publication date: 29-May-2021
    • (2021)Perspectives on Scales, Contexts, and Directionality of Collaborations in and Around Virtual Worlds and Video GamesInternational Handbook of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning10.1007/978-3-030-65291-3_20(371-388)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2021
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