World of Warcraft

Games are created through the act of gameplay, which is contingent on player acts. However, to understand gameplay, we must also investigate contexts, justifications, and limitations. Cheating can be an excellent path into studying the gameplay situation, because it lays bare player’s frustrations and limitations. It points to ludic hopes and activities, and it causes us to question our values, our ethics. In comparison, the concept of the magic circle seems static and overly formalist. Structures may be necessary to begin gameplay, but we cannot stop at structures as a way of understanding the gameplay experience. Because of that, we cannot say that games are magic circles, where the ordinary rules of life do not apply. Of course they apply, but in addition to, in competition with, other rules and in relation to multiple contexts, across varying cultures, and into different groups, legal situations, and homes.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was nominated as the first female presidential candidate of a major party in a United States election and Sylvanas Windrunner was appointed as the first female Warchief of the Horde in the fictional land of Azeroth in which the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft is set. This article is a rhetorical analysis of how authority and ethos were constructed by, respectively, Lady Sylvanas and Garrosh Hellscream in the World of Warcraft and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 United States election. As well as investigating issues of race and gender, it explores how these four figures deploy what Richard Weaver has termed "charismatic" and "ultimate" terms to establish the legitimacy of their actions and positions. This paper was published in Popular Culture Review 29.1 (Spring 2018): 31-50. It is an open access journal; the link is posted below.

There is much discussion about how in-game economies emerge and evolve—particularly how they deal
with money and inflation. But games incorporate economics at even more basic levels. Indeed, many gamers are already using the
economic way of thinking without even knowing it. The
key point is that games are all about basic economic
concepts: scarcity, choice, tradeoffs, opportunity cost,
trade, and entrepreneurship.

This research aims to understand how gamers redefine their identity by extending, aggregating, and assembling the different dimensions of the self in experiential online communities. The authors conducted a series of filmed in-depth and in game individual interviews, group interviews, informal conversations, and observation of online game sessions. A framework of online identity construction shows how gamers assemble their identities combining different self-dimensions, using two different strategies: self-extension and self-aggregation. Self-extension strategies consist in the idealization, development, and manipulation of avatars (their digital self). Self-aggregation strategies refer to group participation and sharing virtual possessions within groups of players. To bring their identities from the experiential community to the real life, gamers combine these strategies by assembling and materializing identities. This framework has theoretical implications for the self, identity, and sharing in online contexts. Finally, the paper considers managerial implications and future research directions in online communities.

Online gaming "worlds," virtual places where people meet other people as virtual avatars, are designed using the same process that theme parks designers use. But they are built in the electrons of virtual space versus in the "brick and mortar" world.  Some gamers and social scientists say these games are like Disney theme parks.  Some say they are sandboxes and others discuss how such games are tools to learn to maneuver in real life.  This short essay discusses these various roles.

The present thesis is a study of the translation of video games with a particular emphasis on the English-Russian language pair. On the one hand, it offers an analysis of the video game industry understood as a global phenomenon in entertainment, with the aim of understanding the norms governing present game development and publishing practices. On the other hand, it discusses particular translation issues that seem to be unique to these entertainment products due to their multichannel and interactive nature, in which verbal and nonverbal signs are interconnected to achieve a maximum persuasive effect on a player.

The purpose of this thesis is to present a comprehensive view on video game localisation process, as conducted by localisation department of Blizzard Entertainment. The thesis is focused on strategy and tactics used during the localisation process and assert that localisation must be judged not only by its adequacy and equivalence to the origin, but also by its purpose or scopos. The scopos of localisation is to make a player feel comfortable inside the game, to “translate the experience”, as if a game was created in players’ native language.

Esta investigación de pre grado en Antropología pretende estudiar distintas practicas sociales,  formas de identidad y significado mediante la figura de los Avatares en una sección del ciberespacio -los videojuegos-, el avatar es algo que se construye a partir de una teoría denominada "triada" en donde no se puede despojar al avatar del origen orgánico que es el jugador junto a su mundo cognitivo-interno que llega a través del ciberespacio por medios físicos como las maquinas computacionales y la internet.

As a discipline, anthropology is uniquely situated to trace transformative shifts in human sociobiological processes over time. As environments and resources change, human ingenuity responds with increasing technological sophistication and variations in accumulative behaviors. As technologies integrate and connect global populations, the accumulation of wealth and resources likewise shifts from the natural to the digital worlds. While many anthropologists look to the past and to processes of globalization to sketch these shifts in the natural world, there is a growing trend researching these transformations in digital spheres. Here, I examine the ways players in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor marshal social and economic resources in both the natural and digital worlds to accumulate power and prestige in order to overcome in-game challenges and garner out-of-game financial benefits. Based on ethnographic methods including participant observation, document analysis, and concentrated interviews, I examine how players leverage resources to negotiate, resist, and overcome conflicts and challenges in order to be successful in competitive gaming. Findings demonstrate that players utilize out-of-game resources such as gaming hardware systems and leisure time, while in-game, players use their skill and expertise to establish social relationships that can be leveraged for competitive play. In constructing their reputations and accumulating prestige, players integrate online and offline resources, traversing the natural/digital divide in their pursuit of achievement. As this research primarily focuses on the online and in-game aspects of building these reputations, future research needs to include offline impacts and official game competitions.

We use ethnographic, interview, and survey data to examine problematic play within the popular online game, World of Warcraft, or ‘WoW’ for short. Research shows that players drawn to the interpersonal dimensions of online games are more prone to experience negative outcomes associated with their computer use. Our study suggests that it is not only whether online gamers seek meaningful social interactions that determine if WoW play becomes problematic, but exactly how players interact with others in online game-worlds. Specifically, levels of problematic WoW play depend on the extent gamers play with offline or ‘real-life’ friends and relations. Our survey data reveals both a direct relationship between playing WoW with offline friends and problematic online gaming and also an indirect one mediated by ‘immersion’ (defined as the extent that players feel like they are in a virtual world and in some cases actually their character). Interpreting these results through ethnographic and interview data, we suggest that playing WoW with real-life-friends allows gamers to transfer in-game accomplishments and experiences into offline social networks. Rather than competing and conflicting with the world outside of the game, WoW played in this way tends to enhance gamers’ offline lives. Further, by keeping gamers in touch with perspectives outside of WoW, playing with real-life-friends instills critical distance and greater awareness of how excessive play can damage offline commitments and relationships, allowing gamers to better monitor, evaluate, and ultimately regulate excessive game-play.► Playing MMOs with offline friends and relations allows for healthier online gaming. ► Playing MMOs with real-life-friends allows gamers to enhance their offline lives. ► Playing MMOs with offline friends allows for better monitoring and control of online play. ► Playing MMOs with real-life-friends can lessen players’ experience of immersion. ► Less immersion in these online gaming contexts can also lead to healthier play.

The study of the player-avatar relationship has been central to scholars of video games and virtual worlds. Work has attempted to explain the relationship by focusing on the technologies of social presence, the socio-emotional relationship between players and avatars as distinct social others, the capability of players to adopt the personae of their avatars, and the psychological merging of player and avatar as a unified person. While these approaches are useful in explaining specific forms and types of player-avatar relationships, they tend to adopt qualitatively-different approaches to the phenomenon that limit their ability to inform one another and, in turn, our understanding of the holistic player-avatar experience. To this end, the following paper demonstrates how player-avatar archetypes generated from narrative analysis can be reanalyzed for dimensions of character attachment to highlight intersections with agency and intimacy, and suggests the utility of such an approach to understanding the larger video game entertainment experience.

Play is social. However, the operation of play is often a physically solitary act (Brand et al., 2014: 18). Notwithstanding this fact, the creation of the gaming experience is inherently social. Co-creating Videogames and Battlefields of Negotiation deal with the collective creation of this communal experience. With their entrance into classical museums, video games have come far along their long road toward legitimization as a leisure activity and a cultural object. Envisioned as a cultural object, video games are now being studied as such and, therefore, relationships among the actors of this creation are being analyzed. These books adopt a distinct standpoint about this topic. Reading Co-creating Videogames takes you behind the screen for an industry viewpoint, whereas Battlefields of Negotiation puts you in the shoes of a player of World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004). The processes described recall Plato's idea of human life as a pilgrimage from appearance to reality. Indeed, participants in the creation of the video gaming experience seek to make their ideas come true. By shedding light on this collective committed creative activity, these works commonly argue that sharing playing activity enriches the gaming experience in which players get engaged. The profiles of the two researchers differ in age, experience and field of expertise. As an experienced sociologist, John Banks gives priority to his field, displaying thrilling case studies of a few titles run by Auran, mainly Trainz and Fury. Calling on complementary sources from manifold disciplines to analyze the discourses he collected, Banks' work goes beyond the scope of sociology and succeeds in bringing new knowledge. René Glas' doctoral dissertation is entrenched in the game studies tradition and its references. Descriptions displayed throughout the book richly help the reader to get into the core experience of playing the famous game. The data collection ranges from a myriad of sources, but little is said about how the data were analyzed.

New media technologies are ubiquitous. Among these, digital games continue their rise in significance, constituting a visible domain within which people learn and develop specific sets of skills and practices. This study addresses a lack of research into the socialization experiences of new media technology users. I explore how participants experienced socialization into two digital games that they had never played before, World of Warcraft and Portal 2. Using a symbolic interactionist approach and an array of qualitative methods such as observations, talk-aloud protocols, audiovisual recordings of gameplay, “gameplay reviews” and in-depth interviews, I extracted rich data from the gameplay and interpretations of eight university student participants who each played approximately 20 hours of each game. Players engaged in micro-level meaning-making processes through which they made sense of the virtual environments. I outline a process of gameplay socialization that organizes the development of meaning-making over the course of their participation, and show how players had varied socialization experiences. A significant portion of their gameplay was spent interacting with digital objects, some of which became significant others. Such human-object relationships can be complex and social, and digital objects are major agents of socialization into digital games. Complexity in digital games rises with the potential addition of human interactants, and I analyze player-to-player interactions in cooperative and conflictual situations to show how players socialized one another in terms of game rules and social norms. Finally, I discuss some methods players developed to pragmatically handle increasing complexity in terms of outcomes of gameplay socialization. Analyzing gameplay socialization provides insight into the significance of user experience with new media technologies, which has implications for media creators and users. Being attentive to user experience increases reflexivity in media development and use, as well as enhances communication between creators and users.

This article proposes a scale for measuring player identification in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Three dimensions have been derived from the literature, avatar identification, group identification, and game identification, whereby avatar identification is a second-order factor consisting of similarity identification, wishful identification, and embodied presence. Based on the results of a cross-sectional survey of 544 World of Warcraft players, the measurement instrument's proposed factorial structure was confirmed and the constructs were successfully tested for convergent validity. Subsequently, support for nomological validity was gathered by testing nine theoretically rooted hypotheses linking the identification constructs to motivations for playing MMOGs. The results show that avatar identification is positively associated with roleplay, customization, and escapism; group identification with socializing and relationship; and game identification with escapism, discovery, advancement, and mechanics. These findings indicate that the Player Identification Scale provides a reliable measure of identification in online games ready to be used and further validated in subsequent research.

Video games Dramaturgical models are not thoroughly mapped yet. In this context, even a computer game like World of Warcraft lacks dramaturgical analysis. In this paper, we analyse World of Warcraft under a dramaturgical perspective. We support that the dramaturgic composition of World of Warcraft is structured in order to allow game expansions. This means that World of Warcraft is dramaturgically built to incorporate new characters and to expand fictional time and space to create new game experiences. Résumé en français à la fin du texte

As a result of technological advancement and exponential increases in global access, cross-disciplinary research has recently turned to digital online video games. Most anthropological research within this area has centered around player self-identification, gender construction, and gaming communities. Yet many interactions occur at nodes of dynamic conflict where agentic players navigate intersections of power, which are unaddressed in the scholarly corpus. By utilizing ethnographic methods in World of Warcraft’s player versus player events, I examine resources, relationships, and tools that underpin player actions and understandings. My findings reveal layered and dynamic patterns of sociotechnical conflict. Players’ geographical location impacts access to infrastructure while hardware and software constrain in-game action in fundamental and inescapable ways. Player versus player events add additional restrictions and create fluid situations where players continually negotiate fluctuating social tensions while event-dependent dispersions of power fluctuate between groups and individuals. Players become leaders by legitimizing power in contextually unique ways, and competing imaginaries generate conflicts that are interpreted through game-specific subjectivities. In exploring these occurrences and utilizing theoretical explanations within World of Warcraft contexts, this research contributes to disciplinary understandings and discussions addressing conflict, leadership, and power, and to methodological techniques utilized in virtual world study. By foregrounding how players navigate power differentials in conflict situations, this research informs broader conceptions of how individuals and groups manage social disputes within and outside digital social events, informs game design, and has policy implications for resolving virtual world conflicts in real world courts.

2014 yılı istatistiklerine göre; Türkiye’de 375 milyon dolar dijital oyun harcaması yapılmıştır ve 2013 yılında dijital oyun oynayan insanların sayısı 22,5 milyondur. Araştırmalar özellikle çevrimiçi oyun kullanıcılarının haftalık 25 saatten fazla zamanı sanal dünyalarda geçirdiğini göstermektedir. Dijital video oyunlarının ileri seviyedeki görsel kalitesi, her geçen gün daha fazla insanı bu eğlence türüne çekmektedir. Giderek daha büyük bütçeli ürünlere sahne olan dijital oyun endüstrisinin tüketicileri konumundaki oyuncular ise birçok disiplinin ilgi odağı haline gelmişlerdir. Özellikle çevrimiçi dijital oyunların bir serbest zaman ve eğlence faaliyeti olmalarına rağmen ciddi kurallara çerçevelendirilmiş bir tür mesaiye dönüştüğü görülmektedir. Yaygın olan kanının aksine, son araştırmalar çevrimiçi oyuncuların kendi yöntemleriyle sosyalleştiklerini savunmaktadır. Bu çalışmada “Kullanımlar ve Doyumlar” yaklaşımı kılavuzluğunda, çevrimiçi oyun deneyiminin oyuncuların geleneksel medya ve internet kullanımını etkileyip etkilemediği araştırılmıştır. Bu amaçla en fazla kullanıcıya sahip çevrimiçi oyun olan “World of Warcraft”ın Türkiye’deki oyuncularından 364 katılımcıya anket uygulanmıştır.

When playing video games, there is a certain amount of information and sensory stimuli that players need to process, interpret, and act upon in order to play the game successfully. This can vary from simple visual cues to complex systems of, for example, mathematical, literary, or ludic functions, which requires different amounts of attentional resources to be understood correctly. To process these there is a variation in cognition from the focused deep attention, a cognitive mode to process few but large pieces of complex information, to the more frantic hyper attention, a mode to process large amounts of small pieces of simple information. This thesis takes a close look on the cognitive modes apparent in playing the video game: World of Warcraft.