Choice Reviews Online · 2008 · 296 citations · 0 references
Social SciencesCommunicationCultural StudiesCultureDigital Culture StudiesMedia StudiesGaming CultureInternet CultureOnline CommunitiesVideo Game CultureVideo Game StudiesVirtual WorldsCultural Representation In GamesCultural Studies Of GamesGamer CultureGaming SubculturesMassively Multiplayer Online GamesMultiplayer GamesPlayer IdentityVirtual World Communities
World of Warcraft is the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game, boasting over ten million subscribers who play roughly twenty hours a week, and has attracted scholars from game studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. This book investigates the complexity of World of Warcraft from multiple perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of increasingly complex digital game worlds. The authors immersed themselves in the game, spending hundreds of hours playing, leading guilds and raids, exploring the auction house, conducting interviews, and analyzing Blizzard’s design and player‑modified interfaces to examine how the game reflects real‑world capitalism, gender, geography, mythology, death, deviant strategies, and identity. Contributors include Espen Aarseth, Hilde G.
World of Warcraft is the world's most popular massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), with (as of January 2008) more than ten million active subscribers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia who play the game an astonishing average of twenty hours a week. This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds. The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players (leading guilds and raids, exploring moneymaking possibilities in the in-game auction house, playing different factions, races, and classes), conducting interviews, and studying the game design--as created by Blizzard Entertainment, the game's developer, and as modified by player-created user interfaces. The analyses they offer are based on both the firsthand experience of being a resident of Azeroth and the data they have gathered and interpreted. The contributors examine the ways that gameworlds reflect the real world--exploring such topics as World of Warcraft as a capitalist fairytale and the game's construction of gender; the cohesiveness of the gameworld in terms of geography, mythology, narrative, and the treatment of death as a temporary state; aspects of play, including deviant strategies perhaps not in line with the intentions of the designers; and character--both players' identification with their characters and the game's culture of naming characters. The varied perspectives of the contributors--who come from such fields as game studies, textual analysis, gender studies, and postcolonial studies--reflect the breadth and vitality of current interest in MMOGs. Contributors: Espen Aarseth, Hilde G. Corneliussen, Charlotte Hagstrom, Lisbeth Klastrup, Tanya Krzywinska, Jessica Langer, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, T. L. Taylor, Ragnhild Tronstad.