This article explores the notion of assemblage for computer game studies. Drawing on this framework, the author proposes a multifaceted methodological approach to the study of games and the play experience. Drawing on user-created mods (modifications) in the game World of Warcraft and an analysis of a raid encounter there, a discussion is undertaken about the relationship between technological artifacts, game experience, and sociality. Primary to the consideration is an argument for the centralizing the interrelation of a variety of actors and nodes when analyzing lived play in computer games.
A study of Everquest that provides a snapshot of multiplayer gaming culture, questions the truism that computer games are isolating and alienating, and offers insights into broader issues of work and play, gender identity, technology, and commercial culture. In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps—as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces. Taylor's detailed look at Everquest offers a snapshot of multiplayer culture. Drawing on her own experience as an Everquest player (as a female Gnome Necromancer)—including her attendance at an Everquest Fan Faire, with its blurring of online—and offline life—and extensive research, Taylor not only shows us something about games but raises broader cultural issues. She considers "power gamers," who play in ways that seem closer to work, and examines our underlying notions of what constitutes play—and why play sometimes feels like work and may even be painful, repetitive, and boring. She looks at the women who play Everquest and finds they don't fit the narrow stereotype of women gamers, which may cast into doubt our standardized and preconceived ideas of femininity. And she explores the questions of who owns game space—what happens when emergent player culture confronts the major corporation behind the game.
Virtual environments present researchers with a range of methodological considerations, both new and old. With the advent of embodied online worlds, experiences with distributed presence, anonymity and multiple modes of engagement increasingly have become the norm. Avatars and their textual counterparts lead us to critically encounter how research can be most meaningfully handled given a terrain in which users are actually embodying themselves digitally, and often in multivalent ways. This article discusses some of the theoretical issues at stake in this form of research, as well as providing several grounded practices to help methodologically negotiate virtual worlds.
This article explores the issue of gender and computer games by looking at the growing population of women in massive multiplayer online role-playing environments (MMORPGs). It explores what are traditionally seen as masculine spaces and seeks to understand the variety of reasons women might participate. Through ethnographic and interview data, the themes of social interaction, mastery and status, team participation, and exploration are considered as compelling activities female gamers are engaging in online. Given that these online games often include a component of fighting, the issue of violence is discussed. Rather than seeing this group of players as an anomaly, this article explores how focusing on the pleasures women derive from gaming might lend a more complex understanding of both gender and computer games. Finally, a consideration of how design is affecting this emerging genre is explored.
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