Scaling Technoliberalism for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Abstract

The sandbox genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) addresses players as subjects with agency to shape worlds, impact populations, and make history through their actions within virtual environments. Designed features afford feelings of empowerment and solidarity that undergird technoliberal forms of subjectivity, which uphold technological structures as legitimate means to emergent effects in virtual worlds. This article uses ethnographic fieldwork and player interviews at EVE Online fan conventions to examine how the ideas and affects of technoliberalism are afforded through procedurally-encoded game processes, yet are aestheticized through branding onto player communities and their platforms. This smooths over the contradiction at the heart of technoliberalism that players’ agency to shape virtual world content is contingent on rules encoded into platforms whose development and adjustment are beyond their control. These contradictions are the key to understanding the pleasures of freedom and complexities of control in designed environments beyond gaming.

EVE Online is not for Everyone: Exceptionalism in Online Gaming Cultures

“…Carter's explorations of antisocial play subsequently have been extended by Ian Gregory Brooks (2018) in his investigation into whether or not such betrayal is actually unethical. Similar themes were relayed by Aleena Chia (2018) and Mark Johnson and Robert Mejia (2018), who explored the explicitly neoliberal undertones of this gameworld in the time since the research in this article was conducted.…”

“…Christopher Paul argued that this approach to learning the game enculturates and solidifies a tight-knit community of players. Extensions to this research contends the imagined EVE player is assumed similar in subcultural knowledge and humor to that of existing players, as evidenced in an examination of playercreated newbie guides (Bergstrom, 2013), player-made propaganda (Carter, 2015a), and fieldwork conducted at fan conventions (Chia, 2018). My research adds further empirical evidence that the existing player base may not always be particularly apt at offering assistance to a diversity of new players.…”

Technoliberalism and the Complementary Relationships between Humanitarian, Conservation, and Entrepreneurial Dronework in Indonesia

“…Several scholars consider capitalist technological practice as contradictory to the formation of social equality (Atanasoski and Vora, 2018; Chia, 2018; Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Pfister and Yang, 2018). For these scholars, ‘technoliberalism’ describes a corporate discourse that celebrates technology while omitting its conflicts in class and gender relations.…”

“…Drone scholars are rightfully skeptical of these summations (Jackman and Brickell, 2022). Academics often read this rhetoric of technologies simultaneously energizing economic and social benefits as an example of efforts to elide the contradictions of capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, and ecological decay (Atanasoski and Vora, 2018; Chia, 2018; Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Pfister and Yang, 2018).…”

Destruction as Deviant Leisure in EVE Online

“…This makes up a large portion of coverage about EVE by the gaming enthusiast press (Bergstrom, 2019e), but also informed the early scholarship about this game (Blodgett, 2009;Craft, 2007;White, 2008). The second generation of EVE scholarship took a more balanced approach to the game that were less focused on the outright anti-social elements of gameplay (Carter et al, 2016;Chia, 2018;Goodfellow, 2015;Milik, 2017;Warmelink, 2014;Webber & Milik, 2018). This is not to say that examinations of treachery and deceit in EVE have stopped, but rather that the earlier work which is more focused on one-off and/or scandalous events, this new work as exemplified by Marcus Carter (2015a, 2015b, Ian Gregory Brooks (2018), or my own collaborations (Bergstrom et al, 2013;N.…”