Conflict, Thought Communities and Textual Appropriation in MMORPGs by Esther MacCallum-Stewart 4. Player Production and Innovation in Online Games: Time for New Rules? by Aphra Kerr 3. Light and Ben Gosling Part II: Production and Play 2. The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Gaming by Garry Crawford, Victoria K. Bringing together a series of original essays from both leading and emerging academics in the field of game studies, many of which employ new empirical work and innovative theoretical approaches to gaming, this book considers key issues crucial to our understanding of online gaming and associated social relations, including: patterns of play, legal and copyright issues, player production, identity construction, gamer communities, communication, patterns of social exclusion and inclusion around gender and disability, and future directions in online gaming. This book explores the opportunities, challenges and patterns of gameplay and sociality afforded by the Internet and online gaming. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the advent of the Internet. There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. Moreover, they also suggest a radically new perspective to marketers of ordinary goods and services: viewing marketing as a form of game design. The results provide a new perspective to game design with interesting implications to developers. Based on a review of a number of MMOs, we describe some of the most common patterns and game mechanics and show how their effects can be explained in terms of analogous techniques from marketing science. To begin bridging the gap, we propose that the design patterns and game mechanics commonly used in games and online hangouts should be viewed as a set of marketing techniques designed to sell virtual goods. Professional marketers, on the other hand, tend to overlook the internal design of games and hangouts and focus on marketing the services as a whole. Game developers have long created compelling game designs, but having to market virtual goods to players is a relatively new situation to them. In this paper, we argue that the marketing of virtual goods currently falls short of what it could be. Selling virtual goods for real money is an increasingly popular revenue model for massively-multiplayer online games (MMOs), social networking sites (SNSs) and other online hangouts. These findings through the application of Actor Network Theory alter the current understanding of the MMORPG player and allow us to answer the thesis question of “how have we misunderstood MMORPG play?” The first finding is that humans, more specifically, those who study participants considered as “friends” throughout MMORPG play were actually found to be fragile and non-essential to sustaining that play the second finding is that humans do not hold as privileged a position within the sphere of MMORPG play and development, and that non-human, technologies often have as dramatic an effect on play thirdly, this thesis finds that the way in which MMORPG play occurred and MMORPG players came to be could not be classified with rudimentary taxonomies as had been attempted previously, rather each occurrence of play and each player construct was unique through formation and, finally, the fourth finding is that how one eventually comes to be an MMORPG player is the realisation of a complex tapestry of potentialities, sometimes years in the making. This led to the uncovering of important non-human, technological actants, that formed an important part of the construct of MMORPG play and the player itself, and, have been underserved by previous research. Through the semi-structured interviews of sixteen participants obtained through a snowball sampling strategy within the MMORPG of Final Fantasy XIV, this thesis uses a novel application of Actor Network Theory to trace their MMORPG play. However, these previous enquiries have failed to address MMORPG players as both a result of not just the human and social, but also of technological actants. The arguments for why this has happened typically focus on the humans that play them whether that be psychological, financial, or lifestyle factors. The growth in the populations of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) has stopped growing since 2009.
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