Is Electronic Community an Addictive Substance?


Chee Florence Smith Richard
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

In this study, we examine how online games, like the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) EverQuest, are represented and controlled through media rhetoric. We look at international attempts to regulate their use through policy, and unearth some of the ways in which media reports have constructed public opinion of online games. We then contrast those reports with an ethnographic study of the EverQuest environment. The analysis of game experience and informant testimony shows that regulation and control of games is ultimately not a correct course of action in order to heal social dysfunction, of which excessive participation in electronic communities is only a symptom.

 

Understanding Korean experiences of online game hype, identity, and the menace of the “Wang-tta”


Chee Florence
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

This paper presents an ethnographic analysis of case studies derived from fieldwork that was designed to consider the different ways Korean game players establish community online and offline. I consider ways online game hype and identity are formed by looking at Korean PC game rooms as “third places,”, and activities associated with professional and amateur gaming. A synthesis of the Korean concept “Wang-tta” provides extra insight into the motivations to excel at digital games and one of the strong drivers of such community membership. Korea’s gaming society has many unique elements within the interplay of culture, social structure, and infrastructure.