‘What sort of Fish was it?’ How Players Understand their Narrative in Online Games

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MacCallum-Stewart Esther
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Online worlds have become a fundamental element of the virtual landscape. The development of MMORPGs has helped give credence to the idea that online spaces can support valid social communities. Having proved that these communities exist, scholars must now decide whether these communities are different to those in the 'real' world. What makes gaming communities stand out? This paper looks at how players contextualise their behaviour within game narratives. In particular, the ways that players manipulate the divergent narratives of each game, and the paradoxes that these structures create is investigated. MMORPGs are rife with social tension. Players appear to use a series of different social codes when they justify their behaviour, borrowing from different rules sets dictated by circumstances in the game according to their need. To contextualise this, this paper examines how players express and argue their ideas through their understanding of the game world and narrative. Like fan communities , players appropriate the MMORPG text for themselves, reinscribing it according to their own conceptions. However, whereas fans must do this away from their key source, in MMORPGs, players discuss the text as they enact it. Narratives are deliberately dynamic – purporting to give players agency to move at their own pace or to chose the routes and standpoints they take throughout each game. Thus fans actively work upon the text in a much broader context, and their discussions are often visible to large amounts of people within the game. If all players consider themselves as fans, then how does this affect the perception of the text itself?

 

Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game

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MacCallum-Stewart Esther Parsler Justin
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Games which involve historical topics have always been a staple of digital games, but at the same time they have often caused controversy and debate. This paper traces some of the pitfalls inherent to the creation of historical games, as well as trying to reach an understanding of how a history game can be defined. Throughout the paper, we investigate how some aspects of history can be problematic, and how others have been made more difficult by a lack of definition or an expectation that all historical games operate on the same intellectual level. We also examine how controversial games have coped with difficult subjects, and relate this to the development of complexity and scope within gaming.

 

From Catch the Flag to Shock and Awe: how World of Warcraft Negotiates Battle

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MacCallum-Stewart Esther
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Within the MMORPG World of Warcraft, attitudes towards warfare are expressed in conflicting ways. This is partly a result of the difficult relationship modern Western society has with warfare, and the various political agendas that surround this. Within World of Warcraft, this is expressed specifically in the minigames known as ‘Battlegrounds’, which allow players to fight against each other in teams. The way in which these popular areas have been developed in the game is symptomatic of increasingly accepting attitudes towards warfare.