Playing Disney: Experience and Expression in the Land of Curation

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Taylor T.L.
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

 

“Whose Game Is This Anyway?”: Negotiating Corporate Ownership in a Virtual World

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Taylor T.L.
2002 Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings

This paper explores the ways the commercialization of multiuser environments is posing particular challenges to user autonomy and authorship. With ever broadening defi nitions of intellectual property rights the status of cultural and symbolic artifacts as products of collaborative efforts becomes increasingly problematized. In the case of virtual environments – such as massive multiplayer online role-play games – where users develop identities, bodies (avatars) and communities the stakes are quite high. This analysis draws on several case studies to raise questions about the status of culture and authorship in these games.

 

Power games just want to have fun?: instrumental play in a MMOG

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Taylor T.L.
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

In this paper I explore a particular slice of massive multiplayer participants known as power gamers. Through my ethnography of EverQuest, as well as interviews with players, I analyze the ways these participants, who operate with a highly instrumental game-orientation, actually facilitate their play style through a variety of distinctly social activities. Rather than seeing this segment of the gaming population as “lone ranger” figures or via various other “geek gamer” myths, this work explores the way high-end players are actually embedded in deeply social structures, rituals, and practices.

 

Negotiating Play: The Process of Rule Construction inProfessional Computer Gaming

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Taylor T.L.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

When discussing how computer games work one oftenencounters the argument that a primary functioncomputation plays in the space is “handling” rules. In thismodel of computer game play the device, be it personalcomputer or console, acts as central (and often final) arbiterof rules, upholding the contract of the game with its playersand seamlessly and equitably enforcing a fixed set of rules.While other “layers” of rules are sometimes introduced tonuance this model, there often remains a core sense that thecomputer is centrally relied upon for the lion’s share ofrule-governance.Yet there are a number of studies that signal this story ofthe division of play labor is not so clearly demarcated. InMikael Jakobsson’s fascinating article on a console gameclub and their competitions for the game Super SmashBrothers he shows how the gamers enact a dynamic set ofrules to facilitate play that go well beyond the formalizedones set by the game itself [3]. This often includes on thespot “tweaks” to facilitate play at a particular event. T.L.Taylor’s work on MMOGs also highlights the complexnegotiation around what counts as appropriate and fair playfor online players and how they often interact with softwareto construct strong norms & rules governing their activitieswell beyond the fixed system the game software provides[7,8]. We might additionally look at the interesting work ofauthors exploring practices around cheating, hacking, androle-play to find waypoints in understanding rulenegotiation in computer game spaces [1,2,4,5,6].This piece picks up on the theme of rules negotiation bylooking at how these processes are handled in theprofessional computer gaming scene. One might think thatthe kinds of negotiations described by the scholars notedabove are a unique subset of play and that the very seriousdomain of pro-play (where large sums of money andprestige are often at stake) would surely represent a spherein which the rules of play bear a more one-to-onecorrespondence with system rules & constraints and arecertainly well-defined in advance of competition. I willargue, however, that rules negotiation is a consistent featureof multiplayer computer gaming.