Co-Constructing Virtual Identities: Insights from Linguistic Analysis

This article critically examines the co-construction of personae for fictional characters in virtual environments. Expanding upon Gee’s (2003) tripartite notion of identity in virtual worlds, this paper focuses on how virtual identities are created, and who does the creating. Using sociolinguistic methodology, I show how alterations in behavior based on avatar characteristics (The Proteus Effect: Yee and Bailenson 20007) can be used as a window into the virtual identity creation process. Potential contributions to virtual identity from three sources are analyzed: the community, the creators of the virtual environment, and influences from the non-virtual world, concluding that community created knowledge seems to play the most significant role in virtual identity construction.

The Effects of Player-Avatar Identification and Empathy: The Impact of Honor of Kings on Players’ Attitude and Knowledge of Historical Figures

Defence of Chinese state-sanctioned history against perceived attacks from Honor of Kings

I Predict a Riot: Making and Breaking Rules and Norms in League of Legends

This paper examines the relationships between player community norms and developer-created rules of play in the competitive team game, League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009). Since the game’s release, players have established their own sets of strategic norms – much like player positioning systems in sport – which are used as a de facto baseline for play at all levels of competition. Since these norms are distinct from the game developer’s rules concerning online behaviour, however, it is unclear as to whether individual players have the ‘right’ to enact experimental game strategies that fall outside of the pre-existing framework. In November of 2016, however, it was revealed in one of the game’s online community hubs that a player had been threatened with a permanent account ban after repeatedly engaging in one such experimental strategy. A study of the following discussion as it played out within the player community shows that players are aware of larger issues concerning meaning-making in competitive League of Legends, and that they identify the game developer as a key figure in this ongoing process.

Critically Approaching the Playful and Participatory Genealogy of MOBAs

This paper gives close attention to the term ‘Multiplayer Online Battle Arena’ (MOBA), establishing what it implies in popular discourses as a term with specific generic connotations and more critically, what its short but eventful history represents alongside wider participatory trends across the Internet. Despite its far reaching influence and now commonplace usage, MOBA is not a neutral term and it signals a precise transitional moment towards a new normalisation of playful, cultural and economic control for the genre. Through adapting Foucault’s term of the ‘dispositif’ and applying a genealogical approach towards mapping the transition from the mod of Defense of the Ancients (DotA) to the genre of MOBA, this paper argues that MOBAs continue to be laced in significant bottom-up movements and characteristics. It is these lingering characteristics of playful and participatory residue that many of the genres most notable game design and paratextual aspects can be found. However, it is also here that critical questions surrounding the platformed state of these relations also make themselves evident.

The Well-Played MOBA: How DotA 2 and League of Legends use Dramatic Dynamics

This paper will analyse the two most popular games within the MOBA genre, DotA 2 and League of Legends, as performance-designed spaces. By analysing MOBAs as performance and using Marc LeBlanc’s (2006) Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics as an aesthetic framework the aim is to posit a greater understanding of the ways in which e-Sports and MOBAs specifically can be designed in order to create dramatic tension within the increasing variety of available viewing platforms. In this way, this paper helps present new ways to think about how games can be designed/structured in order to be satisfyingly performed and consumed through increasingly diverse viewing methods.