Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most popular massively multiplayer games (MMOs) to date, with more than 6 million subscribers worldwide. This article uses data collected over 8 months with automated “bots” to explore how WoW functions as a game. The focus is on metrics reflecting a player’s gaming experience: how long they play, the classes and races they prefer, and so on. The authors then discuss why and how players remain committed to this game, how WoW’s design partitions players into groups with varying backgrounds and aspirations, and finally how players “consume” the game’s content, with a particular focus on the endgame at Level 60 and the impact of player-versus-player-combat. The data illustrate how WoW refined a formula inherited from preceding MMOs. In several places, it also raises questions about WoW’s future growth and more generally about the ability of MMOs to evolve beyond their familiar template. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Rather than simply identifying “emergence” as a prime property of massively multiplayer online game life, a better understanding of the complex nature of player-produced culture is needed. Life in game worlds is not exempt from forms of player-based regulation and control. Drawing on ethnographic and interview work within World of Warcraft, the author undertakes initial inquiries on this subject by looking at three areas: nationalism, age, and surveillance. This case study shows systems of stratification and control can arise from the bottom up and be implemented in not only everyday play culture but even player-produced modifications to the game system itself. Due to the ways these systems may simultaneously facilitate play, there is often an ambivalent dynamic at work. This piece also prompts some methodological considerations. By discussing field site choice, the author argues that context is of utmost importance and needs to be more thoughtfully foregrounded within game studies. </jats:p>

<jats:p> A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinions; the meanings they make; the social capital they derive; and the networks they form and to develop a typology of players and guilds. In keeping with current Internet research findings, players were found to use the game to extend real-life relationships, meet new people, form relationships of varying strength, and also use others merely as a backdrop. The key moderator of these outcomes appears to be the game's mechanic, which encourages some kinds of interactions while discouraging others. The findings are discussed with respect to the growing role of code in shaping social interactions. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Player-created game movies have been an outlet for creative expression by World of Warcraft (WoW) players since the beta version of the game. The proliferation of players, clans, Web sites, and community forums for creating, consuming, and commenting on WoW movies is remarkable. Linking multiplayer game communities and the making of animated movies is not unprecedented. It has been a characteristic of machinima for more than a decade. In this article however, the author hopes to show that the context, content, and consumption of game movies based on massively multiplayer games raises new questions about contributions game-based performances make to player communities. The author connects the brief history of WoW movies to the history of machinima and other game movies, illustrates the variety of impulses behind WoW movies through three quickly recounted examples, and gathers together salient themes around one movie in particular: Tristan Pope's Not Just Another Love Story. </jats:p>

<jats:p> One of the pleasures of playing in the “World” of Warcraft is becoming part of its pervasive mythology. This article argues that to understand the game’s formal, aesthetic, and structural specificity, its pleasures and potential meanings, it is essential to investigate how the mythic functions. The author shows that the mythic plays a primary role in making a consistent fantasy world in terms of game play, morality, culture, time, and environment. It provides a rationale for players’ actions, as well as the logic that under- pins the stylistic profile of the game, its objects, tasks, and characters. In terms of the “cultural” environments of the game, the presence of a coherent and extensive myth scheme is core to the way differences and conflicts between races are organized. And, as a form of intertextual resonance, its mythology furnishes the game with a “thickness” of meaning that promotes, for players, a sense of mythological being as well as encouraging an in-depth textual engagement. </jats:p>

<jats:p> With the immense popularity of massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), other media as well as game research have discovered gaming as a topic of discussion and study. These discussions, however, tend to ignore the history of both games and of game studies. This article addresses the connections between one of the old and, today, obscure forms of using computers for multiplayer gaming—the text-based Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)—and the current, highly visible and massively used graphic interface game World of Warcraft. These connections range from player style through game-play options to social interaction and player-controlled social modifiers within both types of games. The comparison is based on play, observation, and interviews with players in MUDs and in WoW. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article discusses the viability of the open-ended game classification model described in “A Multi Dimensional Typology of Games.” The perspectives of such a model is discussed with emphasis on how a structural theory of games can contribute to game design and the development of formal and semiformal game design methods, such as Game Design Patterns. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article explores issues of gender and video gaming, typically perceived as a masculine practice, through case studies of two adult women gamers. Drawing on a conception of identities in practice, the analyses show that dominant assumptions about women’s preferences and orientations toward video gaming do not reflect the diverse ways that women might make meaning of, respond to, and take pleasure in such games. To better understand women’s and men’s orientations toward gaming, the article argues for the need to take into account the complexity of people’s identities, not just gender alone but its interplay with and enactment in combination with personal histories and cultural factors that play out differently in individuals’ lives. This understanding, in turn, leads to insights into how video games may serve as spaces for the enactment of new forms of gendered identities. </jats:p>

<jats:p> From photoblogs to cell phone cameras, digital technology is rapidly and fundamentally changing the cultural practice of photographic representation. At the same time, the remediation of photography, in both technical and cultural modes, is occurring in the digital game. Although conventions surrounding “the camera” have commonly played a role in some game genres, with increased frequency a more literal transposition of the photograph is making its way into the game: from x-treme stunt photography to the shift of the role of photographer from narrative context to play dynamic. How and why is the practice of photography now being performed virtually in the digital game? What does this redundancy teach us about both the cultural role of photography and the evolving medium of the digital game? </jats:p>