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Robert Li Thesis RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY: A STUDY ON ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY IN PRACTICE. Robert Li Swinburne University of Technology Australia Thesis satisfying requirements for Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) Supervisors: Dr. Mark Finn & Dr. Steven Conway August 3, 2020 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY 2 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY Thank you to my amazing wife, Jobelle, who has allowed me to be an eternal student, seen me through thesis hell, and continued to support my endeavors even when they don’t make a whole lot of sense. Thank you to my supervisors, Dr. Mark Finn and Dr. Steven Conway. It’s been an incredibly long road, and I was never a candidate who inspired much confidence. I am so lucky to have experienced their mentorship, guidance and patience. There is no way I would have found myself where I am, and with a complete manuscript without their support and prodding. I could not have asked for a better team of supervisors. For that I am truly grateful. Finally, I want to thank my mother, Jane Ho, who instilled within me the spirit to continue lifelong learning where the destination is no longer important, only the journey itself. I am truly a lucky son. 3 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY Declaration The examinable outcome: 1. Contains no material which has been accepted for the award to the candidate of any other degree or diploma, except where due reference is made in the text of the examinable outcome; 2. to the best of the candidate’s knowledge contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the text of the examinable outcome; and 3. where the work is based on joint research or publications, discloses the relative contributions of the respective workers or authors. Signed: Robert Li Date: August 4, 2020 4 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY 5 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY TABLE OF CONTENTS RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY: A TREATISE ON ACTOR- NETWORK THEORY IN PRACTICE. 9 MMORPGS AS WE KNOW THEM 11 THE ASSUMPTIONS OF A GENRE 17 CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW 33 EVERQUEST AND THE EARLY 2000s 36 CONTEMPORARY MMORPG RESEARCH POST-WORLD OF WARCRAFT 42 IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY 43 INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE VIRTUAL 48 LEARNING THROUGH MMORPGs 49 TWO CONUNDRUMS: VIRTUAL PROPERTY AND VIRTUAL ADDICTION 54 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT WHY PEOPLE PLAY MMORPGS 63 RECENT DISCOURSES AROUND PLAYERS AND MMORPGS 69 ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY 71 CHAPTER TWO: METHODOLOGY 77 ACTOR NETWORK THEORY 79 CHARACTERISTICS OF ACTOR NETWORK THEORY 82 INTERSECTING VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY 90 ETHNOGRAPHY: A BRIEF HISTORICAL ACCOUNT 93 RESEARCH PRACTICE 99 RESEARCH METHODS 102 SAMPLE AND SITE SELECTION 104 CHAPTER THREE: WHO NEEDS FRIENDS? 113 FRIENDS AS OBJECTS WITHIN THE MMORPG PLAYER ASSEMBLAGE 114 THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING 115 EXISTING LITERATURE 122 IS FRIENDSHIP THE RIGHT WORD? 134 FRIENDSHIPS AND SOCIALITY IN RELATION TO MMORPG PLAYER ASSEMBLAGES 143 6 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY CHAPTER FOUR: THE MECHANOIDAL FRONTIER 146 THE HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN ARE INSEPARABLE 149 GENERALIZED SYMMETRY – THE ABRIDGED VERSION 154 ROLE PLAY: AN EARLY HISTORY IN BRIEF 156 WELCOME TO THE TECHNOLOGY FRONTIER 161 HOW AZEROTH WAS WON. 171 FROM WHERE WE’VE COME 179 CHAPTER FIVE: PLAYERS ARE SNOWFLAKES 181 PLAYERS AS HETEROGENOUS ENGINEERS 182 THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING 185 VIRTUAL CLASSISM 190 TRACING SNOWFLAKES 203 CHAPTER SIX: YEARS IN THE MAKING 217 THE ENTELECHY OF ENTELECHY 219 THE ENTELECHY OF THE PLAYER ASSEMBLAGE 234 CONCLUSION: THE MMORPG PLAYER IS A MECHANOID 242 A BRIEF RECAP 244 FRIENDS NOT REQUIRED 247 THE MECHANOIDAL ASSEMBLAGE 251 HETEROGENEOUS ENGINEERING 253 ENTELECHEIA AND IRREDUCTIONS 256 HOW CAN WE RECONCEPTUALIZE MMORPG PLAY? 259 EPILOGUE 266 BIBLIOGRAPHY 269 7 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY 8 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY: A TREATISE ON ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY IN PRACTICE. It’s 7:54am, September the 16th, 2005. Faxmonkey appears inside his hovel and makes his way towards the market board of Orgrimmar eager to see whether any of his wares have sold while he’s been “logged out”. As he snakes his way through the city’s buildings made of mud and straw, he notices dead and decomposing bodies littering the streets. He did live on a PvP or “player-versus-player” server, so it wasn’t unusual for assassins of the Alliance to sneak in unannounced and murder some of the city’s denizens. However, the number of bodies was a little out of the ordinary, “Odd”, he thought to himself, “an Alliance guild must have decided to do an early morning raid.” It was the only way Faxmonkey could rationalise what he was seeing. The street opened up into the town centre, but instead of being met by the usual throng of adventurers and merchants, there were only a few avatars milling about. A fellow troll priest runs by, gushing, what looks like blood. Not more than ten meters away from Faxmonkey he collapses, motionless. In the distance he notices similar red splotches periodically spurting from the few avatars he had noticed earlier. What he hadn’t noticed until now was the ground littered with more bodies and bones than he’d ever seen before in the years he had lived in Orgrimmar. Faxmonkey starts backpedalling. 9 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY Sploosh. -251 damage -252 damage “Crap”, he thought to himself. Whatever that troll guy has, he’s got it now too. Faxmonkey casts a healing spell on himself, before turning to run back home. And so, began the Corrupted Blood pandemic (Tylius, 2007; Ziebart, A., 2011). 10 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY MMORPGS AS WE KNOW THEM “Massively Multiplayer Online Games are officially mainstream. A title from the genre has had an entire cartoon episode made about it, features in an advertisement starring Mr. T, and hosts some ten million players worldwide. World of Warcraft is a fundamentally important element to the MMO landscape, but more than that it's an ecology, a society all its own.” – Zenke M., 2008 Massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) have come a long way since the first rudimentary MUDs kickstarted the genre. These were virtual worlds made in the fashion of Dungeons and Dragons within the bedrooms of computer science students such as 1978’s Zork (Anderson, T., Galley, St., 2004), and surreptitiously existed within university research networks. However, actual research into the sustainability of MMORPG play and players is currently thin and over the last decade has remained so. We can draw three conclusions from this. Firstly, sustainability hasn’t yet been explored with MMORPG play. Secondly, the reasons as to why a player is a player or stops becoming a player are wide ranging, inter-connected, and multi- faceted. Finally, the current tools and levers that developers employ in an attempt to sustain a virtual world’s population can actual lead to the very opposite occurring. All of this points to an underlying question that this thesis aims to answer, have MMORPGs and MMORPG players been misunderstood? But before diving into answering the question of whether MMORPG play has been 11 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY misunderstood, and how we go about reconceiving it, it is important to briefly describe what an MMORPG is. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, and Taylor (2012, p.59) describe MMORPGs as fantasy based online games. Although they may vary in theme from being science fiction based, to high fantasy, to even being based on comic book heroes, Boellstorff et. al. described them as all adhering, mechanically, to a similar basic format of advancing characters through levels via team-based combat, exploration, crafting and commerce inspired by the conventions of Dungeons and Dragons. Some examples they point towards include Anarchy Online (2001); EVE Online (2003) and the now defunct City of Heroes (2004). Castronova, in Synthetic Worlds: the business and culture of online games (2005), describes through the thoughts and actions of a new player and their avatar, Sabert, the controls, windows and buttons of the MMORPG interface, the camera motions following the avatar Sabert, amongst the imaginary, fantastical surroundings of a forest. Castronova states that, while the interface is unfamiliar, and the setting fantastical, in essence, it is just a new stage for the age-old performance of human social interaction (p.36-58). More recently, Sourmelis, Ioannou and Zaphiris (2017) sought to more explicitly define MMORPGs. They arrived at the compound descriptions of them being network-based, three dimensional, interactive, narrativistic environments that are permanent and consistent. Narrativistic because they are usually driven by a defined plot; and consistent because they continue to exist in real time when a player logs out or pauses play. Massively multiplayer because they can refer to millions of users; and role playing because a player can assume the role of a fantastical in-game avatar. 12 RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY From the perspectives explored within this thesis, an MMORPG adheres to all of the above definitions. They are the fantastical playgrounds of heroes, aliens and epic battles, and like Huizinga’s (1938) conception of the Magic Circle, they also adhere to the rituals, rules and performance art described by Boellstorff et. al. They are also the software programs, interfaces, and frontiers of social interaction that Castronova described, and they are also the persistent, three-dimensional, network based, interactive, and narrativistic environments that Sourmelis et. al. claim them to be. Collectively, this means that MMORPGs should be seen as techno-social constructs. They are both the product of human and technological activity and interaction. However, they aren’t often seen as such. This thesis will be exploring throughout, how humans and technologies are both equally contributing to construction of MMORPGs and MMORPG play, and how neither can be seen as subservient to the other. So now you have a slight glimpse of what an MMORPG is, the question still remains of why you, or anyone else, should care.
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