By utilizing ethnographic methods in World of Warcraft’s player versus player events, I examine resources, relationships, and tools that underpin player actions and understandings. Yet many interactions occur at nodes of dynamic conflict where agentic players navigate intersections of power, which are unaddressed in the scholarly corpus. Most anthropological research within this area has centered around player self-identification, gender construction, and gaming communities. Further, I show how video games have the capacity to reinscribe dominant Western ideological trends that through the art of immersion and play become more than abstract paradigms reserved for academia, and instead are inscribed as common consumer understandings of foreign territories, peoples and histories through a new subject-positioning of the player.Īs a result of technological advancement and exponential increases in global access, cross-disciplinary research has recently turned to digital online video games. Ultimately I argue that through digital reinscription, video games render the region, the geographies and the people of the Orient as meaningful only through the subjective Western gaze that comes to understand these geographical, material, and human spaces through a stereotyped and Western-centric cultural lens. Focusing specifically on the recent World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, I argue that by making Pandaria and the Pandaren race so stereotypically Asian, so bluntly Othered, and so vividly exotic merely encapsulates the idea that diversity, difference and especially the East are all now more easily consumed by a world entrenched in such a clash of ideology and clash of cultures, where all facets of identity and play have been transformed into consumable products in the virtual world as potently as they also have in the real world. Focusing first on the capitalist fairytale that is recreated in the virtual economy and gaming ludology, I briefly discuss “gold farming” and how this real world aspect of WoW bridges the Oriental ideology in both real and virtual spaces, as both spaces benefit from this process. It is with this understanding that I see ideology in video games as both an illusion that informs our understanding of the world, as well as an allusion to our very real subject positionings within the real world. Applying Louis Althusser, Edward Said, and many other pertinent scholars, I consider World of Warcraft, the world’s largest online video game, and what our digital production and consumption of this gamic space says about our identities and place in a larger cultural ideological framework. Chapter Six concludes with a discussion of power-gamers as a neo-liberal workforce.Ĭonsidering video games as sites of semiotic play, I argue that video games are a commodity that inscribes the consumer into various subject positions that often participate in the replication of ideology in simulated spaces. Chapter Five explores narrative structure in games, and their relation to power-gaming practices. Chapter Four examines reality in relation to virtual worlds, and how players in virtual worlds explore and unpack their surroundings, which mirrors many scientific practices in the real world. Chapter Three explores how different cultures globally choose to play-games, and the forms of sociability involved in this play. Chapter Two explores facets of technical hobbies, masculinity, skill, and how they relate to power-gaming. Chapter One analyzes how ethnographic fieldwork is performed in virtual worlds, and the necessary frameworks inherent to this. Through ethnographic fieldwork and exploration this thesis examines what constitutes “power-gaming” and seeks to unpack the differences between skill, fun, and labour.
Custom modular home plans are also available.This thesis studies a subset of players of video games called “power-gamers” who play games in a way that mirrors labour as opposed to leisure. Home prices are determined by Ritz-Craft home builders, who quote all modular home costs.
Be sure to request a copy of current specifications from your selected homebuilder. Due to occasional updating of building codes and Ritz-Craft’s continuous product improvement, specifications are subject to change without prior notification. Approved home builders are independent business entities and are not agents of Ritz-Craft. Based on vendor availability, all options portrayed on this site are subject to change without notification. Refer to standard specifications for included items.
Interior views may include optional features. Be sure to thoroughly discuss all aspects of your building project with your Ritz-Craft homebuilder. Renderings may include optional and site-installed features. Artist renderings depict homes as they may be built on a typical site.
0 kommentar(er)
