Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games(mmorpg),
have become a part of our world. Most people you talk to will know or at least
heard of one MMORPG, in most cases, this would be World of Warcraft (WoW) which
boasts 11 million players. These games provide a persistent fantasy world where
you create an avatar of yourself with a unique set of skills and abilities, and
then sends you off on a adventure with thousands of other players, who you are
free to communicate or fight with.
Though WoW is the most popular and well known of the MMORPG
sphere, there are dozens of other MMORPG's out there. Whether they are free or subscription
based, there is a huge global market for these communities, there is an
estimated 75 million MMORPG players worldwide. While questing within these
worlds it is easy to forget that every single person you see running around is
another person behind a computer screen just like yourself.
Elizabeth Erkenbrack,
author of the 'Mediated personhood and World of Warcraft: An
Ethnographic and linguistic analysis, states that "An MMORPG is a type
interactive social media. Ethnographic treatment of this type of media deserves
balanced consideration to ensure that it is recognized as both cultural artifact as well as an actual
site of culture and cultural formation (Hine: 2000, 2005)" . This means
within globalization, not only do we have our planet to think of in terms of
cultural significance, now we have dozens of other worlds.
References:
Changyou. "The Globalization of MMORPGs -
MMORPG.com Blogs."Online MMO and MMORPG
Gamelist, News, Reviews and Community at MMORPG.com. Version -. -, 12 Mar. 2010. Web. 6 Sept. 2012.
<http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/changyou/032010/5872_The-Globalization-of-MMORPGs>.
Erkenbrack, Elizabeth.
"a thesis in Anthropology." 'Mediated personhood and World of Warcraft: An Ethnographic
and linguistic analysis -.- (2011): 6. Print.http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1559&context=edissertations
2 comments:
The number of massively multiplayer online role-playing games as high as 75 million is interesting, the analogy that within globalisation there is now dozens of different virtual worlds that hold cultural significance and not just our own planet is a fascinating thought. This has been a great post and very informative
I like that last line about the dozens of other worlds, however the post seems to be lacking any sort of argument or discussion apart from that. Informative and easy to read, just needed to talk on that last line of cultural significances more imo.
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