Scaling Technoliberalism for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Scaling Technoliberalism for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Aleena Chia

Abstract

The sandbox genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) addresses players as subjects with agency to shape worlds, impact populations, and make history through their actions within virtual environments. Designed features afford feelings of empowerment and solidarity that undergird technoliberal forms of subjectivity, which uphold technological structures as legitimate means to emergent effects in virtual worlds. This article uses ethnographic fieldwork and player interviews at EVE Online fan conventions to examine how the ideas and affects of technoliberalism are afforded through procedurally-encoded game processes, yet are aestheticized through branding onto player communities and their platforms. This smooths over the contradiction at the heart of technoliberalism that players’ agency to shape virtual world content is contingent on rules encoded into platforms whose development and adjustment are beyond their control. These contradictions are the key to understanding the pleasures of freedom and complexities of control in designed environments beyond gaming.

Keywords

MMOGs; affordances; technoliberalism; brandfests; agency

Full Text: PDF [Archive.org-Backup]


DOI: https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v10i3.7264

About the Journal

The full website for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research can be found at: http://jvwresearch.org

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research Vol 10, No 3 (2017): EVE Online

Licence: CC_BY_NC_ND_US

This special issue in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research highlights the ways that EVE scholarship has matured. A sub-discipline within a sub-discipline, writing about EVE no longer focuses just on what makes this particular MMOG so different to the more mainstream online games and virtual worlds, but now describes in fascinating depth the elements of this virtual world that have taken 15 years of play to develop. As guest editors, we are excited to share this collection as these five articles exemplify the contributions that EVE Online scholarship will continue to make long into the future.