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19.
MANUFACTURING CONSENT IN MMORPGs
Online gaming space is intrinsically
ideologically different from the usual conception of online space.
The myth of a wholly democratic information superhighway is still
perpetuated, and in the case of blog popularity for instance,
can often look like a reality. Within cyberspace we can find cyberplanets,
loosely grouped as online chat, or news media, or pornography,
or online gaming. Within the latter category we can identify cybercontinents:
MUDs and MOOs; online gambling; first person shooters; and the
de rigeur massively multiplayer online roleplyaing games (MMORPG).
In a fully-3d online world , gamers create a character with the
attributes of their choosing and engage (most often) in strategic
combat with countless other players, in a solo quest or as part
of a "clan". Competition has become intense in recent
years, and game-specific dealings, lucrative. Particular titles
have amassed
an economy with a virtual worth of multi-millions of dollars,
on account of people's willingness to spend actual money on in-game
items or attributes. As a result of the potential for the individual
gamer to turn a profit, users have begun playing with the sole
intent of trading their progress in the game for cold hard cash.
Unsurprisingly,
this has caused some amount of worry amongst the game companies.
The appearance of gamers taking control seems to back developers
into a corner in which they feel forced to reassert themselves.
To regain control of their digital economy, they subtly wage war.
At first, concessions are made about the nature of the virtual
realm as uninhibited and removed from reality, as (despite the
fact that these games are subscription-based) advertising finds
its way into the gaming. Then, commercials become fully integrated
into the game -Everquest 2 was released with a command
that permitted
the player to simply type "/pizza" and the local
Pizza Hut would be contacted for delivery immediately. And most
recently, steps have been made to prevent gamers from engaging
in real-world transactions of game artifacts. While still preaching
a near-boundless digital space, MMORPGs are quickly closing in
on gamer freedom. Marketed as an opportunity to create your own
reality and game as you please, the industry's growth has seen
an incline in restrictions of what is believed to be acceptable
play. In a sense though, the fantasy "reality" is mirroring
actual reality with a constant tightening on the limitations of
freedom. Yet the games themselves still put forth a sense that
anything is possible; that the world in which the player functions
does not suffer from the imposition of top-down control. The pervasion
of the digital world by the commerce of the real, and vice versa,
has created barriers to the notion that a cyberspace may exist
independent of the forces of the real world's global economy.
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