13 - MMORPG as Locally Realized Worlds of Action
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
This paper addresses the question of concrete realizations of imaginary worlds as situated worlds. As a case study, the author bases his reflections on Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventure, an MMORPG based on the adventure of Conan the barbarian, the character created by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s. The author of the paper uses Erving Goffman's theory of game and the notions of “locally realized world” and “membrane” to address this situated production. He then discusses the place of the player and the relations to the representations in the game as a vicarious experience and a distance implied by playful practices. By crossing several works of Erving Goffman, the author shows that immersion in gaming worlds is the product of both being absorbed in the action and maintaining a distance with it in order to be at the same time an actor and a spectator of the action.
Keywords: MMORPG, Action, Immersion, Transmedial World, Conan
While younger than other forms of expression, video games have gained much popularity in the last few decades. They are now often part of broad multi-platform commercial strategies and, thereby, offer specific actualizations of fictional worlds that appear on various media (as also seen in the previous chapter).
Within the framework of the recent “world” trend in media studies (Ryan and Thon 2014, 1), I suggest to consider another point of entry to the study of “worlds”, borrowing thoughts from the sociologist Erving Goffman and crossing perspectives about games and world building. This work aims to show how a game can be a specific actualization of a world in an interactionist sociological sense and what place it has in a transmedia environment. As a case study, I will take Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) developed by the Norwegian company Funcom. This game is based on the stories about Conan, the famous barbarian invented by the Texan author Robert E. Howard, one of the founding fathers of the fantasy genre (Besson 2007, 100; Parsons 2015, 58).
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- Information
- World Building Transmedia Fans Industries , pp. 231 - 250Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017