Discipline and Dragon Kill Points in the Online Power Game

Silverman, Mark E.; Simon, Bart

doi:10.1177/1555412009343572

Cited by 36 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The hyper-quantified, neoliberal way of approaching the game that grew within Impetus has been present in hardcore gaming circles since Vanilla WoW [4,14,29,32,39]. But this approach to the game was not as prevalent as it is today.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Paul and Philpott [33] documented social life in a guild where an increasing focus on the allocation of scarce resources (e.g., spots for in-game activities and rare weapons), created a competitive atmosphere that eventually led to the guild's demise. Silverman and Simon [39] examined guilds' use of incentives in raids. Rewarding players with an unofficial, nonmonetary currency, guilds tried to increase individual participation in raids, and increase individual loyalty to the guild.…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, WoW is one of the most studied games in the academic literature, providing a solid basis for evaluating changes in player behavior [1,4,8,9,11,14,29,30,32,33,38,39,43,46,47]. Second, changes to World of Warcraft's software are documented through Blizzard's official patch notes, forum discussions, and wiki sites.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

"Something We Loved That Was Taken Away": Community and Neoliberalism in World of Warcraft

Crenshaw¹,

LaMorte²,

Nardi³

2017

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

"Something We Loved That Was Taken Away": Community and Neoliberalism in World of Warcraft

Crenshaw¹,

LaMorte²,

Nardi³

2017

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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“…These systems are commonly referred to as DKP (Dragon Kill Points) systems (see e.g. Malone, 2009;Silverman and Simon, 2009;Chen, 2009). Active groups tend to utilize a wide array of ICTs, which assists in both the intra-group sharing and the tracking of contributions (Warmelink, 2014, pp.…”

Section: Guilds Corporations Clans As Information Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seek, share, or withhold: information trading in MMORPGs

Harviainen

Hamari

2015

Journal of Documentation

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ways in which information acts as a commodity in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and how players pay for items and services with information practices. Design/methodology/approach – Through meta-theoretical analysis of the game environment as a set of information systems, one of retrieval and one social, the paper shows how players’ information practices influence their access to game content, organizational status and relationship to real-money trade. Findings – By showing how information trading functions in MMORPGs, the paper displays the importance of information access for play, the efficiency of real money trade and the significance of information practice -based services as a relatively regular form of payment in virtual worlds. Players furthermore shown to contribute to the information economy of the game with the way in which they decide not to share some information, so as to prevent others from a loss of game content value due to spoilers. Originality/value – The subject, despite the popularity of online games, has been severely understudied within library and information science. The paper contributes to that line of research, by showing how games function as information systems, and by explaining how they, as environments and contexts, influence and are influenced by information practices.

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“…Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter began Games of Empire (2009) by remarking that the constitution of subjectivities at work in certain games is described as 'reassertion', 'rehearsal', and 'reinforcement'. And similarly, for Silverman and Simon (2009), the grind of the avatar levelling process exemplifies the disciplinary aspect of computer games. In Foucault's later work, on Greek and Roman Antiquity, his studies revealed a subject that was not constituted, but involved in constituting itself through well-ordered practices, leading him to proclaim that 'it is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research.'…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self: Game Studies and the Late Work of Michel Foucault

Zhu

2018

ToDIGRA

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This paper aims to critically introduce the applicability of Foucault’s late work, on the practices of the self, to the scholarship of contemporary computer games. I argue that the gameplay tasks that we set ourselves, and the patterns of action that they produce, can be understood as a form of ‘work on the self’, and that this work is ambivalent between, on the one hand, an aesthetic transformation of the self – as articulated by Foucault in relation to the care or practices of the self – in which we break from the dominant subjectivities imposed upon us, and on the other, a closer tethering of ourselves through our own playful impulses, to a neoliberal subjectivity centred around instrumentally-driven selfimprovement. Game studies’ concern with the effects that computer games have on us stands to gain from an examination of Foucault’s late work for the purposes of analysing and disambiguating between the nature of the transformations at stake. Further, Foucault’s tripartite analysis of ‘power-knowledge-subject’, which might be applied here as ‘game-discourse-player’, foregrounds the imbrication of our gameplay practices – the extent to which they are due to us and the way in which our own volitions make us subject to power, which is particularly pertinent in the domain of play.

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Discipline and Dragon Kill Points in the Online Power Game

Cited by 36 publications

References 16 publications

"Something We Loved That Was Taken Away": Community and Neoliberalism in World of Warcraft

"Something We Loved That Was Taken Away": Community and Neoliberalism in World of Warcraft

Seek, share, or withhold: information trading in MMORPGs

Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self: Game Studies and the Late Work of Michel Foucault

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