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

Crenshaw, Nicole; LaMorte, Jaclyn; Nardi, Bonnie

doi:10.24251/hicss.2017.247

Cited by 9 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…While the Southeast Asia English site alleviated some of these concerns, it is uncertain how much of the harvested data is authentic in nature in that regard, especially since the Southeast Asian region is not an option for account creation in the virtual gaming world. Several other works also report on complications with server regions (Crenshaw, LaMorte & Nardi, 2017) or study participation selection restricted to server location (Mancini, Caricati, Balestrieri & Sibilla, 2018).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While certain player motivations are associated with teamwork, competition to engage with MMORPGs (Billieux et al, 2013), and escapism (Oggins & Sammis, 2012); and certain WoW communities combine both the affordances of technology and the influence of culture (Crenshaw, LaMorte & Nardi, 2017), recent research leans towards conclusions that World of Warcraft, in particular, has produced communities that are essentially neoliberal (Crenshaw, LaMorte & Nardi, 2017), victim-playing (Blommaert, 2017), and discriminatory (Mancini, Caricati, Balestrieri & Sibilla, 2018). Nevertheless, in Thorne, Fischer & Lu (2012), WoW serves as a "semiotic ecology" of game-generated text, player-to-player communication and collaboration (p. 279).…”

Section: Communities In World Of Warcraft®mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…World of Warcraft® (WoW) is a unique online storytelling community in that not only does it afford live, massively multiplayer, virtual gaming, and face-to-face interaction (Crenshaw, LaMorte & Nardi, 2017), but it also boasts a robust online forum community consisting of general, guild, technical, game world, special interest, and storytelling threads (Poor, 2014;and Brown, 2017), amongst many others. It is a subscription-based, multilingual, massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) which was launched in 2004 (Wright, 2004;and McMillan, 1996) by Blizzard Entertainment, and -at the time of this writing -with over 4,000,000 players (Brown, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A literature review commences, followed by methodology, findings and discussion, and finally a conclusion where implications for real world applications regarding interaction amongst multicultural communities will also be considered. It is not the intention of this present study to comment on the current state of WoW (Brown, 2017;and Crenshaw, LaMorte & Nardi, 2017), but rather to reinvigorate a storytelling forum thread that inhabits the diverse characteristic senses of an online community, which -if nurtured and cultivated properly -could yield opportunities for further research and offer a "fuller understanding of the variety of communities in our society" (McMillan & Chavis, 1986, p. 19).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Virtual Sense of Community in a World of Warcraft® Storytelling Open Forum Thread

Gui

2018

JVWR

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World of Warcraft® (WoW), a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) extends to its members a virtual landscape of live gaming opportunities through such platforms as “dice” rolled character stats, open-ended story development, and interactive AI. These affordances are underpinned by a kind of virtual sense of community bringing players together in order to develop relationships and the self, adventure together, build up wealth, and overcome obstacles in order to complete quests. In addition to live game-play (or “in-world”) communities, WoW residents create alternative communities through rich online forums—here, new members are recruited into guilds, disputes are spawned and slayed, and seasoned warriors reminisce over worlds and lives that once- were. However, a third type of community is also evident through particular threads crafted within forums specifically for collaborative storytelling (or roleplaying). This paper examines sense of community—a sense of “belonging to, importance of, and identification with a community”—through one particular thread, “The Darkening Grove Tavern” under the forum World’s End Tavern using an adaptation of McMillan and Chavis’ theory and Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor’s ethnographic data collection methodology for qualitative analysis of virtual worlds . Findings from players’ story text (or “turns”) suggest that online storytelling forum threads exhibit a linguistically and semiotically branded sense of virtual community.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Communities In World Of Warcraft®mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Virtual Sense of Community in a World of Warcraft® Storytelling Open Forum Thread

Gui

2018

JVWR

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“…Case Study 3: Amateur game server governance For our final case study we examine governance in the popular game Minecraft. Governance in digital games has become an important arena for innovative institutional design [12,23,38,69], especially multiplayer games that follow a self-hosting model, by which fans in the community personally host publicly accessible instances of a game. Fans who self-host assume the difficulties of governance, while also gaining access to technological innovations for addressing those difficulties.…”

Section: Operational Layermentioning

confidence: 99%

"This Place Does What It Was Built For"

Frey

Krafft

Keegan

2019

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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Whether we recognize it or not, the Internet is rife with exciting and original institutional forms that are transforming social organization on and offline. Governing these Internet platforms and other digital institutions has posed a challenge for engineers and managers, many of whom have little exposure to the relevant history or theory of institutional design. The dominant guiding practices for the design of digital institutions to date in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and the tech industry at large have been an incentive-focused behavioral engineering paradigm encompassing atheoretical approaches such as emulation, A/B-testing, engagement maximization, and piecemeal issue-driven engineering. One institutional analysis framework that has been useful in the study of traditional institutions comes from scholars of natural resource management, particularly that community of economists, anthropologists, and environmental and political scientists focused around the work of Elinor Ostrom, known collectively as the "Ostrom Workshop." A key finding from this community that has yet to be broadly incorporated into the design of many digital institutions is the importance of including participatory change mechanisms in what is called a "constitutional layer" of institutional design. The institutional rules that compose a constitutional layer facilitate stakeholder participation in the ongoing process of institutional design change. We explore to what extent consideration of constitutional layers is met or could be better met in three varied cases of digital institutions: cryptocurrencies, cannabis informatics, and amateur Minecraft server governance. Examining such highly varied cases allows us to demonstrate the broad relevance of constitutional layers in many different types of digital institutions.

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Striving for balance: A look at gameplay requirements of massively multiplayer online role-playing games

Daneva

2017

Journal of Systems and Software

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

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 9 publications

References 34 publications

Virtual Sense of Community in a World of Warcraft® Storytelling Open Forum Thread

Virtual Sense of Community in a World of Warcraft® Storytelling Open Forum Thread

"This Place Does What It Was Built For"

Striving for balance: A look at gameplay requirements of massively multiplayer online role-playing games

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