MMOGs and our Societies

I have recently found my thesis topic.

MMOGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Games) are becoming popular in our societies. In the process, they affect our infrastructure. From learning to providing a place for socializing, participants change their life patterns, and carry out daily activities such as work, play, and relationships in different ways. Since these infrastructure build into our social fabrics, we may see it as a form of knowledge: in words, in practice, or as artifacts.

A stable society requires one type of knowledge that is well-embedded: culture. I see culture is a set of well accepted rules and practices that are self-governed by its members. Emergence of MMOGs such as World of Warcraft (WoW) challenged some of the existing cultural rules, and China saw WoW evolving into a different form. For example, skeletons were banned in the virtual environment, monthly subscription transformed into a pay-as-you-go gaming card system, and Internet cafes become an integral part of play. Therefore, when technology was adopted by a society, a co-evolution takes place. Each transforming the other.

In my research, I intended to probe deeper than Internet cafes, banning skeletons, and change of payment methods. The influence WoW has on societies have to emerge out of social confrontations, between the existing and the emergent, the local and the foreign. We saw mods in World of Warcraft as providing such opportunity to observe them. Mods are the short form for software modifications – players developed addons that modify part of the gaming interface and increase functionalities. All players use some kind of mods depending on their current tasks. Mods lie at the intersection of virtual environment, players, players-developers, and the game development company. Mods situate our research at the intersection of their confrontations.