Reconceptualizing MMORPG Play: A Study on Actor-Network Theory in Practice

RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY: A STUDY ON

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY IN PRACTICE.

Robert Li

Swinburne University of Technology Australia

Thesis satisfying requirements for Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD)

Supervisors: Dr. Mark Finn & Dr. Steven Conway

August 3, 2020

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Thank you to my amazing wife, Jobelle, who has

allowed me to be an eternal student, seen me through

thesis hell, and continued to support my endeavors

even when they don’t make a whole lot of sense.

Thank you to my supervisors, Dr. Mark Finn and Dr.

Steven Conway. It’s been an incredibly long road, and

I was never a candidate who inspired much

confidence. I am so lucky to have experienced their

mentorship, guidance and patience. There is no way I

would have found myself where I am, and with a

complete manuscript without their support and

prodding. I could not have asked for a better team of

supervisors. For that I am truly grateful.

Finally, I want to thank my mother, Jane Ho, who

instilled within me the spirit to continue lifelong

learning where the destination is no longer important,

only the journey itself. I am truly a lucky son.

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Declaration

The examinable outcome:

1. Contains no material which has been accepted for the award to the candidate of any

other degree or diploma, except where due reference is made in the text of the

examinable outcome;

2. to the best of the candidate’s knowledge contains no material previously published or

written by another person except where due reference is made in the text of the

examinable outcome; and

3. where the work is based on joint research or publications, discloses the relative

contributions of the respective workers or authors.

Signed: Robert Li

Date: August 4, 2020

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY: A TREATISE ON ACTOR-

NETWORK THEORY IN PRACTICE. 9

MMORPGS AS WE KNOW THEM 11

THE ASSUMPTIONS OF A GENRE 17

CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW 33

EVERQUEST AND THE EARLY 2000s 36

CONTEMPORARY MMORPG RESEARCH POST-WORLD OF WARCRAFT 42

IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY 43

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE VIRTUAL 48

LEARNING THROUGH MMORPGs 49

TWO CONUNDRUMS: VIRTUAL PROPERTY AND VIRTUAL ADDICTION 54

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT WHY PEOPLE PLAY MMORPGS 63

RECENT DISCOURSES AROUND PLAYERS AND MMORPGS 69

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY 71

CHAPTER TWO: METHODOLOGY 77

ACTOR NETWORK THEORY 79

CHARACTERISTICS OF ACTOR NETWORK THEORY 82

INTERSECTING VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY 90

ETHNOGRAPHY: A BRIEF HISTORICAL ACCOUNT 93

RESEARCH PRACTICE 99

RESEARCH METHODS 102

SAMPLE AND SITE SELECTION 104

CHAPTER THREE: WHO NEEDS FRIENDS? 113

FRIENDS AS OBJECTS WITHIN THE MMORPG PLAYER ASSEMBLAGE 114

THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING 115

EXISTING LITERATURE 122

IS FRIENDSHIP THE RIGHT WORD? 134

FRIENDSHIPS AND SOCIALITY IN RELATION TO MMORPG PLAYER

ASSEMBLAGES 143

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE MECHANOIDAL FRONTIER 146

THE HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN ARE INSEPARABLE 149

GENERALIZED SYMMETRY – THE ABRIDGED VERSION 154

ROLE PLAY: AN EARLY HISTORY IN BRIEF 156

WELCOME TO THE TECHNOLOGY FRONTIER 161

HOW AZEROTH WAS WON. 171

FROM WHERE WE’VE COME 179

CHAPTER FIVE: PLAYERS ARE SNOWFLAKES 181

PLAYERS AS HETEROGENOUS ENGINEERS 182

THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING 185

VIRTUAL CLASSISM 190

TRACING SNOWFLAKES 203

CHAPTER SIX: YEARS IN THE MAKING 217

THE ENTELECHY OF ENTELECHY 219

THE ENTELECHY OF THE PLAYER ASSEMBLAGE 234

CONCLUSION: THE MMORPG PLAYER IS A MECHANOID 242

A BRIEF RECAP 244

FRIENDS NOT REQUIRED 247

THE MECHANOIDAL ASSEMBLAGE 251

HETEROGENEOUS ENGINEERING 253

ENTELECHEIA AND IRREDUCTIONS 256

HOW CAN WE RECONCEPTUALIZE MMORPG PLAY? 259

EPILOGUE 266

BIBLIOGRAPHY 269

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RECONCEPTUALIZING MMORPG PLAY: A TREATISE ON ACTOR-NETWORK

THEORY IN PRACTICE.

It’s 7:54am, September the 16th, 2005. Faxmonkey appears inside his hovel and makes his way

towards the market board of Orgrimmar eager to see whether any of his wares have sold while

he’s been “logged out”.

As he snakes his way through the city’s buildings made of mud and straw, he notices dead and

decomposing bodies littering the streets. He did live on a PvP or “player-versus-player” server,

so it wasn’t unusual for assassins of the Alliance to sneak in unannounced and murder some of

the city’s denizens. However, the number of bodies was a little out of the ordinary,

“Odd”, he thought to himself, “an Alliance guild must have decided to do an early morning

raid.” It was the only way Faxmonkey could rationalise what he was seeing.

The street opened up into the town centre, but instead of being met by the usual throng of

adventurers and merchants, there were only a few avatars milling about. A fellow troll priest

runs by, gushing, what looks like blood. Not more than ten meters away from Faxmonkey he

collapses, motionless.

In the distance he notices similar red splotches periodically spurting from the few avatars he

had noticed earlier. What he hadn’t noticed until now was the ground littered with more bodies

and bones than he’d ever seen before in the years he had lived in Orgrimmar. Faxmonkey starts

backpedalling.

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Sploosh.

-251 damage

-252 damage

“Crap”, he thought to himself. Whatever that troll guy has, he’s got it now too. Faxmonkey

casts a healing spell on himself, before turning to run back home.

And so, began the Corrupted Blood pandemic (Tylius, 2007; Ziebart, A., 2011).

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MMORPGS AS WE KNOW THEM

“Massively Multiplayer Online Games are officially mainstream. A title from the

genre has had an entire cartoon episode made about it, features in an advertisement

starring Mr. T, and hosts some ten million players worldwide. World of Warcraft is a

fundamentally important element to the MMO landscape, but more than that it's an

ecology, a society all its own.” – Zenke M., 2008

Massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) have come a long way since the

first rudimentary MUDs kickstarted the genre. These were virtual worlds made in the fashion of

Dungeons and Dragons within the bedrooms of computer science students such as 1978’s Zork

(Anderson, T., Galley, St., 2004), and surreptitiously existed within university research

networks.

However, actual research into the sustainability of MMORPG play and players is currently thin

and over the last decade has remained so. We can draw three conclusions from this. Firstly,

sustainability hasn’t yet been explored with MMORPG play. Secondly, the reasons as to why a

player is a player or stops becoming a player are wide ranging, inter-connected, and multi-

faceted. Finally, the current tools and levers that developers employ in an attempt to sustain a

virtual world’s population can actual lead to the very opposite occurring. All of this points to an

underlying question that this thesis aims to answer, have MMORPGs and MMORPG players

been misunderstood?

But before diving into answering the question of whether MMORPG play has been

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misunderstood, and how we go about reconceiving it, it is important to briefly describe what an

MMORPG is.

Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, and Taylor (2012, p.59) describe MMORPGs as fantasy based

online games. Although they may vary in theme from being science fiction based, to high

fantasy, to even being based on comic book heroes, Boellstorff et. al. described them as all

adhering, mechanically, to a similar basic format of advancing characters through levels via

team-based combat, exploration, crafting and commerce inspired by the conventions of

Dungeons and Dragons. Some examples they point towards include Anarchy Online (2001);

EVE Online (2003) and the now defunct City of Heroes (2004). Castronova, in Synthetic

Worlds: the business and culture of online games (2005), describes through the thoughts and

actions of a new player and their avatar, Sabert, the controls, windows and buttons of the

MMORPG interface, the camera motions following the avatar Sabert, amongst the imaginary,

fantastical surroundings of a forest. Castronova states that, while the interface is unfamiliar, and

the setting fantastical, in essence, it is just a new stage for the age-old performance of human

social interaction (p.36-58).

More recently, Sourmelis, Ioannou and Zaphiris (2017) sought to more explicitly define

MMORPGs. They arrived at the compound descriptions of them being network-based, three

dimensional, interactive, narrativistic environments that are permanent and consistent.

Narrativistic because they are usually driven by a defined plot; and consistent because they

continue to exist in real time when a player logs out or pauses play. Massively multiplayer

because they can refer to millions of users; and role playing because a player can assume the

role of a fantastical in-game avatar.

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From the perspectives explored within this thesis, an MMORPG adheres to all of the above

definitions. They are the fantastical playgrounds of heroes, aliens and epic battles, and like

Huizinga’s (1938) conception of the Magic Circle, they also adhere to the rituals, rules and

performance art described by Boellstorff et. al. They are also the software programs, interfaces,

and frontiers of social interaction that Castronova described, and they are also the persistent,

three-dimensional, network based, interactive, and narrativistic environments that Sourmelis et.

al. claim them to be. Collectively, this means that MMORPGs should be seen as techno-social

constructs. They are both the product of human and technological activity and interaction.

However, they aren’t often seen as such. This thesis will be exploring throughout, how humans

and technologies are both equally contributing to construction of MMORPGs and MMORPG

play, and how neither can be seen as subservient to the other.

So now you have a slight glimpse of what an MMORPG is, the question still remains of why

you, or anyone else, should care.

The answer to that question and the reason why it’s important to better understand MMORPGs

and MMORPG play, is relatively simple: the genre, collectively, generates tens of billions of

dollars a year and presents substantial cultural significance.

From the underground projects of passions by research hobbyists, MMORPGs as of 2016

generated over US$26 billion of revenue a year (Newzoo, 2016). World of Warcraft, released in

2004 by Blizzard, is seen as both the progenitor and flag bearer for this generation of

MMORPGs. In September of 2019, Blizzard Activision released a classic version of the title

for its 15-year anniversary, and that still had enough interest for over 29.6 million players to

eagerly receive it (Industry Six, 2019).

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When compared to our own global economy these statistics would make the MMORPG

economy larger than the economy of Iceland according to the IMF (2019) and the 107th largest

economy in the world according to the World Bank (2019). The collective population of

MMORPG players, if grouped together, would make a country with the 89th largest population,

or larger than Jordan, according to the Central Intelligence Agencies World Factbook (2019). In

fact, World of Warcraft’s active player population is larger than the population of Croatia, by

itself. Point being, MMORPGs, as a genre, are a massive market that, on size and economic

value alone, cannot be overlooked.

But it isn’t simply economic value that underpins their importance. MMORPGs are also an

important cultural artefact that lie at the centre of the increasing convergence of the social and

technological.

This has been a major strand within the study of MMORPGs and has been frequently written

about and discussed. This will be elaborated on in greater detail in later chapters, but as a brief

overview, at an individual level, T.L. Taylor, in Play Between Worlds (2006) argues that the

intersection of society and culture is crucial to the enjoyment of MMORPGs. Perhaps this is

best illustrated by the first few passages within her book that illustrate her offline experiences

of Everquest (1999) (EQ), where she attends a “Fan Faire” held by the

developer, Sony Online Entertainment,

“Both at the Fan Faire and within the game, solitary players quickly find themselves

immersed in much larger structures that are crucial to their enjoyment of the space.

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The social is not just an add-on. Much like my experience of the Live Quest, it is in

the moment of play in which the social and the formal game intersects that the more

familiar connections are created. Shared action becomes a basis for social interaction,

which in turn shapes the play… There is no single-typed EQ player, nor any single

way to play the game… In much the same way that there is a multiplicity of play, we

might also imagine a multiplicity to the artifact of EQ.” (Taylor, T.L., 2006, p. 9-10)

Taylor suggests that these MMORPGs are more than what is conventionally seen as a game,

and the definition of an MMORPG player is more than simply a person who plays the game

virtually. To her an MMORPG can shape and mould the activities of everyday real life through

the daily practice of engaging and learning from within its culture, for example through

conversing with other players outside of the MMORPG world (in this case the Everquest’s

Norrath) via phone calls and message boards; participating in forums; and attending fan events

such as the abovementioned “Fan Faire”. This breaks down the semblance of separation

between the digital virtual world and real physical and tangible worlds of an MMORPG.

Celia Pearce is another prominent MMORPG ethnographer who, like Taylor, found herself part

of an MMORPG community that straddled the virtual and real (Pearce, C., 2009). When the

community she had chosen to study suddenly found themselves orphaned from their virtual

world, Uru Prologue (2003), they renamed themselves the “Uru diaspora” and tried to recreate

elements of their virtual home in other worlds. Other external technologies helped keep them

bound together despite no longer being tethered to a defined virtual place. Her experiences

illustrated the fact that the MMORPG experience at its core is a techno-social construct, and in

the absence of the MMORPG itself or defined structures for sociality such as guilds, or clans,

humans and technologies can continue to work together to substitute and perpetuate the

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experience – that the techno-cultural aspects derived from Uru are powerful enough that within

these technologies, and within these player experiences, they live outside of the MMORPG

itself, mirroring the conclusion that Taylor came to three years earlier.

But it’s not simply the cultural significance of MMORPGs to individual researchers and

players. MMORPGs, especially the most successful ones, like World of Warcraft, and the

current day Final Fantasy XIV, as well as older worlds like Second Life, also entered popular

consciousness. Mediums such as television, film and social media built shared experiences and

constructs that took them from being a niche genre within the gaming industry that went largely

unnoticed, to cross over titles with multi-billion dollar franchises such as Lord of the Rings

Online, Marvel and DC Universe MMORPGs, Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old

Republic. For example, World of Warcraft is regularly referenced on television, from popular

commercials featuring celebrities such as Chuck Norris (who, coincidentally, made it into the

game proper as a non-playable character) and Mr. T, to entire shows built around it, such as the

South Park episode, “Make Love, Not Warcraft”. There were memes, or pop culture artefacts

that spread rapidly online, such as the haphazard Leeroy Jenkins character; and it even

influenced fields of research that may have seem far removed from MMORPGs. For example,

the Corrupted Blood pandemic, described above, that happened in World of Warcraft, was a

virtual contagion that spread throughout Azeroth in late September of 2005 with particularly

fatal effects for less experienced characters. First studied by Balicer in 2007, it drew

comparisons to and informed future studies by epidemiologists on similar real-world pandemics

including the COVID-19 global pandemic (Lofgren, E.T., Fefferman, N.H., 2007; Krotoski, A.,

2020).

More recently, MMORPGs as a genre have inspired and informed the production of a number

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of widely released films including Player One (2018), Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), the

Japanese film Brave Father Online: Our Story of Final Fantasy XIV (2019) and, Warcraft

(2016), which was based on World of Warcraft.

THE ASSUMPTIONS OF A GENRE

The success of World of Warcraft spurred an explosion of titles, many of which closely hewed

to the World of Warcraft blueprint but also attempted to tap into other existing popular fictional

universes hoping to similarly capture the imagination of their audiences in the same way that

Blizzard had. These efforts were not always successful.

Sony Online Entertainment released Everquest II, also in 2004, the successor to one of the most

successful titles of the previous generation of MMORPGs, Everquest (1999), which,

coincidentally, inspired World of Warcraft (Williams, M., 2018). It never reached the peaks

that the original Everquest did, only achieving a maximum of 325,000 subscribers soon after its

release compared to the 550,000 subscribers that Everquest had in just the previous year (Ivory,

J.D., 2012).

Matrix Online was released in 2005 by Monolith Productions as a followup to the recently

concluded Matrix Trilogy (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999, 2003a, 2003b). It was shut down in

2009 with less than 500 remaining players.

The Lord of the Rings Online was released by Turbine in 2007 expanding the universe

popularised in The Lord of the Rings book and recently concluded film trilogy (2003). It peaked

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at 570,000 subscribers in 2010 after moving to a free to play subscription model (O’Connor, A.,

2013).

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning was released in 2008 by Mythic Entertainment

attempting to capitalize on the long running and enthusiastic player base of Warhammer

Fantasy (Games Workshop, 1983). Despite winning numerous awards, it was shut down in

2013, as well as its planned successor Wrath of Heroes (O’Connor, A., 2013).

Star Trek Online was released by Cryptic Studio in 2010 and was developed in anticipation of

the release of, what would be, the hugely popular reboot of the Star Trek franchise with the

2009 film Star Trek. It received a middling response (Van Ord, K., 2010; Welsh, O., 2010) and

just two years later it was relaunched as a free to play title.

This slow progression towards the convergence of popular culture and MMORPGs would

culminate in the 2011 release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Developed by BioWare and

released by Electronic Arts, it was and still is one of the most expensive video games ever

created, at nearly $250 million dollars in budget and around 1,800 actors, designers and

developers working on it (Ivory, J.D., 2012).

It was critically lauded. The most popular gaming publications described it as “…stand-out,

wonderfully crafted…” (Kolan, N., 2012); “…the best of both worlds with characters who not

only advance both in terms of physical ability, but also express a kind of emotional identity”

(Butts, S., 2012); and “…an achievement as an RPG and MMO, The Old Republic offers

something bold and new…” (Augustine, J., 2011). NASDAQ analysts marvelled at the scale of

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the launch and expected that it would “…boost its [Electronic Art’s] top-line growth going

forward…” (Zacks Equity Research, 2011). In 3 months Star Wars: The Old Republic had sold

more than 2 million units and had nearly 1.7 million active users. Just five months later that

population had fallen by 400,000, and two months after that, Electronic Arts announced that

they, too, had decided to convert Star Wars: The Old Republic into a free-to-play title

(Electronic Arts, 2012).

Despite generating its first billion dollars in revenue nearly eight years later (Makuch, E.,

2019), it never achieved the commercial success first predicted. In March of 2017, Star Wars:

The Old Republic would bottom out at just 33,058 active players, less than two percent of the

population the virtual world started with (Industry Six, 2019).

Star Wars: The Old Republic would be one of the final major MMORPG titles to be released

during, what could be reasonably considered a period of tremendous growth and maturity in the

genre.

MMORPG population data tracked by Van Geel showed that the genre’s total population had

peaked in 2011 at just over 22.5 million active players, before steadily declining (Van Geel, I.,

2013). More recent population data tracked by the media network Industry Six lists the total

population of tracked MMORPGs at just under 12.5 million active players as of September of

2018 (Industry Six, 2019).

The success of World of Warcraft enticed an entire industry to create their own version of it in

the hope of emulating its success. Yet, in the fifteen years since its release, no other MMORPG

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has come close to matching its population size and the size of its active users.

It is perhaps because of this rush to create the next major MMORPG title, and an assumption

that World of Warcraft was a blueprint for success, that developers failed to acknowledge that

World of Warcraft itself had a long history of influences, and went through hundreds,

potentially thousands, of obstacles and trials, large and small, involving numerous

technological actors, adjustments and innovations. At a conference in early 2011, just ten

months before the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, Greg Zeshuk, one of BioWare’s co-

founders, admitted as much, "It is a touchstone. It has established standards; it's established

how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break

any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb… If you have established standards,

WoW established them." (Martin, M., 2011)

The long history of where the MMORPG came from, as well as the subsequent forgetting of it,

will be discussed later within this thesis in chapter four.

At the same time MMORPG research also saw rapid growth. Analysis of MMORPG research

by Pena et. al. (Peña, Sierra, Romero, Gutiérrez, & Echavarría, 2013) demonstrated that the

most prevalent areas of inquiry between 2000 and 2009 were in the study of its systems, and

the game experience. Within the research area of the game experience, the paths of inquiry

were highly diverse. Some researchers saw MMORPGs as a new avenue for socialization, and

exploration (Bainbridge, 2012; Boellstorff, 2008; Castronova, 2001; Nardi, 2010; Pearce, 2009;

Taylor, 2006). Others explored the blurring line between virtual and real economies (Dibbell,

2006; Castronova, 2005, 2007). Research into the addictive potential of MMORPGs has also

been highly visible (Caplan, Williams, & Yee, 2009; Griffiths, King, & Demetrovics, 2014;

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Hide, 2006; Lee, Yu, & Lin, 2007; Lin & Tsai, 1999; Ng & Wiemer- Hastings, 2005; Wan &

Chiou, 2006).

The investigation of MMORPG play as product of both technological as well as human

influences is lacking, however. While Bainbridge (2012), Boellstorff (2008), Nardi (2010), and

Pearce (2009) did all, indeed, discuss the physical process of how one would go about

beginning MMORPG play, for example, the installation and updating process, the focus was

largely on their lived and virtual experience, acclimating to the virtual world and their

interactions with other avatars and players, as opposed to the technological influences in

shaping the way they interacted with the virtual world or “played”.

Taylor, similarly, explored her lived experience within Everquest in her 2006 book, Play

Between Worlds, but in a later article, The Assemblage of Play (2009), she would go on to

acknowledge the importance of technology in shaping MMORPG play.

Castronova’s (2001) first work would mirror that of other virtual ethnographers like

Bainbridge, Boellstorff and Nardi, but the majority of his work later focused mostly on the

economy of MMORPGs, including their size, activity and monetary flows and how they shaped

play (2005, 2007). Julian Dibbell (2006) similarly focused on elements of the economy, but

rather than viewing it from a macro level, Dibbell viewed the economy through the lens of

virtual currency and how it is used, exchanged and crosses the boundaries of the real and

virtual. The economy and virtual currency are both non-human and, in a way, technological

influences on MMORPG play, however, what Castronova and Dibbell primarily focused on

was the use of these to facilitate play, as opposed to influences in their own right shaping the

MMORPG experience.

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Finally, the research on the addictive potential of MMORPGs was perhaps the most visible

body of MMORPG studies. A number of theorists, including, notably, Caplan, Yee (2009) and

Griffiths (2014) among others, argued that the incentives and environment afforded by

MMORPGs, effectively turned them into potent Skinner boxes i.e. positive feedback loops.

However, these studies framed the technological influence of MMORPGs as disease-like,

something that needed to be diagnosed, treated and eliminated. In essence, MMORPGs were

seen as destructive before they ever got the chance to be understood for what they truly are, a

socio-technological construct that is shaped by both technology and the human – they do not sit

apart from the researcher or players.

This is but a small subset of some of the foundational research within MMORPG studies, and it

will be explored in greater detail in chapter two, the literature review.

Essentially, in much of the fundamental research that has be done on MMORPGs over the last

20 years, the focus has been centred squarely on the part of the human player within the

MMORPG experience, with little attention paid to the influence of technology as a fundamental

part of MMORPGs and MMORPG play.

This has been similar to the approach of developers and has led to erroneous assumptions by

both creators and researchers about how to best sustain and grow the population, and

commercial sustainability of MMORPGs.

This thesis will make the argument that the failure of MMORPGs is because of a failure to

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understand both the human and technological influences that go into creating the MMORPG

experience and are foundational to MMORPG play. It will be an exploration of the MMORPG

and the MMORPG player as a construct that is equally influenced by technological

advancement and the innovation of humans. And it will do so by exploring key assumptions

found throughout literature and evidenced by the actions and statements of MMORPG

developers that have led to the disintegration of MMORPG player assemblages.

This will be done through the novel application of Actor Network Theory, which, throughout

this study has emerged as a natural choice as a framework to understand MMORPGs as a

techno-social construct due to its ontologically flat nature. This means that equal importance is

placed on humans, and non-human actors, including technological actors, when trying to

understand the MMORPG construct. It avoids the typical predilection for anthropocentrism, a

predilection that will be made clear in the literature review.

This is done in service of fleshing out the assemblage of the mechanoid, a new construct being

advanced within this thesis, and which will be discussed in greater detail later both within this

introduction and in the final chapters.

To briefly elaborate, the assemblage of the mechanoid relates to a new understanding of the

techno- social construction of MMORPGs and MMORPG play. Whereas, and notwithstanding

the influence of Haraway (1984), a cyborg is seen as the human augmented by machines, in the

context of this work, the mechanoid, is seen as not only as a marriage of the machine and the

human, but, really, the perspective of seeing the machine, that is both the rendered virtual

world, and the software and hardware that is connected to it, given equal import and tracing all

the way back to the human actors supporting it through mediated interactions with the

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interfacing technology.

Up to this point, Actor Network Theory has been employed only sparsely within MMORPG.

Firstly, by De Paoli and Kerr (2009) in their description of cheating within the MMORPG of

Tibia (CipSoft, 1997) as a socio-technical construct. It described how cheaters, developers, and

the technological actors tussled to define the bounds of “cheating” and police or evade it. And

secondly, by T.L. Taylor (2009) who explored how the interfaces, specifically modifications to

the interface that tracked damage, could take on a pivotal role in the co- construction of

MMORPG play and group play, “We can see a complex set of relationships between not only

the player and their software, but the collective use of software and the production of group

practices.” (Taylor, T.L., 2009, p.336)

The other reason for the use of Actor Network Theory is that MMORPG studies are still

relatively nascent as an area of inquiry. Our understanding of MMORPGs is still relatively

fluid, and in its most elemental form Actor Network Theory is an unfiltered description. This

allows the reader and text to construct meaning together, rather than it being contrived by the

practitioner. This and Actor Network Theory as both a methodology and framework will be

discussed later in Chapter Two.

Going back to the key assumptions mentioned previously, four are explored within this thesis.

The first of them is that friends are seen as an essential requirement for the success of an

MMORPG. This is common across both the makers of MMORPGs, and those that study them.

However, the importance placed on friends is, as will be seen later in Chapter Three, often

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overstated.

Almost universally, developers have attempted to use the friendship networks of their existing

player base to aid the recruitment of new players. For example, World of Warcraft and Final

Fantasy XIV, both have recruit-a-friend programs, which dangle incentives such as faster

levelling, free virtual currency and the prospect of obtaining rare virtual items that can only be

obtained through referral.

Similarly, in the academic sphere, many theorists seized on the primacy of the human actant in

forming MMORPGs and constructing MMORPG play early, and have continued to do so to

this day.

The first was Turkle (1994) who, when interacting with the progenitor of MMORPGs, MUDs

(or Multi User Dungeons), which were text based, multiplayer dungeon adventures, saw them

as vehicles to expand social reach. She described technology as directly servicing the expansion

of the human capacity for friendship. In 1998, Richard Bartle, makers of one of the first MUDs,

MUD1 (Bartle R., Trubshaw, R., 1978) argued that MUDs were a unique society of their own,

and that players, masked by their avatar nom de guerre, were able to develop deeper feelings of

attachment because they felt more uninhibited.

In more recent research, Jakobsson and T.L. Taylor (2003) based their argument that the notion

of sociality was central to the success of the MMORPG player base, on their personal shared

experiences in Everquest (1999). They further argued that the current formalized methods of

player groupings through constructs such as “parties”, “guilds”, “clubs” and “clans”, didn’t go

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far enough to facilitate the full range of human interaction that needed to be developed to

sustain them.

However, not every theorist subscribes to the importance of friendship. In fact Yee,

Ducheneaut, Nickell and Moore (2006), some of the most widely read theorists in MMORPG

studies, concluded that, despite the importance typically placed on social interaction within

MMORPGs, when looked at more thoroughly, it is, perhaps a misnomer to consider these

interactions as friendship forming. Rather, social interaction in MMORPGs was more about

being able to have audience to either perform feats in front of, discuss those feats or engage in

chitchat.

This matched the earlier conclusion of Ducheneaut and Moore in 2004. Their investigation of

interactivity within Star Wars Galaxies (Daybreak Games, 2003) found similar short termed,

transactional social interactions.

This thesis finds, like Ducheneaut, Nickell, Moore and Yee (2004, 2006), that friendships,

despite being referenced by eight of the fifteen participants in this study, were similarly, short

termed, unstable and transactional.

Some found themselves drawn to the fantastical nature of the virtual world, and the avatars

within it, as opposed to the other players. For many others, friends were actually an impediment

to MMORPG play. Those that had predicated their play on the play of others had, perhaps, the

highest likelihood of quitting,

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“Some of my friends stopped playing and it was just again down to me and a different

one of my friends playing. […] I just felt that the game was kind of becoming a

responsibility rather than having fun playing.” (Interview with Admike, 2016)

This is but a brief account of how the focus on human friendship by both academic and

commercial actors within MMORPG studies and production is flawed, and these perspectives

fail to take into account the important influence of technology. How the importance of friends

and friendship have been exaggerated, and how we can reshape the understanding of the

significance that these hold in MMORPGs and MMORPG play, will be discussed in greater

detail in Chapter Three.

This brings us to the second assumption that will be discussed in this thesis, that the human and

technological are distinct and separate in MMORPG play, leading to the makers of MMORPGs

using technology to entice the human player. This is done by shortcutting the not un-arduous

process through which a player would typically acclimate and build mastery; trivializing the

activities not done with others, otherwise known as “solo-able” content; and providing perks

such as the ability to skip 30 levels, as is the case in World of Warcraft. This in an effort to

direct the player’s focus on the “end game” or “elder content”, which, coincidentally, is also

typically the most complex content in the virtual world, requiring a high amount of skill and co-

ordination between team members.

Not unlike the explosion of titles in the genre following the release of World of Warcraft, the

rush to shepherd new players into the end game means that no time is given for that person to

acclimate to the MMORPG to master new skills; similarly no time is given for the environment

to mold that person’s MMORPG play. But that human impatience leads to undesirable

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consequences. Untested and only lightly invested, any challenge then is likely to overwhelm,

introducing a commercial consequence of churn.

The perils of a hastily built construct of MMORPG play, separating from the influence of

technological actors within the MMORPG world, will be discussed in greater detail through the

long history of how MMORPGs themselves came to be constructed in Chapter Four.

The third assumption that will be discussed is the assumption that the constructs of MMORPG

play can be categorized into relatively straightforward taxonomies.

There are two commonly accepted models of player taxonomy. The first and most commonly

cited is Richard Bartle’s (1996), which he first outlined in Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades:

Players Who Suit MUDs.

In his model of player taxonomy, he outlined four player types: killers, achievers, socializers

and explorers. Bartle stated that this model arose from a six month long debate in MUD2 (a

Multi-User Dungeon that he oversaw at the time) (Bartle, R., 1985) and that he had never tested

it, nor did he ever intend to, leaving it up to other MMORPG theorists to debate about its

validity amongst themselves. Nevertheless, it remains largely unchanged, and continues to

strongly inform contemporary games design studies (Zenn, J., 2017; Kumar, Herger & Dam,

2018).

The second and less commonly accepted model of player taxonomy, possibly due to its

complex multidimensionality, is one that was formed by Nick Yee as part of his study on player

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motivations (Yee, N., 2006). But, despite its complex nature, at its most simple, it can be

divided up into three main components: Achievement, Social and Immersion. Yee broke these

down further into another ten sub-categories, or variants of the main components.

Importantly, Yee’s taxonomy of player types was still an evolution of Bartle’s model and so,

despite its expanded nature, it was still subject to the same limitations. He did eventually come

to the realization that subdividing players into types was counterproductive, “People are never

just one thing… If it’s ok for me to like both ice-cream and French onion soup in real life at the

same time, why can’t I be both an Achiever and Socializer in an MMORPG at the same time?”

(Yee, 2006, p16-17).

Yee was hinting at what will be explored in this thesis: that every player within an MMORPG,

and every style of play is interwoven, continuously evolving and complex. No two players or

styles of play are truly alike, and, because of this, there is no taxonomy that can be

meaningfully applied.

Take for example, two of the participants within this study. One had a style of play that was

effectively the management of two distinctly different avatars and their personalities. Another

found the puzzle of deciphering and then exploiting combat algorithms was central to their

construct of MMORPG play.

This and further instances of MMORPG play that doesn’t conform to the taxonomies provided

by Bartle and Yee will be elaborated upon in Chapter Five.

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The fourth and final assumption that will be discussed within this thesis is the idea that one’s

MMORPG play starts when you enter the virtual world and ends when you leave it.

An interesting finding that emerged throughout the course of conducting research was that the

moments that are eventually discovered to have been pivotal to a player successfully starting

their construct of MMORPG play can often come from years in the past.

For many of the participants within the study, many years of experience with previous titles

within the same franchise that the research site, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (Square

Enix, 2013), emerged from, was what allowed them to take up MMORPG play.

For others, this thread of connection to the past wasn’t so apparent. For example, that pivotal

moment for one participant was when she got her first console, a Sony PlayStation; for another

it was being employed as a contractor in the games development industry and beginning his

MMORPG play as a form of research; and finally, even less apparent, for one of the

participants it was the experience of being home schooled.

On the other side of MMORPG play, Celia Pearce (2009), notably demonstrated that it can

exist even after the virtual world is closed down. In Communities of Play, despite the closure of

Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (Microsoft, 2003), Celia Pearce described the migration of its

inhabitants to There.com (Makena Technologies, 2003) creating an “Uru Diaspora” that

continued for another six years, which led to another relaunch, and then subsequently going

through another exodus after the relaunch itself was also closed.

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Just in the brief account above, it can be seen that where MMORPG play starts, and ends

extends well beyond the “logging on” and “logging off”. For some it can stretch years or even

decades before and after the existence of the MMORPG itself. This reimagining of what it

means to be a sustainable MMORPG will be elaborated on further in Chapter Six.

Finally, and after considering the assumptions made, and the discussion of them, this thesis will

conclude by advancing the assemblage of the mechanoid, which is a new, visceral way of

understanding socio-technological constructs. To elaborate, the mechanoid cannot be seen as

such without the human connected to it, it would simply be a mass of wires, circuit boards, and

software instructions. Similarly, a mechanoid cannot exist with simply the human inhabiting it

unconnected to and uninfluenced by any technology. This is, of course, a simplification, as the

assemblage is also connected with the Internet, data, other avatars, and players, even the

government rules that govern parental guidance ratings. None can be split from the mechanoid,

both are intrinsic to the mechanoid. The same can be said of the construct of MMORPG play.

As is the nature of all works that involve Actor Network Theory, the aim of this thesis is not to

provide something definitive. Rather, the hope is that this thesis reorients the way that the

MMORPG and MMORPG play are viewed. This leads to new and innovative approaches to

investigations, which uncover previously unseen influences, and that we are able to return to

the way some early MMORPG theorists viewed MUDs, with a sense of “newness”. Instead of

seeing play that falls outside of accepted taxonomies as aberrant, viewing it as valid, unique

and a construct that is valuable in further informing us on the countless permutations that

MMORPG play can evolve into.

It is only through this necessary passage point that we may be able to collectively question the

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truth of our conceptions on the MMORPG and MMORPG play itself.

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CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW

As previously discussed, the MMORPG player base has been in a state of decline since 2009.

Reasons for this have yet to be clearly defined. Part of the problem has been that MMORPGs

are densely packaged networks that have yet to be critically unpacked.

This chapter aims to draw a more complete picture of research done within the field of

MMORPG studies, which has so far largely concentrated on the questions of why people play,

and people become engaged. Its purpose is not to provide an exhaustive list of summarized

references, but rather to define broad subsections that MMORPG studies have slowly separated

into over the last two decades, as well as major contributors to these subsections.

Academic interest in MMORPGs first emerged in the mid-1990s with early research occupying

the fringes of media theory and computer science. The most prominent scholars of this period

were Sherry Turkle, Richard Bartle and the duo Pavel Curtis and David Nichols who began

Palo Alto Research Centre’s (PARC) long-standing association with MMORPG research.

Bartle and Turkle both explored theories in the construction of the MMORPG “player”, while

Curtis and David (1994) experimented with modes of communication in virtual environments,

comparing them to real-world interactions.

More specifically, and building on her work in the Second Self, Sherry Turkle (1985)

investigated Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs; text-based multiplayer virtual environments) in

terms of identity construction, and the malleability of human behaviour when interacting with

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technology. She argued that the line between the human and the artificial had become vague

and that virtual representations of the self had real implications for the physical representation

of the human self. Consequently, Turkle saw the changeability of virtual identities as

potentially therapeutic for the player inhabiting them, but Turkle also saw that this gave rise to

some peculiar consequences. She observed heightened aggression in virtual interpersonal

conflicts; she anticipated problems occurring from the misrepresentation of the self and argued

that differentiating between real and virtual crimes would become more problematic then and

into the future.

Turkle’s (1985) ideas regarding the human-virtual interaction continue to be evoked in modern

debates. In contrast, Richard Bartle’s (1996) early work has, in many ways, been superseded,

although it is still regularly cited. Arising out of attempts by MUD players under his oversight

to classify themselves, Bartle’s (1996) most significant early contribution to MMORPG studies

was his taxonomy of player types. There were four player types constructed out of a matrix of

two binary abstract concepts: Acting versus Interacting and Player versus World. These

described the types of activities player types enjoyed, and how they interacted with other

players and the environment. Bartle (1996) termed the four player types Achievers, Explorers,

Socializers and Killers.

Achievers described through Bartle’s (1996) matrix were “Acting on the World”, in other

words, they were interested in imposing themselves upon the environment. Explorers were

more interested in experiencing the environment or “Interacting with the World”. Socializers,

as their name suggests, “Interacted with other Players”, while Killers were more prone to

imposing their will on others, or “Act on other Players”. This will be discussed in greater detail

in Chapter Five: Players are Snowflakes.

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Bartle’s (1996) theories were implemented by Andreasen and Downey in 1999, in what is now

referred to as the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology. A questionnaire with thirty items of binary

choice, it has since had over 800,000 participants and continues to be a widely accepted method

of classifying player archetypes within MMORPGs. However, it has not been without its

detractors.

John Radoff (2011) criticized the dichotomous nature of Bartle’s theories and Andreasen and

Downey’s (1999) test, and Nick Yee (2004) advanced an alternative model arguing that

component attribution based on motivation factors was a better method of defining the player

than Bartle’s (1996) characterization framework. Bartle’s (1996) taxonomy also suffered from

errors in research methodology and sweeping assumptions from its inception. This included a

limited and narrow sample size (fifteen leading members of a single MUD from a single

server), and Bartle’s tendency to commit to absolutist conclusions with a lack of data, citing his

own experience instead.

However, research conducted by Turkle, Bartle, Curtis and Nichols was centred on MUDs,

which, by that point, had existed for almost two decades, and they received little academic

recognition for, in retrospect, important foundational work. This was also a time when MUDs

were in a state of flux. Graphical representations of MUD play were beginning to emerge with

the inception of Neverwinter Nights (Stormfront Studios, 1991), and Lucasfilm Games,

Quantum Link and Fujitsu’s (1988) Habitat. Later, the template for the modern MMORPG was

established with the release of Ultima Online (Origin Systems, 1995).

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It was not until the early 2000s, as the success of Everquest (Sony Online Entertainment, 1999)

drove MMORPGs towards the mainstream that academia began to show interest.

EVERQUEST AND THE EARLY 2000s

The first and possibly most influential MMORPG researcher of this era (and arguably of any

era) was Edward Castronova (2001). His paper, ‘Virtual Worlds: A first-hand account of

Market & Society on the Cyberian Frontier’, catapulted MMORPGs into serious discourse

among members of the academic community. Released at the height of Everquest’s popularity,

the sheer weight of the compiled data from Castronova’s broad economic analysis of the virtual

world housed within, Norrath, was profound. He discovered that MMORPGs had transcended

the traditional conceptions of frivolity within games, and, much like what was required to

motivate any other economic system, the systems within MMORPGs had begun “to mean a

great deal to large numbers of ordinary people” (Castronova, E., 2001, p.2).

At that time 60,000 players were inhabiting Norrath at any one time; over 23% of the

approximately 400,000-strong subscriber base spent more time working on their representative

self within Norrath (commonly referred to as an avatar) than on paid work in their physical

reality. Revenue generated by Everquest for Sony Online Entertainment was projected to pass

US$1.5 billion by 2004, and the prevalence of currency trading (despite its dubious legal status)

meant that the exchange rate of Norrathian currency against the US dollar eclipsed the value of

several real currencies at the time, including the Italian Lira and the Japanese Yen (Castronova,

E., 2001, p.3, 31-32).

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Castronova’s (2001) work typified the kind of research that was published during this era, at

the cusp of the genre’s meteoric rise to the forefront of popular culture. His observations were

coloured by sheer amazement, and his conclusions, while tentative, were ebullient. He

postulated that as methods of communication achieved higher fidelity, and virtual worlds began

to naturally merge with the physical, as he had already described, it would become “one of the

most important forums for human interaction … in that role, they may induce widespread

changes to the organization of Earth society” (Castronova, E., 2001, p.37). In essence, he saw

MMORPGs as potentially being an important and uniquely networked third place (Oldenburg,

R., 1999), a sentiment echoed much later by Ducheneaut, Moore and Nickell (2004, 2007), and

Williams and Steinkuehler (Steinkuehler, C., 2005; Steinkuehler, C.A. & Williams, D., 2006).

Surprisingly, beyond Castronova, very little (if any) research of a similar economic focus

(quantitative analysis of a virtual economy) has been done since. Most of the focus within

MMORPG research at this time centred on analyzing and deconstructing and/or reconstructing

the concept of the “Player”, building on what had already been done by Bartle and Turkle.

While similar in focus, the difference between researchers of the past and the researchers that

were beginning to come to the fore was that the latter was a generation who had the perspective

of having grown up with MMORPGs—participant–observers who had never known a world

without MMORPG culture. Two of the first to emerge of this cohort were Nick Yee and T.L.

Taylor.

T.L. Taylor’s (2002) seminal work Play Between Worlds explored the blurring of divisions

between the real and the virtual in the person, their avatar, and the combined relationships.

As a participant ethnographer in Norrath (the virtual world encapsulated by Everquest), T.L.

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Taylor documented her journey from MMORPG neophyte to her involvement with MMORPG

player groups and activities, which began to extend out from the bounds of virtuality the more

deeply embedded she became. She continuously argued that this blurring not only occurred in

social interactions but also through gaming conventions and spaces, distorting what could be

considered a game or not, and what could be considered real or not. Similarly, she argued that

boundaries between differing player types were not as clear cut as originally conceived by

Bartle (1996). According to Taylor, identity formation and exploration were much greater

factors in determining a play style than pre-existing psychological dispositions.

Taylor also explored the complex matrix of influences and social groups that comprised the

modern MMORPG. Firstly, she looked at the historical development of MMORPGs, likening

the evolution of mechanics as actualizing a chain of Althusserian interpellations mirroring real-

world interpellative iterations. She argues that, much like a policeman hails a civilian; the game

hails its players who are obligated to act on certain social cues. Over time, as the game

interpellates more and more players, a complex network of social obligations emerges.

Secondly, she was an early observer of what is now commonly referred to as power gaming.

Briefly, she described power gamers as players who engaged with the virtual world as an object

for statistical mastery, blurring the lines between the Bartle player archetypes.

Ultimately, Taylor views them as a positive part of the social network, as she considered them

essential repositories of knowledge within MMORPGs. Thirdly, Taylor expanded on her

argument for blurring realities by briefly discussing emergent phenomena spawned by the

interactions between MMORPG worlds and the physical reality that surrounds them. In

particular, she focused on the Real Money Trade (RMT)—which was the trade of real-world

currency for virtual goods and services within these MMORPG worlds—the concept of labour

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within MMORPGs, and fan culture within the spaces surrounding MMORPGs. She concluded

that both players and developers were equally responsible for the creation of virtual worlds.

While an important contributor to the advancement of MMORPG studies, her arguments here

would not factor greatly into the explosive debate over virtual property rights that would

emerge later in the decade.

However, Taylor’s most detailed discussions centred on women within MMORPGs. Viewing

the concept of identity in much the same way Turkle (1996) did, Taylor hypothesized that,

despite being regularly marginalized by often hyper-masculine advertising, women were still

interested in games of this kind for the social aspects and fluidity of identity. Taylor explained

that experiences within MMORPGs were often attractive to female players because they were

faced with threats that gender had no bearing on, as opposed to the real physical world, where

gender-biased threats were infinitely more common.

Taylor’s work marked an important milestone in MMORPG research. Up to that point, both the

development of and reaction to MMOPRGs was dominated by simplistic and inflated gender

stereotyping. Developers tended to marginalize women by promoting hyper-sexualized imagery

catered to the masculine perspective. The feminist “pink” gamer movement, on the other hand,

called for the design of games to be gender specific, that is, designing games specifically for

women, implying an inherent incompatibility in the disposition of female players with the

current conception of games (Taylor, T.L., 2003; Kafai, Y.B., Heeter, C., Denner, J. & Sun,

J.Y., 2008). The importance of Taylor’s work lay in her acknowledgement that gender was

complex and fluid within the equally complex genre of MMORPGs. Taylor called for a more

informed understanding of female players by developers while rejecting the simplistic view that

females could not connect with anything within the entirety of the gaming landscape.

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The only criticism, perhaps, was that Taylor’s work did not stray far from the foundation

provided by Turkle (1996) nearly a decade earlier, who also discussed and hypothesized the

problems that had or might have emerged due to the blurring of boundaries between the real,

and the virtual, and the ambiguity and fluidity of gender and identity in these environments. But

Turkle was writing about MUDs in an era when persistent networked virtual environments

were relatively rare. In comparison, Taylor’s research was conducted within Everquest—a

breakthrough MMORPG franchise with hundreds of thousands of active subscribers at the

height of its popularity—and that point of difference that the critical mass of participation

provided means Taylor’s work remains a core text within MMORPG studies.

Another academic who continues to be at the core of the development of MMORPG studies is

Nick Yee. Yee, like Taylor, was fascinated by the Everquest phenomenon, and, as a

psychologist, the online construction of identity. His earliest paper discussed how a player’s

choice of race might affect their subsequent social interactions (Yee, N., 1999) and his later

series of papers on the Proteus Effect would explore this in greater detail (Yee, N., 2007; Yee,

N., Bailenson, J., 2007; Yee, N., Bailenson, J. & Ducheneaut, N., 2009). His first major

contribution to MMORPG research, though, was The Norrathian Scrolls (Yee N., 2001). It has

since been revised several times between 2001 and 2005. Still, it was the first paper to provide

an extensive array of quantitative, as well as qualitative, data to accompany some of the

findings and hypotheses of previous theorists, who, up to that point, had largely engaged in

qualitative data collection.

With over 4,000 participants completing over 25,000 forms over five months, Yee’s data

provided information on the demographics of Everquest players, their relationships both within

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and external to the virtual world, and the dynamics of group formation, both on a temporary

and more permanent basis. This included player groups known as guilds within Everquest, but

this common feature has since had many different names under different franchises.

Much like Turkle before him, Yee also explored the factors contributing to virtual identity

formation in detail, particularly the phenomenon of virtual “gender-bending”. Surprisingly,

male players were significantly more likely to participate in and accept it than were females.

This contradicted the assertions of previous theorists (Turkle in particular) that female players

were likely drawn to virtual worlds such as MUDs and MMORPGs partly due to the flexibility

of gender, and the fact that challenges within these environments were gender neutral, unlike

many physical circumstances. Yee found in many cases females saw gender-bending as

abhorrent and the player inhabiting the avatar less trustworthy. This was clearly as much of an

obstacle in virtual environments as female players may have experienced in physical

environments.

This synthesis of staggering amounts of data would come to characterize the type of work Yee

would eventually do along with his counterparts, Nicholas Ducheneaut, Robert Moore and Eric

Nickell, at PARC. Of note, and most highly cited, was Yee’s largest body of work, The

Daedalus Project (Yee, N., 2006a). Over six years, he surveyed over 40,000 players from a

wide variety of MMORPGs. He would eventually compile this data in The Demographics,

Motivations and Derived Experiences of Players of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical

Environments (Yee, N., 2006b). He would also present an alternative model for classifying

players on attributive motivational factors in Motivations for Play in Online Games (Yee, N.,

2006d). Yee was highly critical of Bartle’s taxonomy of players within MUDs (Bartle, R.A.,

1996), particularly of Bartle’s assumptions that a preference for one type of play suppressed

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others, and the fact that Bartle never (nor did he ever intend to) empirically tested whether this

was indeed the case. Using a factor analysis approach on the answers of 3,000 MMORPG

players to a forty-item questionnaire based on Bartle’s Player Types, Yee created a matrix of

three major components comprised of ten sub-components that described player motivation

factors. He described the three major components as Achievement, Social and Immersion.

Interestingly, despite male players scoring higher in the achievement components than did

female players, and female players scoring higher than did male players in the relationships

sub-component of the Social Component, Yee found that age better explained these differences

than gender, and that male players socialized as much as females, but often to different ends. It

was also noted that problematic usage (those players in the 99.9th percentile of hours played per

week) was often linked to pre-existing mental illness. However, despite the nuance with which

Yee was able to classify player types, Bartle’s model continues to be a significantly more

popular method of analyzing the motivations for play among MMORPG players. Nevertheless,

the data generated by Yee and his PARC colleagues proved to be one of the major catalysts for

the current growth in MMORPG research.

CONTEMPORARY MMORPG RESEARCH POST-WORLD OF WARCRAFT

Another major catalyst for the growth in MMORPG research was the explosive popularity of

MMORPGs in the mid-2000s predominantly due to the phenomenal success of World of

Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004). With twelve million active players at the height of its

popularity (Van Geel, I., 2012a), World of Warcraft (often referred to as WoW) embedded the

MMORPG genre into popular culture and mainstream media. As the virtual began to entwine

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with the physical/real, academics from various fields of research began to afford it more serious

attention.

IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY

There continued to be researchers who performed the type of participant ethnography pioneered

by Taylor in understanding the nature of identity and the behaviour of communities within the

MMORPG environment. Three of the most prominent researchers to emerge in this period were

Celia Pearce, William Sims Bainbridge and Bonnie Nardi.

As a games designer, Pearce had an affinity for the emergent play that sandbox environments

engendered, the identity of the player in these spaces and the conception of narrative within a

game environment. In her earlier works, Pearce straddled the narratology versus ludology

debate and commented on the meta-theoretical implications of the assertions of others (Pearce,

C., 2005). It was only in 2009 that Pearce’s own ideas began to gain traction with her book

Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (Pearce, C.

& Artemesia, 2009).

Divided into four ‘books’, Pearce’s work follows her involvement with multiple virtual

communities stemming from her experiences with members of the defunct Uru Prologue (Cyan

Worlds, 2003). Using her avatar, Artemesia, as the conduit through which she acted as a

participant–observer, Pearce (2009) focused on the reactions of her avatar compatriots

(compatriots in that they all had a shared sense of cultural identity that would be akin to a

national identity whom she labelled the “Uru Diaspora”) following the collapse of Uru

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Prologue, and their attempts to maintain contact through multiple virtual environments. The

most notable facet of Pearce’s (2009) work, though, was her insistence on making clear the

methodology she employed in each book. In particular, Peace (2009) developed a theoretical

continuum to provide a useful means of analyzing how a player’s emergent behaviour could be

shaped by the affordances and constraints placed upon them by the environment’s maker. On

one end of the spectrum, where content creation is predominately developer driven, she labels

the world fixed- synthetic, an example being World of Warcraft (Pearce, C., 2009). On the other

end of the spectrum, where user-created content is encouraged, she saw the world as co-

created, an example being Second Life (Pearce, C., 2009).

All of this provides a useful blueprint for the study of communities within virtual worlds.

Pearce, like her previous works concerning the narratology/ludology debate, explained that

there should be no predilection for either quantitative or qualitative research when looking at

virtual communities. However, she primarily employed qualitative research methods in her own

academic body of work.

Another theorist who almost exclusively used qualitative data in his exploration of MMORPG

society and culture is William Sims Bainbridge. A theologist and sociologist, Bainbridge’s

fascination with advanced technologies led him to become an avid participant in World of

Warcraft and, eventually, to write about his experiences.

In The Warcraft Civilization Bainbridge (2012) argued that World of Warcraft, and the world

encapsulated within it, Azeroth, is an example of “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or a “total work of art”,

mirroring aspects of Western society such as history, religion and social structures. Significant

emphasis was placed on the lore that contextualizes the “Azerothian” society and Bainbridge,

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through painstakingly detailed thick descriptions and historical references, broadly described

almost the entirety of the virtual environment. He described striking similarities in structure

between religious and spiritual events and institutions within Azeroth and our physical reality.

He posited that the possibility of virtual “life after death” could evolve to replace the existential

need that religion currently fulfils in many people’s lives. Bainbridge also saw World of

Warcraft as a rich experiential learning environment both from a pedagogical and social

ethnographic perspective. Though simplistic—Bainbridge (2012, p.143) made immediately

clear his distrust of traditional economic methodology—he attempted to explore the economy

from the perspective of a crafter (equivalent to a self-employed manufacturer of goods). This

included the fractious issue of gold-farming—often conflated with RMT, which will be

discussed later in this chapter, although the practice of gold-farming itself is the act of

efficiently generating a large amount of virtual currency. However, Bainbridge’s conclusion

could be perceived as naive, for although he acknowledged that it is an inadequate

representation of economies of the physical world, his main contention was that the millions of

participants within Azeroth might come to impact real-world economies by expecting them to

function similarly to virtual economies (which are generally closed economic systems).

Interestingly, Bainbridge (2012), in his chapter regarding virtual cooperation, chose to focus on

role-play during player to player and player to non-player character interactions, their effect on

larger player groups and the interfacial, technical and design barriers to full cooperative play

within the parameters of role-play. Despite forgoing the more fashionable route of exploring

high-level competitive play, often referred to as “raiding” (Nardi, B., 2010), which has become

a trademark peculiar of many contemporary MMORPGs , Bainbridge still provided an

important contribution as one of the only theorists to have delved deeply into the nature of role-

playing in fantastical environments since Gary Alan Fine’s Shared Fantasy (1983, 2002).

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Another theorist who followed suit in producing a book-length monograph on their experiences

within an MMORPG virtual world, but perhaps has been the best example, so far, of

synthesizing the ideas first brought up by Bainbridge and Pearce, is Bonnie Nardi. In 2010, she

published My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft.

Echoing the sentiments of Castronova, Nardi (2010) suggested that in the face of increasing

globalization and the disappearance of virginal cultures, virtual worlds offer humanity a new

frontier for scientific exploration. Using a Leontievian activity theory framework, Nardi (2010)

approached her analysis of virtual worlds in a problem-centric manner. She attempted to clarify

play within virtual worlds and dispel popular myths with which mainstream media encumbered

MMORPGs. Using a Deweyan characterization of aesthetic experience to provide the

parameters for defining the activity of play, Nardi (2010) attributed the success of virtual

worlds such as World of Warcraft to its many opportunities for “performative mastery”, an idea

well established within MMORPG studies (Yee, N. 2006a, 2006d; Ducheneaut, N., Yee, N.,

Nickell, E., Moore, R.J., 2006; Steinkuehler, C.A., 2004), stating, “the marriage of performance

and stimulating visual experience impels players to spend long, dedicated hours engaged in

activity in game worlds” (p.88). However, she was careful to avoid condemning this time-

intensiveness as being indicative of addiction.

Nardi (2010), in her unique capacity as an interaction designer, also paid particular attention to

the value of rules within MMORPGs. Similar to Pearce, she described the two ends of a

continuum as player-centric and designer-centric, where player-centric paradigms see

mechanics as subordinate to player agency, and designer-centric paradigms afford developers

authority as the primary creative force. While Nardi (2010) placed herself somewhere in the

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middle ground, she highlighted that rules created by developers are not obstacles to the

Deweyan aesthetic activity of play, rather they are “resources preserving good design” (p.74).

Here, Nardi (2010) took a turn to existentialism, arguing that in Second Life (Linden Labs,

2003), despite Linden Labs giving residents almost limitless freedom on travel, creativity and

interactivity, it has devolved into spaces largely dominated by consumerism and sex.

Where Nardi (2010) made her most unique contribution, though, was in her observations of

MMORPG play in China. Nardi resisted the temptation to make broad sweeping conclusions

about cultural differences; instead, she described the sociality of different spaces for play and

the different perceptions of the economy regarding player participation and the economy within

MMORPGs. Surprisingly, MMORPG play among Chinese participants, according to Nardi, is

almost entirely gender neutral, or absent. She attributes this to the entrenched cultural logic of

competitiveness.

Nardi (2010) demonstrated that to understand player experience, researchers needed to consider

the location of play, who the person is that is initiating the activity of play and why that person

might be doing so. Similar to the views of Taylor (2008), Nardi (2010) noted that the virtual

world experience does not occur in an uncontaminated vacuum. This understanding of the

growing enmeshment of the virtual and the physical led other researchers to ponder its

implications and possibilities, asking a more diverse array of questions than had been

contemplated before.

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INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE VIRTUAL

For the most part, enquiries have been brief and exploratory. These have revolved around the

idea that MMORPG societies, as relatively organic and complex microcosms of human society,

might provide accurate testing grounds for experimentation that would otherwise be impossible

on human subjects.

Bradley and Froomkin (2004) argued that MMORPGs could provide an avenue to test the

design of legislation, and more objectively inform policymakers of the possible ramifications of

harmonization, whether due to regional influences, lobbyists or ideology.

Balicer (2007) and Lofgren and Fefferman (2007) all commented on the September 2005

virtual pandemic that occurred in World of Warcraft, commonly known as the Corrupted Blood

Incident, which was caused by a mechanic displayed by a new boss at the time. Upon attacking,

that boss (known as Hakkar) would cast a debilitating spell on players, their pets and minions

that was highly contagious and would drain health points (causing virtual death if said health

points reached zero). It was supposed to have been contained within the confines of the raid

Zul’Gurub, but, due to an unintended error in programming, was allowed to be carried out by

pets and minions, spreading quickly to highly populated areas and drastically changing

gameplay. During those ten days that players evacuated cities, Blizzard attempted to quarantine

the areas affected. Some players with the ability to heal volunteered their abilities, while others

took advantage of the situation. All three epidemiologists noted the realism of the population’s

response and Blizzard’s attempts to control the plague—realism that Fefferman asserted could

not be captured by traditional modelling (of the dispersion of infection diseases). She argued

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that human behaviour was simply “very hard [to] predict” (Orland, 2008). However, Fefferman

was not without her critics. They argued that the behaviour displayed by players during this

period was flawed because it hinged on the fact that death was significantly less problematic in

virtual environments (Smith, G., 2007). Balicer (2007) and Fefferman were also hampered in

their attempts to obtain data by Blizzard’s commercial sensitivity, stating that World of

Warcraft was “first and foremost, a game” (Ahmed, M., 2008).

Nevertheless, MMORPGs have shown that they have the potential to impart real benefit to the

external physical world, and one of the most promising areas currently being researched is its

application within education.

LEARNING THROUGH MMORPGs

J.P. Gee (2003) was perhaps one of the first to look deeply at the pedagogical potential of video

games in a holistic sense in his article “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning

and Literacy”. Gee (2003) saw effective practices of learning as a product of design and

learning itself as semiotic, situated and cyclical. However, Gee’s (2003) focus was mainly on

the individual, not touching on socially situated learning environments until the final chapter of

the revised 2007 edition, making a brief reference to Everquest, World of Warcraft and Cryptic

Studio’s now-defunct City of Heroes (Cryptic Studio & Paragon Studios, 2004).

The greatest advocate in the past decade for the beneficial employment of virtual worlds in

education, though, was Constance Steinkuehler. To Steinkuehler, MMORPGs encapsulated

much more realism than their escapist and fantastical worlds tended to evoke. She argued that

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success within an MMORPG is cognitively demanding. It required “exploration of complex,

multi-dimensional problem spaces, empirical model building, the negotiation of meaning and

values within the relevant gaming community, and the coordination of people, (virtual) tools

and artefacts, and multiple forms of text—all within persistent virtual worlds with emergent,

sociological characteristics of their own” (Steinkuehler, C., 2005, p.5).

In her earlier research, Steinkuehler found that new players learned through full participation in

gameplay-related activities with more experienced players who mentored along the way.

Genuine expertise was developed through activity focused collaborations supplemented by

information. The system itself and other players provided immediate, clear and tangible

feedback, for example, failure and success might have been rewarded with death or experience

points, respectively, and, less tangibly, affect social standing. Failure was relatively easy to

recover from, and performing at the limits of one’s current competency level not only seemed

to sustain engagement but also developed social cachet (Steinkuehler noted the desire for

players to be known as hardcore). This, combined with socially sanctioned precociousness—

the basest instinct underlying scientific enquiry—produced an effect on players that

Steinkuehler observed motivated them to aggressively seek out more complex tasks

(Steinkuehler, C. A., 2004). In other words, players were participant–observers of each other’s

performance mastery.

Steinkuehler (2004, p.527) concluded that the learning practised during gameplay in virtual

worlds was contingent on the game not only as a designed object but also as a social practice—

that an environment conducive to learning was not solely determined by the right curricular

materials but also a matter of getting the emergent social structures surrounding the curricula

“right”, as well. What she was less sure about, though, was how to leverage these MMORPGs

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as learning environments. That research would not be advanced until 2007.

Steinkuehler (2007, 2011) was highly critical of those who attempted to draw a causal link

between videogame play and falling literacy levels in the United States. It is perhaps this, and

the nudge provided by an editorial in the New York Times (Solomon, A., 2004) that spurred her

on to developing the concept of MMORPGs as a constellation of literary practices.

Steinkuehler (2007) argued that interaction with even the most mundane of MMORPG spaces

was an exercise in developing “literacy” as defined by Cazden C. et al. (1996)—that “literacies

crucially entail sense-making within a rich, multi-modal semiotic system, situated in a

community of practice that renders the system meaningful” (p.191). Further, even when based

on the restrictive traditionalist definition of literacy as the ability to read and write, Steinkuehler

(2007) argued that MMORPGs, far from displacing literary practice, were, in fact, a literary

practice in their own right. In later studies published in 2011, she incorporated external texts

into her definition of MMORPGs as a constellation of literary practices out of which she

determined there were five main types of text: informational resources, open community

discussion forums, resources for established social groups (guilds and similar player groups),

resources concerning the user interface, and player produced resources, such as fan-fiction and

artworks, and non-fictional resources such as tutorials and guides. These texts were densely

multimodal, complex and employed academic literary practices (Steinkuehler, C., 2011, p.13).

Participants of the three studies, regardless of pre-diagnosed reading ability, were able to read

texts up to eight grade levels above their ability with over 94% accuracy. This was evident in

struggling readers as well, pointing to virtual worlds as having the potential to be an important

part of reversing falling literacy levels in the United States (and other countries with similar

trends in education; Moje, Overby, Tysvaer & Morris, 2008). Steinkuehler (2011) attributed the

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alarmist, reactionary behaviour surrounding MMORPGs and their effect on literacy levels to

ingrained technophobia and ephebiphobia within sections of the wider community (p.13-14).

While Steinkuehler mainly focused on literacy when discussing the pedagogical potential of

MMORPGs, her recognition of the importance of MMORPGs as communities of practice—that

the environment learning is situated within is as important as the content of study—has also

played a part in research that has focused the possibilities of MMORPGs assisting the

development of social and leadership skills.

As part of the Daedalus Project, Nick Yee (Yee, N., 2006a) found that almost half of his 2,804

respondents felt that they had learned either a little or a lot across four key leadership skills he

had identified. These key areas were mediation and de-escalation of group conflict, persuasion,

motivation and leadership. Neither gender nor whether the respondent had a leadership role in

their physical lives had any major impact on the findings; rather, age was the deciding factor.

Younger respondents felt that they had gained greater insight into leadership skills than did

older respondents.

While Yee acknowledged the potential for MMORPGs to be involved in developing complex

social skills, and/or used in screening situations to determine how respondents dealt with

stressful group situations as a decision-maker, it would be his PARC colleagues who delved

further into the implications MMORPGs social environment had on the development of social

skills.

Following on from Jakobsson and Taylor’s (2003) observations, Ducheneaut and Nickell

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(2005), noted that, while a significant amount of learning was required to navigate the virtual

environment and user interface, this was only enough to account for what many others had

observed, which was the mindless and iteratively more complex repetition of tasks (what Gee

[2007, p.68] and other educators would refer to as a cycle of automization of skills through

practice). What Jakobsson and Taylor (2003), and Ducheneaut and Nickell (2005) saw was that

the additional social layer that MMORPGs introduced created an infinitely more complex

experience. Players spent much more time communicating than running around and killing

things, and the development of social capital was as important as the accrual of experience

(points) if not more so. They both pointed to quests in Everquest as an example. Often, they

were too difficult for players to complete by themselves. Hence, success was generally

determined by the ability of the player to develop the social skills that would allow them to

persuade others to form groups with them to accomplish tasks, fulfil an instrumental role within

the player group’s matrix of responsibilities, mediate complex and divergent agendas and

motivate the player group. These are skills that Yee (Yee, N., 2003) had outlined earlier, and

practices that are consistent with Gee’s (2003) pedagogical concept of communities of practice.

The later work of Sourmelis, Ioannou and Zaphiris (2017) is consistent with this. Through a

meta-analysis of MMORPG literature between 2010 and 2016, they also found that, up to this

point, there was a strong focus on communication within MMORPG studies. However, they did

note that there were still several important skills needed when considering the needs of future

employment that had been understudied. Some of the interesting recommendations they made

in addressing the ability of MMORPGs to help develop what they termed 21st Century Skills

included formally considering MMORPGs as Personal Learning Environments, that is, a fluid,

personally directed learning environment in which players are developing skills related to

information literacy as they advance their avatars; more thoroughly investigating the

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leadership, communication and collaboration skills developed within expert guilds, which

Sourmelis et al., considered, arguably, better structured than in real-life professional

environments or workplaces; and, finally, Soumelis et al. argued that there was enough

potential educational value demonstrated in past studies that MMORPGs should be included as

a useful tool in the matrix of evolving practice within the sector of formal education.

For the most part, academics, researchers and educators who have looked at MMORPGs and

virtual worlds in detail have been in accord that they are complex social and literary spaces,

which have the potential to significantly contribute to richer learning experiences. However,

not all facets of MMORPG studies have been as uniformly positive as in the area of education.

There have also been the much more public, controversial and divisive matters of virtual

property rights and the concept of MMORPG addiction.

TWO CONUNDRUMS: VIRTUAL PROPERTY AND VIRTUAL ADDICTION

MMORPG addiction is considered a niche of internet addiction. As such, much of the research

done in this area has hinged upon the work of Kimberly Young. Young’s framework for

evaluating internet addiction was first developed in 1998 (p.237-244) by adapting the model for

assessing pathological gambling, with diagnosis determined by a brief eight-item questionnaire.

In part of her findings, Young determined that MUD players had the highest ratio of dependent

to non-dependent players (28% of respondents reported they were dependent on MUDs, while

only 5% said they were entirely non-dependent; Young, K., 1998). However, the granularity of

the rest of the study did not get finer than a distinction between dependents and non-

dependents. Despite this, Young’s (1998) findings were seized on by theorists seeking a causal

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link between MMORPGs/MUDs and addiction, most notably by Ng and Wiemer-Hastings

(2005).

Where the idea of MMORPG addiction gained the most traction, though, was in Taiwan,

particularly through the works of Wan and Chiou (2006a, 2006b) and Hsu, Wen and Wu

(2009). Both groups of researchers’ works stemmed from the government-sponsored study

published by Lin and Tsai (1999) who determined male adolescent players were most

susceptible to internet addiction, alleging that their dependence on the internet was augmented

by the tendency to seek out pleasurable sensations, and, thus, suggesting a link between the

practice of addiction and chemical addiction. Lin and Tsai’s (1999) work legitimized the moral

panic surrounding the increasing prevalence of the internet and this mindset in many Taiwanese

has mostly continued today.

Wan and Chiou’s (2006a) original hypothesis was that addiction through MMORPGs could be

explained by seeing MMORPG play as a vehicle through which players could fulfil the

Maslowian hierarchy of human needs, and achieve a “flow state” or, in other words, achieve

self-actualization and transcendence of identity through a continual state of optimal experience.

However, in the two studies they conducted, Wan and Chiou (2006a, 2006b) found that

participants classified as addicts according to the Internet Addiction Scale for Taiwanese High

Schoolers, developed by Lin and Tsai (1999), and peculiar to Taiwan, did not obtain a high

level of flow experience, and, consequently, flow state could not explain addiction. They also

found that, while compulsive use did alleviate dissatisfaction, it did not promote satisfaction

among players classified as addicts (Wan, C.S. & Chiou., W.B., 2006a, p.323).

Not satisfied with the inconclusive findings of their original quantitative studies, Wan and

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Chiou (2006b) immediately launched a qualitative study, interviewing ten subjects who spent

more than 48 hours per week within MMORPGs. Based on the data collected from the subjects,

they found four major needs that MMORPG filled within the subjects: entertainment value, an

emotional coping mechanism, the provision of challenges (performative mastery) and an

avenue for escapism. They also asserted that it was likely most of the subjects interviewed were

in a mentally depressed state, had a poor perception of their physical self-image and saw

MMORPGs as an anonymous way to achieve a sense of control (Wan, C.S. & Chiou., W.B.,

2006b, p.765).

However, this was somewhat contradicted by Hsu, Wen and Wu (2009). Out of a total matrix

of eleven factors, Hsu et al. (2009) determined the factors of “challenge”, “fantasy” and

“control”—three of the factors Wan and Chiou (2006b) explicitly referred to in their second

study—as well as the factors of “competition”, “cooperation” and “recognition” poorly

correlated to a high likelihood of MMORPG addiction (as defined by the metric outlined by Lin

and Tsai ([1999] referred to above). Hsu et al. (2009) then argued that the onus was on

developers to create MMORPGs that minimized players’ exposure to factors that they found

did correlate to a high likelihood of addictive behaviour: “rewards”, “community”, “belonging

and obligation” and “role-play”, which, of course, would mean taking the MMORP out of

MMORPG (p.996-998).

However, both Wan and Chiou’s (2006a, 2006b) and Hsu et al.’s (2009) conclusions are

problematic. Their studies had narrow subject selection criteria and both research teams

laboured under the view that MMORPG play led to dependence as a priori (volunteers were

between the ages of 16 and 24 in Wan and Chiou’s [2006b, p.319] first study and gender was

not divulged). Volunteers were aged between 18 and 25 in Hsu, et al.’s (2009, p.994) study,

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and were overwhelmingly male (73.4%). There have been few counterpoints to this. One of

them was the work of Lee, Yu and Lin (2007, p.212-213), who acknowledged that the

phenomenon of internet addiction/dependence was a complex interplay between usage habits

and real/physical situations, although the scope of their study limited the amount of analysis

they could perform.

Among Western academics, the perception has been vastly different. The most cited study was

authored by Ng and Wiemer-Hastings (2005). To them, although it was clear that MMORPG

players spent significantly more time playing than those who primarily played single-player

games, much of that play was concentrated on the social aspects of the MMORPG, which many

found more pleasant and satisfying than the physical world.

However, players did not seek to improve their self-esteem through MMORPG play, nor did

they suggest they would get anxious from abstaining for one day. This ran counter to the

assertions of Wan and Chiou (2006b) and would seem to suggest that, overall, MMORPGs did

not elicit patterns of usage to indicate addiction. Rather, Ng and Wiemer-Hastings (2005)

repositioned the argument and suggested that MMORPG players simply had an alternative

conception of what it was to socialize virtually, and that if MMORPGs did not exist, they

would likely simply engage in online social behaviour on a different platform.

While Ng and Wiemer-Hastings (2005) rejected the notion of MMORPG addiction, more

recently, MMORPG studies heavyweights Scott Caplan, Dmitri Williams and Nick Yee (2009)

have acknowledged the issue of problematic internet use (PIU). Using a combination of self-

reporting surveys and data collected from the servers of Everquest 2 (Sony Online

Entertainment, 2006)—the first time that raw data has been released by the developer of a

large-scale commercial MMORPG (although CCP UK regularly releases economic data from

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its flagship MMORPG franchise, EVE Online [CCP Games, 2003])—Caplan et al. (2009)

determined that, although the reasons for playing MMORPGs coupled with the amount of time

spent playing an MMORPG were statistically significant factors, they were actually very small

contributing factors to the manifestation of PIU. They found overwhelmingly that the

prevalence of PIU was more strongly associated with a participant’s psychological profile and

amount of time spent simply being online, with perceived loneliness being the single most

influential predictor of PIU (Caplan et al., 2009). Caplan et al. (2009, p.1318) argued that

emphases on internal MMORPG-related factors distracted from the more fundamental issues

that most strongly correlated to PIU and that were external to MMORPGs.

However, discourse surrounding MMORPG addiction has largely remained muted and

fragmented, partly due to the opposing arguments separated into different markets of ideas, and

partly because the positive sentiment surrounding MMORPG studies, especially among

Western academics, has relegated discussion regarding addiction to near taboo.

At the other end of the spectrum, the most highly contested area of research within MMORPG

studies for the last decade has continued to concern virtual property rights. It is a debate unique

to MMORPGs due to the ontological difficulties defining what property is within virtual

environments, and has polarized into two opposing, but equally and (currently) legally valid

camps. On the one hand, developers see virtual environments in their entirety as bits of code,

and subject to their ownership under End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs), which are also

created by developers. On the other hand, players see virtual chattels under their virtual control

as tangible assets and EULAs as contractually unfair and overly onerous. Among the confusion

and debate, trade-in virtual property, sometimes referred to as the RMT, has become a

burgeoning grey market. Figures are difficult to assess due to its questionable legal status, but

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as an indicator, the largest China-based virtual e-commerce platform, 5173.com, reported a

trading volume of over US$1.37 billion for 2007 (Xiang, Y. & Guo, L., 2013, p.2).

Lawrence Lessig (1999, p.9-13) was one of the first to note the ambiguous nature of virtual

property when he documented a protracted dispute over a virtual dog and its unfortunate

contact with a neighbour’s deathly poisonous flowers in a MUD called LambdaMOO (Curtis,

P., 1990). Later, Raph Koster (2006) was one of the first to take a somewhat complicated

position on the matter, which he explained in “Declaring the Rights of Players”. Koster (2006)

did not outline his philosophical foundations when he referred to two “theories of rights”: the

theory that rights were not intrinsic, but, instead, decided by the cultural norms of a populace,

and the theory that rights were intrinsic to all people, regardless. He attributed each theory to

both perspectives of the virtual property debate, the first to developers and the latter to players

(Koster, R., 2006). Though he was careful to state his reluctance to take either side, Koster

(2006) took the step to extricate the concept of the avatar from either the control of developers

or players. Instead, he treated it as a separate entity with its own set of rights and

responsibilities and, in that way, oddly enough, came to a position that lay closer to advocating

rights for players, than not (Koster, R., 2006). Koster (2000) recounted a rancorous response

from fellow developers upon the release of the first “A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars”.

He later reworded the document to conform to the perspective that it would make retaining a

player base easier. While the content was primarily the same, developers much more

accommodating of such reforms at that time, although what Koster had previously referred to

as “rights” had been transformed into the weaker “code of conduct”.

Koster had trouble defining the “player”, “developer” and “avatar”, and experienced firsthand

the difficulty in dealing with the loaded concept of “rights”. These conflicted conceptions have

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remained mostly unresolved today despite many theorists calling for a resolution and some

calling for compromise, as the status quo had become untenable (Slaughter, J.B.J., 2008;

Castronova, E., 2006; Fairfield, J., 2005; Blazer, C. 2006; Westbrook, T.J.T., 2006).

However, the most influential voices (including players and developers) within this debate have

remained steadfast. Lastowka and Hunter (Hunter, D. & Lastowka, F.G., 2003, 2004), were two

of the first to define and advocate player property rights, and, arguably, started the current

contest of ideas. They justified the significant real value of virtual property based on three

major normative theories that concern property rights. Under Lockean theories of property,

they argued that a player was entitled to limited property rights within virtual worlds, much like

the rights they would have been afforded over chattel in physical reality, and that the Lockean

proviso was irrelevant in such environments (Hunter, D. & Lastowka, F.G., 2004, p.46-48).

Regarding Hegelian personality theories on property, Lastowka and Hunter asserted that

conditions within virtual worlds inherently fulfilled the theory’s requirements, as it had been

long accepted that avatars, their possessions and actions were inextricably linked to a player’s

sense of self. Also, while Lastowka and Hunter rejected Bentham’s Utilitarian account as a

means to allocate virtual property rights, they did accept its value in justifying the creation of

said virtual property rights. Finally, Lastowka and Hunter predicted that, as virtual and earthly

realities became more entwined, and as people started to use virtual spaces for work education

and socializing, along with play, it would become increasingly likely that courts would reject

the punitive restrictions many EULAs placed on the interests of players, and that proving the

legitimacy of a EULA in their current form would become a much more difficult thing to do.

This is a position also taken by Slaughter (2008), who saw neither current property law nor

current contract law as able to govern virtual property effectively. He argued that the best

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solution would be an amalgamation of both sets of laws that took both stakeholders into

account: a process he termed virtual easement. Slaughter acknowledged that this would have to

overcome some challenges in implementation, however. For example, virtual worlds and

MMORPGs are transnational by their very nature, and, hence, Slaughter argued, they would

also require a transnational response. However, due to geopolitical complexities surrounding

global, or even regional, legislative harmonization, he saw this as an unlikely scenario.

Nevertheless, Slaughter appreciated the tremendous economic potential of currently

encumbered virtual worlds, and, therefore, endorsed a move towards a more balanced

attribution of virtual property rights. Oddly enough, this essentially utilitarian position was

partially rejected by Lastowka and Hunter, although it was supported by another early

proponent of a more egalitarian distribution of virtual property rights, Josh Fairfield (2004).

While never achieving the visibility that Lastowka and Hunter received, Fairfield (2005) did

much more to attack the fundamental arguments of those who rejected virtual property as a

concept. He contended that the standard arguments were unconvincing; that control of virtual

property was still possible without prohibiting private property rights; that commodification

was a non-issue as virtual objects were commodified from their inception; and that, far from

threatening online communities, prohibiting the sale of virtual properties unfairly locked

players into an environment they possibly felt uncomfortable within.

Fairfield’s (2005) arguments were likely directed at the first to see the concept of virtual

property and the rights associated as destructive: Richard Bartle. Bartle (2004) railed against

what he labelled as commodification following the virtual trade experiences of Julian Dibbell

(2007) in Play Money. He asserted that the relationships players engaged in and around

MMORPGs were fundamentally non-commercial and that any allowances for commercial

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behaviour could only be sanctioned and actualized by that developer (as the vendor).

Bartle (2004) formulated five key pitfalls of virtual property. He rejected the notion of virtual

property essentially on the grounds that it would break the bounds of the magic circle

(Huizinga, J., 1938) surrounding MMORPGs, and that EULAs were the legal structures that

held these boundaries intact, restricting the distribution of property rights to end players.

Hence, arguments otherwise were philosophically or legally invalid. These were, of course,

assertions based on the assumptions that the magic circle surrounding MMORPG play was

non-porous, which was long dismissed most clearly by Taylor’s (2002) work in Everquest, and

that EULAs were incontestable, a legal fallacy. The other reasons Bartle (2004) presented to

discredit the concept of virtual property were that developers would be encumbered with the

responsibility to maintain the value of player’s virtual property and that players would resent

them if they did not do so. However, as Fairfield (2004) pointed out, much of Bartle’s (2004)

arguments were reactionary, simply unfounded and buttressed by weak reasoning and poor

justifications. Bartle’s (2004) sentiments, though, were supported by other theorists who put

forth much more reasoned arguments against the entrenchment of virtual property.

Castronova (2004) acknowledged the porousness of the magic circle that surrounded

MMORPGs; however, he argued that the legitimization of virtual property would only serve to

weaken the circle further. He posed the question: if virtual property was to be governed by

common law, then in what jurisdiction should it apply, and what further impositions would

these jurisdictions apply? Castronova argued for the strengthening of EULAs to maintain

virtual worlds as spaces of play and for net neutrality, arguments that he packaged into the

concept of “the Right to Play”. These were much the same arguments presented by Balkin

(2004) and Dibbell (2003): that EULAs, while far from perfect, were currently the only tools

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preventing judicial and governmental interference.

More recent discourse surrounding virtual property rights has turned to the EULAs themselves.

In the context of MMORPGs, EULAs have never truly been contested in a court of law

(Dibbell, 2006, p.138-139), but legal theorists such as Radin (2000) and Meehan (2006)

suggested that if EULAs were to be subjected to scrutiny in a court of law, they would likely be

found invalid on the grounds of procedural and substantiative unconscionability. They argued

that the players adhering to a EULA were unlikely to have read or understood it; that it was

likely that developers would have engaged in thousands more EULAs than players; that it was

almost certain that players had no negotiating influence on the formulation of a EULA; and,

that the terms were so onerous that they were unlikely to be the result of buyer’s choice (Radin,

M.J., 2000, p.1149).

Meehan (2006), instead, suggested the separation of the often conflated virtual representation

of properties, and their underlying code and hardware, and distributing rights accordingly: a

concept that Meehan referred to as the “protection of bits in context”. This closely aligned with

the arguments of Slaughter (2008), and his concept of “virtual easement”.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT WHY PEOPLE PLAY MMORPGS

The body of research within MMORPG studies has proliferated since the mid-90s thanks

largely to the work of the academics discussed previously, and whose views continue to shape

the evolution of continued research. However, since 2011, when the number of active players

peaked at just over 22.5 million users, the population has been slowly declining (Van Geel, I.,

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2012a). Blakey now lists the total population of MMORPG players at just under 12.5 million

active players as of September 2018. While academics have continued to debate the social,

pedagogical, economic and legal implications of virtual worlds, few have sought to ask why

people play or leave MMORPGs.

While the concept of players leaving online services, typically termed churn, is not a new one,

Richard Bartle (2004, p.142-3) was the first to recognize it as an issue within MMORPGs,

albeit, at the time, not a major one. He also recognized the difficulty of obtaining data relating

to churn, as it could be seen as commercially sensitive information. Bartle’s (2004, p.143)

perspective was informed by his role as a MUD administrator, and he argued that successful,

established virtual worlds should aim to have churn rates of under 5% per month, citing his

own experience with MUD2, which, in 2003, had a churn rate of approximately 4% per month.

However, in cases in which churn was not so easily controlled, he emphasized that attracting

new players was of greater importance than the retention of existing players, citing the success

of Everquest (Sony Online Entertainment, 1999), which at the time had a churn rate of

approximately 12.5% per month.

However, the landscape of MMORPG play has changed dramatically since, and the argument

for prioritizing the acquisition of new players has become considerably weaker. Jaya Kawale,

Aditya Pal and Jaideep Srivastava (2009) were instrumental in first attempting to model churn

prediction within MMORPGs, recognizing that retaining existing players was not only more

economically sound than attempting to attract new ones, but that the failure to retain existing

players negatively influenced the churning intentions of their neighbours, ironically, based on

6,213 data points obtained from Everquest II (Sony Online Entertainment, 2004) in August

2006. Using a socially influenced-based approach, network analysis showed a

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cascading/energy-propagating effect when comparing a player’s probability of churning versus

the number of neighbours who had churned, from a base probability of approximately 19% per

month when two or less neighbours had churned, to an elevated probability of approximately

33% per month when twelve neighbours had churned (Kawale, J. et al., 2009, p.425). This was

only part of the data analysis that they published but is the most pertinent to the aims of this

thesis.

A later paper that more explicitly engaged with the question of players leaving MMORPGs was

co-authored by the team of Debeauvais, Nardi, Schiano, Ducheneaut and Yee (2011) and aptly

titled “If You Build It They Might Stay: Retention Mechanisms in World of Warcraft”. From

the population of World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG of the last decade (Van Geel,

I., 2012a), 2,865 players voluntarily participated in a series of surveys and were grouped

according to the attributive model of player types based on motivation factors developed by

Yee (2006d). While emphasis was placed on player retention in this paper, of particular note,

and especially pertinent to the aims of this thesis, was the percentage of people who had, during

the study, stopped playing for a period of time—what the researchers referred to as the stop

rate. Overall, the stop rate was significant at 77% (of players within the study), 14% of whom

had stopped for at least a year (including those that had left altogether). Importantly, they found

that various external influences contributed to the likelihood of a player stopping, and players

from different backgrounds, at least on a very broad level, had different stopping tendencies.

Players from East Asia tended to play more hours per week but were significantly more likely

to stop than their Western counterparts. Those who self-classified themselves as hardcore

played almost twice as many hours per week than those who self-classified themselves as

casual (Debeauvais et al. [2011] described casual players as players who preferred ease of play,

as opposed to hardcore players who sought efficient strategies to combat challenges) and they

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had a stop rate significantly below the mean. Formalized social groups, such as guilds (as was

the case in World of Warcraft), were also an important factor in affecting a player’s stopping

tendencies. Players not in a guild were more likely to stop play than those within one, and this

difference was even more pronounced when compared to players who led these guilds. This

would seem to suggest social relations within virtual worlds were a major determinant of one’s

stopping intentions, but, oddly, when the researchers looked at more intimate social relations,

such as players who had either made new friends or partners and that ended up meeting them

outside the virtual world, this was not the case. One group they noted that were often

overlooked by other researchers (although Pearce [Pearce, C. & Artemesia, 2009] is one who

did a great deal of work with them) were those aged over forty-five. These players exhibited the

lowest stop rate of any player group identified (53%).

What should be noted, though, regarding the researchers’ measurement of stop rate within such

a monolithic virtual environment, is that Blizzard (2004), as the developers for World of

Warcraft, had significant resources with which to release new content continually and promote

it effectively. This is a capability that most other MMORPG developers do not have, and still

do not share. What was not explored was whether the infusion of new content was a significant

determinant of players’ intentions of returning following a period of stoppage and if they would

have returned at all if content was not changed so drastically. This new content could be in the

form of, often, freely downloadable patches that augment existing content or purchasable

expansion packs that drastically changed or added to existing content.

Ultimately, Debeauvais et al.’s (2011) findings were inconclusive. What was determined was

that the reasons for a person to stop playing were varied, often unexpected, difficult to

determine, and not necessarily confined to the virtual world.

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Another important paper was that authored by Wu-chang Feng, in conjunction with CCP

Game’s David Brandt and IBM’s Debanjan Saha (2007). It looked at the long-term trends in

player population behaviour within the space MMORPG, EVE Online (CCP Games, 2003) over

almost three years. What they found was also significant and similar to the results obtained by

Debeauvois et al. (Debeauvais, T. et al., 2011). A month after the release of EVE Online, 30%

of the player base had stopped participating. Within 18 months, 70% of the original player

based stopped, and newer players exhibited less intention to continue over time. Within 24

months, three out of every four new players would leave within a month of first participating.

Introducing new content was found to have a limited impact on existing players. Feng et al.

(2007) postulated that the inability for CCP Games to retain players over time was due to the

persistent nature of the virtual world, which allowed a stratified power structure to emerge:

“new players often come in at a severe disadvantage to those who have played from the game’s

launch … virtual wealth and power, the disparities in ability, often discourage new players

from continuing to play” (p.21). This was likely exacerbated by the uniquely competitive and

laissez-faire nature of the EVE Online environment, where new players could be pressured into

acting on behalf of other, more powerful players’ and in the process experiencing real losses in

wealth while protecting those interests. However, the researchers failed to provide any evidence

to confirm their hypotheses that socio-economic disparities created such pressure as to cause

new players to leave or even whether this socio-economic disparity existed. Despite this, Feng

et al.’s (2007) findings were significant because, firstly, this was the first paper that analyzed

big data retrieved directly from a developer’s infrastructure, and, secondly, the results obtained

were consistent with Debeauvais et al.’s (2011) findings that would seem to indicate this

problem transcends individual franchises, and concerns a fundamental flaw in the way

MMORPGs are conceived, which have become highly genre-fied and derivative for the last

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two decades (Bartle, R.A., 2013).

Hou, Chern, Chen and Chen, (2011) analyzed the behaviour of players leaving MMORPGs as

human migration using the methodological framework of push-pull-mooring (PPM) where

push factors were described as detractors that would deter a reasonable person from staying in a

particular location, such as war or poverty; pull factors were described as the positive aspects of

an intended destination that would seek to draw emigrants such as lifestyle and/or economic

opportunity; and mooring factors were described as anything that would seek to impede

migration, such as cultural, social or economic influences, for example, one’s family or owning

a business. This was pivotal not only because was this a novel implementation of a uniquely

applicable methodology but also because PPM was able to take into account both the relative

numbers of people leaving as well as broad factors that influenced that decision. They found

that players’ intentions to either switch to another virtual world or to leave altogether were most

strongly influenced by mooring factors, with pull factors also being a significant influencer.

Inversely, push factors were found to have a negligible effect on players’ switching intentions.

In MMORPG population migrations, the most powerful factors within the mooring framework

were the perceived cost of leaving including forgoing accumulated economic and social capital,

the perceived variety of content within the virtual world inhabited, and whether or not they had

nomadic tendencies, that is, whether or not a player had left a virtual world before (these are

sometimes referred to as content locusts [Parsely, I., 2012]). In terms of pull effects, the most

attractive aspects of potential destinations were their perceived level of potential enjoyment,

perceived levels of customer service and lower upfront costs. This has perhaps contributed to

the growing prevalence of free to play subscription model—that is, subscription models that,

instead of relying on the more traditional model of players paying an ongoing fee for the ability

to access a virtual world (usually on a per month basis), provide an initially free service and

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allow players to pay to unlock more features or content. Part of the findings of Hou et al.

(2011) within the mooring framework, however, contradicted major assertions by Feng et al.

(2007): additional content did seem to have a substantial impact on players leaving a virtual

world. This contradiction could be explained, though, by further exploration of how the

addition of different types of content affects a player’s mooring factor. Hou et al.’s (2011,

p.1901) suggestions that developers provide additional support for players to be able to retain

accumulated capital when migrating between different virtual worlds also runs counter to Feng

et al.’s (2007, p.21-22) hypothesis that it is, in fact, this accumulated capital that hinders the

sustainability of a virtual world. There would also be logistical, ontological and economic

difficulties with this transference of capital: one would have to ask the question, what is an

asset from one virtual world worth in another?

RECENT DISCOURSES AROUND PLAYERS AND MMORPGS

With the continued decline in the prominence of the MMORPG genre, few have continued to

contemplate the players and MMORPG play. The last significant wave of research concerning

this subject was primarily published between 2014 and 2016.

The most significant of this wave of research was a meta-analysis of twelve previously

expounded player typologies by Hamari and Tuunanen (2015). Their attempt to combine the

typologies resembled, in large part, the meta groupings that Yee (2005) had come up with nine

years prior, a testament to the influence he had on the researchers that came after him

attempting the same thing. Similarly, Hamari and Tuunanen (2015, p.44-45) also had

misgivings about the categorization of players into archetypes, which they saw as a

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simplification (in other words, a reified understanding or in the context of this work,

punctualized) and explained through the following six points.

Hamari and Tuunanen (2015) argued:

• These categorizations were too often discussed as dichotomous groupings when they

should be seen on a continuum or as “ scales”.

• The concept of player typologies was doubly “simplified”—that is, that they do not

refer to any concrete “player” but rather a set of motivations or behavioural patterns.

• Player typologies were created within different virtual environments, and whether these

typologies were transferrable across environments was yet to be explored.

• Classification, though perhaps a useful aid, was counterproductive to the investigation

of player experience in richer detail; in essence, it encouraged simplification.

• Player typologies are inherently subjective, and hence their use was limited, as they

could be interpreted in any number of ways.

• Perhaps player typologies were not needed at all, and traditional frameworks from the

broader field of psychology could be used instead.

Hamari and Tuunanen’s conclusions about player typologies and their arguments that evolved

throughout their research are perhaps the closest to mirroring the central thesis of this particular

study: that MMORPG play has been misunderstood and that there is still further research to be

done.

However, research into the sustainability of MMORPG play and players is currently thin and

over the last decade has remained so. From what research has been published, however, we

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arrive at three conclusions. First, we do not know what sustainability means. Second, so far, the

factors determined to contribute to the intentions of a player leaving a particular virtual world

are wide-ranging, interconnected, and multi-faceted. Thirdly, the current tools and levers that

developers employ in an attempt to retain players often detract from the long-term

sustainability of a virtual world’s population.

So far all the research that has been published has been mostly quantitative, and no one could

argue that the amount of data collected and analyzed has been found wanting (multiple research

teams, tens of thousands of respondents and years of collecting). But the findings deduced from

these massive data sets have proven to be inconclusive and solutions proposed have been

contradictory. What this indicates is a failure to trace adequately all the interconnected actants

that affect how we understand the MMORPG player and how we understand MMORPG play,

leading to only a partial view of their interactions. The above approaches, therefore, inform the

methodological approach that this thesis will be taking.

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Based on what has been previously discussed within this chapter, MMORPG researchers do not

yet clearly understand how any factor, whether social, psychological, economic or otherwise,

affects the intentions of a player to leave a particular virtual world. So, like the flat nature of

this literature review, this thesis is able to and should draw on Bruno Latour’s (2005)

framework of Actor-Network theory (ANT). Latour conceived ANT as an anathema to what he

saw as a fashionable tendency to presuppose theoretical and ideological perspectives when

conducting research. In ANT terms, the imposition of external perspectives was to engage an

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additional actor-network that would act on the original actor-network that was supposed to be

analyzed, thereby increasing complexity (Latour, B., 1996, 1997). A fruitful analysis could not

occur outside of the actor-network itself. Based on what has emerged so far (Feng W. et al.,

2007; Bartle, R.A., 2013; Hou, A.C.Y. et al., 2011), this has clearly been a problem with

current research.

While ANT may seem appropriate to employ to analyze what is essentially a manifest

networked digital reality, ANT cannot be conceptualized in terms of traditional network

architecture. Rather, it is dimensionless and not strictly sociological, though it can inform an

understanding of the social. A key benefit of employing ANT is the equal attention that is

afforded to the human and the non-human, and the technological and cultural, which is

foundational to the construction of all MMORPGs.

T.L. Taylor provides an example of building on this in her investigations of how user-created

software (often called mods) were powerful actors within the raiding environment. It was

through ANT that she developed the notion of assemblage of play and that diverse components

well beyond the game software itself co-constituted the experiences within these spaces (Taylor

T.L., 2009; Boellstorff, T., Nardi, B., Pearce, C. & Taylor, T.L., 2012, p.164).

Taylor is also instrumental in the blueprint construction of the means through which the

retracing of connections can be done. Boellstorff et al. (2012) recently codified a new form of

ethnographic research practice, virtual ethnography. Building on field-based anthropological

ethnography first demonstrated by Malinowski (1978), virtual ethnography goes beyond

viewing MMORPGs as cultural artefacts, but see them as fully fledged worlds in and of

themselves (additionally, Boellstorff, T. et al. [2012, p.6-8] noted clearly that an MMORPG

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needs to be viewed holistically as it cannot be assumed that parts of it reflect experiences

within physical reality). Virtual ethnographers, in obtaining deep, longitudinal and empirical

data, seek to engage with and immerse themselves within the everyday of MMORPG life. A

central component of that research is to engage in participant ethnography, with the researcher

becoming a player, and analyzing the practice from a research perspective. Similar to ANT,

virtual ethnographers, beyond picking the virtual field-site and selecting the scope of the player

groups they seek to engage with, have no presupposed hypothesis to prove or disprove.

Outside of the MMORPG studies niche, Waldrich (2017) co-opted an interpretation of the

Foucauldian term “dispositive” by Mosel (2009) to discuss “the arrangement of heterogenous

processes and technical devices, which occur and manifest in the very act of playing games”

(Waldrich, H., 2017, p.175). By interrogating the approaches of games studies with elements of

ANT, he, too, found that the many different approaches to the investigation of the act of

playing games were so singular in nature that he came to a similar conclusion as this thesis,

finding them to be unsatisfactory. Instead, he saw the play of games, and what he came to term

the home console dispositive, as complex cultural artefacts that were changing constantly, akin

to the Latourian conception of an actor-network, “what is made to act by a large star-shaped

web of mediators flowing in and out of it” (Latour, B., 2005, p.217). He also demonstrated that

they were not limited spatially, but rather, were conditioned by extensive networks of media-

technical infrastructure, which, while they appear to be invisible, were actually all part of the

same wide actor-network mobilized and reciprocating to different degrees in support of that

moment of play.

Finally, with conclusions similar to the narrative of this thesis, although the combination of

existing theoretical frameworks and a hierarchical structure to the eventuating model is not, is

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the work of Conway and Innocent (2016), specifically the work of Conway and Trevillian

(2015) in the short but compelling article, ‘“Blackout!’ Unpacking the Black Box of the Game

Event”. The authors combine Goffmanian frame analysis, phenomenology—particularly that of

Alfred Schutz (1945, 1962)—and a Latourian interpretation of ANT (Conway, S. & Trevillian,

A., 2015, p.71) to create a new way to understand the moment of play or game event, a new

ontology. They specifically designed it as a model “grounded in three principles: practicality,

robustness and minimalism” (p.79), that could be applied outside of just video games (which

they illustrate with a case study involving the infamous headbutt by Zinadine Zidane in the

2006 FIFA World Cup [p.85-86]) and defined by three levels, in order of lowest and most base

to the highest and most superficial: the Social World, Operative World and Character World

(what would later be referred to as the SOC Model [Conway, S. & Innocent, T., 2016, p.10])

that the game event and objects within it can move between in moments referred to as upkeying

and downkeying.

One example among many they use to illustrate the use of this new ontological model comes

from a boss battle in Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid (Konami Computer Entertainment

Japan, 1998). In it, the game reveals the boss Psycho Mantis yelling, “Blackout!” He then,

under the pretext of having powerful psychic abilities, then appears to turn your television

black with the neon green text “HIDEO” appearing in the top right corner. All of a sudden, the

memory card in your PlayStation, your controller, even your television, are upkeyed into the

Character World, becoming part of the encounter. You are literally fighting your home

television set. While they explain that this is “evident across Kojima’s oeuvre” (p.89), a

hallmark of his approach to games design, it does bring into sharp relief the previously

transparent network of objects that make up the game event black box.

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Conway and Trevillian (2015) similarly conclude that “Games and Black Boxes: the

accumulation of a vast number of objects that comes together, oftentimes, incognito, to produce

a Game Event” and that “man of play cannot exist without a whole host of allied objects

colluding” (p.95). In that way, they both acknowledge that, within any moment of play, non-

human objects and actors have agency. The game event cannot exist purely from the effort of a

human actor. This is made obvious and important in boss fights such as the above encounter

with Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid, and while they are often less visible in MMORPGs,

they are no less important. For example, high-level team raids on dungeons would look

radically different if the prevailing connection type was still copper-based dial-up. This will be

discussed in greater detail in Chapter Four, and throughout the thesis.

Outlined above are the approaches this thesis aims to take, which will be expanded on in a later

chapter specifically concerning methodology. While this thesis cannot view that the player is a

wholly more or less important actor-network throughout the research, the point of entry for this

thesis will be the process of unpacking it. The only way that an understanding can organically

emerge is through the qualitative research that the practice of virtual ethnography can bring.

As discussed previously, the rapid progression from the broad, almost naive, yet viscerally

detailed and descriptive explorations of early and seminal MMORPG researchers such as the

aforementioned Turkle (1985) and Castronova (2001), and later, Taylor (2006), Boellstorff

(2008), Pearce and Artemesia (2009) and, finally, Nardi (2010), to more specialized lines of

inquiry, has led to the premature black-boxing or punctualization of an incomplete

understanding of MMORPG play and MMORPG players that now serves as an unstable

foundation weakly connected to the current study of narrower and narrower views of the

MMORPG assemblage. Why is this important? From the commercial perspective, have seen a

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steady decline in the prominence of what was once described ebulliently by some theorists as a

new virtual frontier (Steinkuehler, C., 2005), while at the same time, very little literature or

acknowledgement of this occurring has appeared in academia, demonstrating that these new

lines of inquiry are only weakly connected to the MMORPG assemblage itself.

By retracing the connections that constitute the constellation of actor-networks within the

player and that the player is part of, this thesis aims to discover the outcomes of moments of

translation that have led to systemic breakdowns in the MMORPG player actor-network.

This leads to the next question of how exactly this might be accomplished.

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CHAPTER TWO: METHODOLOGY

The previous chapter of this thesis established that MMORPGs have become increasingly

visible in academic discussions, however, since 2009, only a small amount of that research has

engaged with the nature of the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of players leaving

MMORPG. Furthermore, very little of that research has sought to understand MMORPGs and

MMORPG play itself.

Research that has been published has been inconclusive. As previously discussed, factors found

to contribute to the intention of a player joining or leaving a particular virtual world have been

wide-ranging, inter-connected, and multifaceted, and solutions proposed have been haphazard

and contradictory. Similarly, so far developers have been unable to create conditions that allow

them to retain players without detracting from the long-term sustainability of a virtual world’s

population. This is, perhaps, not unexpected, as research has hitherto been conducted within

mooring itself to an understanding of the fundamental constructs of MMORPG play and the

MMORPG itself.

This chapter aims to outline the methodological approach of this thesis in drawing the reader to

a greater understanding of how we may have misunderstood MMORPGs and the MMORPG

player. It will first provide a brief outline of the methodological framework being employed,

including how it has been utilized in previously published research. Secondly, this chapter will

outline the methods through which this will be achieved - including a description of the site

selection, sampling and data collection strategies - as well as ethical considerations; what

research tools are to be employed and how they will be used.

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Researchers and theorists have yet to reach agreement or determine whether an essentialist

consensus can indeed be reached at all. To be clear, this thesis does not aim to provide such a

conclusion. However, it with not seek to impose external theoretical/ideological perspectives

that have been developed by past research either.

It is hoped that, through describing and mapping these translation errors, it may better allow the

collective player entity to express momentary answers to the question of how have we

misunderstood MMORPG play?

To do so, this thesis will draw on Actor Network Theory (ANT), which was first iterated upon

by T.L. Taylor in her development of the concept of the “assemblage of play” (Taylor, T.L.,

2009). It is important to keep in mind, also, that ANT cannot be viewed as a prescriptive

framework, as to do so would, ironically, violate one of its central tenets. Rather, this thesis

aims to accept the nebulous that previous researchers have already alluded to - that the reasons

for someone leaving a virtual world are wide-ranging, inter-connected and multi- faceted. For

every moment, a player’s intention to leave is uniquely translated and the most apt perspective

to engender understanding is in the actors-networks at play themselves.

This thesis will also draw heavily upon some of the methods created by Taylor in conjunction

with Boellstorff, Pearce and Nardi (Boellstorff, T., et. al. 2012) collectively known as virtual

ethnography. Of particular relevance is the use of participant observation, which will form the

majority of the research output within this thesis. This facilitates adherence to the commitment

to qualitative empirical study required of both ANT practitioners and virtual ethnographers.

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Where virtual ethnography breaks from ANT though is with analysis. While this cannot occur

beyond the network when strictly adhering to core tenets of ANT, virtual ethnography allows

for the act of retracing the connections between actor networks to be explained outside of the

network. It is not seen as lacking in fortitude, as Latour would argue (Latour, B., 2005). The

densely packaged encapsulated MMORPG allows for a constant stream of data to bombard the

player/participant, some of which is conceptually foreign, and still requires prying apart into

their elemental actor-networks. The moments of interpellation between actor-networks still

need to be retraced and connections between sites of commonality will need to be made.

Where this thesis will pay particular attention is to the moments of translation error concerning

the player actor-network entity, and the interactions and interpellations that arise out of these

moments. Taylor’s concept of the assemblage of play (Taylor, T.L., 2009) could not have

occurred if she had not allowed for explanation outside the actor-network of the third party

software modules within MMORPGs, also known as mods. There is always the need to be

careful, however, to avoid unnecessary complexity and risk translation error within the process

of unpacking and explanation.

ACTOR NETWORK THEORY

Actor Network Theory (ANT) had a particularly tortuous upbringing; partly due to its

ontological complexity. It was difficult to define, summarize and explain, because the very act

of defining, summarizing or explaining went against its central ethos, a perplexing

contradiction that many students of ANT have struggled with,

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“P: So ...I take it that you are a bit lost?

S: Well, yes. I am finding it difficult, I have to say, to apply Actor Network Theory to

my case study on organizations.

P: No wonder! It isn’t applicable to anything.

S: But we were taught . . . I mean . . . it seems like hot stuff around here. Are you

saying it’s useless?

P: It might be useful, but only if it does not ‘apply’ to something.

S: Sorry, but are you playing some sort of Zen trick here?” (Latour, B., 2005, p.141)

The development of ANT is largely associated with three writers from the tradition of Science

and Technologies Studies (“STS”): Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and John Law, who were the

first writers to label their approach to enquiry as such (Callon, M., 1998; Callon, M., Law, J.,

1997; Latour, B., 1987; Latour, B., 1996; Latour, B., 1997; Latour, B., 1999; Latour, B., 2005;

Law, J., 1992; Law, J., 1997; Law, J., 1999; Law, J., 2009). While they drew upon elements of

Foucault’s theories on power, and the literary sensibilities of philosopher Michel Serres, the

intellectual predecessor their work most resoundingly identified with was that of Thomas (The

Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962). However, as a mode of enquiry that was best

performed rather than explained, for much of its early history, attempts at describing it were

largely abstract and ephemeral.

It was not until 1996 that Latour, frustrated with what he saw as the misinterpretation and

misuse of ANT, decided to synthesize the sensibilities of the “theory” as developed by his

colleagues within the field of STS. He decided to “systematically introduce” (Latour, B., 2005)

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the intellectual framework at the Louvain-la-Neuve and in the article On Actor Network

Theory: A Few Clarifications (Latour, B., 1996). Latour would continue to expand his

definition of ANT in On Recalling ANT (Latour, B., 1999), and, finally, albeit most

irreverently, in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Latour, B.,

2005).

Methodologically, Latour stated that an ANT practitioner approached their field of study with a

sense of “newness” or naivety, as opposed to seeing it as “ready-made” (Latour, B., 1987). This

is a pivot on Khun’s conception of the “pre-paradigm” (or “pre-science”) period prior to

scientific consensus (Khun, T., 1962), where the investigation of phenomena has yet to be

encapsulated by the context of a defined paradigm.

What this entails then is a deeply empirical description of the primary site, followed by the

painstaking process of seeking out and following the most densely bundled “actor-networks”

- painstaking in that the researcher in his or her naïve state cannot assume to know which actors

are relevant and highly networked until the process of tracings its network associations has been

substantially completed. It is through this somewhat brute-force process of unpacking these

actor-networks (sometimes referred to as “de-black boxing” if the actor- network concerned has

consolidated its form, or become “punctualized”) that an ANT practitioner can allow for an

understanding of its component effects to arise. As Law wrote of Thomas Hughes, influential

within STS, “[…] he does not spell out a method. He simply uses one. What he does is follow

Edison and other system-builders wherever they go […]” (Law, J., 1992, p.11).

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CHARACTERISTICS OF ACTOR NETWORK THEORY

While ANT’s commitment to empirical research and the rejection of linear models of network

construction are not unique, there are several distinct concepts peculiar to it.

The first and most immediate of these distinctions is the seemingly oxymoronic term, “actor-

network”. An object is referred to as such because, at its most basic level, whether it is seen as

a self-determining actor or a network of a confluence of effects is dependent on perspective,

and it is not reducible to either just an actor or just a network. As Callon described, “An actor is

simultaneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network

that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of […]” (Callon, M., 1986, p.93).

As a universal unit, within ANT, there is no distinction between human and non-human objects,

as Latour stated, “[…] an actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source

of action […]” (Latour, B., 1996, p.373). In other words, an object, an actant, an actor-network,

can only be defined by its associations with other objects, actants, actor- networks. This is a

nod to the post-structuralist sensibilities of Foucault, where power and meaning, projected by

signs, is dependent on their relation to other signs (Foucalt, M., 1977).

To overcome the deeply ingrained duality between the human and non-human, ANT

practitioners consciously employ the concept of “generalized symmetry” (Callon, M., 1986).

This will be explained in more detail later in this thesis, but, briefly, it refers to the ontological

flattening of all objects that lend effect to the construction of the actor- network.

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In isolation, it can be recognized that the social is partially comprised of non-human

heterogeneous objects, and that the technological is partially comprised of heterogeneous

human elements, but often consideration for this confluence is overlooked.

“[…] in practice, we bracket off non-human materials, assuming they have a status

which differs from that of a human. So, materials become resources or constraints;

they are said to be passive; to be active only when they are mobilized by flesh and

blood actors. But, if the social is really materially heterogeneous then this asymmetry

doesn’t work very well. Yes, there are differences between conversations, texts,

techniques and bodies, of course. But why should we start out by assuming that some

of these have no active role to play in social dynamics?” (Callon, M., Law, J., 1997,

p.168)

Herein lies the first source of uncertainty. As ANT is the study of associations between

heterogeneous actors, a network within the ANT intellectual framework cannot be

conceptualized as a conventional sociological nor technological structure. Where networks as

they are commonly understood exhibit a degree of homogeneity and dimensionality, actor-

networks are spatially and geographically dimensionless, and heterogeneous in nature. As

Callon and Law explained, ANT practitioners are not so concerned in how individuals interact

with each other, as more orthodox social science might be, but rather how actors “[…] define

and distribute roles and mobilize or invert others to play these roles […]” (Callon, M., Law, J.,

1997, p.285).

In ANT, the above-mentioned associations make up the entirety of a practitioner’s work.

Consequently, and another of ANT’s radical concepts, everything – humans, groups,

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organizations, nature, machines, government – is the result of heterogeneous actor-networks.

This is considered to be one of ANT’s radical concepts. Therefore, in the ANT epistemology

“cause” is lost and there are only effects. There are no essentialist explanations, therefore, there

is no affect.

Hence, how large, powerful or influential an actor-network may be can only be viewed through

the prism of their associations. Power, therefore, is inter-connectivity. One actor- network

cannot be said to be “more powerful” than another, rather, it is simply bound to more

associations,

“When you simply have power in potential – nothing happens and you are powerless;

when you exert power – in activ – others are performing the action and not you[…] an

effect, but never as a cause[…]” (Latour, B., 1986, p. 265)

How an actor-network expands, influences, consolidates and defends itself is through the

process of “translation”. Its conception is borrowed from the philosophy of Michel Serres. At

the most superficial level, translation is the way in which an actor-network overcomes arbitrary

divisions, and mobilizes sometimes disparate political, economic, technological, scientific and

other elements, and their histories (Brown, S. D., 2002). ANT takes this a step further.

Translation is still a process whereby relevant actors from these disparate fields are identified

and mobilized, but the associations are negotiated, and always in danger of succumbing to

oppositional effects, resulting in “translation error”; success is finite, always subject to

movement, and the process actualized in fora that are established and defended. As ANT is an

intensely empirical approach to research, the process or act of translation is also contingent,

localized and subject to variability.

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Despite being bound to context, there are seminal works demonstrating ANT in practice. One

of the most widely read is Michel Callon’s ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation:

Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’ (Callon, M., 1986, p.196-

233). Published in ‘Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge’ (ed. Law, J.,

1986), Callon’s investigation on the re-population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay demonstrated

four overlapping “moments” of translation.

The first of these moments he termed “problematization”. During this moment, an actor

identifies a problem or point of contention and formulates questions in order to both determine

the identities of necessary actors, and define the problem in such a way as to establish itself as

an indispensable conduit within the forming network. To do this the questions posed become

obligatory passage points - where the central initiating actor reinforces within the actors it has

identified a sense of mutual benefit, and the answers to the questions cannot be obtained alone.

In essence, the argument is made that in order for the identified problem to be solved every

actor needs to converge on this particular question, as Callon observed in the abovementioned

study,

“[…] the interests of these actors lie in admitting the proposed research programme.

The argument which they develop in their paper is constantly repeated: if the scallops

want to survive (no matter what mechanisms explain this impulse), if their scientific

colleagues hope to advance knowledge on this subject (whatever their motivations

may be), if the fishermen hope to preserve their long term economic interests

(whatever their reasons) then they must: 1) know the answer to the question: how do

scallops anchor?, and 2) recognize that their alliance around this question can benefit

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each of them.” (Callon, M., 1986, p.205-206)

The second stage in the translative process Callon referred to as “interessement". So referred to

because it is at this point that the central actor asserts its interest, “[…] to be interested is to be

in between (inter-esse), to be interposed […]” (Callon, M., 1986, p.204). More specifically, the

central actor attempts to solidify associations with the actors it had identified previously. The

robustness and validity of the problematization is tested, and the strength of the associations

between each of the actors is negotiated. Each associated actor can either submit to being

integrated, or define its own identity, its goals and motivations in an incompatible manner.

However, this is not a binary event, nor is the outcome certain and free from contestation. As

previously discussed, ANT is better understood as a continuous process, rather than a static

intellectual framework. Translation is no different. The actors identified during

problematization, as networks themselves, are subject to and negotiating the effects of

problematization from other actor-networks external to the boundaries set out during this stage.

Hence and likewise, the boundaries, the identity of the initiating actor- network, and the

problematization being prosecuted, are also subject to negotiation, and continual reformation

and re-adjustment. Consequently, problematization does not and cannot occur in isolation,

independent of interessement.

Hence, no matter how strongly reinforced the case for problematization is made, the

associations between actor-networks is never guaranteed. In other words, the next stage of

translation, “enrolment” is a continual process reinforcement (interessement) and tenuous

arrangement. Enrolment, as described by Callon as “[…] the group of multi-lateral

negotiations, trials of strength and tricks that accompany interessement and enable them to

succeed [...]” (Callon, M., 1986, p.207-211), is a difficult stage within translation to pinpoint.

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As Callon notes in his investigations of the St. Brieuc Bay scallop researchers, the negotiations

of associations to bring about a state of enrolment are constantly thwarted by interjecting

associations, which must be dealt with first.

The sought outcome of this nexus of “moments” remains, however, whereby the central actor-

network continues to attempt to bring the actors it has identified as relevant into agreement with

the problematization. In the case of Callon’s subjects (the researchers of St Brieuc Bay), their

questions of whether scallops anchor in the first moments of their existence, through the

process of readjustment and negotiation of associations, slowly transform into more certain

statements – yes, in problematization it is established that the scallops do anchor in the first

moments of their existence, and through interessement and continuing in enrollment, the

fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay do want the bay to be restocked. In the case of interpreting the

central thesis of this work, “how can we reconceptualize the understanding of MMORPG play”,

would, as associations are retraced and more certainty can be placed in such statements, ideally

become, “this MMORPG is misunderstood, and both the developers, the communities, and

other stakeholders of this MMORPG do want to better understand.”

As the certainties become more established and the associations between actor-networks more

defined, an alignment of interests occurs and an assemblage begins to emerge (an example was

referred to earlier in Taylor’s assemblage of play [Taylor, T.L., 2009]). It is at this point that

the assemblage, adequately stable, begins to engage a wider range of connected, but until now,

dispassionate, actor-networks seeking to mobilize them into action so that they might also

assume the role of “spokesperson”, seeking out their own associations to reinforce the central

construct, which, in themselves, also requires process of translation. Hence, this final stage in

the translative process is referred to as “the mobilisation of allies” (Callon, M., 1986, p.208).

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With the active support of its allies behind it, the central actor- network that conceived the

original problematization then assumes the role of “[…] a sole and ultimate spokesperson […]”

(Callon, M., 1986, p.212).

Though, as a conceptual framework, this is the end of the four moments of translation, as noted

previously, these moments are overlapping, fleeting, and the alliance created, brittle. The

represented actor-networks are momentary, and through the course of mobilization and

movement over time, exist only as long chains of representatives and equivalencies, their

identities constantly subject to re-negotiation. Consensus by its very nature creates a tightly

constrained network of associations, which can be contested and broken with increasing

likelihood the longer the assemblage persists. Translation error is, in the end, inevitable.

Whether it is during its fraught creation, or the slow degeneration of associations, all actor-

networks, assemblages, are always inexorably travelling towards their own demise.

There are many instances, however, where the results of translation are durable enough that

over time, with repeated association, the actor comes to be seen as a single entity, the network

or association that it is comprised of, implicitly aligned and hence invisible.

ANT practitioners refer to these appearances of unity, and the disappearance or obscuring of

the network as “punctualization”. While it is an accepted part of ANT that all phenomena are

the effect of heterogeneous networks, the human mind is often unable to detect network

complexity, much less comprehend it on an infinite scale. In order to cope (mental shortcuts, if

you will), patterns of association that are widely and commonly performed are more or less

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taken for granted, “[…] the process of punctualization thus converts an entire network into a

single point or node […]” (Callon, M., 1991, p.153)

In essence, the punctualized series of networked associations becomes a “black-box”. This is a

term that is not unique to ANT, but it is oft-used because, in its original usage within the

Information Sciences (IS), black-boxing referred to intentionally making opaque the inner

workings of technologies so as to reduce the complexity of comprehending them to inputs and

resultant outputs.

Much like how black-boxed technologies are utilized in wider applications in IS, the

punctualization of an actor-network into a black-box, a point, or a node, allows it to be

comprehended and utilized as a resource in other larger, and more complex actor-networks.

This further illustrates the indivisibility of the actor from the network, and the network from the

actor, as whether it is seen as one or the other is dependent on one’s perspective.

Punctualization, however, is a highly precarious state. As heterogeneity is the overarching

factor, in employing the punctualized object, one cannot expect it to work in exactly the same

way, or at all, each time an association is performed. The reason being associations of the

heterogeneous networks encapsulated within the black-box are not suddenly rendered

immutable and unchanging post-punctualization. They continue to be performed, and subject to

renegotiation and readjustment. There, as always, remains the risk of subversion, and the

encapsulated network of associations degenerating into a mess of naked, failing networks.

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INTERSECTING VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY

From the previous description of ANT, one might characterize it as a theory intensely focused

on empirical observation, where researchers are compelled to produce entirely descriptive

accounts. Indeed, one of the criticisms of ANT is that it fails to take into account intangible

social processes, such as values, norms and morality (Radder, H., 1992, p.145- 146). Another

criticism by others within the STS community, particularly from Collins & Yearley (of the

“Epistemological Chicken debate” fame) (Pickering, A., 1992, p.301-326), has been the

possibility for the tracing of associations to degenerate into endless relativist regress.

However, as several of its key proponents have stressed since its inception, ANT never

assumed the role of a prescriptive framework, rather, as Law repeatedly stated, it is more a set

of sensibilities (Law, J., 2007, p.157). Even Bruno Latour, most credited for defining what

ANT is, is famously loathing of its label as a theory, referring to ANT as “[…] perfectly fit for

a blind myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing and collective traveller […]” (Latour, B., 2009, p.9)

That is not to say that ANT does not have basic precepts, but its ontological flatness allows the

incorporation of methods that cross intellectual boundaries. It is here that ANT allows the

opportunity to intersect with Virtual Ethnography. Both methodological approaches seek to

bring to attention non-human actor contributions to the construction of the social and both

strongly adhere to empirical observation.

This is not the first instance in which ANT has been incorporated in an analysis of MMORPGs.

As briefly described earlier, T.L. Taylor used elements of ANT in conjunction with her

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ethnographic sensibilities in the development of the idea of the “assemblage of play”. Her

notion of the assemblage aimed to bring parity between human and non-human actors – that the

performance of each moment of play is the result of numerous associations.

“[…] games and their play are constituted by the interrelations between (to name just

a few) technological systems and software (including the imagines player embedded in

them), the material world (including our bodies at the keyboard), the online space of

the game (if any), game genre, and its histories, the social worlds that infuse the game

and situate us outside of it, the emergent interior lives, personal histories, and aesthetic

experience, institutionalized structures that shape the game and our activity as players,

legal structures, and, indeed, the broader culture around us with its conceptual frames

and tropes […]” (Taylor, T.L., 2009, p.332)

In other words, Taylor understood the MMORPG she was a part of and observed ‘World of

Warcraft’ (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) as more than simply a static, boxed product of

leisure. Rather, she viewed it as a lived, playful artefact; each ephemeral moment a culmination

of many negotiated meanings and contested associations. In doing so, Taylor had avoided the

narratology/ludology divide, and structuralist sensibilities that had consumed much of the

discourse within games studies during the early to mid-2000s (Jakobssen, M., Taylor, T.L.,

2003; Steinkhueler, C., 2005; Yee, N., 2001; Castronova, E., 2001, 2006) – as Latour would

say, Taylor did away with the, “[…] ready-made science […]” (Latour, B., 1999, p.19).

Certainly, her conception of the assemblage of play is an ambitious notion as it embraces the

complexity that inevitably accompanies contemporary video games (consider the size of the

workforce and the man hours required to create something like ‘World of Warcraft’ (Blizzard

Entertainment, 2004); then consider the complexity of the emergent effects created by the tens

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of thousands of avatars occupying dozens of virtual worlds, interacting with millions of objects

and tens of thousands of non-playable characters; and, this is only a most superficial view of

the virtual). This is a complexity that is often ignored (punctualized), perhaps an effect of its

construction and the accepted model of consumption (that is, consumption without

contemplation, and an overwhelming emphasis on superficiality, both aesthetically and

conceptually).

While Taylor would not explicitly cite the influence of ANT until later (Boellstorff, T., Nardi,

B., Pearce, C., Taylor, T.L., 2012, p.164), the parallels were readily apparent in her

ontologically flat and strongly empirical observations of the profound effect a non-human actor,

the third-party software add-on (or mod), CTRaid Assist, had on the play experiences of

challenging boss encounters (commonly referred to as raids). These concepts were later

amalgamated and further developed in conjunction with Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi and

Celia Pearce, all prominent virtual ethnographers in their own right, in Ethnography & Virtual

Worlds: A Handbook on Virtual Ethnography (Boellstorff, T., Nardi, B., Pearce, C., Taylor,

T.L., 2012).

This thesis will draw heavily upon the methods described within the above-mentioned

handbook (and will be further elaborated upon in later sections of this chapter), as well as the

work of T.L. Taylor in arriving at her conception of the “assemblage of play”. As the result of

current research addressing the question of why players leave MMORPGs has been

contradictory and inconclusive, the aim of this thesis will not be to provide an essentialist grand

theory; rather, informed by the sensibilities of ANT, and rejecting the historical discourse and

the “ready-made science” that has led us to this point, this thesis looks to present moments in

which effects of associations within and surrounding an MMORPG may have led to a

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breakdown in the “assemblage of the player”.

The following sections shall define and describe the research methods deployed as conceived

by Boellstorff et. al. (2012), the group of player subjects followed, and the field site observed.

ETHNOGRAPHY: A BRIEF HISTORICAL ACCOUNT

However, before discussing the methods to be deployed it is important to note that Virtual

Ethnography, as its name suggests, is an adaptation of one of the oldest forms of research

practice, ethnography, and modified to suit the peculiarities of virtual worlds.

While it was not always called ethnography, even from the earliest pictographs, humans have,

in some form or another, reflected on their cultures and the cultures of others. Despite its Greek

etymology (ethnos meaning people, and graphein meaning writing), the term “ethnography”

itself was not seen until the period of German Romanticism (Vermeulen, H.F., 2008; Bunzl, M.,

1996). It emerged out of discontent with the ideals of Enlightment – standardization, derived

from the Comtean tradition of Positivism.

Where positivists sought to create generalized nomothetic encyclopaedic compendia of all

human knowledge, ethnographers have typically sought to created detailed, idiographic,

situated accounts of culture, which reflected the perspectives and sensibilities of the culture

being observed.

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It is then no coincidence that Virtual Ethnography, arising from the ethnographic tradition, and

ANT exhibit such similarities. While ethnography was, chiefly, a reaction to the prevalence of

positivism, ANT was a reaction to the essentialism that the prominence of quantitative research

had bred amongst scientists, and the Khunian sensibility that “generalized theory” was only

unified within certain contexts or until the next paradigmatic shift.

Where Thomas Khun could be considered, in some ways, as the progenitor of ANT, in the case

of ethnography and ethnographers, that figure would be Bronislaw Malinowski (Kuper, A.,

1996). While Malinowski cannot be credited for inventing ethnography, the unification of the

previously segregated roles of “field worker” and “theorist” to create the method that would

come to define the singular modern ethnographer, participant observation, was largely a result

of his work on the Tribal Islands of Papua New Guinea between 1914 and 1918.

Malinowski’s ideas have, in most cases, been superseded (Bunzl, M., 2004), however, he did

spark the growth of a generation of modern ethnographers both in Europe (at the London

School of Economics) and in America (at Yale). Among the most prominent from the 20th

century was the symbolic ethnographer, Clifford Geertz, who defined the meanings of “etic”

and “emic” understandings of culture (Geertz, C., 1983, p.55-70). Geertz viewed the external

analysis by an ethnographer of a subject’s life (the “etic” understanding) to be distinct from the

subject’s own understanding of its life (the “emic” understanding), and it was a flawed position

to confuse the researcher’s conclusions with that of the subject’s.

In the case of the subject matter contained within this thesis, it could be argued that the

incongruity of current research has been a result of either the confusion surrounding the “emic”

and “etic” understandings of why players may want to leave an MMORPG, or the lack of

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consideration for the “emic” (player’s own) perspective. For instance, the signs of this type of

flawed approach can be found in a paper by Lin, Yu and Li (2007), ‘Leaving a Never- Ending

Game: Quitting MMORPGs and Online Game Addiction’, in which the concept of addiction is

treated as an underlying presumption symptomatic of MMORPG play, despite the varying

statements provided by interviewed subjects and an admission that a variety of factors make

both the actions of the player and the decision to leave a particular MMORPG much more

complex than simply a singular negotiation with addiction.

However, ANT, if incorporated into an ethnographic framework, would mean there would be a

need to eschew external (etic) explanations altogether. As Bruno Latour once said to a

particularly confused student, “[…] A case study that needs a frame in addition, well, it is a

case study that was badly chosen to begin with […]” (Latour, B., 2005, p.143)

In other words, the description of the subject should be self-explanatory (the actor should be

able to speak for itself), and failing that, further tracing of associations is required. Should

tracing uncover few associations with the intended subject then it was a poor actor to follow to

begin. As stated earlier, ANT is concerned with effects, and only effects, that coalesce into the

actor – there is nothing outside of the heterogeneous network.

The methodological tool that an ANT practitioner deploys to do this is another concept

popularized by Clifford Geertz (1973, p.3-30). It is also widely used in Virtual Ethnography.

Derived from Gilbert Ryles work on Ordinary Language philosophy, “thick description” refers

to observational accounts that provide rich context. Ryle illustrates the importance of

contextual embedding within a thick description in the second volume of his collected papers

(‘Collected Papers Volume 2: Collected Essays 1929 – 1968’, Ryles, G., 1980).

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“Consider […] two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this

is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two

movements are, as movements, identical; from an I-am-a-camera “phenomenalistic”

observation of them alone, one could not tell which was a twitch and which was a

wink. Yet, the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is

vast […] The winker is communicating in a quite precise and special way […]”

(Geertz, C., 1973, p.4)

Although there are limits to the fidelity with which an actor can be represented in the virtual

realm due to the need for interface translation, these types of contexts continue to exist

digitally, and, due to the designed nature of an MMORPG, it is important to note that the

practice of cool, dispassionate observation typical of the pre-1960s “gentlemanly ethnographer”

(Boellstorff, T., et. al., 2012, p.17; Bunzl, M., 2005, p.188), would fail to provide the richly

detailed context required for the effective deployment of deep description. For example, Taylor

could never have understood how important third-party software add- ons (mods) were to the

raid experience had she not allowed herself to become fully invested in the participation of such

raids herself (Taylor, T.L., 2009).

To “go native” was a phrase that was coined by Malinowski (1922, p.107). In order “[…] to

grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world […]”

(Malinowski, B., 1922, p.209) Malinowski was a strong advocate of researcher participation.

While, within the context of ANT and this thesis equal attention is also paid to the non-human

actors, the principle remains the same; that in order to catch a glimpse of the subject’s “gaze”

one must immerse themselves within its culture.

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Despite Malinowski’s historical prominence, the contemporaneous view was that he was

considered a fieldworker, one of many “informants brought back from some primitive tribe”

(Freilich, M., 1970, p.viii). This meant that it would not be until the rise of the civil rights and

feminist movements that his ideas would challenge the predominant classic assumption of the

“self” and the “other”. The increasing presences of people of varying race, gender, ethnicity,

and sexual orientation, religious and cultural backgrounds studying their own communities

made the traditionally negative perception of the “native” ethnographer problematic.

The crux of this negative perception seemed to lie with the assumption that in the relationship

between the scientist and the subject objectivity and subjectivity was irreconcilably

dichotomous, with the realm of objectivity exclusively reserved for the “outsider” (Tedlock, B.,

1991, p.71; Gold, R.L., 1958, p.217-223).

This segregation of scientist and subject, however, has been roundly rejected, for example,

Victor Turner, in commenting on the work of Bennetta Jules-Rosette, write that “[…] to each

level of sociality corresponds its own knowledge, and if one wishes to grasp a groups deepest

knowledge one must commune with its members, speak its essential we-talk […]” (Turner, V.,

in Jules-Rosette, B., 1975, p.8).

By “we-talk” Turner was referring to Jules-Rosette’s communicative practice as neither

objective nor subjective, rather, it occupied a space of “human intersubjectivity”. Aside from an

emphasis on human actors, Turner’s analysis is a close simile to the structure of enquiry that an

ANT practitioner would use when retracing associations.

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Similarly, this retracing of associations goes beyond the objective and subjective. As previously

discussed, ANT takes its lead from Khunian philosophy; as such, the monopoly on objectivity

scientific enquiry typically assumes is only objective so long as its paradigmatic context holds.

Should that break or degenerate due to cumulative translation error, objectivity is lost, and,

hence, was an illusion, never as such to begin with. ANT, therefore, acknowledges that all acts

of knowing are constructivist.

Boellstorf, Nardi, Pearce and Taylor (2012, p.29-51) also rejected emphasis on the externally

developed hypothesis driven model of scientific research. In forming Virtual Ethnography they

stated,

“[…] Subjectivity is an inescapable condition of science; no pure realm of objectivity

exists in which the interests, biases, predilections, concerns, attitudes, dispositions,

conceits, judgements, axioms and presuppositions of investigators are absent and

without impact.

Rather than pretend a “God’s eye view” of the world is possible, it is more scientific to

realise that science generates situated knowledge (Khun, T., 1962; Latour, B., 1993)

that is a complex product of what is already known (whether what is known is

accepted or challenged) and the contemporary world view shaping interests and

attitudes […]” (Boellstorff, T., et. al. 2012, p.41)

They further asserted such is the all-encompassing nature of subjectivity that “[…] to build an

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adequate view of a total society and of its components […]” (Mills, C.W. 1959, p.221) an

understanding of intersubjectivity has become a vital part of modern ethnographic rigor. That

is, to understand an ethnographic encounter as not simply interaction between two people, but

rather, the result of a flow of multilayered, densely connected and continually negotiated

meanings, where objectivity lies only in the understanding that all actors are subjective.

Developing intersubjective understanding, then, is analogous to Latour’s concept of retracing

associations, in that, as an ethnographer (virtual or otherwise) or ANT practitioner, primary to

building a comprehensive understanding, the process of de-black boxing or unpacking “the

social”, is the navigation of these spaces between human, and also non-human in the case of

ANT, actors.

This leads to the next section in this chapter where the question of how this was done and what

tools were deployed will be discussed.

RESEARCH PRACTICE

Part of the difficulty in explaining ANT is that, methodologically, ANT approaches the site of a

study as a process, a confluence of actors shaping and reshaping the space. Its dictum, “follow

the actors”, then becomes confusing with such a broad range of actors, some of which are so

ephemeral one can barely glimpse a network before it disintegrates. So, the question becomes,

“which actors?”

Fortunately, ethnography, or in this case, virtual ethnography to be more specific, can provide

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the framework that allows the prototypical deeply descriptive, rambling, narrativistic accounts

to emerge, such that the ANT practitioner allows the intended reader to be a future interlocutor,

unpacking and negotiating meaning through the consumption of the text.

The methodological toolkit available to ethnographers is vast. It includes everything from

interviews, both individual and in group situations, formal and ad-hoc, historical research,

analyses, surveys and questionnaires. There is, however, one method that is, above all others,

essential to ethnographic research such that a study that does not employ it cannot be

considered ethnographic. Crucially, it informs the use of other methods and particularly so in

the case of ANT, when avoiding presuppositions is required. That method is “participant

observation” (and its variants). According to Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce and Taylor, “[…]

participant observation is the embodied emplacement of the researching self in a field site as a

consequential social actor. We participate in everyday life and become well known to our

informants […]” (Boellstorff, T., et.al., 2012, p.65)

While participant observation has sometimes been viewed as if it were a quantum of

ethnographic practice, where at one extreme the researcher is a complete participant, and at the

other a complete observer (Gold, R.L., 1958, p.217-223), there are some problems with this

view.

One of them, that within heterogeneous networks of intersubjective actors, objectivity is

illusory, has already been discussed. The second is that, while Boellstorf, Nardi, Pearce and

Taylor argue that full participation is unnecessary on the grounds of pragmatism (they use the

example that “[…] it is not necessary to become a brain surgeon to study brain surgeons […]”

(Boellstorff, T., 2012, p.81)), it should be argued that full participantion (in other words to “go

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native”) affords the possibility of the most informed, highly nuanced account (arising from the

ability to use, interpret and negotiate in Turner’s “we-talk”), as they would later state of the

virtual ethnographers creed, “[…] Everything is important and worth of being documented until

proven otherwise […]” (Boellstorff, T., et. al., 2012, p.82)

Similarly, the flat ontology of the ANT perspective demands this of the researcher (Latour once

stated that the output from an incomplete retracing of associations on the grounds of

practicality was simply a lack of fortitude and not a work of ANT at all (Latour, B., 2005)).

However, that is not to say embracing participation precludes the researcher from groups

outside of the native’s grasp. The very nature of virtuality allows for flexible, multiple

identities (Turkle, S., 1995) through projected embodiment within an avatar, which affords the

researcher the ability to assume roles both as an outsider investigating other actor- networks,

and a native within the subject group. In fact, Tom Boellstorff was able to inhabit both roles

simultaneously during his research into Second Life (Linden Labs, 2003) by “dual- boxing”

(the technique of using multiple accounts on multiple clients to enable a user to control two

avatars at once, often in the same virtual world) (Boellstorff, T., et. al., 2012, p.83).

In addition to field notes, research within virtual worlds also afford the ability for the researcher

to readily record events with incredible fidelity, and at real time, while maintaining a

naturalistic frame of reference that, perhaps, the obtrusiveness of a camera might not project.

This is done through audio-visual screen recordings (screen captures), screen shots (still

captures of what is on the screen at the time), and the recording of chat logs, which, when

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viewed in conjunction with each other at a later date, allows the researcher access to a rich,

holistic overview of the original event (almost as if it were a multimedia form of thick

description), although the repercussions of the event over time, and the effects it projects on

actors can only be thoroughly interrogated through longitudinal participant observation.

In the ways described above, virtual worlds (and MMORPGs by extension) can allow a

researcher to engage in ethnographic practice where, to a degree, participant observation and

time can be reduced to singularities.

RESEARCH METHODS

The journey into MMORPG research began long before it was decided to formally document it

in this thesis. Unlike the vast majority of ethnographers, social anthropologists, and curious

academics, the approach is not to fulfil a desire to explore strange environs, and foreign

cultures (Nardi, B., 2010; Pearce, C., 2009; Castronova, E., 2001). A sense of “newness” and

wonderment is something that has not been experienced since the first days stumbling about the

world of Vana’diel (Final Fantasy XI, Square Enix, 2002) and running away from sword

brandishing goblins. Like the anthropologists of the feminist and civil rights movements, the

author very much identifies as a native of the MMORPG community.

This work is a personal account of a journey with a group of subjects through which genuine

personal connections have formed. Coming from the “inside”, one cannot pretend to be a coolly

detached observer, rather, as a long time participant of the MMORPG who later decided to

formally document those experiences, one can see oneself as part of a vanguard of digital

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natives who now, more than ever, have begun to dissolve the illusory barriers between the

virtual and non-virtual, subjectivity and objectivity, and joining the growing prevalence of

virtual ethnographers who have moved away from the mainstream view of virtual environments

as interesting, quaint, but nonetheless frivolous and alien (Boellstorff, T., et. al, 2012, p.26), to

seeing them as lived realities.

This thesis subscribes to the philosophies and practice of ANT, discussed earlier. Such rigorous

tracing of associations between actors-networks necessarily requires lengthy engagement with

the network, and an equally expansive generation of qualitative data, which largely fits with the

most elemental drive of an ethnographer in an exotic environment – that of exploration. This

type of approach, the collection of a wide gamut of materials: audio- visual recordings, texts

and chat logs, observation and virtual artefacts, is the basis from which a deep understanding of

the contexts, constructions and associations of the player actor-network, essential to the central

question of this thesis, can be engendered.

Similar to the approaches of Nardi (2010), Taylor (2006) and (eventually) Pearce (2009),

(Boellstorff, T., et. al., 2012, p.76-82), the methods for generating the data in this thesis are

strongly participatory. As an ANT practitioner, the notion of intersubjectivity that accompanies

strongly participatory accounts resonates with the process of translation, where, in this case, the

construction of the player actor-network is the result or effect of the negotiated relations of

associated actors (who are themselves the effect of an endless chain of negotiations between

nearby and distant actors - ripples within the wider network).

Borrowing Taylor’s term this thesis unpacks the “assemblage of the player”. However, unlike

Taylor’s “assemblage of play”, this thesis will not be investigating the effects and translation

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process that brings about a successful assemblage, rather, this thesis investigates how the

“assemblage of the player” degenerates and breaks down, where the translative process is

erroneous, and the once tangible punctualization found to be illusory. As Callon (1986, p.15)

notes, nothing is conclusive or static. Over time the countless ways in which controversies and

betrayals can occur eventually breaks from the narrow definitions of negotiated associations

that originally led to the effect of the appearance of unity, a result of the translative process. All

the inner machinations are laid bare.

It is important to note, however, the breakdown in the player actor-network or assemblage is

not static either. Part of the interest in finding out why players leave MMORPGs, and why the

notion of the “player” breaks down over time, is also linked to why they are often reconstituted

again.

SAMPLE AND SITE SELECTION

A tangible benefit of MMORPG research is that, beyond the technical requirements for an

adequately powerful computer system, and a stable broadband internet connection, it has a

relatively low barrier to entry. It is unlike most ethnographic fieldwork, where physical travel is

required, and sometimes it is necessary to leave one’s home to live in a difficult, remote

environment for many months at a time. In the case of this thesis, the MMORPG ‘Final Fantasy

XIV: A Realm Reborn’ (FFXIV) (Square Enix, 2010) and the North American server known as

‘Faerie’ was chosen as the site. In terms of monetary outlay, the client itself cost approximately

$60 (AUD), and an ongoing subscription fee of $12 (AUD) per month was required to maintain

open access. There was no need for a research grant, and basic communication in other

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languages was provided with the included auto-translate function, although, as it seemed, the

server was predominately inhabited by an English-speaking population, so the auto-translate

function was rarely needed.

The reason for the choice of FFXIV was threefold:

Firstly, it was an MMORPG that one had already been part of since October of 2013, hence, the

initial period of interfacial and cultural acclimatization typically required for new participation

was not required, nor was there the need to reach the highest experience level in order to fully

access the world, its objects and the avatar groups.

Most, if not all, MMORPGs have an experience level requirement with a completely new

avatar starting at level one. In ‘World of Warcraft’ (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) the

maximum level an avatar can reach is 100, while in FFXIV that maximum is 50.

The avatar a player effects control over is limited in the amount of things it can do, and areas it

can access (safely, if at all), with those limitations incrementally reduced the higher an avatar’s

level until, at maximum level, it is, in a sense, fully functional, and additional improvements

are sought.

This is a period of play where the still developing player also develops the comfort and fluidity

of motion to manipulate the interface with sophistication, a necessary skill if negotiating the

challenges of raiding like Nardi and Taylor performed in their ethnographic journeys. Nardi

managed to gain entry into the “theory-crafting” community, where players would attempt to

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decode game mechanics and strategize how best to overcome them in typically highly complex

diagrammatic and mathematical calculations (2010, p.137-151). Taylor referred to this style of

play within MMORPGs as “power gaming” (2006, p.67-92).

The play experience at maximum level is typically referred to as the “end game”, and it can

take a period of weeks if not months to reach on some MMORPGs. Cultural acclimatization

could be best summarised from previous work,

“[…] Unlike single player experiences, or experiences relating to the other sub-genres

of MMOGs, full immersion and socio-cultural acceptance necessitates undergoing a

cultural acclimatization.

This can include understanding the jargon used in conversation, creating an income

stream for the character, memorising the physical landscape of the world and

understanding the social landscape/meritocratic hierarchy of a particular server.

Importantly, a player must also accept a departure from the player-centric nature of the

single player experience - the avatar is not the player embodied as deus ex machina in

this environment come reality.

Understandably, this can be an almost dehumanising experience, and not all players

arrive at its completion […] ” (Li, R., 2011, p.23-24)

Secondly, there was already strong rapport established with a number of leaders within the

community my avatar circulated. As gatekeepers for several interconnected player groups, they

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were crucial to initializing the task of retracing associations.

Finally, FFXIV had a particularly tortuous beginning. This incarnation of FFXIV is actually the

second, with the first version published in September of 2010. It performed so poorly that,

while aesthetically similar to the first version, an entirely new MMORPG was made with nearly

an entirely new development team, and released in August of 2013 to replace it (Nutt, C.,

2014).

Consequently, the current development team has shown itself to be highly communicative.

Director, Naoki Yoshida, has released monthly letters addressing player concerns and hints

regarding future developments since assuming the role, and has indicated his willingness to

provide support for FFXIV for at least a decade (Corriea, A.R., 2015). This is not

unprecedented, as Square Enix’s previous MMORPG, ‘Final Fantasy XI’, has been actively

supported since its release in 2003, and genre defining titles such as ‘Everquest’ (Sony Online

Entertainment, 1999) and ‘World of Warcraft’ (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) also continue to

be supported.

This is atypical of most large (a player base of over 200,000) MMORPGs, where commercial

sensitivity defines rhetoric, and communications are generally left to be managed by a team of

community managers with no connection to the executive. This was a particular problem when

previously attempting to gather data from Blizzard Entertainment regarding their flagship

MMORPG, ‘World of Warcraft’ (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004).

Yoshida’s commitment to long term development support also meant that it was largely assured

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that FFXIV would continue to be active for the duration of this study, so the unfortunate

instability that Celia Pearce (2009) had to contend with when her chosen field site (Uru Live,

Cyan Worlds, 2003) was abruptly cancelled during its development, re- released in 2007,

cancelled again, and then released yet again in 2010, need not be encountered.

The entry points to the field site were through three different computers. Two of them were

desktop computers located in my office space, and at home. The third was a high-powered

“gaming” grade laptop (it had an independent graphics card, the most powerful processor

available at the time, and a large amount of memory. The downside of all this largesse was that

it weighed almost four kilograms). All of the computers had mirrored (identical) copies of the

required software, client, and ancillary files so the experience on each, from a technical

perspective, was largely the same.

This, of course, was not essential to the fieldwork but it did allow one to be in close proximity

to entry points at all times. Despite being able to conduct research from the comfort of a padded

chair in air-conditioned rooms, there was no sense of detachment from the environment,

reflecting the experiences of other researchers who had conducted similar research. As Nardi

noted of her own research in World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004),

“My entry point to the field site was a computer on my dining room table where I sat

in a comfortable chair and played for many hours. And yet, this fieldwork was nearly

as immersive as the field work I conducted in Western Samoa or Papua New Guinea

[…]” (Nardi, B., 2010, p.29)

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In addition to accessing the field site for at least 12 hours per week (although, often much

more), content from social networks, online message boards, and official websites, the most

popular of these being the FFXIV sub-reddit, which provided valuable insight into

understanding the cultural landscape, and the official FFXIV website. Of particular interest was

the theory-crafting culture, a real-world example of a translative dialectic in action.

The research methods used are part of standard research practice within Virtual Ethnography:

participant-observation, interviews and day-to-day conversation, and textual analysis of related

online content. It is important to note that interviews were conducted in an informal manner.

While questions can facilitate communication with subjects, it is argued that meandering,

unhurried conversations, where interesting and often unexpected ideas are explored, yield the

richest output, and also adhere to the ANT sensibility of avoiding external input in research

practice.

Interviews were all conducted online through a group voice-over-IP (VoIP) service in password

protected virtual rooms, via Discord and Teamspeak; the audio was recorded and later

transcribed, with all identifying names, pseudonyms, and player groups modified to maintain

subject anonymity.

The way the field site is described is both an application of theory, and the laying out of a

multitude of events and details to create a richly textured pastiche of the lived experience

within an MMORPG. As John Law explained (Law, J., 2009, p.141), ANT, despite its

designation as a theory, is not a theory in the sense that it does not make a claim or try to

explain anything. It is descriptive rather than foundational, and better understood as a collection

of tools that provide space for actors to generate their own interesting accounts of messy,

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subjective and negotiated associations.

The avatar chosen was (the embodied presence of a player, or participant, within the virtual

world) a sturdy, red-headed, androgynous, Roegadyn Sea Wolf named Edana Kellan, and she

called the free company (the term given to formally organized and registered player groups)

Holy Knights, her home. A diverse group of over 170 players made up the Holy Knights,

including engineers, lawyers, retirees, and students. Most of the members lived in the United

States, reflecting the North American regional designation given to the server.

The reason for choosing a somewhat uncommon combination of race, gender, and ethnicity (for

each of the four playable races within FFXIV, there is the combined choices of the two

traditional genders (female and male), and two ethnic groups) were twofold.

Firstly, that the combination was rare enough to be memorable, and allowed an easier

propagation of the understanding within the player group of who was “the researcher”.

Secondly, minor variations in the fortitude, strength, intelligence and agility of this race/ethnic

combination made it the most versatile of all combinations.

One of the differences between ethnographic research performed in physical reality and

MMORPGs is its strongly participatory nature. This was a characteristic that was also

recognized by both Nardi and Pearce (Nardi, B., 2010, p.35). Pearce suggested the term

“participant-engagement” to reflect this form of deep immersion (Pearce, C., 2009, p.210)

where a researcher’s very appearance lends an immediate degree of separation from the subject

group, in the physical world. In the virtual realm, an avatar is an avatar, and the researcher is

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very much included as a player. Play dominates so much of an MMORPG that the act of

participation, for all practical purposes, is also engaging in the act of play. In ANT terms this

research through play is consistent with the philosophy of description within the network.

Within the FFXIV universe Edana was a full participant. Edana (almost always referred to as

“Ed”, except in the most exasperating situations) was engaged in the same activities as any

other avatar might have been. She was fortunate enough to have a strong rapport with

influential members within the community, and was considered skilled enough to form part of

the lead progression raiding group within the free company.

In the case of FFXIV, a raiding group consisted of eight players with varied responsibilities

tasked with overcoming the most difficult enemy encounters. In the experience of Edana, it was

not uncommon to spend four to five hours at a time dying (commonly known as “wiping”) over

and over to the same enemy, with incremental progress (hence, the term “progression”)

measured in single digit percentages considered a victory. This in itself came with unique

dynamics, and responsibilities, which will be elaborated upon throughout the course of this

thesis.

While the subjective lived experience (or becoming a “native”), was embraced in this thesis, it

is not the only way to conduct field research. For every researcher like T.L. Taylor (2006) and

Bonnie Nardi (2010), who preferred blending into their respective communities (although they

did still make it known to their subjects their intentions and background), there are those who

follow paths similar to that of Tom Boellstorff (2008) and Celia Pearce (2009), who both chose

to overtly identify themselves as researchers to the viewing community.

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In order to better illustrate the MMORPG experience, the next section will provide the reader

with a personal account of a day in the life of an avatar within FFXIV. So begins the journey to

unpack the “assemblage of the player” and reconceptualize our understanding of MMORPG

play and players.

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CHAPTER THREE: WHO NEEDS FRIENDS?

It’s 8:02pm. The glowing blue aetheryte crystal spins serenely in darkness as I await to assume

the life of Edana, albeit temporarily.

As the darkness gives way, I notice a mass of avatars milling around her. Some are running

around in circles, some are jumping and others seem to be directing obscene gestures at

everyone else.

‘What’s going on guys’ I type into the chat box.

‘Amax just left’ replied Phiur.

‘Again’ added Admike.

I checked our free company logs and, just as they had said, there it was: Amax left the free

company.

‘He’s gone to some Korean MMO’ Admike continued.

‘But wasn’t he the one that got you guys into FFXIV?’ I replied.

‘Meh, he always does that and then leaves us hanging. OK, this pug [pickup group] just filled

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up, we gotta go. Cya [sic].’

And without so much as a wave goodbye they both disappeared into the distance. Edana turned

around to face the nearby target dummy. Time to practice rotations.

FRIENDS AS OBJECTS WITHIN THE MMORPG PLAYER ASSEMBLAGE

“He is usually, out of my friends, the one that's always looking for the next new game.

I remember we actually started playing this game, he did at least before the big 2.0

Realm Reborn update. He was like ‘You know guys, the game is going to change so

much. We got to get into this now.’ He got a few of our friends to start playing it right

on Realm Reborn… It's usually, my friend … is always like ‘Hey man, let's play this

game’ and we all just jump on it.” – Admike (2016)

The above exchange to effect and initiate the translation of the player assemblage would seem

not unusual. In fact, in many MMORPG studies, it has been assumed to be a common norm

(Cole, H., Griffiths, M.D., 2007; Jakobssen, M., Taylor, T.L, 2003; Munn, N.J., 2011;

Martoncik, M., Loksa, J., 2015).

“[…] participation in immersive virtual worlds, or MMORPGs, and in World of

Warcraft in particular, is capable of providing the kind of shared activity that is

required for the development of friendships.” (Munn, N.J., 2011, p.9)

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But is this a premature assumption to make?

The current hypotheses on the significance of friends in the translation and construction in the

player assemblage are often overstated. This chapter will discuss how the findings derived from

the research conducted for this thesis reshape the understanding of the position that friends hold

within the player assemblage and how they align with the findings within earlier studies.

THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING

It is seen in a myriad of forms throughout a number of MMORPG titles. Both World of

Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) and Final Fantasy XIV (Square Enix, 2010, 2013)

have a Recruit-A-Friend program; Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine, 2007) has a Refer-a-

Friend program; Everquest (Sony Online Entertainment, 1999) has an Invite-a-Friend program;

and EVE Online’s (CCP Games, 2003) Recruit-A-Friend Program is intrinsically interwoven

into its virtual economy. All of these referral programs have the same intention: leveraging

current players to bring in their existing network of friends outside of the MMORPG.

From a business case standpoint, this would seem an obvious marketing strategy, however,

limited research has been conducted on how successful these programs actually are.

Debeauvois et al. (2010) described Blizzard’s Recruit-a-Friend feature in World of Warcraft,

which allows players to invite fellow family members and friends, and act as a sponsor

throughout their integration into the MMORPG. The material benefits to the player are evident.

Sponsored avatars can immediately gain 30 levels, they’re able to summon each other from

anywhere in the virtual world, and both the sponsoring avatar and the sponsored avatar are able

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to level three times faster than normal.

Final Fantasy XIV’s Recruit-a-Friend program, similarly, incentivizes players to invite others

by providing exclusive material awards, such as currency towards rare virtual items and

equipment, and trinkets, which increase experience earned. EVE Online’s Recruit A Friend

program rewarded points that players could allocate to skills and currency, which EVE Online’s

publisher and developer, CCP Games, explicitly used as a “faucet” to increase the money

supply within its virtual economy.

Williams et al. (2009) noted that there were some limitations around the use of such programs

to recruit new players, particularly when it came to a player’s psycho-social responses. For

instance, females were happier playing with their partners than males, and the males found

themselves to be more aggressive when playing with their partner. Debeauvois et al. (2010, p.8)

surmised that this might be counterproductive in that the heightened aggression would threaten

the “playful atmosphere” of the MMORPG, and “[…] degrade the game experience.”

In investigating how MMORPGs are introduced to players as part of the Daedalus Project, Nick

Yee (2005) found that 40.8% of male players and just 23.8% of female players out of a sample

size of 1,778 and 420, respectively, found themselves playing an MMORPG without any

assistance from a friend, family member or romantic partner.

Cole and Griffiths (2007) conducted a similarly quantitative study. Of 912 self-selected

participants, 80.8% stated that they enjoyed playing with real life family and friends, and that

76.2% and 74.7% of male and female participants, respectively, had developed friendships

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online. 67.4% of participants believed that MMORPGs had a positive effect on the

relationships of those within the game.

Nicole Lazzaro’s (2004) extensive exposition of the four games design keys she believed were

paramount to maintaining and promoting the engagement of players included the “social

experience”. She notes that many of the participants within her study stated that their

enjoyment centered on playing with others, whether inside or outside of the virtual

environment. One participant noted that it was “…the people that are addictive, not the game.”

(p.32)

For Jakobsson and Taylor (2003), their personal shared experiences in EverQuest led them to

determine that socialization was one of the most important aspects of the game. In fact, they

believed the existing vehicles that facilitated social interaction, for example, formalized “clubs”

or “guilds”, and raiding parties (groups of players who temporarily band together in pursuit of a

shared goal), were not adequate and that it was “…clear that increasingly sophisticated models

for interaction and relationships will need to be developed.” (p.21).

However, it is at this point there is a disconnect between what developers and researchers

expect to happen and what actually does. Despite such a high percentage of MMORPG players

being introduced to games through an existing relationship external to the MMORPG, the

influence of that existing relationship on MMORPG play dissipates rapidly from there. In a

number of recent studies into MMORPGs, quantitatively, friendships originating from outside

the MMORPG environment have repeatedly shown low correlation to a player’s attachment to

the MMORPG environment.

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In the study by Cole and Griffiths (2007) referenced previously, some discrepancies arise.

Nearly 40% of participants stated that they would discuss sensitive issues with their friends

online that they would not reveal to their friends in an offline realm. One would expect a

similar number of participants to state that their online friends were more trustworthy than their

real life friends. However, only 4.8% of participants indicated that was the case.

Cole and Griffiths theorized that this could be attributed to the relative anonymity of the

MMORPG environment, “The appeal of discussing issues such as sexuality lies in the ease and

anonymity with which online seekers can obtain advice and reassurance, particularly regarding

sensitive topic” (p.582).

This brings up two points of contention. Firstly, the participants of this study were self-

selecting, that is, they were players who, by their mere choice, were inherently more likely to

disclose sensitive issues, and this is supported by the discrepancy between the proportion of the

study’s participants who stated that their online friends were more trustworthy than real life

friends, and the proportion of people who disclosed sensitive information that they would not

have told their friends in real life. Secondly and consequently, if the vast majority of players

who self-disclose do not do so because of an intimate level of trust of others, then can this truly

be regarded as friendship, or more a form of cathartic release or even simply an audience to

perform in front of, which leads to the work of Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell et. al. (2006), who,

although from different fields of study, foreshadowed this very concept a year earlier.

Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell et. al. (2006) described World of Warcraft as widely considered as a

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social experience stating that “what makes a difference for many is apparently the shared

experience, the collaborative nature of most activities and, most importantly, the reward of

being socialized into a community of gamers and acquiring a reputation within it.” (p.407),

referencing Koster’s emphatic statement within his widely referenced A Theory of Fun for

Game Design, “MMORPGs are COMMUNITIES. Not games” (2005). However, Ducheneaut

et. al.’s research demonstrated that this did not hold true; in fact, World of Warcraft, popularly

considered one of the most social games in existence, seemed distinctly “unsociable” – a

“virtual Skinner box” (Yee, N., 2001) goading players from reward to reward.

Despite the different types of player archetypes, or classes, being designed to fit with one

another, they found that the most consistently popular classes were the ones that required little

interaction with others to complete tasks, or the most “soloable” ones.

And although Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell et. al. state “guild membership encourages players to

play more and to group more”, in the very same set of observations they note only a 10%

participation rate in joint guild activities and a high churn rate (p.414). Paradoxically, despite

the conclusion that sustaining groups of any significant size in MMORPGs was a difficult task,

they were also cited as a source of addition because of the sense of social obligation they

created.

For the most part, they found that joint activities were not particularly prevalent among the

subscribers of World of Warcraft. Most players stayed outside of grouped situations for most of

their tenure. They speculated that the fundamental nature of MMORPGs, whereby disparities in

power are encouraged, served to undermine social cohesion in larger formalized groups such as

the aforementioned “guilds”, as, despite the size of World of Warcraft, the distinct lack of

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“grouping” could not be attributed to play styles.

They did describe a novel concept within MMORPG studies, however, that players perhaps

mistook sociability for – often referring to the nebulous “social factor” when referring to why

they had taken up World of Warcraft: Social Presence (2006, p413). They describe it as a

player’s sense of being witnessed by an audience, being a spectacle.

As an example, Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell et. al. (2006) point to the “general” chat channel

broadcast to all players within a particular region, and the “guild” chat channel that is broadcast

all throughout the virtual world, but only to the select group of players within the same guild

group. This leads to a sense of Social Presence, which they state, “may at first appear

unrealistic”.

However, from the Actor Network perspective, this is an entirely realistic notion. When the

urge to elevate the human actant is removed, one can see that it is not only “humans” that create

the effect of a living, breathing society, but also the technological actants, in this case, chat

boxes.

When Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell et. al. refer to a large fraction of the population using these

channels to build a “critical mass” of interaction, from the perspective of the player, this is

distilled into a small chatbox in the corner of his window, the level of interaction defined by the

velocity of the text flying upward. The faster the text is moving, the greater the sense of “Social

Presence”. In this way, and in this example, this “chatbox” plays a critical role in effecting the

player assemblage as though it were being observed by an audience. There isn’t really an

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audience to witness the spectacle of the player, though, just a chatbox, goading the player

along. This is, effectively, the interpellation of an important non-human actant, the chatbox,

ambiguously hailing players, as if to say to all of them, you’re being watched.

The example of Social Presence that Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell et. al. (2006) provide, and the

contradictory conclusions of Cole and Griffin (2007) indicate a dissonance in research of

MMORPGs and the actions of developers hint at an element of truth, that has perhaps, until

now, been obscured by the focus on the human elements of an MMORPG as opposed to the

non-human.

This is where Actor Network Theory finds itself particularly suited to analysis.

This chapter will explore the existing literature surrounding friendship in MMORPGs, how it

effects the construct of the player assemblage, and how the concept of MMORPG friendship

has been effected into being by academia – how is its meaning defined by the actants connected

to it, and what are those actants?

This chapter will then dissect, or, in other words, trace, the accounts of participants within this

study; how friendship has effected the way that MMORPG play has been translated for them;

whether the actant of friendship can be considered an obligatory passage point; and how

densely connected is friendship to the successful translation of MMORPG play itself.

The above analysis will then be compared against the current understanding of friendship in

MMORPGs to answer the question of whether friendships really matter. Are they as densely

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connected or as essential as previously thought?

The purpose of this chapter is not to hypothesize a new understanding of what friendship means

when concerning MMORPGs, rather this challenges the existing monolithic understanding of

friendship and sociality being the sole raison d’etre for the existence and popularity of

MMORPGs.

EXISTING LITERATURE

The earliest literature surrounding friendship in an environment similar to MMORPGs emerged

from the contemplation of Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs, built off digitizing the framework

first popularized by Dungeons & Dragons (Arneson, D., Gygax, G., 1974) and the progenitor to

modern MMORPGs, as social worlds.

Pavel Curtis (1993) the creator of LambdaMOO (1990), an early MUD, was the first to

understand them as a “[…] new kind of social sphere […]” (Curtis, P., 1993, p.16). While he

did not delve deeply, it is fascinating how prescient his final comments in Social Phenomena in

Text-Based Virtual Realities were in relating to the lines of enquiry that eventually formed out

of studying MUDs, and MMORPGs,

“It thus behooves us to begin to try to understand these new societies, to make sense

of these electronic places where we'll be spending increasing amounts of our time,

both doing business and seeking pleasure. I would hope that social scientists will be at

least intrigued by my amateur observations and perhaps inspired to more properly

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study MUDs and their players. In particular, as MUDs become more widespread, ever

more people are likely to be susceptible to the kind of addiction I discuss in an earlier

section […]” (Curtis, P., p.17)

Perhaps, the first social scientist to study MUDs seriously was Sherry Turkle (1994) who

illustrated what she saw as the expansion of social reach with the story of Peter (Turkle, S.,

1994, p.161-162), a 23-year-old physics graduate at the University of Massachusetts. Peter logs

into MUDs for at least 40 hours a week, building a life online that seems more expansive than

his physical self, so he can talk to people. Through MUDs, Peter had morphed from someone

who had “[…] known little success with women […] to a courtship in which he is tender and

romantic, chivalrous and poetic” (Turkle, S., 1994, p.162).

However, despite Turkle’s intensely personal and vivid description of Peter’s life within

MUDs, one cannot escape how fundamentally intertwined the MUD, the machine and the

software are with that.

Turkle places technological actants “[…] directly in the service of the development of a greater

capacity for friendship, the development of confidence for a greater capacity for intimacy.”

(Turkle, S., 1994, p.163)

In Actor Network Theory terms, Turkle has punctualized and subjugated technological actants

to serve as an object for Peter’s social development. However, one has to wonder? If Peter’s

social development is really at the center of this densely connected actor-network, if all the

supporting actants were really mobilized to crystallize his ability to relate to others. If this

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really was the case, why did this not transfer to Peter’s physical life and self?

As it did not, it should, consequently, be argued that the development of his online identity into

somewhat of a virtual Casanova was being mobilized not for Peter’s own social development,

but rather in support of the player assemblage. Turkle’s focus on human actants, and

deprioritization of non-human actants provides an early example of where friendships within a

virtual environment, in this case MUDs, are erroneously afforded prominence, and reflect

Latour’s argument that science had, for too long, favored the human over the technological

when making assumptions (Latour, B., 1988, p. 153-157)

As noted in the Literature Review, Richard Bartle was another theorist who powerfully

influenced early studies into MUDs. In one of his earliest works, a draft recreation of a study

from the University of Twente, When studying MUDs, a form of Role playing game on the

InterNET, it is clear that there is a society (2003), Bartle states,

“The pose and feeling commands in particular offer players a medium through which

to substitute for the non-verbal cues that we take for granted in everyday life. By using

them players may shrug, laugh, smile demonically, frown in anger, and offer hugs and

kisses to fellow players. By using each of these commands MUD players are able to

string a web of communication which ties each player to a social and virtually physical

context, a shared web of verbal and textual significances that are substitutes for, and

yet distinct from, the shared networks of meaning of the wider community. This

unique method of communicating is the set of solutions devised by MUD players to

meet the specific problems that they face, and which binds them into a common

culture.” (Bartle, R., 2003)

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While he does not elaborate, he goes on to add,

“Everyone also agreed that there was an increase in friendliness and intimacy on the

MUDs more than in some parts of regular life. […] The safety of MUD and

friendships increases their worth, and players can, ironically, become extremely

dependent upon such relationships. The lack of factors inhibiting intimacy, and the

presence of factors encouraging it, can induce deep feelings of attachment in players

toward their virtual friends.” (Bartle, R., 2003)

Reading this one could very easily conclude that MUDs were a very powerful amplifier of the

inherent social tendencies of its players, and yet,

“Their means of expression are severely limited by the technology on which MUDs

are based, but instead of allowing that to restrict their communication they have

devised methods of incorporating socio-emotions into pure text. They use text

(normally such a restrictive medium) to make up for what they lack in physical

presence. On MUDS, there is no lack of emotions expressed, in fact it is in some ways

more obviously reflected then in real life. MUD’ders want their expressions conveyed

so therefore they do find ways for this to happen.” (Bartle, R., 2003)

The above passage clearly defines the primacy placed on the human, minimizing the

technological actants mobilized; indeed, it’s as if the technological actants are incidental,

replaceable, without any agency or contouring effect. In this context, from an Actor Network

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Theory perspective, the very act of a message being communicated between players is not

simply mediated by technological actants, as if an object. Rather, the translation of a message

through a MUD from one player assemblage to another, leverages a complex network of

technological actants that ends up creating heterogenous sociotechnical assemblages. Players

may refer to these as “friendships”, but as this very paper acknowledged, this is dissimilar to

physical representations of friendship, and, more than anything, contributed, and is mobilized,

to support the almost “Skinner box” nature of the MUD, and sustain the player assemblage, as a

technological actor network. This was the MUD acting on players, as intended, “Some would

insist however that 'MUD' does in fact stand for Multi Undergraduate Destroyer, in recognition

of the number of students who may have failed their classes due to too much time spent

MUDding […]” (Bartle, R., 2003)

More recently study has centered upon MMORPGs, most visibly, the franchises of Everquest

(Sony Online Entertainment, 2003), with studies published by Edward Castronova (2001) and

T.L. Taylor (2006), among others, and World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), with

a prolific amount of research published by Ducheneaut, in partnership with Moore, Nickell and

Yee (2004, 2006).

In Jakobssen and Taylor’s (2003) forays into Everquest, they argued that there were two

distinct layers to social interactions within MMORPGs. The first being by association, for

example, “[…] being in a group entails lowering your guard somewhat and trusting the

collective to treat everyone fairly.” (p.5), where a common goal requiring co-operation aligns

player’s intentions. The second is association through a real life (or RL) connection, in the case

of Jakobssen and Taylor, this was a fellow player’s husband, who, after dying in an unsafe area,

elicits an almost immediate response from his wife’s fellow group members (p.7- 8),

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Beastlord ‘Man my husband just got killed in a bad place and cant get to his body or

rezzed’ NewMagician ‘Where is hubby [beastlord]?’

Beastlord ‘Asking’ Beastlord ‘Hmm hes upset’ Warrior ‘Why?’

Beastlord ‘Not talkng atm [at the moment]’

Beastlord ‘Cause he may not be able to get his body back’ NewMagician ‘Where did

he die?’

Beastlord ‘Hes not saying i know its near bur[n]ing woods’ NewMagician ‘Could a 60

ranger get it’

Beastlord ‘He was 52 i think he lost his lvl [level]’

Warrior ‘If he needs help i can summon his corpse’ [implies having access to a

necromancer or shadowknight]

Beastlord ‘Might’

NewMagician ‘Got a 57 cleric too’ Beastlord ‘He thinks he got 1’

NewMagician ‘K well i can rez him with my son’s cleric and probably drag with my

ranger’

Beastlord ‘What lvl clewric?’ NewMagician ‘57’

Beastlord ‘Okay I told him.

Beastlord ‘Our puters are not in the same place so we talk thru tells too lol’

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They liken this rapid response to a mafia-esque “made man” rule, i.e. just as the mafia tended

to base trust on the closeness of one’s blood bond (Laippalainen. T., 1993), real life friends and

family playing Everquest (Sony Online Entertainment, 2003), tended to be afforded an

additional level of trust based on closeness.

In fact, Jakobssen and Taylor refer to the notion of sociality (p.21), the idea that social

processes are central to a player’s success, referring to the comments of Brad McQuaid

(Aihoshi, R., 2002), one of the designers of Everquest,

Players won’t be drawn in and there won’t be anything there to bind them. The key to creating

community, therefore, is interdependence. In EverQuest, we forced interdependence in several

ways and although we’ve been criticized for it, I think it’s one of a couple of reasons behind

our success and current lead. […] By creating an environment often too challenging for a solo

player, people are compelled to group and even to form large guilds and alliances. All of this

builds community, and it all keeps players coming back for more and more (Aihoshi, R., 2002).

While Jakobssen and Taylor use this passage to illustrate the point of Everquest being an

example of an MMORPG with an ideal implementation of explicit embedded socialization

processes, when one understands that, within this text, they have sought to establish sociality as

central to the success, it can be seen that Jakobssen and Taylor, have, in fact, mis-used

McQuaid’s statement. Actor Network Theory provides a full account of its meaning.

From the Actor Network perspective, one can see that friendship and socialization did not

underpin the design of Everquest (Sony Online Entertainment, 2003), even from the developer

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perspective. Rather, the actor networks within the MMORPG effected players in such a way as

to mobilize friendship for the ongoing successful translation of the player assemblage, i.e. “[…]

it all keeps players coming back for more and more […]” (Aihoshi, R., 2002).

In this instance, far from sociality being central to the successful and continued translation of

the player assemblage, the appearance of friendship was a byproduct of its mobilization to

support that translation.

Perhaps the most prodigious group of researchers to investigate sociality in MMORPGs is the

group of Nick Yee, Nicholas Ducheneaut and Robert J. Moore (2004, 2005, 2006, 2006, 2007,

2007, 2009). Ducheneaut and Moore, in particular, over time evolved their understanding of

sociality to, perhaps, the closest reflection of how Actor Network Theorist might view sociality.

In partnership with Nickell, they first noticed the poor sociability in MMORPGs in 2004, when

they examined the, effectively, virtual “third places” in Star Wars: Galaxies (Daybreak Game

Company, 2003),

‘“[Third Places] do not set formal criteria of membership and exclusion. […] the

charm and flavor of one’s personality, irrespective of his or her station in life, is what

counts […] beyond the contexts of purpose, duty, or role” (Oldenburg, R., 1989: p.24-

25). Here it is worth noting that SWG’s [Star Wars: Galaxies] design runs exactly

against this principle.’ (Ducheneaut, N., Moore., R., Nickell, E., 2004, p.7)

What they found was that while cantinas, Star Wars’ version of a bar, did attract a large

proportion of the population in SWG, only a small fraction of visitors used them as a means to

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genuinely interact with others. The vast majority used them as “grind halls” (p.11), where

players only visited because their certain class required them to in order to gain experience and

“level up”. Visits were short and transactional. Rather than being a “third place” as Oldenburg

would have likened it, these virtual bars reflect the same characteristics observed above, in

MUDs, and in a more modern MMORPG like Everquest, that they are a form of positive

feedback loop or a “virtual Skinner box”, that “[…] keeps players coming back for more and

more […]” (Aihoshi, R., 2002).

Ducheneaut, Moore, and Nickell, along with Yee, further developed the argument in “Alone

Together?” Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (2006) that

MMORPGs were less social environments or communities, and more carefully crafted systems

that expertly ramped up difficulty with reward to reinforce player commitment,

“Players are always on the edge of opening up new abilities, of discovering new

content. The increase in playing time right before new abilities become available

illustrates how easily players can be driven by such rewards.” (p.7)

This led Ducheneaut et. al. to ask several important follow-up arguments and questions that

were, ultimately left unanswered.

They argued that the defining factor in the popularity of an MMORPG was in its design of that

positive feedback loop; that the smoother that gradient of progression in reinforcing player

commitment was, the less of an intensive “grind” it would seem, “This shows that, as the

multiplayer games market gets bigger and more choices become available, players might favor

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good game designs over rich social environments” (p.7).

This was the reason, they argued, for World of Warcraft (2008), the test environment within

this study, being so popular and being seen as “accessible”, while in no way less demanding of

a player’s time or energy, when compared to the earlier studies Ducheneaut, Nickell and Moore

had conducted in Star Wars Galaxies,

“The importance of game design versus the community features of MMORPGs might

be best illustrated by comparing WoW to one of its competitors, Star Wars Galaxies

(SWG). The latter was explicitly designed to emphasize the more social aspects of

multiplayer gaming, but was also widely criticized as having one of the most intensive

“grind” of the genre (Ducheneaut, Moore, 2004, p.360-369) – in other words, a

player’s progress was nowhere near as smooth as in WoW. And SWG, targeting the

same audience as WoW, never reached the massive number of subscribers WoW

attracted within the first few months of its launch (it is estimated that SWG’s

population peaked at around 300,000 subscribers (Woodcock, B., 2007).” (p.7)

In essence, this describes the system of progression within an MMORPG, not the aesthetic

design, nor its human actants, as being the most strongly connected actant in effecting the

widespread successful translation of player assemblages at scale, and it, most certainly, would

be considered technological as opposed to human.

They also questioned whether player interactions were truly social in nature, whether it was

really about making friends or engaging in community building. Their data showed that the vast

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majority of players within World of Warcraft spent most of their time outside of groups, which

contradicted earlier studies emphasizing the importance of time within groups and joint

activities (Jakobssen, Taylor, 2003). Rather, Ducheneaut et. al., argued that they observed

players were more likely to use others as an audience, both to effect a sense of “social

presence”, and as a reason to create a “spectacle” (p.7), than seek support and camaraderie.

They defined “social presence” as the feeling of a social environment,

“[…] while playing WoW [World of Warcraft], one is always surrounded by

background chatter in the general or guild channels. This gives a strong impression of

playing in a world inhabited by other people, even if these people are not immediately

visible.” (p.8)

However, I would argue that they have, again, prioritized the human over the technological and

one could argue that it’s not “other people” effecting this feeling of social presence, rather it’s

the technological actant, the chat box itself, that is effecting it. For example, if the chat box was

filled with chatter, not from human players, but from non-human bots, would that feeling of

social presence be any different if the contents of the chat box would effectively be the same?

Finally, they also defined MMORPGs as a “reputation game”, where players equip powerful

items to broadcast their sense of achievement. So from an Actor Network Theory perspective,

those pieces of “equipment” are the technological actants mobilized to translate into

“reputation”, and hence are an obligatory passage point to the formation of a player’s identity

within MMORPGs. In other words, they are a crucial part of the player assemblage, and

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MMORPGs are as much, if not more, about how “gear” interacts and is networked with the

virtual world as the human actants within it. Consider, what motivates, or effects, players to

group with one another in an environment where, as Ducheneaut et. al. have observed, for the

vast majority of time, they choose not to?

And so, while this has been a somewhat brief overview of research conducted on friendship,

community and sociality within MMORPGs, it can be seen that, since the era of Curtis and

Turkle, prominence has been afforded to human actants, perhaps, overly so. This has led to the

punctualization and calcification of notions of friendship, community and sociality before they

were given the chance to be properly understood as a construct of both the human and

technological, and as unlike the formation of friendship and community in the physical sense.

It’s elevation in status within the study of MMORPGs as an obligatory passage point has led to

lines of inquiry that have been pursued for decades. Despite this focus, it has led to little insight

into the commercial sustainability of MMORPGs.

Even, in instances where researchers have sought to argue against the traditionally defined

notions of friendship, community and sociality within MMORPGs, because they have hitherto

failed to account for technological actants, contrary arguments have had little follow through,

and those traditional notions continue to occupy a mythologized position within both the study,

play and development of MMORPGs.

This chapter seeks to unpack these notions and trace the technological actants that form such a

crucial part to their formation in an effort to reveal the truly techno-social nature of relations

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within an MMORPG environment.

IS FRIENDSHIP THE RIGHT WORD?

As can be seen from the above analysis of existing texts, the examination of the concepts of

friendship, community and sociability, have, thus far, been inadequate, contradictory and

inconclusive. A failure to take into account technological actants, in other words, observe

generalized symmetry, has meant a failure to fully account for the techno-social nature of

relations within MMORPGs.

From the research for this text, it was found that, despite “friendship” or notions of it being

described by at least eight of the fifteen participants as being part of the translation of their

player assemblages, in none of the cases could it be considered as an obligatory passage point.

In fact, in many cases, the connection to a “friend” was not even the most densely connected

actant to a participant’s player assemblage. They were found to be unstable, short lived and

easily substituted – friendships were often mercenarily formed, relations of convenience,

mobilized to support the translation of another assemblage.

“That game [Black Desert Online (Pearl Abyss, 2014)] was probably just because one

of my friends was like ‘This game is going to be super hyped. Let's get it.’ I gave it

chance and I really liked the combat of that game. It's really fast-paced, really fun

combat. But there's just nothing to do really at the end unless you’re trying the no-life

hardcore grind and be in the top percentage when you get to PvP [Player versus

Player] […] Some of my friends stopped playing and it was just again down to me and

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a different one of my friends playing. […] I just felt that the game was kind of

becoming a responsibility rather than having fun playing.” (Interview with Admike,

2016)

“The reason that I got interested in Final Fantasy XIV is because one of my really

good friends at the time was playing it, and I just wanted to mess around with them, so

I made a free trial account and I followed them around. And then I actually started to

like the game. […] She talked to me about the game... Yeah, it seems like three

months before I actually started getting interested in it. […] When I meet someone in

this... It's because I want to be a funny person, too.” (Interview with Cole, 2016)

“I had a friend that I was talking to for a long time. She was like my art buddy, and she

played Final Fantasy on and off. And it was just, I guess she wanted us to do

something more together. She was like, "Hey, we should all play this game." So it was

me and another girl, and we started to get into it. And they fell out, and I've just

stayed.” (Interview with Helion, 2016)

As one can see from the descriptions of play by study participants, relations within MMORPGs

do not follow the standard notions of sociality, for example, as defined by Jakobssen and

Taylor (2003). Relationships and friendships developed in the real world (or RL) do not always

easily translate to the virtual. While, that isn’t to say that the real and the virtual are bifurcated

realities (it is clear that they effect each other), but when translating friendship within an

MMORPG environment, there are simply more interceding actants that increase the likelihood

of translation failure. For example, in communication, a player is both communicating through

a vessel, the avatar, and using a sub-optimal form of communication, that is text, through

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technological mediums, that is, keyboards, mice, the local network and the wider network, the

screen, the chat box, the font, and different user interfaces, amongst a host of other

technological actants that need to be mobilized in order for the message of “hi” to transmit.

Something that, at first glance, when punctualized, seems like such a simple interaction, upon

deeper tracing or unpacking requires an intricate web of actor network relations in order to

successfully translate. If we take each of those actants, both technological and human, there are

a number of opportunities for interceding actants to cause translation failure. For example, from

something as simple as the human on the other side looking away and missing that message, to

a network failure in a datacenter somewhere halfway around the world, to the “h” key not

working on the keyboard that has been mobilized,

“[…] the five senses aren't all there. You just have to base off of what they say. And

it's really difficult, because you don't know if someone is just messing around or if

maybe they are just having a bad day, but you can't tell, because it's text. You just have

to spend a lot of time with someone to really know what kind of person they are. And

then running stuff with them, adding them to your friends' list and saying "hi" every

two weeks. […] I would say it's exactly like texting with a cell phone. You don't get

instant feedback. You just send it and hope they get the message, that your intentions

are made clear.” (Interview with Cole, 2016)

Equally, there are many other actants that are more densely connected, mostly technological

and often fantastic in nature. While this will be explored in more detail in later chapters, for

illustrative purposes, many participants felt that their translation of the player assemblage was

more densely connected to the network of technological actants, for example, graphical assets,

that contributed to the translation of Final Fantasy XIV’s aesthetic, than any human actant,

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“You don't have to be stuck in whatever armor they give you, so I can go around in a

bikini because I want to. I can just run around in a neon colored pink suit. It's my

choice. I can have a man who wears no pants. […] I don't dress up in real life. I guess

it's just my way of playing dress up.” (Interview with Helion, 2016)

“First impressions were the game's visual aesthetic was really appealing. It's just an

amazing game visually. Like, it's a piece of art. […] And just every single class is

amazing, fluid animations, and the particle effects for things and the spells. […] Like,

certain spells, like, Summoner’s Shadow Flare, like, the Monk has this little aura

around them where it's like lightning, because you're going really fast, and they are

really pumped up and charged up, and they have this really cool aura that goes around

them. I really geek out about stuff like that.” (Interview with Cole, 2016)

In fact, for some participants, their friends were equally responsible for the translation failure of

the player assemblage, or, from the inverse perspective, the successful translation of their exit

from MMORPGs,

“Once most of my friends have left the game, I too will leave the game. That's always

just been a characteristic of us. Some of our other friends that don't play these MMOs

with us will always look at us, they’ll be like, we're not going to buy a game that you

tell us to buy because you guys are just going to leave in three months. That's always

just what we've done.” (Interview with Admike, 2016)

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“I got my friend to play. It was little bit better. Then she quit after about a day because

she just didn't… She couldn’t do the controls and she didn’t enjoy it. I trundled along

for a while. It was like, no, I'm sad here, so I left.” (Interview with Shae, 2016)

From the above examples, it can be seen then that friends, at least when viewed through the

lens of traditional sociality, can be poorly suited to being the obligatory passage point through

which a player assemblage is translated.

Yet, as described earlier in this chapter, MMORPG publishers and developers have made

referral, or “recruit-a-friend”, programs an intrinsic part of their player recruitment strategy.

From an actor network theory perspective, the very concept of “recruit-a-friend”, such that it

has even developed an MMORPG specific moniker, is a punctualized one. When one unpacks

and traces the notion that in order for it to be fully translated, friends need to play together, it

can become an absurd interaction with the MMORPG.

For instance, imagine a player has recruited a friend into World of Warcraft using Blizzard’s

Recruit-A-Friend program (Blizzard Entertainment, 2018). In order to fully leverage the

rewards of that program, which amounts to faster experience accumulation of experience

points, rare pets, and mountable animals, both the player and the friend are required to play

together,

“Play together with unique benefits like friend-to-friend summoning, bonus

experience, and more. […] Summon each other once every 30 minutes for fast

grouping. […] Group together and enjoy 50% bonus experience for faster levelling.

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[…] For every two levels your recruits gain, they can grant one level to your

character.” (Blizzard Entertainment, 2018)

If one’s play, or translation of the player assemblage, is purely predicated upon the play of

another, for example, one would only log in when the other did, one would only complete a

quest or adventure through a dungeon, with the assistance of the other, and one would only

socialize through the other’s network of connected avatars, you can imagine then that this

would not be a particularly durable translation of the MMORPG player assemblage, and that,

the “recruit-a-friend”, or referral, program could be counterproductive for publishers and

developers, if the intent was to retain new players. This type of translation error could explain

Debeauvois et al.’s (2010, p.8) notion of the degraded game experience arising from referral

programs within MMORPGs. The failure to properly mobilize the correct actants to support the

translation of a new player assemblage leads to the failure of both that assemblage, as well as

the actor-network, of the referral program itself.

Tracing it more thoroughly, however, a referral strategy isn’t really about leveraging friendship

or notions of sociality at all.

“For referrals to happen, players have to be given incentives. In terms of in-game

rewards, game companies should, at the first glance, reward the sponsoring player so

that he does it again.” (Debeauvois et al. 2010 p.8)

What Debeauvois et al. is saying, and what can be observed in the way referral programs are

constructed, is that without the virtual rewards, without the rare trinkets, mountable animals,

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special equipment and experience point bonuses, the referral program, and, by extension, the

recruitment of new players, fails. In essence, what this means is that the actants that are most

densely connected are technological, rather than human, that they are, and should be, the

obligatory passage points that the translation of a new MMORPG player assemblage need to

mobilize in order for sustained successful translations. The intention of forcing the ongoing

involvement of a human actant, by publishers and developers, to get access to rewards, to

falsely mobilize them as a mandatory obligatory passage point, leads to the sub-optimal

formation of fragile MMORPG player assemblages. However, why they choose to force this

human involvement, and why this occurs is not surprising. It reflects the widely held belief

within both commercial and academic spheres, that the importance of friendships and the

social, overshadows the technological actants that often have as much to do with the MMORPG

player assemblage as the human.

As discussed previously, prominent MMORPG theorists Jakobssen and Taylor see an ongoing

focus on sociality as the future for MMORPGs, “As the genre develops it is clear that

increasingly sophisticated models for interaction and relationships will need to be developed.”

(Jakobssen, M., Taylor, T.L., 2003, p.21)

This was a similar conclusion that Ducheneaut and Moore came to in their earlier work on

social interaction, specifically with Star Wars: Galaxies, before their understanding evolved to

encompass more nuance, “SWG is one of the first attempts at encouraging social interaction in

specific game locations. This recognition of the social character of multiplayer games is

certainly a step in the right direction […] Our observations of interaction patterns […] however,

reveal that some progress remains to be made for these places to be completely successful.”

(Ducheneaut, N., Moore, R., 2004, p.10)

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There are also a number of widely cited studies on sociality and social interaction in

MMORPGs that have built on Jakobssen and Taylor’s, and Ducheneaut and Moore’s findings,

that are yet to be touched on. In particular, Vivian Hsueh-hua Chen (Chen, V.H.-H, et al. 2015;

Chen, V.H.-H, Duh, H. B.-L., 2007) is, perhaps, the most recent academic to publish work that

has been prolifically cited, concentrating on social interaction within MMORPGs, which she

has placed great emphasis on, stating,

“Social interaction within MMORPGs is of paramount importance, influencing both

the enjoyment and the level of engagement that a gamer has. […] Enjoyment is greatly

enhanced when the game provides opportunities for pleasurable social interactions

such as grouping and socializing, resulting in the formation of social ties. […]

Especially important is the link between social interaction and engagement. Non-

engaged gamers found social interaction a waste of time and a hindrance to their game

play. Conversely all engaged gamers valued social interactions within the game and

stated that it was both important and enjoyable. […] Anti-enjoyment factors include

the experiential states of apathy and anxiety, negative social interactions […]” (Chen,

V.H.-H, et al. 2015, p.265-266)

Chen et al., however, do not elaborate on why they concluded this was the case – that pre-

eminence be placed on social interaction, and that social interaction was the causal link

between players that were engaged, and players that were not engaged. And yet, at the same

time, Chen et al. acknowledged that there were several additional factors they discovered,

which also had an effect on the enjoyment and, hence, engagement, of player’s interactions

with MMORPGs,

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“A reinforcing stimulus is built into the game design, through the random nature of

drops and rewards. This built up of anticipation for future rewards as gamers are never

sure when the next essential item will be dropped, adds on to their enjoyment and

tempts gamers to game even further. […] Real world contextual factors such as

interference by family members or disturbance through phone calls can also disrupt

gamers’ gaming experience. In addition, enjoyment of the game is also compromised

when technical problems crop up, such as hacking, bugs and game lag.” (p.266)

Chen et al., in essence then, is referring to the MMORPG tendency to closely resemble a

Skinner box, which MMORPG theorists have previously identified (Ducheneat, N., et al.,

2006), and acknowledges, albeit briefly, that non-human actants can have an effect on the

translation of the player assemblage, whether that is in mobilization to support, or interceding to

elicit failure/elicit support for the successful translation of a different actor network.

When Chen et al. refer to the “game design”, a punctualized term meant to encompass the

broad overall design of an MMORPG game, they are referring to the very definition of an

actor-network, both technological and human in construction, and an assemblage that can’t

successfully translate without one or the other. When they refer to the “[…] random nature of

drops and rewards […]” building up “[…] anticipation for future rewards […]”, this is a clear

demonstration of a technological actant effecting a human one, one that “[…] tempts gamers to

game even further […]”. When they refer to the “[…] enjoyment of the game […]” also being

“[…] compromised when technical problems crop up, such as hacking, bugs, and game lag

[…]”, this also a demonstration of technological actants effecting a human actant, albeit in

ways that serve to interfere with the successful translation of the player assemblage.

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So, what does this all mean in relation to the understanding of MMORPG player assemblages?

FRIENDSHIPS AND SOCIALITY IN RELATION TO MMORPG PLAYER

ASSEMBLAGES

Chen, is not the only MMORPG theorist to gloss over how intrinsic technological actants are to

the successful translation of player assemblages, or, for that matter, MMORPGs themselves. As

mentioned earlier, almost all theorists, from the time of MUDs to contemporary MMORPGs,

from Turkle (1994, 1995) to Jakobssen and Taylor (2003), and from Cole and Griffiths (2007)

to Ducheneaut and Moore among others, (2005) have, at some point, been guilty of

anthropocentrism, with Chen only being one of the latest to, almost, inadvertently reference

technological actants, while focusing on the human and the social.

This is an approach that has effected, mobilized, and punctualized repeatedly between the

academic sphere and the commercial sphere, starting with Curtis (1994) and Bartle (1990,

1996), and most recently effected by Yee (2006). For instance, Bartle’s easily understood

model of player typology (1996) is still regularly referenced in contemporary games design and

gamification educational literature (Kumar, J., 2013), a typology that was consciously untested

and derived from Bartle’s own observations and discussions with fellow MUD players, which

will be explored in greater detail later in a later chapter.

What this means is that the prevailing network of perspectives, or bias, that the MMORPG

player assemblage is predominantly human centered has been continuously translated and

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reinforced within commercial sector for the last two and a half decades. It has resulted in an

incredibly densely networked and punctualized assemblage. Unsurprisingly then, within the

contemporary MMORPG industry, it is a generally held assumption that publishers and

developers are required to lean upon human networks as the ultimate ideal when recruiting

more players i.e. prompting the translation of new player assemblages, at scale (perhaps this is

related to the often used business term “network effect”).

This is a flawed understanding of how new MMORPG player assemblages are translated and

perpetuated. It fails to take into account the tremendous effects of densely connected

technological and non-human actants, which are essential to the successful translation of such

an experience.

For example, even the most widely played MMORPG in history, World of Warcraft (Blizzard

Entertainment, 2004), has had to contend with a complex, densely punctualized and opaque

regulatory system when launching in China, at several points having to delay and suspend

service, due to censorship requirements (Parrish, K., 2009). This is not to mention the translated

and regionalized interface, the reinvention of the subscription model, and having to contend

with interceding actor-networks such as an unstable distributor ecosystem, and a bottle necked

Internet infrastructure (Andrews, S., 2014).

All of this in an effort to spur the creation of new MMORPG player assemblages in China. It is

a complex interpellation between the technological and human, one that requires a wide range

of heterogenous, seemingly disparate global actor-networks to be mobilized in order for even a

single player to enter their username and password into a log in screen and begin pressing

WASD to direct their virtual vassal, or avatar (vassal is a consciously used term in that an

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avatar has mutual obligation to the player).

The fact that it often occurs so seamlessly, with millions of player assemblages successfully

translated every day, is exactly why there exists the danger of punctualizing the MMORPG

experience as wholly driven by human or social actants. It is thus, unsurprising the predilection

for academics, developers and publishers to veer into anthropocentrism, and a focus on human

social networks, sociality and friendship, whether that is in the study, development or

marketing of them1. But as has been demonstrated throughout this chapter, friends aren’t really

central to the formation and translation of the MMORPG player assemblage.

The MMORPG player assemblage is a technosocial construct, the technological and human

effect one another, and successful translation cannot occur without mobilization of both. This is

generalized symmetry in action, which brings us to the next chapter in this thesis.

1 Jeroen de Kloet and Jan Tuerlings explore similar tendencies by academics, as well as regulators, advertisers,

content consumers/producers and even the platform’s makers, to understanding the new digital broadcast platforms

of Youtube and Tudou using anthropocentric classical models of communication in their 2008 paper Digital

convergence ten years later: Broadcast Your Selves and web karaoke.

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE MECHANOIDAL FRONTIER

It’s 7:58am. Bleary eyed from an early morning raid on a dungeon, I let Edana hack away at the

last of a few globs of yellow goo, their jelly-like forms burst as they perish.

I hear the crackle of a voice channel switch on,

‘That’s the last of them’, says Rah, ‘let’s keep goin’, this is taking forever.’

‘Well, we would have been done ten minutes ago if Ed hadn’t DC’d at the last boss’, Dryst

replied, laughing while his own voice channel hissed in the background, as if to illustrate its

displeasure at Edana.

Raven, the last member of our group, sprints towards the tunnel in front of us, and we follow.

As our avatars round the corner it opens up into a cavernous underground lagoon. Upon a

wooden stage in front of us, what can only be described as an oversized axe-wielding zombie

pirate warlord cackles. But, our avatars weren’t there to gawk at the sights,

‘Pull!’, barks Rah.

Edana runs headfirst towards the zombie pirate,

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‘Pulling’, I reply as Edana lobs her shield.

Nothing happens. Now standing in front of it, Edana slashes wildly but, still, nothing happens.

The zombie pirate warlord shuffles his feet slightly and continues to cackle sporadically.

‘What are you doing Ed?!’ Dryst and his hissing voice channel clearly seem to be losing

patience.

‘Kite it Raven! Ed’s DC’d again’, Rah shouts, with the confidence of an experienced raid

leader, the din of battle can be heard over his voice channel.

On my screen all I could see is Edana still flailing to no avail. Everything else is frozen in

place, as if time had stopped.

I continued to mash at my keys, trying to influence anything I was seeing on my screen, when

all of a sudden there was a flurry of activity. Everything happens so quickly I can barely

decipher what was going on. Before I knew it, I’d snapped back to reality.

Edana lies motionless on the ground. In the distance I can see Rah, Dryst and Raven polishing

off the last of the still chasing zombie pirate warlord.

Their avatars walked over to Edana, ‘Ed, are you back with us?’ Rah asked.

‘Yea, sorry about that.’ I typed into the chat box, too sheepish to speak.

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‘All good, you’re just fighting the lag monster’ replied Dryst as his avatar begins resurrecting

Edana’s virtual body.

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THE HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN ARE INSEPARABLE

“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference

between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally

designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” (Haraway,

D., 2016, p.11)

It has now been established that friendships, and sociality, in other words, human actants, are

suboptimal obligatory passage points for the translation of the MMORPG player assemblage,

and that a long held bias towards the importance of human actants to both the translation of

MMORPG player assemblages and MMORPG play itself has meant that little effort in both the

academic and commercial spheres have gone into tracing the often technological actants that

effect translation error on the MMORPG player assemblage.

Ducheneaut and Moore (2004), in their study of Star Wars Galaxies (Daybreak Game

Company, 2003) determined that the shortcomings they found in the social spaces of the virtual

world, could be explained as being not social enough, “We believe this stems in great part from

a lack of incentives for players to actively engage in non-instrumental interactions in these two

locations. In particular, SWG’s powerful macro system automates the performance of

instrumental action while stripping away any reason to converse with other players. Some

shortcomings in the architecture of the game’s social spaces, as well as the lack of important

awareness data, also compound the problem. We propose that game designers could use social

interactivity data, similar to the one we described in this paper, to go beyond this problem and

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reward the players who make these locations truly social environments. This would allow

instrumental and social players to successfully cohabit within these new, expanding online

worlds.” (p.10)

When we trace their statement above more closely, we can see that there are important

technological actants that effected a distinctly unique construct of sociality within Star Wars

Galaxies, demonstrating the equal importance of the technological and human in the translation

of social interaction within MMORPGs. What Ducheneaut and Moore are arguing for then is,

essentially, more technological intervention so that avatar interactions within MMORPGs better

ape the social interactions we’re more familiar with in the real physical world – effectively,

they are asking for the mobilization of interceding technological actants to effect the translation

error of this technosocial construct or assemblage, in the vain aspiration of making it more

human.

In recent history MMORPG makers have, largely, obliged. It is now common practice for

MMORPG play to be bifurcated into two distinct and sequential parts: firstly, leveling, where

players complete quests and tasks by themselves to gain experience points; and then, the “end-

game”, where players have gotten the maximum amount of experience points allowed, but now

must engage in large-scale, often grouped quests and activities in order to improve their

avatar’s virtual equipment, such as armour and weapons. MMORPGs such as World of

Warcraft lock much of its content behind the end-game (Royce, B., 2014), “[…] World of

Warcraft players were trained to level mostly solo from 1 to 60, doing a 5-man dungeon here

and there along the way, and then bam: Welcome to the raiding endgame! It's nothing like the

rest of the game, and if you don't participate, your gear will be crap, you will look like a

newbie, and you will be destroyed in PvP!”

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This is unsurprising as the modern day makers of MMORPGs often prioritize developing

content and mechanics for it (Townsley, G., 2013), as Jeremy Gaffney, the executive producer

of Wildstar (Carbine Studios, 2014), explained,

“There are several ways to set fire to a hundred-million dollars and lose it. Probably

the best way is not spending time developing your endgame. Leveling is awesome, but

it goes by quickly and then people leave. It's even worse if your hardcore players

report back to the general public that there is nothing to do and that the game sucks.

It's about what you get to as much as it is about getting there.

Right now, 50 to 70% of our team is dedicated to elder content. We need a lot of it,

and it has to be replayable. A huge chunk of the coolest stuff is happening in the elder

content because that's when it has to pay off.”

This curious bifurcation of the MMORPG play experience and de-emphasis on leveling is

reflected in the way many more established MMORPGs have evolved. For example, World of

Warcraft now allows new players to skip thirty levels when invited by an existing player; Guild

Wars 2 (ArenaNet, 2012) allows players to skip to level 80 after purchasing expanded content;

and within Final Fantasy XIV, players now able to purchase their first 60 levels.

These are just some of the means with which MMORPG developers have allowed players to

skip leveling as an incentive to join, under the assumption that the most compelling part of an

MMORPG is its other players, whether that’s your friend (as previously discussed, not as

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essential to the translation of MMORPG play), others that players come into contact with

during grouped activity or within designated areas of sociality.

Effectively, from the Actor Network perspective, this means many newly translated and still

brittle player assemblages are thrust into connecting with an environment containing much

more well established, densely connected, and, in the vast majority of cases, punctualized,

player assemblages and translations of MMORPG play. It is then assumed that these new

player assemblages will be able to simply substitute the process of repeated translations that

these established constructs have already undergone, whereby the actants and networks making

up the player assemblage are given time to iteratively reinforce the construct through the

continuous problematization, interessement, enrollment and mobilization or deployment,

sometimes substitution, of allied actor-networks, by connecting with them. In practice, it is not

so simple,

“It felt very lonely in the game. Again I just like across characters. I would have

people higher level than me just run around and be a nuisance and block me from

clicking on something which was obnoxious. It felt very negative. But I was thinking

it was more that I just didn't understand it and I couldn’t get into it and I didn't

understand where to go from one place to the other. That may have just been my

inexperience probably with my experience with any kind of MMO. I just got stuck. I

didn't really enjoy it enough to figure out even though it would have probably been

easy to figure out.” (Interview with Shae, 2018)

But the elevation of human actants to prominence was not always the predominant model of

inducing the translation of player assemblages. In the embryonic early stages of the MMORPG

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genre, technological innovation, the translation of new non-human actants, was often as

important, if not more so, than the mobilization of human actants to support the MMORPG,

and translate play.

Meridian 59 (3DO, 1996) is commonly considered the first true MMORPG (Achterbosch et al.,

2008; Koster, R., 2017). It featured the first fully three dimensional representation of a MUD; it

was the first to be described as a “persistent world”, used by 3DO in their release press

material; and it was also the first to feature a monthly charging system, what came to be known

as a subscription, as opposed to the hourly rate that was commonly used up until that point.

“Until Meridian 59 launched in 1996 and UO launched in September of 1997 with flat

monthly rates, billing for commercial MMOGs was mainly on a per minute/hourly

basis (with a brief period of free access to AOL’s games from 12/96 to about 7/97).

Thus, the number of total subscribers was less important than how long you kept your

hard core players (the top 10%) in game.” (Mulligan, J., 1996)

The monthly subscription model allowed Meridian 59 to build up a player base of thousands

during its open beta stage of testing. Tiny by today’s standards, but, in 1995 Meridian 59

propelled the genre from a niche, somewhat tribal, play experience, into the territory of being

massively multiplayer. In effect, the creation of the MMORPG genre was spurred into existence

by a non-human, technological actant, Meridian 59’s payment system, acting as the obligatory

passage point.

The goal of this chapter is to trace and describe the other non-human and technological actants

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that have effected the way contemporary MMORPG play and player assemblages have been

translated.

It will begin with a brief overview of one of the core tenets of Actor Network Theory,

generalized symmetry, to provide context as to why it is important to acknowledge non- human

actants, and how failing to do so risks illustrating an incomplete picture when tracing an

assemblage. This chapter will then discuss previous accounts by theorists who have traced

other non-human actants with MMORPGs, and how they saw them effect the translation of

MMORPG play and the player assemblage.

Finally, the chapter will trace prominent historical non-human and technological actants that

have had a profound effect on the way that contemporary MMORPGs have been translated,

before tracing contemporary actants that have, in parts, effected the way that the subjects within

this study have translated their own assemblages of play.

GENERALIZED SYMMETRY – THE ABRIDGED VERSION

As briefly discussed previously, in order to overcome the powerfully ingrained duality between

the human and the non-human, Actor Network Theory practitioners consciously employ the

concept of “generalized symmetry”, wherein, all of the actants and objects that lend effect to

the construction, or translation of an assemblage or actor network, are treated as ontologically

equal.

The term was first coined by Michel Callon in 1986 when observing the laboratorial origins of

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the electric vehicle, but was consciously employed and developed, in other words, repeatedly

translated, between the 1980s and early 1990s through the empirical observations of Callon,

Latour and Law (Callon, M., 1986; Callon, M., Law J., 1997; Latour, B., 1988, 1996, 2005).

The three most influential progenitors of Actor Network Theory saw that the environments of

science and research held the power to revolutionize society - factories for Khunian paradigm

shifts; but the source of that power was largely obscured behind the construct of the “scientist”

much like, in past centuries, the power of the Church was obscured behind the construct of the

amicable “priest”, “If laboratories and research sites are to the twentieth century what

monasteries were to the twelfth, then the sources of their power and efficacy remain a

mystery.” (Callon, M., 1986, p.1)

Past anthropological studies into the activities of these loci of science found nothing

exceptional to explain their effects on the wider society, so they started looking at the rest of

the actants within the lab environment. Though philosophically radical, they determined that

both texts and technologies, as well as humans, were equally important in the construct or

assemblage of scientific discovery, which necessitated the ontological leveling that came to be

called generalized symmetry. We all recognize that the social is, in parts, technologically

heterogenous, and that the technological is, equally, in parts, socially heterogenous – these are

all, one and the same, sociotechnical assemblages or actor-networks. Callon, Law and Latour’s

contention, and the reason for explicitly designating the term generalized symmetry to the act

of ontologically flat observation, was because, even though it was recognized, in scientific

inquiry, it was rarely practiced,

“Often in practice we bracket off non-human materials, assuming they have a status

which differs from that of a human. So materials become resources or constraints; they

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are said to be passive; to be active only when they are mobilized by flesh and blood

actors. But if the social is really materially heterogeneous then this asymmetry doesn’t

work very well. Yes, there are differences between conversations, texts, techniques

and bodies. Of course. But why should we start out by assuming that some of these

have no active role to play in social dynamics?” (Callon & Law 1997, p.168).

This question, posed by Callon and Law over two decades ago, continues to be a valid one. As

mentioned in the previous chapter, human actants have continued to be emphasized by

researchers in the field of MMORPG studies. To trace deeper interactions beyond the

individual, Actor Network Theory calls for the study of the network of associations between

heterogenous actors, how each actor effects another, and how these associations are proposed,

attempted, interceded and/or successfully translated. There is nothing else, from an Actor

Network Theory perspective, than these associations, effects and translations.

This text will be no different. To unpack how the contemporary assemblage of MMORPG play

came to be, this chapter will be tracing the broad network of actants that have effected it over

time, how they came to be successfully translated, or failed to do so; how they have been

mobilized and substituted over time; and how this has effected the current assemblage of the

MMORPG player itself.

ROLE PLAY: AN EARLY HISTORY IN BRIEF

To understand and paint a picture of part of how the MMORPG came to be the new

mechanoidal frontier, we need to trace back to when this type of collaborative play, between

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humans, and between non-human actants, first began, and how technology over time has served

to shape this experience.

It’s the 16th century, and commedia dell’arte, a form of improvisational theatre, is being

popularized throughout Europe by roaming troupes. Roughly translated as a ‘comedy of

artists’, commedia dell’arte is, perhaps, the most influential form of early role play where we

can see the effects of its non-human actants, even today.

While there was a basic formula or framework, performances were largely unscripted.

Participants were subsumed into one of a number of standard personas (Rudlin, J., 1994, p.34),

“[…] in commedia dell’arte, […], personality disappeared to be replaced by type: the

personality of the actor is thus overtaken not by an author’s scripted character, but by the

persona of the mask to be played.”

Performances were held in public markets and squares, often set up without prior warning, so

audiences needed to be organically attracted by the spectacle. And the performers themselves,

their faces, for the most part, were either partially or fully obscured by masks so they were

forced to rely on exaggerated gestures and tonality (Rudlin, J., 1994).

Within this brief description of commedia dell’arte, we can see both the elements of some of

the most fundamental and repeatedly translated aspects of the MMORPG play experience in

their most essential form, as well as evidence of non-human actants ostensibly negotiating with

human actants to translate the performance.

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For example, the standard masked personas, such as the Zanni, Pantalone and Alecchino, could

be likened to the standard class categories within MMORPGs, both of which have standard

patterns of play, which are negotiated between the human and non-human. In the case of the

commedia dell’arte it is the mask and the human inhabiting it, and in the case of MMORPGs, it

is the avatar and the human player interacting with it.

(The terminology used of “class” in both contexts is interesting in that the hierarchy of personas

within the commedia dell’arte, was a classist one, and while it is no longer perceived as a

vertical hierarchy, the damage based classes in MMORPGs are typically thieves, rogues,

archers, and mages, while the healing and tank based classes are often priests and knights,

ostensibly also classist.)

The next major influence on MMORPG play came not long after in the form of wargaming. In

1824, Prussian lieutenant Von Reisswitz, born into a military family, decided he’d like to

modify the German wargame of Koenigspiel, which was essentially a very large and

complicated version of chess invented sixty years earlier.

He called his modification Kriegspiel, the German translation of “wargame”. The chess squares

were abandoned and the pieces representing military units were allowed to move unconstrained

about the board. When the pieces came into conflict, their resolution came about either through

the decision of an impartial umpire or through calculations derived from the experiences of real

world combat. This eventually bifurcated into two distinct versions of kriegspiel, free

kriegspiel, where combat resolution was made via the referee, and rigid kriegspiel, where

combat was decided based on complicated calculations and elaborate rule sets.

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By the early twentieth century, Kriegspiel was a standard tool used in strategic planning and

officer training by almost every military power in the world. During the First World War and

World War II Kriegspiel was extensively used in live combat scenarios. Kriegspiel was also

enjoyed by hobbyists. However, in the early 1900s there was little to separate the version of

Kriegspiel played by professional military officers, and that which was enjoyed by these

hobbyists.

It wasn’t until 1913, when author H.G. Wells, an avid Kriegspiel player himself, published a

meticulously created rule book for hobbyists called Little Wars, partly in response to his

frustration with the experience of it “[…] dull and unsatisfactory exercise, lacking in realism, in

stir and the unexpected […]” (p.21) , and partly because he was an ardent pacifist and saw

Little Wars as an outlet for military aggression (that is, until he actually tested the rule set with

military officers) (p.20),

“Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the

universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and

material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the

available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific

realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War

can do.”

Little Wars would remain on the fringes of hobbyist wargaming for almost half a century,

obscured by the two World Wars that soon followed its release, to the lament of H.G. Wells,

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“[…] miniature soldiers leave no widows and orphans, and that if more people were busy

fighting little wars, they might not be involved in fighting big ones.” (Gygax, G., 2004)

It was then fortunate that a certain Gary Gygax, insurance underwriter and avid wargaming

hobbyist came across the book in the late 1960s. Gygax, would later state in 2004 that H.G.

Wells’ Little Wars would form a part in his creation of both Chainmail (1971), a medieval

themed miniature wargame, and Dungeons & Dragons (1974), arguably the most successful

tabletop RPG in history, now eponymous with the genre itself.

“Little Wars influenced my development of both the Chainmail miniatures rules and

the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. For example, it established the

concept of a burst radius for cannon rounds, an idea that was translated into both the

Chainmail catapult missile diameters and the areas of effect for Fireballs in D&D.”

(Gygax, G., 2004)

This demonstrates that it isn’t just human actants, but also non-human technological actants, in

this case, Little Wars, the book and ruleset, which can equally effect the translation of an

assemblage, such as tabletop role-playing games, for years or even decades after their

mobilization.

This applies equally to Dungeons & Dragons itself, which, through its widespread popularity,

has been translated successfully an indeterminate number of times, such that it has now become

a punctualized genre in and of itself with many of its constituent mobilized actants inextricably

locked in place, their original translation lost to history. For example, while it is known that the

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terms “player character” and “non-player character” came from Dungeons & Dragons, how

these assemblages came about, eventually becoming part of the standard lexicon of role-playing

games, is unknown.

Inevitably, Dungeons & Dragons came to directly influence the creation of MUDs, or Multi-

User Dungeons, the earliest forms of multi-player virtual worlds and, as previously discussed,

the progenitors to MMORPGs themselves.

WELCOME TO THE TECHNOLOGY FRONTIER

“You can solve a lot of problems with a DECsystem-10 or DECSYSTEM-20, The

Personal Mainframe™ from Digital. […] Everyone needs to use the computer? With

The Personal Mainframe, up to 512 users can work interactively at their own

terminals.” (ComputerWorld, 1981).

The PDP-10, later known as the DECsystem-10, was first created in 1966 by the Digital

Equipment Corporation, otherwise known as DEC. It was one of the most popular mainframe

computers in the world during the 1970s, driven by the success of the TOPS-10 (Timesharing

Operating System-10) operating system, also made by DEC, and the first widely used system to

utilize a form of shared memory (Bell, C.G., Kotok, A., Hastings, T.N., Hill, R., 1977).

Around the same time ARPAnet, otherwise known as the earliest version of the Internet, was

being rolled out to research facilities and universities throughout the United States and parts of

Europe, London and (oddly enough) Norway specifically. The primitive Network Control

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Protocol, otherwise known as the NCP, which had defined ARPAnet since almost its inception,

only allowed for host-to-host communication within the network at the time though, limiting

the ability of hosts to broadcast messages widely and to the different technologies utilized

across the world. The transition from a small, closed and experimental network, to a truly open,

global and dynamic network where that would have been possible, required a new governing

protocol.

It took over five years to implement, but by 1978, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf of Bolt, Beranek

and Newman (BBN), the research group that first developed ARPAnet, eventually succeeded in

rolling out the Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, otherwise known as TCP/IP. It was

this protocol that finally allowed the exchange of data between distant and different networks,

the catalyst for what closely resembles the Internet we know today (Hauben, M., 1978).

Not too far away, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students Tim Anderson, Marc

Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling, had just started summer break and were in the process

of completing the last room of a popular ARPAnet game created by one of the original BBN

team and Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast, Will Crowther, called Colossal Cave Adventure

(Crowther, W., 1975), commonly shortened to simply “Adventure”.

Part of the problem with Adventure was that it was written in FORTRAN, at that point a nearly

three decade old programming language, and could only accept two word commands. They had

to enlist the help of a machine language debugger to reach the final point of the game, an

excruciating exercise. There had to be a better way to input commands for games.

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Bruce was part of the MIT team that had developed a sophisticated new programming language

called the MIT Design Language (MDL), jokingly called “muddle” internally, and all four were

looking for ways to fill their time,

“Marc Blank was enjoying a respite from medical school; I had just finished my

master’s degree; Bruce Daniels was getting bored with his Ph.D. topic; and Dave

Lebling was heartily sick of Morse code. Dave wrote (in muddle) a command parser

that was almost as smart as Adventure’s; Marc and I, who were both in the habit of

hacking all night, took advantage of this to write a prototype four-room game. It has

long since vanished. There was a band, a bandbox, a peanut room (the band was

outside the door, playing “Hail to the Chief”), and a “chamber filled with deadlines.”

Dave played and tested the game, saw that it was pretty awful, and left, to spend two

weeks basking in the sun” (Anderson, T., Galley, St., 2004, p.1).

By the time Dave Lebling had returned from sunning himself, much of the game, now called

Zork, had been built by the rest of the team. There were characters, monsters, a house, and a

dam, part of a forest, a maze, a glacier, and a few other partially completed environments.

Importantly, they had created a well-defined ruleset governing how rooms, objects, creatures

and actions interacted with each other, which allowed practically anyone to create a subroutine,

known as a parser, and drop custom creations into the world of Zork. This is a feature that

continues to live on in many massive multiplayer games such as Second Life (Linden Labs,

2003), Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) and The Sims Online (Maxis, 2002).

At the time, the PDP-10s in MIT, which were powering Zork, had been bought in to serve the

collaborations between a small group of expert users, such as Anderson, Blank, Daniels and

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Lebling. They had no security features to block their connection to the outside world.

Because of this, the Zork universe was able to sustain itself through the efforts of a growing

user community that had invaded MIT’s network of PDP-10s (Barton, M., 2007).

Early translations of the Zork player assemblage actually required players to find signs of a

PDP-10 running Zork, i.e. the tracing of an actor-network in a very literal sense, and then

required passage through a number of complicated technological obligatory passage points. But

even so, the process of “logging in”, through repeated translation by actants, both technological

and human, from further and further away, became punctualized as Zork grew in popularity,

“No one ever officially announced Zork: people would log in to DM, see that someone

was running a program named Zork, and get interested. They would then “snoop” on

the console of the person running Zork, and see that it was an Adventure- like game.

From there, it only took a little more effort to find out how to start it up.

For a long time, the magic incantation was “:marc;zork”; people who had never heard

of it, DM, or pdp-10s somehow heard that if they got to something called “host 70” on

the ARPAnet, logged in, and typed the magic word, they could play a game”

(Anderson, T., Galley, St., 2004, p.2).

This was a real world demonstration of black-boxing occurring before the creator’s eyes. In the

end, all that was required to translate the Zork player assemblage was to mobilize a known

connection and input a phrase. Players no longer needed to know to log into MIT subsystems,

nor know that they were accessing a PDP-10, nor know even the person running that instance

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of Zork (it was Marc Blank). These mobilized actants had all been locked into place, and

punctualized. Inputs and outputs were all that was needed.

With the PDP-10, and MDL, a programming language that only ran on the PDP-10s within

MIT at the time, in partnership with a group of four students and researchers haphazardly

making their own version of Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork spread throughout the United

States, carried along by the proliferation of the newly formed ARPAnet (now known as the

Internet). Without this deep intertwining of both human and complex technological and non-

human actants in mobilizing to support the Zork that MMORPG historians remember as the

first MUD, it is likely that it would never have successfully translated – it would never have

existed (Anderson, T., Galley, St., 2004).

This profound generalized symmetry of the non-human and human would also share many

similarities in the way another major contributor to the contemporary MMORPG assemblage

would develop: Meridian 59 (The 3DO Company, 1996).

Almost exactly a full generation, or 25 years after the team of Anderson, Blank, Daniels and

Lebling had started work on the bits of code that would eventually become Zork, two brothers,

Chris and Andrew Kirmse, had just finished their sophomore and junior year at MIT and

Virginia Polytechnic (more commonly referred to as Virginia Tech) (Kirmse, A., 2000).

Microsoft was about to release two industry defining operating systems, Windows NT and

Windows 95, and the end of development cycle crunch demanded an uptick in the summer

internship intake. Coincidentally, both Chris and Andrew applied to join, and both were

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accepted.

The brothers were both avid fans of MUDs, in particular, one called Scepter (Klietz, A., 1978),

which was influenced by Zork, and came out just before Bartle and Trubshaw’s MUD1 (1978).

As personal computing emerged from its hobbyist background, dominated by brands such as

Commodore, Atari, and the then tiny Apple, to becoming more work oriented, IBM, and the

standard they had created with the IBM PC, rapidly gained majority market share. And so, in

1983, Scepter was ported to the IBM PC XT, and renamed Scepter of Goth. Chris and Andrew

spent much of their high school years playing it on their own IBM PC XT rigged up to sixteen,

by that time, outdated 300-baud modems.

However, in the summer of 1993, as Microsoft interns working on the project that would

eventually become Windows NT, they both saw that the golden age of text-based games, of

Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, Scepter and MUD1, was well and truly ending. Company

discount in hand, they used their savings to purchase Windows NT licenses and two Pentium 66

computers, each with 16 megabytes of memory and 500 megabyte hard disk drives – state of

the art at the time.

While the games industry was rapidly industrializing, much of the success of the games

industry at that time, was in the business of arcades, and home consoles. MUDs on the other

hand, having emerged out of university and research facility mainframes, were still being made

by teams of one to four programmers using technologies primarily created for research. A

standard method through which MUDs were successfully translated had yet to be repeatedly

completed and punctualized. Each procession of problematization, interessement, enrollment

and mobilization was still unique to each MUD assemblage, subject to the trials and tribulations

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of interceding actants both human and non-human,

“We were both young […] and knew basically nothing about the game industry, or

even the fact that there were huge companies somewhere churning out games. […]

The first thing Chris and I did was design our scripting language, which we called

Blakod. It had C-like syntax and operators, but data structures were built using lists.

The language would be byte-compiled and then interpreted, and there would be

automatic garbage collection and a class structure with single inheritance. Chris began

work on the game server and Blakod interpreter, while I wrote the Blakod byte

compiler, and later started the game client. The game server ran under Windows NT,

but the game client had to run on the dominant operating system at the time: Windows

3.1. Writing for Windows was a slow, painful, and ultimately pointless exercise, as we

eventually gave up […]” (Kirmse, A., 2000, p.1).

Like the makers of Zork before them, the first translation of their online world didn’t get very

far. The Blakod language was working and so was the interpreter and compiler. They displayed

a primitive two-dimensional representation of a few rooms player’s avatars could move

between, and a few virtual monsters and items to interact with.

It wasn’t until 1995 and the rapid convergence of disparate, but groundbreaking technological

actants, did the idea of a three dimensional, widely networked MUD, in other words, the first

MMORPG, seem possible.

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ARPAnet had been superseded by the commercial Internet only five years earlier and the

number of users able to access it was growing at an exponential rate. Microsoft’s Windows 95

had just been released with a new method of drawing graphics on monitors and printers called

GDI or Graphics Device Interface (this was the precursor to today’s DirectX graphics engine

also created by Microsoft that powers many three-dimensional video games). Personal

computing hardware was becoming exponentially more powerful with the companies AMD and

Intel releasing increasingly fast microprocessors in quick succession throughout the 1990s (in

1995, the latest version of the Intel Pentium was almost three times faster than the ones bought

by Chris and Andrew only two years earlier). And three-dimensional gaming was being

popularized by both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom II (id Software, 1992, 1994).

Similar to the last breakthrough, the brothers were avid fans of both of these games and spent

much of 1994 and 1995 attempting to come up with a similar graphics engine to the one found

in Wolfenstien 3D and Doom II for Meridian 59. Along the way they enlisted the help of

Andrew’s roommate, budding computer scientist Keith Randall, and a coaxial cable connecting

their machine to his Macintosh.

By the end of 1995, they had added a simple quest to retrieve a gem from a cave, character

initialization, and simple customizations to facial features. Chris set up a small server with a

local Internet Service Provider in San Jose, California, and the game was released to the world

in its rough alpha state, able to support thirty-five users at a time.

Over the next few months, they added a number of programmers to their team, while furiously

developing monthly updates. By April of 1996, they entered their beta phase of development

with a more powerful server allowing Meridian 59 to suddenly support hundreds of people at a

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time.

The publisher 3DO took notice, and it was eventually picked up and widely published by them

on September 27, 1996. It was Chris and Andrew’s idea to charge a monthly subscription fee,

now a common method of monetization for contemporary MMORPGs.

Other non-human and technological actants that were first introduced by Meridian 59 and

continue to effect the MMORPGs of today include the chat box, which 3DO had implemented

to facilitate conversation and community building, but was thought of as unrealistic at the time

(Achterbosch et al., 2008, p. 9); and the ‘mini-map’, a small visual representation of an avatar’s

immediate vicinity to allow players, who at that time had never seen a three dimensional

representation of a MUD, to orient themselves (Gach, E., 2016; Parkin, S., 2014).

The importance of Meridian 59 cannot be understated. Beyond the efforts of the brothers Chris

and Andrew Kirmse, there was the assemblage of so many pivotal technological actants, from

ARPAnet, to Zork, Windows 95, to Doom II, all mobilized in the translation of Meridian 59 and

all its constituent technological actants. These continue to effect contemporary MMORPG

assemblages, and the translation of the MMORPG player more than two decades after their

release,

“Meridian was ahead of its time in several areas. For many people using the Internet

for the first time, Meridian was how people actually “saw” people on the other end of

their chat messages. The game’s character gestures, such as waving, added a personal

feel to an impersonal network. Surveys showed that women were a far larger fraction

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of the player base than is usual for PC games. Meridian brought many of the

phenomena well-known to MUD players, such as real-life friendships and even

marriages, from Unix to the PC.

Meridian’s sense of community and its global communication system, wherein anyone

on a server can communicate directly with anyone else, are still ahead of today’s RPGs

[…] Meridian’s user interface, while simple, turns up in game after game.

In-game email and newsgroups, a guild voting system, rentable guild halls, and a

player combat arena made their graphical debut in Meridian” (Klimse, A., 2000, p.3).

Commercial success in the genre and the term ‘massively multiplayer online role playing game’

or MMORPG did not come until Richard Garriot’s Ultima Online (Origin Systems, 1997)

which attracted over 100,000 subscribers at its peak, and Verant Interactive and Sony Online

Entertainment’s Everquest (1999), which surpassed Ultima Online not long after its release,

borrowing heavily from Meridian 59 (Klimse, A., 2000, p.3).

Both of these MMORPGs were a popular past time for members of a certain fast rising studio

that had just released two games to widespread acclaim: Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) and

Diablo (1996). That studio was Blizzard Entertainment.

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HOW AZEROTH WAS WON.

“Azeroth is but one small world in a vast universe, a realm filled with potent magics

and mighty beings. Since the dawn of time, these forces have influenced Azeroth and

the surrounding cosmos, setting the stars in motion and shaping the destiny of

countless worlds and mortal civilizations…” (Metzen, C., Burns, M. & Brooks, R.,

2016 p.13)

Blizzard Entertainment was highly successful. Between 1994 and 1998 the studio had released

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994), Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), Diablo (1996), and

Starcraft (1998), all of them widely considered commercial and critical successes. They would

eventually become the three core franchises that Blizzard would continue to develop to the

present day.

Following the completion of Starcraft, the studio divided its development staff into two teams.

One worked on the successor to Warcraft II, and the other focused its efforts on a new type of

game for Blizzard, a two-dimensional point and click adventure spun off the Warcraft franchise

called Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans.

Despite the richly developed universe, and a strong story following one of the franchise’s

central characters, Thrall, the studio felt that the game would seem outdated by the time it

would have been released. Blizzard ended up cancelling the development of that title.

The fifth generation of home consoles had been around for nearly three years by that time, and

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the popularity of the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation meant that three-dimensional gaming was in

vogue.

Warcraft Adventures, however, wasn’t too dissimilar to adventure games of the past, and so

with little to do, and as avid fans of the then newly released Everquest (1999) from Verant

Interactive and Sony Online Entertainment, the team’s lead and one of the studio’s pivotal co-

founders (Kollar, P., 2016), Allen Adham, championed a new idea: Blizzard was going to make

its own MMORPG (Zenke, M., 2008).

Keeping within the same franchise it was christened World of Warcraft early. Everquest was a

strong influence upon it, and many of its early mechanics were merely tweaked translations of

Everquest’s features,

“The team was engaging with Everquest as fans, but also as game designers,

wondering where the experience could be tweaked and improved. Everquest's death

system forced players to trek back to their corpses, many times without weapons, to

pick up their armour and items; meanwhile World of Warcraft implemented a different

system where you were an invincible ghost and could pay a penalty to simply be

resurrected at any graveyard. Everquest enemies would follow you until you reached a

zone barrier, while WoW [(World of Warcraft)] mobs were tethered to their starting

location and would snap back if they got too far away.” (Williams, M., 2018, p.4).

It was not just Everquest, but other technological actants throughout the process of developing,

or in other words, translating, World of Warcraft that also effected, and sometimes substituted,

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the designer’s intent for its mechanics and design.

For example, it was the original intention of the team to allow the play experience within World

of Warcraft to be freeform, like Everquest and Colossal Cave Adventure before it. As a way to

help new players acclimate and orient themselves to each new virtual environment, training

quests were implemented in each distinct region. However, the popularity of these quests was

such that it was eventually decided to make them a central vehicle for propelling the narrative

of the world.

“[…] pretty early on, once we were doing team play tests, what we learned was the

moment that you ran out of quests in your quest log, the game just felt broken and

people didn't know what to do […] It was definitely this big moment where the team

was like, 'Uh oh, I guess we have to do ten times as many quests as we thought we

were going to do.' But I think it's one of those great moments that happen in game

development, where once you find the nuggets that are really fun, you double down on

it." (Pardo, R., 2018)

This meant that quests had not only fundamentally effected the early design of World of

Warcraft, but also fundamentally effected the development process itself. The team was

expanded to incorporate a corps of quest designers.

In fact, much of World of Warcraft’s development was driven by similar kinds of mobilizations

and substitutions, which were seen as happy accidents for the most part, but through tracing of

descriptions, can be seen for what they truly are: unheralded technological actants effecting the

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translation of the game world, play experience and player assemblage. The interpellation

between developer and technology during the development process demonstrates both

generalized symmetry and translative success in action,

"There was just a lot of doubt until we actually made a building in Westfall that was

super-stylized and we used all hand-painted textures. Even the terrain was more hand-

painted textures. […] When we first saw the human farm building in Westfall, that

was the first time where I was like, 'Wow, I think we got something here.’ ” (Lo, J.,

2018)

Five years of this organic development and World of Warcraft was released over the holiday

season between 2004 and 2005, quickly becoming the most widely played MMORPG in

history.

But that, in and of itself, came with its own challenges. World of Warcraft translated to become

such a monumentally massive technological actant or assemblage it not only embedded itself

into global popular cultures, transcending eastern and western dichotomies, but it also effected

the construct of the studio itself.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as with any large, newly translated assemblage, the process of

continual translation itself, was not always harmonious. Mobilized actants were not yet set in

place and punctualized; interceding actants were unexpected; and the interpellation between the

human and technological was, at times, discordant. Translative failure was a constant threat.

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This can be seen in one instance around late 2005, when Blizzard planned the launch of a

whole new region or zone, and its largest release of content to date, the development team

severely underestimated the role of technological actants in successfully translating this new

experience of MMORPG play,

“Current World of Warcraft technical director Patrick Dawson joined in December of

2005, right before the release of Patch 1.9 and the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj. At the time,

Dawson was on the server team, tasked with making sure the servers stayed stable.

And when the Gates opened, things started to fracture. Everyone on each server was

there to watch the Gates open, but the game wasn't built to have every player in one

zone.

"I think the WoW development team maybe wasn't as well-oiled of a machine back

then, because it actually came as a surprise to the engineering staff that we decided to

funnel the entire population of World of Warcraft into a single area. Everybody was

waiting for that moment all in the same area," recalls Dawson. "We're sitting here

teleporting out level 30 characters - 'You have no business being here and you're just

killing your server!' - and we're doing this by hand just trying to make it." (Williams,

M., 2018, p.12)

In late 2006, it was the technological actant of battlegrounds – zones within the virtual world

where player versus player combat was sanctioned – which alerted the development team to,

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and was instrumental in addressing, a growing inequality that has often led to the translation

error and collapse in many other MMORPGs: population consolidation.

Azeroth does not exist in one single massive and homogenous instance. Technological

constraints dictate that there is a maximum number of players that can be logged in to one

instance of Azeroth at a time. To address this, the development team recreated Azeroth over a

number of different servers, like parallel universes, each able to support a few thousand avatars

and players. Over time each of these different servers, named after pivotal characters or places

within the Warcraft universe, became unique play experiences of their own. Some allowed for

widespread player versus player combat, leading to a brutal Darwinian translation of the

MMORPG play experience; some did not, focusing instead on grouped questing, and defeating

powerful non-player characters within Azeroth; while others focused on neither defeating each

other, nor defeating non-player characters, but instead providing a safe space for players to

fully inhabit their avatar’s persona, in essence engaging in role play similar to the Commedia

del’Arte of four centuries earlier.

Perhaps, predictably, this led to its own problems. Over time players clustered their avatars on a

small number of servers, the popularity of a particular instance of Azeroth would often only

lead to more players seeking entry into that server. This snowballing and consolidation of

players and avatars into a few servers and instances had a particularly lopsided effect on one

part of the World of Warcraft experience.

Zones which were sanctioned for player versus player combat, called Battlegrounds, often

pitted the avatars of one instance of Azeroth against another. What this meant was that the

heavily populated instances, would, almost always have a numbers advantage.

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This would lead to the development of cross-server Battlegrounds, and, eventually cross- server

instances of dungeons and grouped quests, eliminating the problems with translating grouped

activities that inevitably came with a low population instance of Azeroth, “If you were on a

low-population server, or one where one side vastly outweighed the other, you were no longer

without any recourse.” (Williams, M., 2018, pp.13)

This is a technological actant that would go on to become a staple feature in contemporary

MMORPGs that followed World of Warcraft.

2007 brought with it a new expansion to World of Warcraft, which not only meant new content,

but a raft of features were also released. One of those features was flying mounts – creatures

players were able to ride that allowed them to traverse the world much faster than they already

could with land-based mounts.

While the development team thought it ground-breaking – players were able to not only travel

faster, but could now survey an entire region from a birds eye perspective – that also brought

challenges, or interceding actants that effected a complete change in the way that environments

were designed,

"At first we were all like, 'Oh man, that's cool” […] but then as we started prototype

zones, concepting it, and actually thinking about each individual area, it started to

dawn on us. We actually had to think about zone transitions in a different way

compared to Vanilla, where there were a lot of areas you couldn't access. So we didn't

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have to think about blending between two particular zones, because either they can't

get there or they'll never see it. […] That really changed the way we kind of

approached our zones even just design-wise. Traditionally, we would create a concept

of how a particular zone looks. And then right next to that zone, we'll just do another

concept; this time we had to actually put a lot more thought into how we transition."

(Lo, J., 2018, p.15)

World of Warcraft is still the most widely played MMORPG 15 years after its release. Tracing

its early life through the lens of Actor Network Theory, we uncover the reason for its resilience:

the willingness of its developers, the human actants part of the process of translation, to respect

the influences and effects of technological and non-human actants.

They allowed the assemblage of World of Warcraft to fully undergo the processes of

problematization, illustrated by the difficulties in executing the technological feats mentioned

above; interessement, such as with the serendipitous alignment between Everquest’s release

and the failure of Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans; enrollment, for example, in the

hand-painting of the landscape within the Azerothian region of Westfall; and mobilization, such

as when it was decided that quests would become a central vehicle for driving the narrative of

World of Warcraft, as opposed to simply using them as a tool for the instruction of game

mechanics.

It is almost certain that the present day assemblage of World of Warcraft bears little

resemblance to the original vision of its first producer and original obligatory passage point,

Allen Adham (who would leave only ten months before its release), but that is also what is

responsible for its longevity and sustained popularity. Other makers of MMORPGs have sought

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to impose their vision on what their MMORPG assemblages should be, for example, the

narrative-driven studio Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011), and EA Games, richly

funded All Points Bulletin (Realtime Worlds, 2010), effectively becoming interceding actants to

the successful translation of their own MMORPG assemblages, and effecting their own failure.

Tracing the technological and non-human actants, past, present and substituted, of World of

Warcraft, demonstrates their pivotal role in its continued successful translation.

FROM WHERE WE’VE COME

The goal of this chapter was to trace and describe the non-human actants that have effected the

translation of MMORPGs as we know them today.

Firstly, in the 16th century there was commedia del’arte, where the technological actants,

masked personas, such as the Zanni, Pantalone and Alecchino negotiated with the human actant

to form the character’s assemblage. This is much like the avatar and player relationship we see

today in MMORPGs.

Secondly, the advent of Kriegspiel in the 18th century, which evolved into H.G. Well’s Little

Wars (1913) and a meticulous rule book, effected the actions not only of the human actants

engaging in wargames, but also one particular hobbyist, Gary Gygax, who would base his

creation of an influential tabletop RPG known as Dungeons & Dragons (1974) on this.

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And finally, connecting that to ARPANet, PDP-10 mainframe computers, Colossal Cave

Adventure (Crowther, W., 1975), the MDL programming language and the free time four

enterprising computer science students, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave

Lebling, had on their hands during summer break - all of this would culminate in the creation of

the first MUD and progenitor to MMORPGs, Zork.

Through the tracing of these, from the masks in Commedia del’Arte, to the patterns of unit

movement in Kriegspiel, to the PDP-10s that powered Zork, it is clear that these seemingly

disparate, and often overlooked non-human and technological actants have had a profound

impact on the way the MMORPG assemblage has evolved to become the vast virtual worlds we

know today.

The pre-eminence that has been placed upon human actants in the development and translation

of MMORPGs has obscured the equal importance and criticality of the role non- human actants

have to play in the translation of these very experiences.

This brings us to the next chapter which will delve into how non-human actants have played a

critical part in the translation of the MMORPG player assemblage itself. It will be tracing the

accounts of the subjects within this study, and how each of their unique translations of

MMORPG play have been effected by an interpolation between human and technological

actants, many of which have never been addressed before, neither by developers nor within

academia, due to the misplaced pre-eminence placed upon the human actant.

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CHAPTER FIVE: PLAYERS ARE SNOWFLAKES

“[…] I kind of got into crafting because it was a little bit more solo, a bit less lag

dependent, and then when I got a little deeper into it, I really enjoyed the puzzle aspect

of the crafting system in XIV and how you're kind of juggling a lot of moving parts in

trying to see how you can get the highest quality item and beyond that there's the

puzzle of how to make money the best […] it allowed me to continue to participate in

the game even while my Internet wasn't always so great.” (Interview with Emhati,

2017)

Now that this thesis has traced the instrumental effect that non-human actants have had on the

creation of the MMORPG assemblage itself, the further question arises - how do non-human

actants effect the creation of MMORPG player assemblages and the play experience itself.

The brief recounting by one of the participants of this study previously illustrates how the

effects of non-human actants don’t just play a fundamental role in the translation of MMORPG

franchises and the genre, but also a similarly critical role in the successful translation of the

MMORPG player assemblage and play experience. In fact, the interpellation between non-

human and human calls upon such a multitude of different and varied actants and actor-

networks, that each translation of these assemblages is a unique construct and a demonstration

of heterogenous engineering in action.

The aim of this chapter is to trace the accounts of the participants within this study and unpack

each of their player assemblages to show how radically diverse they are, and the equally

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important non-human actants that were mobilized in support of these translations of the player

assemblage.

The first part of this chapter will provide a brief account of heterogenous engineering and why

it is an important concept within Actor Network Theory to understand in considering how to

address the translation of MMORPG player assemblages as well as trace the current

understanding and categorization of the MMORPG player, typologies and its origins.

The subsequent sections within this chapter will focus on the accounts of the participants within

this study, taking care to trace the descriptions of their MMORPG play experiences and unpack

the translations of their player assemblage. The aim is to demonstrate both the Actor Network

Theory concept of heterogenous engineering in action, as well as the need for a shift in the way

both academics and developers understand the MMORPG player assemblage.

PLAYERS AS HETEROGENOUS ENGINEERS

While it’s been briefly referred to throughout this thesis up to this point, before going further,

the question that must be first asked is what is heterogeneous engineering?

“The impossible task of opening the black box is made feasible (if not easy) by

moving in time and space until one finds the controversial topic on which scientists

and engineers are busy at work. This is the first decision we have to make: our entry

into science and technology will be through the back door of science in the making,

not through the more grandiose entrance of ready made science” (Latour 1987, p.4).

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While Actor Network Theory was a framework borne of Science and Technology Studies

(STS), hence the focus on scientists and the environments they work within, heterogeneous

engineering draws on a fundamental aspect of Actor Network Theory itself – that there are no

essentialist, in Latour’s word’s, “ready made”, explanations of actor network assemblages;

there are effects and only effects. All the actants, human, non-human, sociological,

technological or otherwise, that are mobilized in the translation of an assemblage, effect each

other, and are, in turn, effected by actants within the sphere of that assemblage, as well as

outside of it.

What this means is that Actor Network Theory must describe the world in ontologically flat

terms. There is no separation of the social and technological; nor the physical and the virtual; in

fact, it eschews separation altogether, the very act of declaring seemingly disparate actants

connects them.

This leads to the central premise of heterogeneous engineering: an actant in the process of

shaping or translating an assemblage or construct, is constantly integrating with and

negotiating, defining and redefining, the effects of social, technological, virtual, physical and

all other possibilities or entelechies that have materialized and become networked with it.

The term itself is derived from Michel Callon’s study of how electric cars were developed in

the 1970s (Callon, M., 1986). What Callon found during the tracing of this moment was that

the engineers involved were not only negotiating the interceding technological and scientific

challenges that came with the development of new technologies, but were also negotiating the

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social implications of the assemblage itself. They were not only contributing to the translations

of constructs in science and technology, but also the makeup of the “French social structure

[that] would radically change” (Callon, M., 1986, p.84), simultaneously.

This can be seen in Turkle’s early work on MUDs which will be discussed in greater detail later

in this chapter. Delving into unfamiliar territory, Turkle relied on constructing vivid

descriptions of the MUD player assemblage which revealed players who were negotiating,

assembling and mobilizing actants not only from social and technological spheres, but also the

familial, vocational, psychological and emotional in forming these assemblages (Turkle, S.,

1994, p.163).

These translations are all “the function of the interaction of heterogenous elements as these are

shaped and assimilated into a network” (Law, J., 1987, p.113). They are, as all assemblages

when properly unpacked and understood are, works of heterogenous engineering.

However, this would be short lived. The intensive unpacking that inherently occurred within

early investigations of an assemblage would quickly fall by the wayside, as it wasn’t long after

Turkle’s own interrogations of MUDs that the player assemblage would become much more

densely punctualized and, subsequently, categorized. This will be described later within this

chapter, but before reaching that point, we start tracing at the very beginning of the thread

towards MMORPG categorization, where we find the very frustrated Game Master, John

Sgammato.

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THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING

“I wanted to run a campaign that would satisfy all of my players. Some of them had

been dissatisfied recently, while others loved every adventure.

[…] every week we GMs [Game Masters] assume that we can cook up our best work

and everyone will eat it. […] But how do we know if we're compatible with our

players?

Well, I did it. They played six weeks and met ghosts and head-hunters and a lost

subterranean temple full of scorpions and spiders and even hordes of loathsome frog

people. Everyone enjoyed it. Except me; I burned out […] You see, my players all

liked roleplaying, but they all liked it differently. They had widely differing goals in

playing. I found out that I couldn't satisfy all of them and still keep my style of GMing.

So I told them what my ideal campaign would include. Those who liked my style

formed a group with me; the rest formed a group with a different GM, more suited to

their style of play.

[…] You, as GM, may have to sacrifice your artistic leanings for number-juggling of

encounters to satisfy everyone. Sooner or later, something will break. A player may

leave, or the GM may burn out.” (Sgammato, J., 1990)

Despite having existed since 1974, little thought had gone into deciphering the player

assemblages within role playing games, nor, by extension MUDs, save for a short article

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published in a 1990 edition of a community newsletter for a small subsect of the role playing

game ecosystem called Generic Universal Role Playing System or GURPS (Jackson S., 1986).

It was written by a frustrated Game Master, John Sgammato, who identified three interacting

factors of play that identified player typology: randomness versus trust, creativity versus

formulaic, and steady-state or episodic versus expanding universe, or persistent world.

Interestingly, Sgammato, perhaps unbeknownst to him, used non-human actants as a critical

part of differentiating between player assemblages within his GURPS universe.

In the case of randomness versus trust, an innumerable number of seemingly randomized

actants contribute to the effect. Some examples might include, how the die is used to determine

the interactions with non-player characters; and how the interpellation between the random

results of the die, the player assemblage and the constructed rules of the game itself are

translated. How these actants are mobilized by the player (or human actant) determines whether

they are reinforcing, i.e. the player finds it more enjoyable to be subject to chance, wherein

heterogenous engineering has a greater effect on the player assemblage; or, whether they are

interceding, i.e. the player finds it preferable to have more tightly translated actants, such as the

rulesets and story, where the actants are more well defined, repeatedly translated and their

constituent actants, mobilized and calcified or reified. Sgammato referred to the two ends of

this player typology spectrum as the “dice-roller” and “interactor”, respectively.

When looking at creative players versus formulaic ones, there is a similar spectrum although it

concerns the interpellation of the rules and imaginary environment, the encounters with non-

player character, and situation, and the players themselves. Again, one end of the spectrum

favours randomized actants, where there is no thought to repeatedly translate and punctualize;

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and at the opposite end of the spectrum, repeatedly translated assemblages are favoured, in fact,

punctualization is sought for efficiency. Sgammato referred to the two ends of this typology

spectrum as “creative players” and “puzzle solvers”, respectively.

And finally, Sgammato looked to the translation of the imagined environment, past and present

events, and their interpellation with a character’s statistics and property to determine whether a

player assemblage was more episodic in nature, for example, a player who preferred bounded

narratives, or more persistent in nature, such as a player who prefers an imagined world where

they were able to continuously gain power.

This would be the only article written by Sgammato concerning GURPS, and he would not go

on to elaborate on his spectrums of player typology.

GURPS was, of course, a precursor to MUDs and MMORPGs, however, the virtual player

assemblage would not be explored with seriousness until 1994, despite MUDs having existed

for almost 20 years by that point.

Sherry Turkle, in the Second Self (1984), published around the same time that the embryonic

moments that would crystallize into Actor Network Theory were being formed, provided,

perhaps inadvertently, an account of computers that in large part reflected the ideals of

generalized symmetry, and saw them as an important non-human actant that formed an intrinsic

part of the construct or assemblage of a person’s identity. It forced the questioning of the

meanings and nature of concepts we’d previously considered as solely within the realm of

humanity, such as what is alive; what is intelligent; and, what is free will? (Turkle, S., 1994,

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p.164).

In 1994, Turkle began asking the same questions of MUDs,

“There are over 300 multi-user games based on at least 13 different kinds of software

on the international computer network known as the Internet. […] All provide worlds

for social interaction in a virtual space, worlds in which you can present yourself as a

“character,” in which you can be anonymous, in which you can play a role as close or

as far away from your “real self” as you choose. Where they differ is in how

constrained that world is. It can be built around a medieval fantasy landscape in which

there are dragons to slay and gold coins and magical amulets to collect, or it can be a

relatively open space in which you can play at whatever captures your imagination,

both by playing a role and by participating in building a world. […] In the MUDs, the

projections of self are engaged in a resolutely postmodern context. There are parallel

narratives in the different rooms of the MUD; one can move forward or backward in

time. The cultures of Tolkien, Gibson, and Madonna coexist and interact. Authorship

is not only displaced from a solitary voice, it is exploded. The MUDs are authored by

their players, thousands of people in all, often hundreds of people at a time, all logged

on from different places. And the self is not only decentered but multiplied without

limit. There is an unparalleled opportunity to play with one’s identity and “try out”

new ones.” (Turkle, S., 1994, p.159)

As MUDs were so new to the academic sphere at that time, Turkle was required to unpack the

assemblage herself, and translate it as an assemblage that held meaning for her, mobilizing the

actants she was familiar with, coming from the perspective of a social scientist, to act as

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substitutes.

While not a work of Actor Network Theory, per se, in attempting to understand the player

assemblages of the study’s subjects, Turkle’s descriptions of their interactions with MUDs were

highly vivid, such that, despite the focus on the human actants in their translations of MUD

play, it was clear that non-human actants (such as the actor-network of the MUD itself) also

held an equally important role in sustaining these assemblages and experiences.

“Robert is a college freshman who in the months before beginning college had to cope

with his father’s having lost his job and disgraced his family because of alcoholism.

The job loss led to his parents’ relocation to another part of the country, far away from

all of Robert’s friends. For a period of several months, Robert, now at college,

MUDded over 80 hours a week. Around the time of a fire in his dormitory which

destroyed all his possessions, Robert was playing over 120 hours a week, sleeping four

hours a night, and only taking brief breaks to get food, which he would eat while

playing.

At the end of the school year, however, Robert’s MUD experience was essentially

over. He had gotten his own apartment; he had a job as a salesman; he had formed a

rock band with a few friends. Looking back on the experience he thought that

MUDding had served its purpose; it kept him from what he called his “suicidal

thoughts,” in essence by keeping him too busy to have them; it kept him from drinking

(“I have something more fun and safe to do”); it enabled him to function with

responsibility and competency as a highly placed administrator; it afforded an

emotional environment where he could be in complete control of how much he

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revealed about his life, about his parents, even about something as simple for other

people as where he was from.” (Turkle, S., 1994, p.163)

In the case of Robert, the translation of his player assemblage was an effect of his family’s

relocation. His player assemblage was an active form of therapy. It left an indelible effect on

the construct of his life. From an Actor Network Theory perspective, at the time that Robert

was in college, MUDs acted almost as an obligatory passage point to him functioning, and the

continued successful translation of his existence. He was so densely connected that they served

to counteract the interceding actants of suicidal ideations and alcohol.

Turkle’s transcribed illustrations of Robert and the other subject’s experiences within this

study, in many ways closely mirrored the explorations of non-human actants surrounding the

failure of an automated subway system in Aramis or the Love of Technology, which Latour had

published only a year earlier (Latour, B., 1993). It demonstrated the early outlines of an

understanding of player assemblages as being a result of heterogenous engineering – that of

unique constructs that are constantly negotiating their existence with both technological and

social actants.

VIRTUAL CLASSISM

As the academic community further interrogated MUDs, the spheres of development and

academia became more densely intertwined (the study of MUDs and eventually MMORPGs

became a more serious exercise, as opposed to a fringe novelty). Inevitably, the construct of the

understanding of the player assemblage (important to note that this does not mean the player

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assemblage itself, rather the construct of the academic or theoretical understanding of what a

player assemblage is) quickly became, more or less, punctualized from repeated translation.

The first, and perhaps most prominent example of this can be found in Richard Bartles’ Hearts,

clubs, diamonds, spades: Players who suit MUDs (Bartle, R., 1996). It was borne out of a

drawn-out debate in November 1989 to May 1990 between Bartle and fifteen to thirty

experienced participants in a MUD that he was an administrator for, MUD2 (Bartle, R., 1985).

Within it Bartle proposed four dominant non-exclusive player typologies: killers, achievers,

socializers, and explorers,

“The four things that people typically enjoyed personally about MUDs were:

Achievement within the game context.

Players give themselves game-related goals, and vigorously set out to achieve them.

This usually means accumulating and disposing of large quantities of high-value

treasure, or cutting a swathe through hordes of mobiles (i.e. monsters built in to the

virtual world).

ii)

Exploration of the game.

Players try to find out as much as they can about the virtual world. Although initially

this means mapping its topology (ie. exploring the MUD's breadth), later it advances to

experimentation with its physics (ie. exploring the MUD's depth).

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iii)

Socialising with others.

Players use the game's communicative facilities, and apply the role-playing that these

engender, as a context in which to converse (and otherwise interact) with their fellow

players.

iv)

Imposition upon others.

Players use the tools provided by the game to cause distress to (or, in rare

circumstances, to help) other players. Where permitted, this usually involves acquiring

some weapon and applying it enthusiastically to the persona of another player in the

game world.

So, labelling the four player types abstracted, we get: achievers, explorers, socialisers

and killers.” (Bartle, R., 1996, p.4-5)

Bartle outlined two component pairs, each pair measured on a continuum, that determined

which of the four types a player was, whether a player preferred interacting with other players,

or whether a player enjoyed interacting with the world; and whether a player preferred acting

on the world or other players, or allowing the world and other players to dictate.

As can be seen, Bartle placed great emphasis on human actants, elevating them to the exclusion

of non-human actants in the translation of the play experience. In fact, the way that it was

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described, the four factors that determined a player type indicated that the model was a

transactional one. Too much emphasis on player to player interaction, and the MUD would

become little more than a glorified chat room; too much emphasis on the world, and it becomes

a virtual landscape with little more to do than exploration. At the same time, allowing the world

to dictate the actions of a player too often, or, in Bartle’s words “interacting”, and the play

experience becomes a glorified movie; alternatively, giving player’s too much choice, and the

MUD becomes too shallow, the actions of the player, monotonous.

But Bartle’s contention that the key to a MUD (or, similarly, an MMORPG) being successfully

translated relied on catering to the desires of human actants belies the fact that within his very

descriptions of his typology of player assemblages, non-human, technological actants play just

as an important role. In fact, if we take Bartle’s framework to its logical conclusion, a MUD or

MMORPG is the result of the interpellation between the player assemblage and the virtual

world. The virtual world effects the player as much as the player effects it. The resultant

assemblage is a living, constantly evolving, mobilizing and substituting, heterogeneously

engineered construct that is both a network and an actant. The complexity of all of the

combined connections made, negotiated, substituted, strengthened and interceded, necessarily

leads to the translation of MUDs players and virtual worlds that are as unique in composition as

the physical, social and technological realities that we live within. Turkle’s earlier work

reflected as much. So, to break down the player assemblage into a typology of four categories:

killers, achievers, socializers and explorers, as Bartle had done, can then be seen as grossly

reductive.

Another prolific MMORPG theorist, as noted in the Literature Review, Nick Yee, was also

critical of Bartle’s model, citing that the four player types were purely theoretical and possessed

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no instrument for which players could be assessed. This meant that it could not be determined

whether the components that comprised the explorer, achiever, socializer and killer player types

closely correlated, or not, and that “[…] any attempted assessment of players based on this

model might be creating player types rather than measuring them.” (Yee, N., 2006, p.2)

From an Actor Network perspective, what Yee had pointed out was that Bartle had prematurely

assumed the fifteen or so individuals who had taken part in the initial discussion, or translation

of his model of player typologies, as “[…] highly experienced players, of rank wizard or witch

[…]” (Bartle, R., 1996, p.3), could effect “ready made science”. In effect, what Bartle was

describing was the individual bodies, who interacted with other individual bodies in the

creation of a thought construct that existed within their network of interactions. There were

“[…] several hundred bulletin-board postings, some of considerable length […]” (Bartle, R.,

1996, p.3) but, as Bartle had punctualized this process of translation from the outset, and the

reader is only ever given visibility through the obligatory passage point of Bartle’s brief

descriptions, the actor-network assemblage of the player typology existed within the network

behind that lens, and only within that network. Hence, the difficulty in continuing to translate

this assemblage when outside of it. Bartle discounted the process of heterogeneous engineering,

where these individual bodies were seen to be linked together through heterogeneous

instruments, texts and technologies (such as bulletin-board posts and MUDs); and where,

together, the human and non-human were constantly negotiating, redefining and interpellating

the structure of the player assemblage. Consequently, Bartle failed to realize that his model of

player typology was, in fact, also a network of human, and non-human actants.

To illustrate what Bartle’s oversight meant, take, for example, Latour’s realization that Louis

Pasteur was not simply a born researcher from whom the discoveries of vaccination and

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pasteurization magically flowed (Latour, B., 1988),

“[…] work by Bruno Latour shows that Pasteur was nothing more than a network of

heterogeneous elements (Latour 1988). This Pasteur-network was made of a lot of bits

and pieces: laboratories, domesticated strains of bacteria, notebooks, statistics, and

even--as Gerald Geison has treacherously suggested -- vaccines chemically treated by

his colleague Joseph-Henri Toussaint. And one could add many more: the farm at

Pouilly le Fort where sheep lived and died in infected fields; the journalists who

witnessed Pasteur’s spectacular experiment on the farm; the French electors Pasteur

sought to convince; and so on, and so on. The argument is that Pasteur was not a single

entity, not just a body and a soul. Or rather it is that he was much more than a body

who interacted with other bodies. That, instead, he was a combination of a great

number of different elements which produced Pasteur-the-great-researcher.” (Callon,

M., Law, J., 1997, p.167-168)

Despite this, Bartle’s model of player typology still strongly influences the development of

future role playing games and MMORPG designers to this day (Kumar, J., et. al., 2018)

Nick Yee, in finding fault in Bartle’s model of player typology, would eventually translate it

into a more complex component-based model of his own. Using a factor analysis approach on

the results of a 39 item questionnaire answered by 3200 respondents, Yee described three main

components: Achievement, Social and Immersion.

These were further divided into ten subcomponents: Advancement, Mechanics and Competition

under the main component of Achievement; Socializing, Relationship and Teamwork under the

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main component of Social; and Discovery, Role-playing, Customization and Escapism under

the main component of Immersion (Yee, N., 2006, p.6).

In large part, Yee’s work refuted the assumptions of Bartle. The components and

subcomponents did not determine player type nor were they mutually exclusive – being

achievement oriented did not preclude one from also being socially oriented, as was the case in

Bartle’s model of player typology,

“The subcomponents generated by the factor analysis are NOT player types. It is NOT

the case that we have come up with 10 boxes that we can put players in, but rather, we

have revealed 10 subcomponents that co-exist and together reveal the motivations of a

player. Bartle assumed that your underlying motivations “suppressed” each other. […]

The assumption of polarized motivations is also not supported by the correlations of

the current data set.” (Yee, N., 2006, p.8)

This was the largest study of MMORPG players ever conducted. Yet, Yee’s factor analysis that

led to the creation of his ten subcomponents, could only account for 60% of the overall

variance. This meant, inversely, that 40% of the responses couldn’t be accounted for,

demonstrating a high level of variability and a statistically significant number of players who

didn’t neatly align with nor exhibit the behaviour identified by his component model. It

indicates the heterogeneity of each of the participant’s player assemblages.

This is, perhaps, unsurprising as the original tool with which these responses were generated,

Yee’s questionnaire, was comprised of bounded questions derived from “ready made” science,

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in essence, observations made by previous theorists,

“First, a list of possible motivations for playing an MMORPG was generated from

existing literature (such as Bartle’s Types) or open-ended responses from earlier

surveys […]

These motivations were then converted into survey questions, such as:

How important is it you to level up as fast as possible?

Not Important At All

Slightly Important

Moderately Important

Very Important

Tremendously Important” (Yee, N., 2006, p.3)

While the questions posed could be answered in an open fashion, as seen in the choices offered

to respondents they immediately effect punctualization by forcing a response that fits into one

of five possibilities, and removing the power and nuance of heterogeneity beyond the limited

factor of perceived importance.

Furthermore, save for questions exploring a player’s emotional perspectives on the virtual non-

human actants within the MMORPG environment, non-human actants were, largely, ignored.

This is especially so when considering those external but connected to these virtual worlds,

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“How interested are you in the precise numbers and percentages underlying the game

mechanics? (i.e, chance of dodging an attack, the math comparing dual-wield to two-

handed weapons, etc.)

[…]

How much do you enjoy working with others in a group? […]

How important is it to you to be well-known in the game? […]

How much do you enjoy exploring the world just for the sake of exploring it?” (Yee,

N., 2006, p.39-43)

Yee acknowledged that the component model he was proposing could only partially illustrate

the motivations of MMORPG players, and, by extension the player assemblage itself – that

they were complex, diverse and multi-dimensional, in other words, heterogeneous. So, in order

to provide the detail that the component model was found to be lacking, Yee relied on the

descriptions of respondents he had collated over the five years prior to this study. An approach

that, coincidentally, was similar to the process of tracing within Actor Network Theory

practice,

“[…] if we don’t understand why players are in these online worlds to begin with, then

we can never truly appreciate the more complex phenomena that emerge from these

environments.

Oftentimes, we project our motivations onto others and we fail to appreciate what

“fun” is to someone else. The following narratives show how relative fun can be and

the sheer diversity of ways of deriving satisfaction from the same construct. “Fun”

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means something different to different people […] shedding light on where more work

still needs to be done.” (Yee, N., 2006, p.14)

For the most part, Yee only published excerpts of longer transcripts, thereby punctualizing

responses to match component categories, which he acknowledges “[…] might create the

illusion that players are more single-dimensional than they really are.” But, qualifies that “This

was done to make it easier to understand the spectrum of motivations” (Yee, N., 2006, p.14),

hinting at how broad and complex MMORPG player assemblages are when taken in their

entirety. But even these brief accounts provided by Yee reveal the most interesting glimpse

throughout his study into why someone might play an MMORPG, and, inversely, why someone

might leave one, the research question of this thesis,

“It gives me the illusion of progress, I know that. I hate the level of frustrated progress

in the [real world] so I play the game and [level] up instead. It is *crack* for the

achievement center of the brain, like cocaine affects [sic] the pleasure center. [WoW,

M, 34]” (Yee, N., 2006, p.14)

“Part of the reason I play online games is to experience a sense of achievement. When

I put a good deal of time and effort into an in-game task, I am rewarded in a way that's

meaningful and measurable: […] The real world isn't like that. In the real world, there

are few quantitative rewards for the effort one puts out merely 'to live'. In the real

world, you have to run errands, shop at the grocery store, clean your house, do your

taxes, keep all your papers organized, do the laundry, etc. etc.. There is no sense of

'achievement' or forward progression in these things -- they are merely daily must do's.

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[…]

As children, we are taught to 'achieve' by being given milestones with specific goals.

'If you eat your green beans, you can have ice cream.' 'If you get an A in biology, you

can get your driver's license.' […] we are always being judged both quantitatively and

qualitatively as we make our way slowly and methodically to 'adulthood'. There are

direct relationships between 'doing' and 'accomplishing' that I think disappear to an

extent after we enter the 'real world'. Achieving becomes much harder, especially if

you're not sure what goals you want to set for yourself to begin with […] There are no

rewards hanging out there waiting for you to pluck them. You have to go out and

create them, then strive to achieve them, and it takes a lot of effort, and a lot of time

[…] playing online games allows me to find a positive outlet for that need to achieve

on a regular basis. [WoW, F, 37]” (Yee, N., 2006, p.15-16)

“All I did was 'poking' other people (helping them to insert there [sic] implants). So in

other words I just helped some fellow players and my only reward for doing so was

there [sic] thanks. But I found that experience to be very rewarding and did that again

on several occasions. I would call that socializing just for the fun of it […] [WoW, M,

28]” (Yee, N., 2006, p.22)

The above excerpts are just three examples of participant recounting their play experience

within World of Warcraft, but it is clear from just these few that non-human actants played an

integral part in the translation of these participants’ player assemblages.

In the first example, while it is punctualized, the phrase “[…] frustrated progress […]” (Yee,

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N., 2006, p.14) hints at a much larger and complex actor-network mobilized in support of that

particular assemblage. The second example elaborates on a similar sentiment further.

In the participant’s descriptions, when she states, "When I put a good deal of time and effort

into an in-game task, I am rewarded in a way that's meaningful and measurable: I gain a new

item, I finish a difficult quest and get experience points or money, I gain a higher level of

proficiency in a skill or ability, or I gain notoriety in the virtual game community.” (Yee, N.,

2006, p.15) she is, in fact, listing the many non-human (and human) networks, and actants

mobilized in supporting the continued successful translation of her play experience. As she

describes the moments and experiences in her past that have led her to enroll these actants, we

discover entelechies (i.e. potentialities, something that will be explored in greater detail later in

this text) years, perhaps even decades, in the making, that illuminate the sprawling nature of the

actor-network that is her player assemblage,

“As children, we are taught to 'achieve' by being given milestones with specific goals.

‘If you eat your green beans, you can have ice cream.' 'If you get an A in biology, you

can get your driver's license.' 'If you work hard at school, you will get into a good

college.' 'If you get a 90 on a test, that is an A-'.” (Yee, N., 2006, p.15)

In other words, the desire or motivation to achieve, as an obligatory passage point through

which problematization occurred, was not an essentialist part of her being. It was rooted in

childhood. Without the “green beans”, without the “A in biology”, without school, and without

all the other non-human and human actants mobilizing in order to support and effect that

particular translation or desire, it is likely that at this point she would never have sought to

mobilize World of Warcraft and thereby effect the translation of her MMORPG player

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assemblage.

The final example, although brief, illustrates how unique each conception of “socializing” can

be, and hence, by extension, how unique the translation of each player assemblage can be. In

this instance, simply “poking”, or inserting virtual implants into other avatars, despite involving

little communication, constituted an act of socializing for the participant.

What this and previous accounts demonstrate, in combination with the inconclusive outcomes

of the works of Richard Bartle and Nick Yee among others, is that both developers and

theorists of MMORPGs rushed into creating taxonomies and categorizing player assemblages.

This was in an attempt to punctualize players into more easily understood black boxes or nodes

that could be readily deployed for further study or to enhance commercial outcomes. However,

this was never able to happen as, despite efforts, the “science” behind this has never been

“settled”.

The attempt by the MMORPG theorists to rush through a translation of a not fully understood

conception of the MMORPG player led to the creation of an equally fragile model of player

typologies. It attained wide use because it seemed to make sense, but it was, in essence, a

mirage. Errors became readily apparent through repeated translation, as Yee would attest

(2006).

What this next section of the chapter aims to do, through a selection of the accounts of this

study’s participants, and like a “blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective

traveler” (Latour, B., 2005, p.9), as Latour once referred to Actor Network theorists, is take the

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time to trace certain networks and actants that serve to support a player assemblage. This is to

demonstrate the necessity of tracing for still new constructs and assemblages such as

MMORPGs and MMORPG players, but that has been rarely done since the very earliest

interrogations. It is done in the hope that what will be revealed will allow the assemblage to

“speak” or interpellate with the reader, to allow for the translation of the moment whereby a

particular player assemblage is able to come into being, while consciously observing the

principals of Actor Network Theory.

TRACING SNOWFLAKES

In the first section of this chapter we were introduced to one of the participants of this study,

Emhati and an excerpt from his account describing his MMORPG player assemblage. Here it is

again, this time, a full account demonstrating the heterogeneity of MMORPG player

assemblages.

It can be roughly divided into three sections. Firstly, an account of the translation of his own

player assemblage. Secondly, an account of the non-human (and human) actants that both

support and intercede with successful translation of player assemblages. And finally, when

fully traced, the account of the non-human obligatory passage point that Emhati comes to find

was essential to the translation of his player assemblage but only revealed to him after

translation failure had occurred, when, like a computer that has malfunctioned and is in need of

repair, the constituent actor-networks that had once supported it are unpacked and laid bare.

“So yeah, I lived in China for a little while and my Internet was a problem, and if I

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was raiding, or if I was doing dungeons or something, I would occasionally lag, and I'd

quit party or D/C [disconnect], and leave a couple guys hanging, so I kind of got into

crafting because it was a little bit more solo, a bit less lag dependent, and then when I

got a little deeper into it, I really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of the crafting system in

XIV and how you're kind of juggling a lot of moving parts in trying to see how you

can get the highest quality item and beyond that there's the puzzle of how to make

money the best and what to put on the market board and different things, market

board’s like that, and I really just enjoyed that and it allowed me to continue to

participate in the game even while my Internet wasn't always so great.” (Interview

with Emhati, 2017)

In just this first section, while a number of virtual non-human actants are seen to be supporting

Emhati’s player assemblage, such as the components that go into crafting virtual goods, virtual

currency, and the virtual marketboard where the goods are sold, really, the obligatory passage

point that allows for all of these to be enrolled and mobilized is the massive assemblage of the

Internet infrastructure in China. Its effect is such that it actually shapes the way Emhati’s player

assemblage is translated. Translation error occurs when “[…] raiding, or […] doing dungeons

[…]” (Interview with Emhati, 2017). When these are unpacked, unsurprisingly, what is

revealed is both a delicate and complex network of actants being translated hundreds, perhaps,

thousands of times, over the course of a raid, or dungeon. Just the simple act of pressing the key

of “W”, means that the switch under it needs to actuate and create a charge, which is then

interpreted by the logic board in the keyboard, which then feeds what can be described as a

“request” back, through a cable to his computer. That is then interpreted by interpellations of

numerous non-human actants, both physical and virtual, including the code of the client

application for the MMORPG, and the central processing unit, both of which are complex,

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densely bundled technological actants with thousands of actants and networks supporting their

delicate assemblages. The central processing unit fires that command out to the Internet via the

networking interface. That request needs to make its way through a dense maze of not only

thousands of kilometres of copper and fibre optic cabling, through numerous exchanges,

routers, and Internet service providers, but also through numerous regulatory frameworks

policing data, and organizational policies that both interact with and govern these non-human

networks. For example, in this case, one very dense connection that would have to be

negotiated is with the actor network contained within the regulatory framework governing

Internet usage in China, which, much like the central processing unit within Emhati’s

computer, is also a densely bundled and complex assemblage, supported by thousands if not

tens of thousands of human and non-human actants problematizing, persuading, enrolling,

mobilizing, and interceding with one another. This is all before being received by a computer

server within the datacentre housing the code governing the particular expression of the

MMORPG virtual world Emhati, the avatar, is a part of. Once interpreted by the internal

architecture and code within the server, a return response undergoes all of the above again, but

in reverse, before being translated on the computer screen as the avatar of Emhati running

forwards. When successfully translated, the complex negotiations between these interconnected

actants described previously is expected to all happen in a matter of milliseconds, hundreds of

thousands, or even millions, of times an hour across the globe.

Considering the widely dispersed and massively complex actor-network mobilized to translate

an avatar’s actions within the virtual world, it isn’t surprising then that the tight tolerances,

calcified through repeated translations too numerous to count, inevitably effect translation

error.

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Whether it’s a copper cable somewhere within the assemblage breaking, or a server computer

becoming overloaded, or even, perhaps, a censor employed by the Chinese government having

a particularly bad day at work, a translation error in any of the thousands of actants mobilized

to support this assemblage could lead to a perceptible delay between the interface receiving a

command and it being reflected on the corresponding screen to “[…] leave a couple of guys

hanging.” This is punctualized as “lag” effected by the Internet infrastructure in China,

supporting and shaping Emhati’s player assemblage. Without it, it is likely that his avatar

would never have become what it was now. In essence, Emhati had his play style completely

changed by what had become an obligatory passage point for the construct of his MMORPG

play: lag. Instead of raiding dungeons, he effectively became a crafter and a virtual small

business operator.

“My work was pretty easy, and not a lot of preparation as long as I was kind of

focused during class there was little that could have affected me in that respect, […]

but you know while I was at work in China with Final Fantasy XIV and just reading

some different things on Reddit or shooting some private messages between guild

mates and it's just kind of a between classes thing. No I don't think it ever affected me

while I was working in teaching while in China […]

When Final Fantasy XIV came out I got a beta invite and I really enjoyed it, but I

would say that it kind of... things got a little stale right after about 2.2, patch 2.2, and

so I stopped playing for a little while. I was working a lot in China and I was doing

other things, so I kind of moved away from it for a bit, but when Heavensward was on

its way, I came back. A lot of friends returned as well, and we, and I really got into it

at that point. When my wife and I left China I sold my computer and part of the reason

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I haven't been playing since is that I've been really busy with responsibilities as an

adult in trying to find a full time job, trying to find a place for my wife and I to live

and get settled, and taking care of my son, and I really haven't had a lot of time for

games in general, much less MMOs, and, yeah, I've logged on a couple times and

chatted with the guys, did a bit of crafting, but I wouldn't say that I really returned, and

I am really debating with myself whether or not I should continue to try or not,

because, I mean, there's a certain aspect of after you leave an MMO for so long there's

a lot of catching up to do, and that can be, sometimes, a challenge, and fun, but

sometimes it can be very daunting and for me right now the social aspect isn't pulling

me back enough. I've got a lot of co-workers and some friends here now outside of

games, and so I'm fulfilled in that aspect, but I do enjoy the game itself, and so that's

always kind of drawn me back some, and... So it's... There's a debate there, internally,

and has been for a little while, whether I should continue to put in effort into trying to

return to the MMO, to Final Fantasy XIV […] the early patches, a lot of people would

say, and I would agree, that it was a little backwards. The very first patch they released

had a lot of very very high end, high level typical content, and it was great. It was

challenging, it was all brand new because they'd just revamped the entire game. And

then when 2.1 and 2.2 came out, they released the lower end raids for bigger groups

and more casual players, and so people who were already running and beating the

cutting edge content, high end raids, were bored because they could just roll through it

with minimal effort, and it didn't really present a challenge, and it wasn't really

engaging to these skilled players that had already been beating the designed raids for

them, for high end content, and I, personally, didn't quite jump into it, but there was a

lot of culture, and there's a lot of atmosphere around people kind of just rolling

through the new easier raids, and I was one of those people. I didn't quite do the high

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end raids, but I was rolling through the lower end raids, and that culture, that

disengaged atmosphere that there wasn't a lot that was presenting a challenge, or

engaging at that time, and, to be fair, the game was fairly new, so there just wasn't

enough time for it to come out, and the developers were doing a good job, and towards

the end, really, as I said earlier, I came back just before the expansion, and at the time

there was a ton more and good content then, and it was, for me I just needed to give

the developers some time to put in some more challenging content and it was a lot of

engaging and interesting for me. […] it was definitely an atmosphere of checked out,

and a culture of checked out, especially if you were doing anything outside of your

own personal free company, and you were checking forums or you were checking

Reddit, or the official forums. There was a lot of checked out, waiting for updates, for

new content, attitude from a lot of players. […] a lot of people leaving. Many, I would

say, would've come back, kind of like I did, when there was more content to be had,

but, you know, some exodus, and looking for something different. I know that a couple

of my free company mates tried out some different games that released at that time, for

them. None of them quite hit the spot, but, yeah, I would say a lot of people were

looking for something more.

[…] MMOs are a huge time sink and as much as I do enjoy them, I need to spend my

time doing other things, and I still use games as a bit of an escape, and a bit of

relaxation for me, but it's a lot more short pace games these days, like, I've been

playing a bit of Clash Royale where the battles on there last 3 minutes tops...and get

into about 3 battles which last about 10 minutes tops, so you can get it all in, and if

you got 30 minutes you got 3 rounds to go and you get a bit of relaxation and a bit of

escapism right there, and you don't... It's not much of a time sink.” (Interview with

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Emhati, 2017)

This second section of Emhati’s account gives a very clear description of what interceding

actants look like, that both human and non-human actants can effect others and intercede in

ways unforeseen, bringing into sharp relief the limits of the developer’s influence on a

constantly evolving assemblage that is constantly enrolling, mobilizing, translating and

substituting its constituent actor-networks.

While it is unsurprising that the rigors of family life, taking care of a young child and the

pressure to find a fulfilling job would intercede upon the translation of the play of an

MMORPG, perhaps, more surprising, is that an MMORPG itself could intercede upon the play

experience of its constituent players. In response to the wide gap in difficulty between the most

challenging encounters and the rest of the MMORPG, developers introduced new content.

While logically sensible, this placed pre-eminence on the sentiment of human players and

demonstrated the hubris of developers. As with many works of heterogenous engineering, the

effects could not have been predicted. The new content allowed for the player assemblage to

translate much more quickly through rapid consumption. Repeated translation led to

calcification and brittleness, whereby mobilized actants were locked into place and the

tolerances for substitution lessened. Inadvertently, the introduction of new content by

developers had interceded upon the sustainability of the MMORPG.

“Most recently, an action to leave, I sold my computer to a friend because it was

difficult to try and logistically bring a whole large desktop on an airplane back to

America, and so that whole move there, and then I've been using my money for other

things, so I haven't put money towards a computer, and it just hasn't been financially

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smart yet, I mean, I need an apartment, just had a kid, and got a lot of expenses for

different things, and a computer was one of them, so not having a computer has kind

of forced my hand a little bit, but at the same time even if I had a computer I don't

think I would have been playing recently. Just kind of moving along with my new

family and trying to look for a full time job. It's difficult and it's taking a lot of my

time, and so, yeah, I haven't had a lot of time for it. At the same time I haven't had the

desire for it, I've just been wanting to do these other things, and MMOs take a back

seat to that.

I think maybe I gave a couple of people a couple of items, but not much, because at

the time in my head, I thought that I was going to come to America and put together a

computer within a month or two months and return. The time that I left I imagined that

I would be returning, so I didn't really do a lot. I think I paid off some debts to a

couple of people I owed some money to or whatever.

[…] At one point I just kind of realized that I wasn't going back at the rate that I had

originally envisioned, and I was just OK with that. My wife and I were late into her

pregnancy, and I was trying to support here, and so it was just... One day I was just

like, ‘Well, I'm probably not going to go back any time soon, so I probably won't play

any time soon either.’” (Interview with Emhati, 2017)

The final, and, perhaps, most interesting section within Emhati’s account recalls an important

technological actant found to be responsible for effecting the motivation to translate the

MMORPG player assemblage, but this was only able to be determined after it had

disintegrated. Like sifting through remains, its disintegration allowed for reflection and

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unpacking that wouldn’t have been able to occur while in the midst of its translation.

Emhati’s final statement in his recount, “[…] ‘Well, I'm probably not going to go back any time

soon, so I probably won't play any time soon either.’” (Interview with Emhati, 2017)

demonstrates his recognition that he would not be returning to play the MMORPG “any time

soon”. It is also the recognition that the disintegration of his player assemblage was complete,

or, seen inversely, that the successful translation of his exit was complete.

While the traditional pre-eminence placed on the human actant would deem Emhati’s wife and

child most important to trace as, potentially, interceding actants, there are two statements made

within his account that reveal a technological actant that both defined his player assemblage as

an obligatory passage point, and effected the motivation to translate, “Most recently, an action

to leave, I sold my computer to a friend because it was difficult to try and logistically bring a

whole large desktop on an airplane back to America [...] I thought that I was going to come to

America and put together a computer within a month or two months and return.” (Interview

with Emhati, 2017)

Emhati’s personal desktop computer was essential to his translation of the player assemblage. It

effected the motivation for it to be translated. By virtue of its very existence it effected the

moments of problematization, for example, connecting to the Internet infrastructure of China

and being effected by it; interessement, through Reddit forums and recipes for crafting virtual

gadgets; enrolment, through intermediary technological interfaces and being readily visible and

accessibly; and, mobilization of all this to allow the translation of the player assemblage to

occur. Without this particular technological actant, this process could never have occurred. This

is clearly demonstrated when, after leaving China, despite no longer being subject to “laggy”

Internet infrastructure, he found he had no motivation to continue the translation of the player

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assemblage.

The second example, while significantly shorter, is no less interesting or unique,

“Well, I've always been kind of a math guy. So once I've started getting down to the

nitty gritty then I'm having to... At that point I also started to theorycraft at that point

[sic], figuring out how DPS worked, and that was very entertaining to me. And it was

also... I think a part of it was that it was during high school, and I was very bored of

high school. And so I had the time to sink into this, and it was more mentally

stimulating that a lot of classes. I would theorycraft during, in between lessons in

math. So I guess that was also part of the reason why. I mean, just because this was

more stimulating. […] It didn't really make a big impact on how I played the game,

because the stats were, basically, as we knew, just kind of like a personal achievement.

Me, I would actually apply some skills that I know towards a certain goal that I wanted

to achieve. Because up until then math had just been an abstract thing that you used to

solve problems that were given to you on a piece of paper. You knew you are

supposed to do it to solve, rather than having to figure out what you need to do to solve

a problem.” (Interview with Raven, 2017)

For Raven, mobilizing mathematics was such an important component actant of his player

assemblage, it could be considered the obligatory passage point through which his MMORPG

play occurred. Much of this experience occurred outside of the virtual environment, involving

unpacking the algorithms that defined how the actions within were translated, or

“theorycrafting”. In fact, it could be surmised from his account that actually playing within the

MMORPG environment was less important than, and object to, this more stimulating task.

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In essence, Raven is akin to a virtual physicist. For Raven, the MMORPG’s virtual

environment was a research site to test assumptions, and it is the algorithms that define the

rules of this virtual environment that also define his player assemblage. While his actions don’t

align with what would be considered normative by the models of MMORPG play created by

theorists and developers such as Yee and Bartle, Raven’s translation of the MMORPG player

assemblage can still, conceivably, be considered as effecting what can be seen as a play

experience, demonstrating the heterogeneity of these complex constructs.

This third and final example demonstrates how the non-human actants within an MMORPG,

more specifically, the avatars within them, can act upon the player, demonstrating that the play

experience is never an entirely human construct,

“Makes me feel a little crazy when I do it, but I have two characters that I main,

Shaede and Killion. In my head they're like twins, they’re siblings and I make up

excuses why I'm playing one more than the other because I feel bad about not playing

them. Which feels crazy. But I guess, the game feels different when I play each of

them. It feels a little a little darker, a little sharper, a little sadder when I play Shaede.

That's how I feel really how she feels or how she experienced this world. When I play

Killion, it’s kind of brighter. I see a lot of little details in the game. He runs around and

talks to everybody. Shaede does that too but I notice when I play with him because I'm

taking my time. It's hard to explain. That sounds completely crazy. […] It's kind of

like I’m channeling different parts of my personality. I could be silly and upbeat on

Shaede but most of the time when I’m experiencing story, it's kind of like ‘Oh this is

sad.’ It's kind of like more serious to me as supposed to Killion is like ‘Crap, this is

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happening. I got to fix it.’ Shaede is kind of my ‘I see this. I'll do something about it.

This sucks.’ Killion is my ‘I can do something to help these people. I want to do this.’

I guess like different aspects of my personality that allows me to lean more that way.”

(Interview with Shae, 2017)

It had been assumed in previous models of player typology that the nature of the MMORPG

play experience was one that was entirely determined by the proclivities of the human actant;

that if an avatar preyed on others it was because the player controlling the avatar was, innately,

a killer; and that if an avatar decided to socialize with others instead, that the player was also,

innately, a socializer. Not only does this place pre-eminence on the human, but it consequently

also ignores the effect avatars contribute in translating a player assemblage. The choice to

employ the term vassal previously was a conscious one. While an avatar might normally be

seen as subservient to the player, it has as much of an effect on the player as a vassal body may

have to a lord. This is demonstrated in Shae’s account above.

Shae explicitly describes how her two avatars effect her; that she felt bad about not playing

them equally, and that the very nature of her play is dependent upon the particular avatar she

cohabits the MMORPG experience with. Where one might assume that the human player is the

obligatory passage point through which the translation of an MMORPG avatar must pass, as

demonstrated previously, this sometimes isn’t the case. In this specific instance, the role of

obligatory passage point is actually occupied by the avatars themselves.

Both avatars, Shaede and Killion, effect her play experience in different ways, and, in turn,

effect different emotional responses as well. As she describes, Shaede engenders a more

depressed emotional response, while Killion evokes a more practical, even manic, response.

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They even effect the way the virtual world is seen by the human player. As Shae recounts,

Shaede the avatar occupies a world of darkness and sharp contrasts, while Killian occupies a

distinctly brighter one. It is almost as if each of Shae’s avatars were translating an entirely

different MMORPG player assemblage each time she cohabits the play experience with one of

them. And while she rationalizes this by saying, “It's kind of like I’m channelling different

parts of my personality […]” (Interview with Shae, 2017), it could be argued that, without the

avatars themselves, she would not have been able to “channel” those different parts of her

personality. This explains both the very necessity of non-human actants in the translation of

player assemblages, as well as the resultant complex and unique nature of each of these

assemblages due to the multitude of actants and networks involved.

These examples above, as well as the longer excerpts provided by Yee (2006) demonstrate the

heterogeneity of player assemblages; that a multitude of both non-human and human actants

can effect their translations and that to try to boil that down to a series of typologies is highly

reductive.

The commercial implications of these findings mean that developers can sometimes no longer

simply address the long held assumption of placing pre-eminence on the human player, but that

the sustainability of MMORPG populations relies on addressing the interceding actants that

arise from a multitude of networks both human and non-human. For example, Internet

infrastructure and hardware in the case of Emhati’s experience; the algorithmic meta game

being conducted by Raven; or the needs of avatars themselves, in the case of Shae.

When investigating deeper into the heterogeneity of these actor-networks, it is important to

understand that the networks of effects described in the accounts previously did not come from

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nowhere. They are the crystallization of entelechies, potentialities, which started forming

months, years or even decades, ago. The next chapter will explore these, and the moments that

demonstrate how the translation of an MMORPG player assemblage can be a process years in

the making.

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CHAPTER SIX: YEARS IN THE MAKING

“I played Final Fantasy VII when I was a kid in 1997, so when I was 7-8 years old. My dad

bought us a PlayStation, and we ended up getting that game after seeing it in Game Informer, if

that was even around back then. It was whatever the game magazine was at the time. And my

dad bought us that game, and we, me and my brother, just started playing and then we just

followed up by finding out about other Final Fantasy titles.” (Interview with Dafina, 2017)

The original intent of this thesis was the investigation of players leaving MMORPGs, in Actor

Network Theory terms, the disintegration of the MMORPG player assemblage and concurrent

translation of a post-MMORPG existence. However, what became abundantly clear throughout

this process of interviewing and tracing participants’ accounts of their player assemblages and

their play experiences, and unpacking these blackboxed experiences, is that MMORPG play,

the MMORPG player and the use of the term MMORPG itself is somewhat of a misnomer,

because, in fact, none of these assemblages are monolithic constructs. When unpacked it was

found that many of the participants had started the process of translating their player

assemblage many years prior, some before MMORPG was even a term coined by Richard

Garriot in 1997 (Asbjørn Jøn, 2010, p.97), and the entelechies or potentialities that form the

primordial soup from which these assemblages evolve and arise, sometimes stretched back in

time even further.

In the account above, Dafina recalls her father purchasing a Playstation for her, and the

obligatory passage point of the Game Informer magazine, which prompted her into first

translating her player assemblage within Final Fantasy VII (Square Enix, 1997). She goes on to

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say that this is what led her into exploring later iterations of the Final Fantasy franchise, which

led her to translate the MMORPG player assemblage we find today in the research site, Final

Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (Square Enix, 2013)

Dafina’s account not only demonstrates the heterogenous engineering required of her first

player assemblage, effected by not only her father, but also the Playstation, and, most

importantly, a popular gaming magazine; but it further demonstrates that these moments of

translation are part of the entelechy, or potentialities, through which the later translation of her

player assemblage within the research site MMORPG are effected. Despite occurring decades

in the past, there is a direct line that can be traced between the then and now.

Without these, it is likely that the eventual translation may never have happened. In that sense,

it could be said that the MMORPG player assemblage is one that has been years in the making.

This chapter will explore this concept and unpack the entelechies involved in the translation of

participant’s player assemblages; how they arise from the disintegration of previous

assemblages, from weird and wonderful places, often having little to do with the eventual

translation they effect; and the effect of entelechies upon the translation of assemblages, and

how their very nature, as ephemeral moments of potentiality, can impact translation events that

are, chronologically, distant from them.

It will start by tracing the meaning of entelechy itself from its Aristotlean beginnings and how

it came to be co-opted as a term to define the pre-assemblage state of a network in Actor

Network Theory.

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It will then explore how the term entelechy has been deployed by previous adherents to Actor

Network Theory with the often repeated phrase from Latour, “as soon as an actor engages with

an actor-network it too is caught up in the web of relations, and becomes part of the

‘entelechy’” (2005, p.27) before diving into its use in MMORPG studies itself, and its affinity

with explorations of the identity and the self (Boone, G.W., 2008; Gorman, K., 2012).

Finally, through the accounts of this study’s participants, this chapter will illustrate how the

MMORPG player assemblage is an assemblage that starts its journey towards translation, or its

“full realization”, months, sometimes years before the first moment of problematization ever

occurs as the seeds of a network or, as Latour would have it, web of relations.

But, first, it is necessary to briefly explain what is meant by the term entelechy.

THE ENTELECHY OF ENTELECHY

To be clear, the term entelechy is one that is relatively rarely used both within Actor Network

Theory and throughout wider academia. A quick search online found that the most highly cited

examples of the term being discussed were a 1967 article by George A. Blair in the

International Philosophical Quarterly, and a book by Charlotte Witt published in 2003, Ways

of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics, which, combined, had been

cited 201 times as of 2019. Both Blair and Witt are highly respected scholars of Aristotelian

metaphysics, however, as can be seen, neither popularized the term.

That is perhaps not surprising due to the fact that, although Aristotle invented the term of

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entelecheia and entelechy by extension, he was not the one to define them. Since its invention

there has been a centuries-long intellectual battle about what it actually means. St. Thomas

Aquinas declared it as the only possible way for motion to be defined, while Descartes stated

matter-of-factly in his Principles of Philosophy that "motion […] is nothing other than the

action by which some body is transferred from one place to another" (trans. Mahoney, M.S.,

1977, part II, para. 24) or, in other words, “motion is motion” and it is irreducible. Daniel

Graham wrote an impassioned treatise on the etymology of entelecheia (1989, p.73-80) through

which he describes the permutations of the term through the works of Rudolf Hirzel, Kurt von

Fritz and, finally and most approvingly, Herman Diels, whereby he settles upon the meaning of

“being complete”; and, in return, Blair excoriated his approach (Blair, G.A., 1993, p.91-97)

through a letter of reply, four years later.

While the toing and froing of academia over the meaning of Aristotle’s entelecheia is

undoubtedly an interesting traversal of etymological history, it is not the place of this thesis to

dive deeply into it. Rather, what is of interest is what happened when Bruno Latour picked the

term up in his 1984 book, Les microbes: guerre et paix suivi de irreductions or, translated into

English in 1988 by John Law and Alan Sheridan, The Pasteurization of France, the last section

of which is dedicated to entelecheia and his principle of irreductions. Latour takes a somewhat

Descartian approach to the word, that “[…] nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible

to anything else.” (The Pasteurization of France, p.158).

To know why he took this radical approach, it is important to understand how he arrived there

in the first place, which, happily, he recounts in his uniquely Latourian, eccentric way, his

moment of epiphany to preface his treatise on irreductions,

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‘I taught at Gray in the French provinces for a year. At the end of the winter of 1972, on the

road from Dijon to Gray, I was forced to stop, brought to my senses after an overdose of

reductionism. […] To put everything into nothing, to deduce everything from almost nothing,

to put into hierarchies, to command and to obey, to be profound or superior, to collect objects

and force them into a tiny space, whether they be subjects, signifiers, classes, Gods, axioms-to

have for companions, like those of my caste, only the Dragon of Nothingness and the Dragon

of Totality. Tired and weary, suddenly I felt that everything was still left out. Christian,

philosopher, intellectual, bourgeois, male, provincial, and French, I decided to make space and

allow the things which I spoke about the room that they needed to “stand at arm’s length.” I

knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself: “Nothing can be

reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied

to everything else.”’ (The Pasteurization of France, p.162-163)

Latour added to this an almost Joycean account of the philosophical approaches, religions,

occupations and, essentially, reductionists he was repulsed by and who had driven him to

ponder a new philosophy through which to view life “[…] unreduced and set free”. From the

“[…] Hegelian [who] wishes to squeeze from events something already inherent in them” to the

“[…] Kantian [who] reduces things to grains of dust and then reassembles them with synthetic

a-priori judgments that are as fecund as a mule”; from how a “[…] French engineer attributes

potency to calculations, though these come from the practice of an old-boy network” to how ‘A

philosopher sharpens the “epistemological break” to guillotine those who have not yet “found

the sure path of a science.’” (The Pasteurization of France, p.162- 163)

In Latour’s irreducible perspective, the human and non-human can no longer be dismissed as

trivial nor an error. Every human and non-human object has the potential to be an effect or

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“force” upon others and so every human and non-human object is then equal, but none is

inherently reducible to another. Philosophy, physics, biology and psychology are as subject to

these effects as surgeons, generals, nannies, writers, chefs, biologists, engineers and romantics.

“We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these

materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are

the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting

than anything else.” (The Pasteurization of France, p.156)

So, while we can explain the forces and effects; the alliances that need to be created; and the

translations that need to occur for, say, the sap within a tree to become a rubber eraser, we

cannot explain away these forces, effects, alliances and translations by reducing the assemblage

to “rubber eraser is a result of tree sap”, nor can we elevate the human to say that the “rubber

eraser is a result of the rubber maker”. In a way, this is the inverse of punctualization that was

discussed earlier within this thesis. The universe is a tangle of negotiations of effects, and

humans are but a part of that mass.

Latour illustrated the futility of separating the “human” and “society” from the “natural”

through the description of Robinson Crusoe meeting the man he would come to call Friday, as

according to Tournier (1967, 1972).

“This shift from a reductionist to an irreductionist philosophy closely resembles what

happened to Robinson Crusoe when he finally met Friday. I am talking here not about

Defoe's story but about the original version of the myth offered to us by Tournier

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(1967/1972). His story starts off like Defoe's, but halfway through the novel Friday

carelessly blows up the powder magazine and Robinson finds himself as naked as he

was on his first day on the island. For a moment he thinks of rebuilding his stockade,

his rules, and his disciplinary measures. Then he decides to follow Friday and

discovers that the latter lives on an entirely different island. Does Friday live like a

lazy savage? No, for savagery and laziness exist only by contrast with the order

imposed on the island by Crusoe. Crusoe thinks he knows the origin of order: the

Bible, timekeeping, discipline, land registers, and account books. But Friday is less

certain about what is strong and what is ordered. Crusoe thinks he can distinguish

between force and reason. As the only being on his island, he weeps from loneliness,

while Friday finds himself among rivals, allies, traitors, friends, confidants, a whole

mass of brothers and chums, of whom only one carries the name of man. Crusoe

senses only one type of force, whereas Friday has many more up his sleeve.” (The

Pasteurization of France, p.154)

Crusoe’s preconceived notions of the way the world was ordered came crashing down through

meeting Friday who did not share the reductionist view that the island was to be conquered.

Instead Friday, in the irreducible way he negotiated with the island and forest was free to

experience it as it truly was.

Like Friday, Latour insisted that there be “[…] no a-priori ideas about what makes a force, for

it comes in all shapes and sizes.” (The Pasteurization of France, p.154) – that the world cannot

be understood through the lens of raw first principles but requires that we trace and describe the

forces and effects that can be observed.

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Within these few pages, Latour seeded the creation of a radically empirical and ontologically

flat view of the universe; of actants and networks and alliances; of translations and the

irreducible. Eventually, what would come to be formalized as generalized symmetry, and

heterogenous networks. Irreductions within The Pasteurization of France (1988) was an

important part of the entelechy that led to the translation of Actor Network Theory.

THE REDUCTION AND IRREDUCTION OF ENTELECHY

The passage above illustrated that the thread of potentialities, entelechies, can be traced back

years. Actor Network Theory itself, as an assemblage, has been building alliances, being

subject to the trials of academia, being shaped and molded by others for over four decades now.

Each moment of translation “creates time” for the next, and so in that way Actor Network

Theory is not a settled theory, it is only made durable through the forming of alliances and the

weathering of trials. Based on its own observations, it will never be settled, but then, neither

will anything else until they are lost to time.

“1.2.5 Forces that ally themselves in the course of a trial are said to be durable. Each

entelechy generates times for others by allying with or betraying them. “Time” arises

at the end of this game, a game in which most lose what they have staked.” (The

Pasteurization of France, p.164-165)

This chapter will be exploring how translations and moments in the past for this study’s

participants “created time” or led to the entelechy that eventually translated into the MMORPG

player assemblage. But before we do so and make equivalent, or reduce, the journey of these

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player assemblages to the “first principles” of Actor Network Theory, it is important to explore

how the concept of the entelechy itself has been used. As this thesis has no intention of

traversing the entirety of its use in academia, we’ll be looking at how entelechy has been

translated specifically in games and MMORPG studies, and where it has ended up.

The concept of the entelechy didn’t make it into the lexicon surrounding games studies and

peripherally connected investigations until the late 2000s and, even then, it was sparsely

deployed. Through textual analysis, there were three works that refer to it in supporting their

descriptions of, mostly, the concepts of identity and self in MMORPGs and video games in

general.

The first to take it up was Charles Soukup in 2007’s Mastering the Game: Gender and the

Entelechial Motivational System of Video Games. Soukup did not use the framework of Actor

Network theory, instead he deployed entelechy to explain the “[…] discursive logic of many

video game systems [where] the perfect "end-point" is a "complete" aggressive domination of

all others” (p.171), elaborating further that the participants of video games “[…] feel compelled

to see it to its "logical completion" regardless of the moral consequences” (p.171). Soukop uses

“entelechy” in such a way that reflects Herman Diels interpretation of a movement towards the

ideal, couching this motion within the fulfillment of the Burkean ideal of “terminal

compulsion”,

“[…] there is a kind of "terministic compulsion" to carry out the implications of one's

terminology, quite as, if an astronomer discovered by his observations and

computations that a certain wandering body was likely to hit the earth and destroy us,

he [she] would nonetheless feel compelled to argue for the correct- ness of his

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computations, despite the ominousness of the out- come.” (Burke, K., 1966, p.19)

However, this is somewhat antithetical to the core of Actor Network Theory, which rejects the

reduction of a whole series of forces and effects, mobilized actants and networks of relations, to

some amorphous essential “compulsion”. It allowed Soukop to deploy this “node” of meaning

in the further argument that “from a feminist perspective, the entelechial endpoint of complete

domination of all others has significant ethical implications” (p.171), but in effect, what

Soukop did was employ the concept of the entelechy as a means to an end; to explain away

through a punctualization, i.e. that this “entelechial system” he refers to creates the intrinsic

motivation towards mastery and dominance. Of course, in Actor Network Theory, nothing can

be created from nothing, nor can anything be reduced to anything else.

A 2008 thesis by George William Boone describing identity in World of Warcraft (Blizzard

Entertainment, 2008) takes a similarly Dielsean approach to the use of entelechy, that the game

“offers for players to “perfect” an aspect of themselves through the pursuit of in-game power”

(p.87). Boone also deploys the same Burkean philosophical framework as Soukop (2007), also

seeking to actively punctualize the observable actions of an avatar,

“Burke (1973) describes three tactics for establishing consubstantiality between a

rhetor and his or her audience. […] Thirdly, and finally, one may constitute

themselves through linguistic inaccuracy. It is this third form of identification that is

useful for us here, as it represents making oneself consubstantial with both machines

and social hierarchies. For example, I make myself consubstantial with an avatar when

I refer to my actions, via the avatar, as something “I” do.” (Boone, G.W., 2008, p.88)

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Finally, a 2012, Kyla Gorman briefly refers to it when quoting the work of Sandra LaFave

(2016), who defined entelechy as a structure of potentiality, and a movement along a

continuum towards the fulfilment of that. While LaFave’s explanation of entelechial structures

hinges upon her understanding of Aristotlean work, it, coincidentally, reflects much of the

Latourian interpretation of it as well, that “[…] Each entelechy generates times for others by

allying with or betraying them. "Time" arises at the end of this game […]” and that this

movement towards the end goal is a negotiation between both human and non- human objects,

“A knife is a better knife, and more of a knife (it has more knife being) the better it

realizes its potential to cut. Its entelechy is its knifely structure. The structure

organizes its matter and at the same time limits and determines the possibilities for that

matter. (Matter organized in a knifely way can cut, but it can't walk or carry on

photosynthesis. Those limitations are imposed by the entelechy.) The optimal knife,

the best knife, the knife with the most knifeness, is the one put together optimally to

achieve the natural purpose of a knife. We help this along (by cleaning, sharpening,

etc.) or hinder it (by leaving it out in the rain)” (LaFave, S., 2016)

Gorman deploys this in discussing the “soul” of objects within a game’s virtual world. While

he does place pre-eminence on the human, if only offhandedly, by stating that “Any given

object in a game world was put there by a designer or developer […]” (p.6) he also

acknowledges the important role that non-human actants have to play within the construct or

assemblage of the play experience, for example, he notes that “An enemy AI might be placed in

a level with the goal of making an area difficult but not impossible to traverse” (p.6).

Curiously though, he takes the concept of an object’s “soul” and reduces it, or punctualizes it

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through the concept that there can be an “ideal form”,

“Some games encourage the player to explore one of a number of ideal forms, but

most games have in their design an implicit “skilled” way to play, and encourage the

player to strive for that particular ideal.” (p.7)

The concept of the entelechy, the tangle of negotiations, relations and actants, through which

lies the potential for all of these to organize in such a way that an assemblage, construct or

“moment” can translate, is a concept which cannot be reduced. Taking LaFave’s example of the

knife, it’s knifely structure, and all of its “knifeness”, just because it can cut, and one thread

within its entelechial structure might be leading towards cutting, does not mean there is some

essentialist ideal for it to cut, some ideal form, which can appear out of nowhere – there needs

to be allied actants who can mobilize to “help this along” as are there opposing actants that can

intercede or “hinder it”. If, as Latour would, we see no “ideal form” for the knife, only the

effects that define its form, then the entelechial structure is irreduced and has the potential to

organize and translate into a multitude of forms. Like Crusoe finally giving up on imposing his

colonial will on the island and following Friday, the knife is set free.

After traversing the works of the few who had taken upon the troublesomely difficult to define

idea of the entelechy, we reach a point further away from Actor Network Theory than we

started. While Soukop (2007) and Boone (2008) both took the Dielsean approach to

interpreting the entelechy, and Gorman (2012) was influenced by the interpretation of

Aristotlean hylomorphism by Sandra LaFave (2016), whether referring to “terminal

compulsions”, “perfecting aspects”, or striving for an “ideal form”, all three end up in the same

spot (punctualization or node, if you will): the entelechy reduced to an essentialist ideal.

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Thus, it seems appropriate that, before we dive into the entelechies and entelechial structures

that have effected the translations of participants’ MMORPG player assemblages within this

study, we reorient ourselves with some of the principles of irreducibility that will be evident

through tracing (before, effectively, discarding them as reductions). For this we go back to

Latour and the dense stream of thoughts laid down on paper within The Pasteurization of

France (1988):

“1.1.1 Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else. I will call

this the "principle of irreducibility", but it is a prince that does not govern since that

would be a self-contradiction (2.6.1).” (Latour, B., 1988, p.158)

Firstly, to exist is to differ. Object A cannot be Object B, for if Object A could be said to be

reducible to Object B, then, effectively, they would not be separate entities. They would be one

and the same.

“1.1.8 No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together

and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An

eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others.

Is an actant essence or relation? We cannot tell without a trial (1.1.5.2). To stop

themselves being swept away, essences may relate themselves to many allies, and

relations to many essences.

[…]

1.2.2 Entelechies agree about nothing and can agree on everything, for nothing is, in

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and of itself, either commensurable or incommensurable. Whatever the agreement,

there is always something upon which disagreement may feed. Whatever the distance,

there is always something upon which an understanding may be built. To put it another

way, everything is negotiable.

o "Negotiation" is not a bad word so long as it is understood that everything is

negotiable, not just the shape of the table or the names of the delegates. Decisions also

have to be made on what the negotiation is all about, when it can be said to have

started or finished, what language will be spoken, and how whether we have been

understood or not will be determined. Was it a battle, a ceremony, a discussion, or a

game? This is also a matter of dispute, a dispute that continues until all the entelechies

are defined and have themselves defined the others.” (Latour, B., 1988, p. 158-159,

163-164)

Secondly, nothing is beyond relation, everything can be negotiated, there is no space between

objects that they cannot possibly bridge. There is no object that does not possess the force to

relate to, and enlist another, nor is there enough animus between objects that enemies cannot

become allied. Figuratively, there are no lines in the sand that cannot be crossed, rather there

are many lines that can be crossed so long as there is a sufficiently strong alliance to cross

them.

Furthermore, if we take the inverse of the first principle, to form an alliance is to form a single

entity, is to reduce. For A to ally with B they must negotiate relations to some degree – they

must translate, hence, simplify or reduce their counterpart. They must do this because they

themselves are irreducible. So, the reducible and irreducible are not so much contradictions,

but rather a self-reinforcing chain of relations. For relations to occur, objects must be both

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irreducible and reducible.

“1.2.4.1 Though places are distant, irreducible, and unsummable, they are nevertheless

constantly brought together, united, added up, aligned, and subjected to ways and

means. If it were not for these ways and means, no place would lead to any other.

[…]

1.2.12 Nothing is, by itself, either knowable or unknowable, sayable or unsayable,

near or far. Everything is translated […]” (Latour, B., 1988, p.164,181)

Thirdly, nothing can persist on an island. All things must be brought to bear, or translated.

Without the web of constantly negotiated relations, nothing could happen, and nothing would

exist. Everything is a tangle and mess of relations, every moment is an event cascading from

the last. The ontology of the entelechy is, like lines of dominoes falling upon each other,

innumerous tendrils made up of the many moments that define the current moment of reality.

Finally, we trace back to the first principle of Latour’s treatise, the “1.1.1” in his “theory”.

“1.2.8 Every entelechy makes a whole world for itself. It locates itself and all the

others; it decides which forces it is composed of; it generates its own time; it

designates those who will be its principle of reality. It translates all the other forces on

its own behalf, and it seeks to make them accept the version of itself that it would like

them to translate.

[…]

1.4.5 Entelechies wishing to be stronger can be said to create lines of force. They keep

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others in line. They make them more predictable.

[…]

1.5.1 A force cannot be given those forces that it arrays and convinces. By definition it

can only borrow their support (1 .3.4). Nevertheless, it will claim what does not belong

to it and will add their forces to its own in a new form: in this way potency is born.

o When an entelechy contains other entelechies which it does not contain, we say

that it contains them "potentially." The origin of potency lies in this confusion: it is no

longer possible to distinguish an actor from the allies which make it strong. From this

point on we begin to say that an axiom implies its demonstration "in potentia"; we

begin to say of a prince that he is powerful, that the being-in-itself contains the being

for itself, though only "potentially." With potency, injustice also begins, because apart

from a happy few - princes, principles, origins, bankers, and directors - other

entelechies, that is, all the remainder, become details, consequences, applications,

followers, servants, agents - in short, the rank and file. Monads are born free (1.2.8),

and everywhere they remain.

[…]

2.1.7 There are no theories. There are texts to which, like lazy potentates, we

respectfully attribute things that they have not done, inferred, foreseen, or caused.

Theories are never found alone, just as in open country there are no clover leaf

intersections without freeways to connect and redirect.” (Latour, B., 1988, p.166, 171,

176-178)

This is where we begin butting up against the works of Gorman (2012), Boone (2008) and

Soukop (2007), and this is where, once we’ve acknowledged the first three principles, we then,

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immediately, discard them.

Latour’s first principle, to which the others are beholden, is a true “prince”, wherein the power

to govern lies “in potentia”. It has the power to seed discourse, but does not govern it. This

contrasts with classical metaphysics, for example, Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum”, “I think,

therefore I am”, where everything can theoretically be drawn from first principles.

As we trace and uncover the tendrils of the entelechies that have brought to bear the player

assemblages of the participants within this study, it is important to keep in mind this thesis does

not seek to reproduce, or represent, “reality”. From the perspective of Actor Network Theory,

that would be conflating reality with the words you are reading right now, which would be a

gross reduction.

Winners and losers will be made through the discourse that is currently unfolding between

yourself, and this text, and about to unfold between yourself, this text, and others. We can never

capture the entirety of what we study, i.e. “injustices” are about to begin, where “[…] a happy

few - princes, principles, origins, bankers, and directors […]” are uncovered, and the remainder

fall in line to become “[…] details, consequences, applications, followers, servants, agents-in

short, the rank and file […]” (Latour, B., 1988, p.174). Nevertheless, what this thesis seeks to

do, like Latour’s Irreductions before it, is crystallize into something new in the universe, a

semantic actant that can seed new relations, negotiate new alliances, and prompt the translation

of new assemblages.

This thesis’ metaphysical position and veracity will be demonstrated over time by the tangle of

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relations that form around it like the friendships, enemies, tools and hindrances that Friday

contends with on his island in the earlier described Robinson Crusoe - rather than espousing a

theory, which seeks to govern the world, like Crusoe’s attempts to conquer Friday’s island, but

only creates a poverty of discourse by conflating words with reality.

THE ENTELECHY OF THE PLAYER ASSEMBLAGE

At the start of this chapter we introduced one of the participants within this study and a small

excerpt of the entelechial thread that led to the translation of her MMORPG player assemblage.

Tracing the thread further, Dafina’s extended recount not only illustrates the equal and

important roles both human and non-human actants have played throughout the translation of

her player assemblage, but also that these translations and effects that created the entelechy for

which her player assemblage was able to eventually exist, started decades prior,

“Final Fantasy is very nostalgic for me. I played a lot of the titles growing up, and I

had a few friends a couple of years ago when A Realm Reborn came out, they just

were telling me that it was fun and I would enjoy it, and I didn't have to commit a

bunch of time to it, I could play however much I wanted to or however, whatever I

could. So, I just started playing mainly because of my friends. […] The only thing I

was committing was the subscription.

[…]

I played Final Fantasy VII when I was a kid in 1997, so when I was 7-8 years old. My

dad bought us a PlayStation, and we ended up getting that game after seeing it in

Game Informer, if that was even around back then. It was whatever the game

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magazine was at the time. And my dad bought us that game, and we, me and my

brother, just started playing and then we just followed up by finding out about other

Final Fantasy titles. And that was pretty much it.” (Interview with Dafina, 2017)

For Dafina, that first moment was receiving a PlayStation in 1997. That created the time to

allow for the intense interest in the Game Informer article on Final Fantasy, which in turn

created the time to allow for the translation of the Final Fantasy VII player assemblage. From

there nearly every iterative translation of Final Fantasy play would create the potential for the

next,

“It was a game series that I enjoyed playing […] Every time a new Final Fantasy came

out I would always be interested in playing it.

[…]

I've played every single one minus X-2 and the XIII series. I played a little bit of XIII, I

didn't like it, and I didn't play any of the sequels to it.” (Interview with Dafina, 2017)

This was reinforced through the action figures and plushies which were allied with the

assemblage,

“I have a couple of Final Fantasy action figures. I have some plushies. That's about it.

Everything else that I had I no longer have any more, but I did save some of the

figures. I still have them in boxes, and then I have a Vincent plushy and I have Moogle

one somewhere […] gaming for me has always been more of a social thing. I've

always had friends that play games, so we were just... Like, we would just play

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whatever games together. Like... So that's how I got into Final Fantasy XIV was the

friends that I was playing League with all started getting into Final Fantasy, so I just, I

did the free trial for them and then I found it interesting, and then I just played it for a

bit and then I took a really long break. And then I started playing again when

Heavensward came out, and even then I played for a summer and then I took another

break. And I started playing again.” (Interview with Dafina, 2017)

Although Dafina stated that “[…] gaming for me has always been more of a social thing”, this

is, perhaps, more of an indication of how entrenched the practice of placing pre- eminence in

the human actant is, as tracing back through her experiences, it is evident that social gaming

would never have occurred without the potential first emerging from those first moments

involving not only her father, but also the non-human allies, the PlayStation, the Game

Informer magazine and Final Fantasy VII. All of these assemblages of play, allied action figure

and plushy paraphernalia, strengthened the dense entelechy that created the heightened

potential for Dafina to translate her MMORPG player assemblage within Final Fantasy XIV

years, or even decades, before the game itself was ever mooted within the Square Enix team.

Undoubtedly the entelechial mass from which the MMORPG player assemblage was translated

over many years is infinitely more complex and broad than this, but for the purposes of the

scope of this thesis and tracing this will suffice.

However, Dafina’s entelechy is not dissimilar from a number of other participants within this

study,

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“[…] when Final Fantasy XI came out, because it was in the Final Fantasy series […]

I wanted to play it […] been playing Square Enix titles and Squaresoft titles for a long

time. […] just being a fan of the series, you know, I see it posted up, I knew, when

XIV, the original 1.0 came out, I was in college and didn't have the opportunity to get

on to it, then it ended up being a massive flop anyway, and when the reboot came

around I was out of college at that point and had more time to invest so… I moved to

XIV.” (Interview with Rahsei, 2017)

“[…] my first video game on Playstation 1 was Final Fantasy 8, and I've been a fan of

all Final Fantasy series, I've played the previous ones from 8 and then I've been

following it, and then when I came to America, the game released 2 months after, or a

month after, actually, so I figured, pick it up. Bought a new laptop, pick up the game.”

(Interview with Dryst, 2017)

“[…] at first I played some of the original more mainstream [Final Fantasy] games

where they were just, the classic JRPG's. And I was talking to a friend of mine who

also played some of the games, and he brought up XIV back before A Realm Reborn

launch, how it was kind of shitty, and then they were trying to relaunch it, and that was

how I first heard about it. Then later on I heard it was coming to the PS4 so I was like,

"Maybe I'll pick it up." And I did.” (Interview with Raven, 2017)

Like Dafina, Raven, Rahsei and Dryst had previously been involved in translations of play that

were densely intertwined with Final Fantasy. These created the potential for, and eventually

effected the translation of the MMORPG player assemblage within Final Fantasy XIV, the

research site, for each of them.

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However, while there were a number of participants who were effected by previous iterations

of Final Fantasy which played an integral part in leading them onto this one, this definitely, did

not apply to the majority of them. The entelechies which created the potential for others to

translate their own player assemblages were not always so straightforward,

“[…] I was basically I was just getting into playing online gaming and I was playing

an early version of Counter Strike with friends in LAN [Local Area Network] centers

and what not. So it kind of started from there, and then I would see my friends playing

WoW [World of Warcraft] because it was about the time […] I got a subscription then

and I tried do an MMO then, but at first it was hard to get into because of the amount

of time you had to spend levelling up, so I wasn't able to get to the point that my

friends were. So, I got in and then just stopped playing. I got back into playing again at

the end of Burning Crusade.

[…]

I wasn't expecting to find more people to play with. A lot of my "online" experience

was still LAN, so while it was technically online, it was still a bunch of people in the

same room, so it wasn't really strangers because I would know people that were

playing the LAN. This is one of those experiences that I got were I was starting to

interact with new people that I never met before and I would start building

relationships through World of Warcraft.

[…]

I had first heard of it [Final Fantasy XIV] in passing when they had announced the

trailer years ago. This was the 1.0 trailer and then the release of it, I had heard the

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news that it was received very poorly and had a terrible launch at what not. I stayed

away from it […] I didn't actually get into it until much later. […] it was actually

through my work that I got to start playing it.” (Cheezu, 2017)

For Cheezu, that first moment of his entelechy that led to the eventual formation of his

MMORPG player assemblage was playing Counter Strike with his friends in that particular

LAN center. The translation of this moment created time for Cheezu to be connected and

acquainted with, or subject to interessement by, World of Warcraft. The mobilization of other

avatars, players, the network, and the game world itself created a dense assemblage - dense

enough that Cheezu’s entwinement with the MMORPG genre could effect the translation of a

job in MMORPG development as a QA tester. This, in turn, led to the translation of his

MMORPG player assemblage with the site being studied,

“Basically my current work has me involved with certain aspects of Square Enix and

some of that does involve Final Fantasy XIV so when I had started up my job the

things they set me up with was a Square Enix account and then they got me a copy of

A Realm Reborn to get myself familiarized with the game. In that sense they had told

me to give it a try, get yourself familiar, see what you like about it, because if I'm

going to be doing some writing and some translation involving Final Fantasy XIV then

I should definitely try to at least experience it and I was still playing World of

Warcraft at that time, so still focused on that, I was still doing end game raiding then,

but I gave it a shot. I started a character up and I started playing and it was nice to give

it a try casually at first and then it kind of slowly grew on me.” (Cheezu, 2017)

While there are, undoubtedly, countless allies, actants and networks the above accounts have

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forgone, what can be seen for Cheezu, as opposed to Dafina, Raven, Rahsei and Dryst, is that

one of the key moments, the obligatory passage point, which seeded the entelechy that allowed

for this to happen was not the franchise of Final Fantasy, but rather the MMORPG genre that it

was a part of. While it may meander, a line can be traced from his MMORPG player

assemblage back through the genre to the LAN cafe where he and his friends played Counter

Strike. Without the cafe, the computers, Counter Strike, the physical network that connected

both locally and to the wider Internet, and without his friends, and others playing World of

Warcraft, without all of these allied actants, all complex in their own right, coming together

and effecting the translation of this moment for Cheezu, time would never have been created

for the intermediary translations and assemblages, and the potential for his MMORPG player

assemblage to translate would never have occurred.

Cheezu’s entelechial path demonstrates several of the fundamental concepts of Actor Network

Theory. Firstly, it demonstrates generalized symmetry in action, that is the equal importance of

both human and non-human actants in contributing to the effects that lead to successful

translation. Secondly, that his account and this text only offer a glimpse into the near infinite

and complex permutations of the entelechial structure or construct that housed the potential of

the player assemblage to translate, and a relatively poor representation at that, demonstrating its

irreducibility. Finally, part and parcel of that irreducibility is the acknowledgment that the

entelechy that allowed for Cheezu’s player assemblage to translate, was a moment that

stretched back years and years.

Similarly, the focus of this final chapter, the concept of the entelechy, brings us back to the

beginnings of Actor Network Theory. In essence, what this thesis has done is traced backwards,

from the later works of Callon and Law, and the concept of the assemblage, to the extended

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literary epiphany that started it all, Latour’s Irreductions (1988), done through the lens of the

MMORPG player assemblage. And while a work of Actor Network Theory, such as this one,

should have no intention of generating grand theories nor sweeping all- encompassing first

principles, through tracing through MMORPG player assemblages and the “theory” itself, and

its descriptions, there are a few important observations that can be made. Observations, which

could change the way MMORPG players, play, and the assemblages of them, might be viewed,

in answering the question of how can we reconceptualize MMORPG play?

And so now, at the end of this thread or “game”, we reach a point where the once constructed

moments before it have all long disintegrated, and even the most steadfast of allies must “[…]

lose what they have staked” (Latour, B., 1988, p.165). A destination that all “[…] blind,

myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler [...]” ANTs must eventually reach

(Latour, B., 2005, p.9), the limited human actants we are, we arrive at the final section of this

thesis: the conclusion.

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CONCLUSION: THE MMORPG PLAYER IS A MECHANOID

“Quai des Grands-Augustins: all the major players in the Aramis affair are seated

around a large oval table. The project heads from Matra, the RATP, the Region, the

research institutes, and the government ministries have all been convoked by the

clients of the study. Only the elected officials are missing.

‘In detective stories there is always a moment when all the suspects and their buddies

gather in a big circle, quaking, to hear Inspector Columbo or Hercule Poirot name the

perpetrator […]’” (Latour, B., 1996, p.289)

We have traversed the assemblages of MMORPG play and players like detectives uncovering

snippets of information from suspects, and using the framework of Actor Network Theory as

our compass and key to piece them together.

Necessarily, as this compass and key have played such a pivotal role in this unpacking of play

and players, we’ve also traversed Actor Network Theory itself; from the punctualized concept

of the “object”, back to the moment of epiphany, when Latour himself “[…] At the end of the

winter of 1972, on the road from Dijon to Gray, […] was forced to stop […]” (1987, p.164) and

contemplate what would become the primordial aspects of Actor Network Theory, laying down

the entelechy for “objects” to eventually be described.

It’s been a journey along simultaneous and multi-dimensional threads, and while a work of pure

Actor Network Theory would leave it at that, happy in the knowledge that the landscape of

MMORPG play has been wrought, mapped and explored; for the purposes of satisfying at least

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this author, there are a few moments to be recounted, like the grizzled officials post mortem of

the failed Aramis guided transport project that Latour once so lovingly spoke to above (Latour,

B., p.289-301).

This final concluding chapter will outline the map of MMORPG play and players described

previously including the brief overview of the current commercial viability of MMORPGs, the

state of MMORPG studies and the assumptions or punctualizations this thesis has aimed to

unpack.

It will then recount the previous four chapters in brief, summarising what was found, and give a

description of the new understanding. Having recounted the paths already traversed, this

chapter will lay out one final path to be explored, where all of the previous traversals converge,

to answer the titular question of this thesis: how have we misunderstood MMORPG play?

For too long pre-eminence has been placed upon the human actant when describing MMORPG

play and the MMORPG player. To single out an actant to explain a wider assemblage is to see it

wither and die, as the wider assemblage is subject to the trials of reality and all its effects; of

opposing and intervening actants; substitutions of mobilized supports; and the punctualizations

and calcifications of negotiated, then codified relations. This thesis argues opposingly:

MMORPG play and the MMORPG player in particular, are not human, they are inseparably

part of a larger tech-social construct. Yes, they are not simply ‘cyborgian’ either, a term

popularized by Haraway (1991) and used before. They are mechanoidal. Here is why:

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A BRIEF RECAP

First, we need to reaffirm what was previously described on how this pre-eminence on the

human actant had come to be.

As was established at the beginning of this thesis, the genre of the MMORPG was, at one point,

the darling of the video game industry. It had been a nearly 30 year journey to go from the first

rudimentary MUD, 1978’s Zork, (Anderson, T., Galley, St., 2004), to Blizzard’s World of

Warcraft launched in 2004. So commercially and critically successful was World of Warcraft

that it generated billions in revenue and continues to be the touchstone through which the

mainstream viewed MMORPGs. Unsurprisingly, it also led to a number of other high studios

and publishers aping Blizzard’s blue-print with high powered franchises nestled deeply within

popular culture. Perhaps, not unreasonably, they made the logical assumption that creating the

same technological artefact for fictional universes the wider population had grown to love and

take ownership of, would lead to a similar cash cow on their hands.

But, as with all logical assumptions, in other words, punctualizations, little thought is given to

how the actor-network being aped was first translated. Nobody had bothered to trace World of

Warcraft back to its entelechial origins, where they would have discovered that the process of

translation was a five year journey and its obligatory passage point, an MMORPG from an

earlier era called Everquest (Sony Online Entertainment, 1999), rather than the players that

formed the World of Warcraft community, and that were highly visible throughout popular

culture (Koch, C., 2014).

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This miscalculation would lead to a consistent series of catastrophic commercial failures first

with the Matrix Online (Monolith Productions, 2005), then Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine,

2007), followed by Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (Mythic Entertainment, 2008), and

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (Funcom, 2008), before the greatest commercial failure in

the history of game development: Bioware’s $250 million dollar Star Wars: The Old Republic

(2011).

At around the same time, like all new fields of inquiry, MMORPG research rapidly expanded in

a number of diverse tangents. Many of the most prominent of those researchers viewed

MMORPGs as a new avenue for socializing and exploration, a new and expansive “third place”

(Bainbridge, 2012; Boellstorff, 2008; Castronova, 2001; Nardi, 2010; Pearce, 2009; Taylor,

2006); a virtual, but very tangibly real economy (Dibbell, 2006; Castronova, 2005, 2007); or, a

system akin to a Skinner Box with the potential to be highly addictive (Caplan, Williams, &

Yee, 2009; Griffiths, King, & Demetrovics, 2014; Hide, 2006; Lee, Yu, & Lin, 2007; Lin &

Tsai, 1999; Ng & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005; Wan & Chiou, 2006).

Throughout all this, the focus within the assemblage of MMORPG play continued to be the

human actant – how they interacted with each other, and how they interacted with the virtual

world: the non-human actants were at best, punctualized, at worst, not even acknowledged. And

yet, these assumptions by both the makers of MMORPG worlds and those who study them has

led to the commercial collapse of the genre and no clear path to the sustainability of its

population.

Actor Network Theory was chosen as the methodology of choice for this thesis, firstly, because

of its ontologically flat nature, its equal treatment of both human and non-human actants, when

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unpacking assemblages. This is eminently suited to the study of MMORPGs, which are, if

nothing else, constructs of both the technological or non-human, and human. Secondly,

MMORPG studies is a relatively nascent area of inquiry. Because of this, as described earlier in

this thesis, it’s still relatively fluid. In its most elemental form Actor Network Theory is almost

entirely unfiltered description, allowing the interpellation between text and reader to construct

meaning, rather than having it shaped by the practitioner,

“[…] in situations where innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are

uncertain, when the range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates, the sociology

of the social is no longer able to trace actors’ new associations. At this point, the last

thing to do would be to limit in advance the shape, size, heterogeneity, and

combination of associations. To the convenient shorthand of the social, one has to

substitute the painful and costly longhand of its associations.” (Latour, B., 2005, p.11)

And so, the focus on human actants thus far has led to an erroneous understanding of

MMORPG play and MMORPG players. Through a novel application of Actor Network

Theory, and tracing the descriptions provided by MMORPG player participants, this thesis

counteracts these assumptions to form a new understanding of MMORPG play and the players

themselves.

This is what was found.

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FRIENDS NOT REQUIRED

Friends are seen as a ubiquitous requirement for the success of an MMORPG. This has been

seen both commercially and academically.

MMORPG developers have, almost universally, created recruitment programs that rely on their

existing player base’s network of external friends, for example, both World of Warcraft and

Final Fantasy XIV, the research site for this thesis, have Recruit-A-Friend programs.

Incentives such as virtual currency, faster levelling or the prospect of obtaining a rare item are

often dangled in front of players to incentivise them to influence their friends to join. The long

running space MMORPG, EVE Online, has even made their Recruit-A-Friend program an

intrinsic lever within the virtual economy, using it like a monetary faucet to adjust money

supply and influence inflation.

Within academia, friendship and the primacy of the human actant was put at the forefront early.

First, Turkle (1994) saw MUDs as a vehicle to expand social reach, and placed technological

actants, as described earlier, “[…] directly in the service of the development of a greater

capacity for friendship, the development of confidence for a greater capacity for intimacy.”

(p.163). Then, in 1998, Bartle argued that MUDs clearly formed a society – that through the

uniquely limited chat interface a shared network of meaning was developed, and through the

safety of that medium, which substituted for physical presence, players could, uninhibited,

develop deep feelings of attachment towards virtual friends. More recently, Jakobsson and

Taylor (2003) referred to the notion of sociality as being central to the success of an MMORPG

player base, citing the comments of one Brad McQuaid, one of the designers for Everquest,

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“[…] people are compelled to group and even to form large guilds and alliances. All of this

builds community, and it all keeps players coming back for more and more.” (Aihoshi, R.,

2002)

Not every theorist subscribed to the importance of friendship to the translation of the

MMORPG player, however. Yee, Ducheneaut, Nickell and Moore concluded in 2006 that,

despite there being what may ostensibly be considered upon first glance, social interaction

within the MMORPG of World of Warcraft, upon deeper investigation, it was determined that

player interactions were less social and more about accessing an audience to both perform feats

in front of, to glean information from, or to idly chitchat with,

“Based on WoW’s success, this suggests alternative design strategies for online games

(and online spaces more generally) where encouraging and supporting direct

interactions might be less important than designing for the “spectator experience” and

a sense of social presence.” (Yee, N., et. al., 2006, p.415)

This followed similar, though more hopeful, conclusions by Ducheneaut and Moore in 2004.

Their investigation of social interaction within the MMORPG of Star Wars Galaxies revealed a

similarly low level of interactivity between players, that was dominated by short, transactional

and instrumental moments. At the time they put it down to structural issues that future

designers could control. But, as the later 2006 study demonstrated, this was more a misplaced

emphasis on the human actant, and there is a need to study the technological actants that

effected and informed these interactions in more detail in a similar vein to T.L. Taylor’s

approach to studying how damage meters (used to track how much damage players have dealt

to enemies) effected play in The Assemblage of Play (2009).

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Although the approach differed, through tracing the descriptions of participants within this

study, it was similarly found that friendships weren’t necessarily critical, nor the obligatory

passage point that the translation of an MMORPG player needed to pass through.

Despite friendship occurring in at least eight of the fifteen descriptions provided by

participants, many of these connections were found to be short-lived, unstable and often

substituted,

“I got into it right after all my art buddies did it, because that's just something we're

doing. But then they fell out and they went back to whatever they were doing, […] so I

got into the game, because it was just something that I thought I could get good at. ”

(Interview with Helion, 2016)

In Helion’s recount it can be clearly seen that the translation of her player assemblage, while it

briefly involved “art buddies”, they were quickly substituted for the mechanics of the

MMORPG itself.

For others, their player assemblages were found to be more densely connected to fantastical,

technological actants, rather than the human. For Cole this was, partly, his avatar, and other

avatars within the MMORPG,

“All of the characters feel like they have a personality. Like, if you look at a character,

they can do a ton of different emotes, they have different poses, races look totally

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different from each other.” (Interview with Cole, 2016)

And for many of the remaining participants within the study, friends were actually an

interceding actant, introducing failure into the translation of their own player assemblages. The

fragility of an MMORPG player assemblage where the obligatory passage point is friendship is

perhaps most bluntly illustrated by the descriptions of one participant, Admike, “Once most of

my friends have left the game, I too will leave the game.” (Interview with Admike, 2016)

This is only a brief recount of what has already been discussed, but the point being made is that

the repeatedly reinforced network of perspectives that has been reflected in the works and

actions of both academic and commercial actants – the assumption that human-centered

friendships are core to, or the obligatory passage point to, the successful translation of both

MMORPG play and MMORPG player assemblages, is flawed. They are, in fact, too unsuitable,

too brittle, and too easy to intercede and substitute to sustain the MMORPG play and player

assemblage of another (for example, Admike’s above) leading to inevitable translation failure.

These perspectives also fail to take into account the innumerable non-human, technological

actants that have an equal part within this process of translation, from massive fibre optic

networks, to the computer being used, to the chatbox that always seems to be in the bottom left

corner, to obscure international agreements allowing the trade of digital information around the

world. The disintegration of any one of these actants, not to mention the many actants described

by the participants of this study, effects the translation of MMORPG play and the player

assemblage and demonstrates the observation that friends should not be a privileged actant

within the MMORPG player assemblage.

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THE MECHANOIDAL ASSEMBLAGE

So, the question became, if the human should not be privileged in the translation of the

MMORPG player assemblage, what should be?

The previous description might assume that the technological should hold precedence. It is

these descriptions where generalized symmetry must be consciously employed, enforcing the

flat ontology where neither the human nor non-human are given primacy but are, in fact seen as

equal and inseparable in the translation. It is also the reason for the purposeful and carefully

considered use of the term Mechanoid – where the human is encased within a network of

technological actants and relations, and where both are intrinsic to its existence. This will be

explored in greater detail later within this chapter.

However, the purpose of involving the concept of the Mechanoid brings us to the next

observation or description to emerge from tracing the entelechial origins of the MMORPG.

Within contemporary MMORPG studies and commercial MMORPG development, pre-

eminence has been placed on the human actant in an almost self-re-inforcing feedback loop.

Take, for example, the previously referenced work of Ducheneaut and Moore (2004). They did

not simply describe the lack of sociability in Star Wars Galaxies (Daybreak Game Company,

2003) but also proposed mobilizing additional technological actants in an effort to effect

interactions in such a way as to make them appear more human. Similarly, the makers of

today’s MMORPGs have used technological actants in an attempt to entice new players by

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almost short-cutting or punctualizing the actual translation of MMORPG play itself. They do

this by bifurcating it into two stages: trivialising the play before an avatar attains maximum

level where much of the activities are done without the assistance of other avatars through

providing perks such as the ability to skip 30 levels (World of Warcraft, Blizzard

Entertainment, 2004); and focusing on the endgame or elder content – content which is

designed to be completed after an avatar attains maximum level, often difficult and highly

complex to complete, almost always requiring that multiple avatars and players be involved.

As was described earlier, the translation of MMORPGs was itself not a short process. It

involved generations of actants and sprawling networks of relations, from Commedia dell’arte

to Dungeons & Dragons (Gygax, G., 1974); from PDP-10s and Zork (Anderson, T., et. al.,

1977) to the breakthrough Everquest (Sony Entertainment Online, 1999). None of this could

have been sidestepped. The countless negotiations, mobilization of allies and actants, and every

iteration of that was and is integral to the translation of the current generation of MMORPGs,

represented by the seminal World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004). Without the

advent of three-dimensional gaming, popularized by the Nintendo 64 and Playstation consoles,

and Blizzard’s development team’s devotion to Everquest it may have never happened, “[…]

The team was engaging with Everquest as fans, but also as game designers, wondering where

the experience could be tweaked and improved [...]” (Williams, M., 2018, p.4).

This is not unlike the translation of MMORPG play and the MMORPG player. The

coincidences early in the translation of MMORPG play can neither be predicted, nor modelled

or skipped. These are the moments of repeated translation. The human and technological

actants are given the time to negotiate the player assemblage, reinforced and hardened through

resisting interceding actants and substituting weak allies by mobilizing stronger ones. Like

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Latour’s Aramis (1992), attempts to hurry this process by our own, very human impatience,

leads to undesirable consequences. In the case of Aramis, it was an emergence of an

assemblage doomed to probable failure, and the label of being a construct “before its time”

(because that’s really what has happened); not dissimilar to a brittle untested player assemblage

prone to translation error.

And so, to return to the construct of the mechanoid briefly shaded earlier in this chapter, to

intervene, as developers have done, and to trivialise the technological, while prioritising human

interaction in the process of translating MMORPG play and the MMORPG player, is like

wrenching the human out of the mechanoid. Separated, both machine and human are frail,

brittle constructs susceptible to the effects of interceding actants. As in all mechanoids, the

human and non-human are required for the entity’s function.

This brings us to the next observation in our retracing of this text: those wrinkles caused by the

coincidences referred to earlier are the very moments that make each player assemblage unique.

HETEROGENEOUS ENGINEERING

There was a time when academia saw player assemblages in a similarly heterogeneous manner.

When MMORPGs were but a twinkle in Richard Garriot’s eye, and MUDs were reaching their

zenith, Sherry Turkle (1994) viewed its players with a certain intense fascination. Her

“newness”, similar to the state of naivety consciously employed by Actor Network

practitioners, allowed her to describe the very unique interpellation between the human and the

technological in vivid detail. In one recount, she noted how indelibly a MUD could effect the

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growth of a person,

“At the end of the school year, however, Robert’s MUD experience was essentially

over. He had gotten his own apartment; he had a job as a salesman; he had formed a

rock band with a few friends. Looking back on the experience he thought that

MUDding had served its purpose [...]” (Turkle, S., 1994, p.163)

This type of open-minded discovery into the translation of MMORPG player assemblages did

not last long, however. Just two years later, and without much more being added to the

academic discourse, Richard Bartle (1996), ex-administrator of MUD2, proposed a framework

for categorising players with four player typologies. Emerging out of a long running debate

between the players of his own MUD, these four typologies were: killers, achievers, socializers

and explorers.

Bartle explicitly stated that he had not tested these typologies, nor did he ever intend to (Bartle,

R., 1996, p.25). And yet, Bartle asserted that catering to the desires of human actants using this

framework as a guide, was the key, or obligatory passage point through which the translation of

a MUD could succeed. Apart from being grossly reductive, Bartle failed to acknowledge the

equally important role of the technological actant in defining the very typologies he described,

in other words, he had missed the elements of heterogeneous engineering in action when

describing his framework. Killers and socializers need other avatars, virtual weapons and chat

boxes (to name a few) to successfully translate; explorers and achievers need a digital

landscape, the ability to traverse it, and the virtual tools to investigate it to similarly translate

these typologies. It was crude and flawed, but, in the absence of another framework, Bartle’s

player typologies had, and continue to have, a tremendous effect on contemporary MMORPG

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developers (Hamari, J., Tuunanen, J., 2014, p.37).

It would take 10 years for another academic to iterate on Bartle’s model. Nick Yee was critical

of Bartle’s player typologies due to the fact that there was no instrument with which to measure

a player or players against them, meaning that they could only ever be theoretical in nature and

could, in fact, be simply creating player types, as opposed to measuring whether they held true

(Yee, N., 2006, p.2). His attempt to answer this by surveying 3200 participants and attempting

to attribute a complex combination of 13 components and sub-components, while largely

refuting Bartle’s assumptions, also failed to establish a universal framework of player

classification of his own. Despite the vastness of the study, Yee’s model could not account for

40% of the responses, and through the tracing of descriptions of MMORPG play and viewing

them through the lens of Actor Network Theory there is a good reason why.

The translation of an MMORPG player assemblage, along with the human actant, involves

thousands, perhaps even millions, of equally important non-human and technological actants.

How these interpellate with each other, negotiate alliances, and repel interceding effects, can be

an infinitely complex question to answer. However, what can be understood is that, due to the

complexity and immensity of every process to translate the MMORPG player, each

successfully translated assemblage is thoroughly unique. This is heterogeneous engineering in

action, and the uniqueness of each heterogeneously engineered translation of MMORPG play

was seen in the descriptions of this study’s participants, for example,

“[…] I really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of the crafting system in XIV and how you're

kind of juggling a lot of moving parts in trying to see how you can get the highest

quality item and beyond that there's the puzzle of how to make money the best and

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what to put on the market board and different things, market board’s like that, and I

really just enjoyed that and it allowed me to continue to participate in the game even

while my Internet wasn't always so great.” (Interview with Emhati, 2017)

Here, understanding the concept of heterogeneous engineering and unpacking the moments of

translation can trace the visible near term, and allow us to see the network of relations

surrounding the MMORPG player. But these translations do not simply emerge out of nowhere

and the potentialities which give rise to these moments of translation aren’t time bound. They

can extend back years or even decades. The translation of MMORPG play is just one moment

on a continuum of events where each translation effects the next. This brings us to the last,

most recent observation retracing the descriptions within this thesis, and it is one that, in 1972

(Latour, B., 1988 p.162), seeded the very translation of Actor Network Theory itself:

entelechies.

ENTELECHEIA AND IRREDUCTIONS

As previously discussed, the concept of the entelechy is not yet a settled one. It’s been debated

throughout academia since its creation by Aristotle and its contemplation by St. Thomas

Aquinas. However, this debate, while interesting, is not a path that can be adequately traced at

the end of this thesis. Rather, it is Latour’s use of it that is of interest here.

We are concerned with, of course, Latour’s Les microbes: guerre et paix suivi de irreductions

(1984), translated by Law and Sheridan in 1988 as The Pasteurization of France, and in

particular the last section, which is concerned with entelecheia and irreductions, the protozoic

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form of contemporary Actor Network Theory.

Latour uses the term of entelechy to describe the potentiality to effect or act upon other actants

– an interpretation of Descartes use of entelechy as an irreducible force. To elaborate briefly,

we previously laid out Latour’s fundamental principles of irreducibility: firstly, that no two

objects were the same (or they would not be separate); secondly, nothing is beyond relation,

and everything can be negotiated; thirdly, nothing can come from an island, all things must be

translated; and finally, and most paradoxically, once these principles are acknowledged, and are

able to seed discourse, they are to be discarded.

In summary, every human and non-human, the social and technological, have the potential to

effect or act upon others, and none are so powerless as to be able to be reduced to another.

Latour viewed the world as entirely a result of the negotiated effects, within which humans and

non-humans are connected in equally important ways. Each effect creates time for the next, and

so, like tendrils within time, as long as it has not been lost to time, as all things are eventually,

these effects can be traced back years, or even decades.

So, what does this have to do with the assemblage of the MMORPG player?

While tracing the descriptions of MMORPG play with the participants of this thesis, it was

uncovered that the player assemblages being described were a construct years, and sometimes

decades, in the making. This was a surprising observation, and to this point within both the

study of MMORPGs and their commercial development, as far as could be determined at the

time of writing, this was not an observation that had ever previously been made, and may never

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have been uncovered if not for the application of Actor Network Theory.

For many of the participants, previous entries within the franchise of the research site, Final

Fantasy, effected the entelechy which allowed the MMORPG player to translate,

“[…] I've been a fan of all Final Fantasy series, I've played the previous ones from 8

[...]” (Interview with Dryst, 2017)

“[…] just being a fan of the series, you know, I see it posted up [...]” (Interview with

Rahsei, 2017)

For some, it was non-human actants that were more obscure, surprising or distantly connected

that created the potential for the MMORPG player assemblage to occur in participants,

“My dad bought us a PlayStation, and we ended up getting that game after seeing it in

Game Informer […] me and my brother, just started playing and then we just followed

up by finding out about other Final Fantasy titles. And that was pretty much it.”

(Interview with Dafina, 2017)

“[...] my current work has me involved with certain aspects of Square Enix and some

of that does involve Final Fantasy XIV so when I had started up my job the things they

set me up with was a Square Enix account and then they got me a copy of A Realm

Reborn to get myself familiarized with the game […]” (Interview with Cheezu, 2017).

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Previous accounts of MMORPG play and attempts to study it have typically focused on the

moments occurring between starting and ending play itself, in part a consequence of the

influence that is wielded by Huizinga’s concept of the magic circle in games studies (Huizinga,

J., 1938). This was also the original focus of this thesis. However, what has been found through

the descriptions of its participants, and the tracing of those descriptions, is that MMORPG play

starts forming well before a copy of the game is bought, and that these moments leading to the

translation of it can stretch back years. If we couch it in the same conceptualization as

Huizinga, it is as if play is not a two dimensional circle where there is a two dimensional plane

of possibilities, but ultimately, there is an edge where it all “ends”; rather it is a

multidimensional vortex, or vortices that are effected from elsewhere in time, like tendrils they

can be months long, years long, or even, in some cases, decades long.

This misunderstanding leads us to the final element of this thesis, and the very reason for it to

exist (or be translated).

HOW CAN WE RECONCEPTUALIZE MMORPG PLAY?

This thesis has already explored four of the ways that we, as makers and explorers of

MMORPGs, have misunderstood both the assemblage of play and the player.

Firstly, that friendships, so often leveraged as an obligatory passage point, are actually quite

unsuitable for that role, resulting in brittle assemblages, ready substitution and, ultimately,

translation failure.

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Secondly, and elaborating on the previous descriptions, the importance of non-human

technological actants to the successful translation of MMORPG play and the player assemblage

has also been misunderstood and consistently underappreciated.

Thirdly, the assumption that all instances of MMORPG play can be typecast into a limited

number of tightly defined typologies, the two most commonly accepted models created by

Bartle (1996) and Yee (2006), when, in fact, it was found that player assemblages were

significantly heterogenous, translating into a myriad of weird and wonderful playstyles often

with little to do with the prime motivating factors established by Bartle and Yee of virtual

combat, exploration, socialization and achievement, for example, in the previously mentioned

case of Raven, who’s assemblage of MMORPG play was translated through the algorithms that

governed the virtual world’s physics.

Fourth and finally, that MMORPG play and the translation of the MMORPG player assemblage

starts when logging into the virtual, and ends when logging out. The further the descriptions of

this study’s participants were traced, the more it could be seen that this was, in fact, a very

limiting way to view MMORPG play. For many of the participants, their journey to translating

their assemblage of MMORPG play began years, or even decades into the past.

Throughout this thesis there has been a common denominator to these misunderstandings. It

cannot be said that this is some essentialist root cause, but there is the pervasive and

disproportionate focus on the human actant, whether that has been the voice of the human

player, a developer’s own motivations, or the suggestions from theorists, that has effected these

misunderstandings. On the whole both creators and scholars of MMORPGs are singularly

focused on the human. As alluded to earlier in this thesis, to singularly focus on any actant,

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human or otherwise, is to wrench it from the folds of a complex, multidimensional, holistic

assemblage. While much easier to conceive in the light of day, it is a frail and brittle

representation of the much larger whole. Isolated and naked, it is much more susceptible to

interceding actants and so withers and dies over time.

This is reflected in the commercial stagnation and decline of the MMORPG genre. As we’ve

seen, developers have attempted to arrest this decline by furiously creating end-game or elder

content in response to the most vociferous and densely connected within their player bases and

attempting to leverage the social networks of players through referral programs. For the

academics that study these MMORPGs, few have responded to this decline.

So, if none of the actions of developers or academics have effected a reverse in the decline of

MMORPGs, and there are continued misunderstandings due to the pre-eminence placed upon

the human actant as a player, what is a more suitable way to conceive the MMORPG player

assemblage?

This is where we introduce the Mechanoid, a carefully conceived concept and understanding of

the MMORPG player assemblage as an irreducible and inseparable technological and human

construct.

The term cyborg, while it may seem apt at first glance, is problematic in at least two ways.

Within academic discourse, it is of course, occupied most prominently by the work of Donna

Haraway, as briefly alluded to earlier in this thesis. Haraway similarly rejects essentialist

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explanations, and also observes the collision of the natural and mechanical. However, her

cyborg theory mostly stops at writing, used as a technology to proffer increasingly artificial

linguistic twists that serves to politically advance wider societal phallogocentrisms,

“Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late

twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against

perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the

central dogma of phallogocentrism.” (Haraway, D., 1991, p. 183)

Within Haraway’s general population, the term cyborg also elicits connotations of augmented

human ability and humanity. It is even partially defined as such within the dictionary,

“cyborg (NOUN) - A fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are

extended beyond normal human limitations […]” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019)

The key contention here with the use of the term cyborg, is that within this context, the

technological actant is still only viewed as a tool or object to transmit human intention, whether

that is in support of a human ability, such as viewing the bionic ear as an object to human

hearing, or for transmitting human political communication, such as Haraway’s description of

writing as a tool used by men to control socialist-feminist tendencies.

Cyborgian existence is simply an “extension of man”. As such, these explanations underserve

the intrinsic role that technological and non-human actants play in the translation of both socio-

political messaging and artificial hearing.

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The concept of the Mechanoid is squarely aimed at remedying this. It does not seek to declare

any position, neither in socio-political nor bio-political discourse. It maintains the ontological

flatness of Actor Network Theory and it only seeks to describe and equally consider all actants,

both human and technological, intertwined within techno-human assemblages such as the

MMORPG player. It is, therefore, a theory that is irreducibly agnostic.

A mechanoid would not be mechanoid without the human connected to and within it; it would

simply be an inert mass of cables, metal plates, actuators, logic boards and software

instructions. But, at the same time, it would not be a mechanoid without those cables, plates,

actuators, logic boards, and software instructions either. Both are intrinsic to the Mechanoid.

None can be isolated and wrenched out without eliciting translative failure.

The same can be said when viewing the MMORPG player assemblage. While it can be, and has

been correctly surmised previously that human actants play an important role in the translation

of the player assemblage, it is clear throughout the participant descriptions within this thesis,

that they are far from the only ones, and are often not even the most densely connected actants,

An MMORPG player assemblage cannot be successfully translated without the effects of the

human actant, but neither can it be successfully translated without the equally important non-

human and technological actants, such as the screen, the keyboard, the transistors on the

motherboard, the legislation governing the data transferred between countries, or, as described

previously by one participant, Emhati, a slow Internet connection. Emhati’s player assemblage,

and, for that matter, every MMORPG player assemblage, is an irreducibly heterogeneous

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techno-social construct. As unique as the translation of play is, it is also equally both human

and technological. The MMORPG player assemblage is thoroughly mechanoidal.

To see the MMORPG player in such a way requires a reorientation in the way both academics

and developers view MMORPGs, and what an MMORPG player is. It is then hoped that this

thesis and the Mechanoid theory will provoke different, unconventional and innovative ways to

unpack the status quo and question previously ignored actants. Instead of viewing a translation

of MMORPG play that doesn’t smoothly follow the expected path of progression laid out by

developers as an aberration, seeing it for what it is: a beautiful instance of heterogeneous

engineering in action, where, perhaps, the algorithms within the virtual environment are

effecting the player as much as the player is effecting the virtual environment (in the case of the

participant, Raven); instead of viewing the stagnation and decline of the MMORPG as simply a

function of not being able to provide what the human player wants, seeing technological actants

as being an equal effector, for example, the referral mechanic allowing avatars to skip levels, as

explored previously, could be responsible for effecting the translation of frail, brittle, and short

lived player assemblages.

And though it is not within the scope of this thesis, the assemblage of the Mechanoid is not

simply restricted to MMORPG player assemblage. It would not take a particularly large logical

leap to envision it being applied to almost any of the emerging techno-human assemblages that

are captivating the public consciousness. In many ways, modern technology has become our

obligatory passage points to the world, the representative actant of the modern human

assemblage, with human and non-human actants mobilized in support of it.

For example, if we view an account on the popular visual social media platform, Instagram, one

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may assume that it is the representation of an identity driven by the motivations of a human

actant. However, reducing it to the identity of the human actant, that the person’s identity and

Instagram representations are one and the same, ignores the reality that the platform, its filters,

and other pictures, among many non-human, technological actants, are part of the process of

translation that has effected this Instagram identity, as much as the human actant has. And

while the human actant is densely connected to this assemblage, they are not one and the same.

The Instagram representation is a thoroughly mechanoidal one.

Widening the aperture through which the concept of the Mechanoid is applied, such as the

exploration of the aforementioned social media assemblages, is, for now, reserved for future

works, or perhaps for another intrepid trailsniffer to also unpack and trace.

But in the moment that this thesis has created, as the human experience increasingly becomes

defined by technological actants, not only through the MMORPG player assemblage, but also

through emerging technological actants such as self-driving cars, connected clothing, identity

defining smartphones and the offloading of thought to an increasingly powerful, amorphous

“cloud”, while we can answer the question for one of these in how we can reconceptualize

MMORPG play, another question for a future ANT journey arises first from this, have we also

misunderstood the player itself?

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EPILOGUE

And so, I have made the journey and come back to tell a story of how I came to be an

MMORPG player and will never be the same.

I save the thesis into the cloud and sync its bibliography with a server from somewhere in

Europe. As I prepare to close the laptop, my fingers worn smooth from the incessant typing, the

iPhone next to it starts to shriek,

“6:00PM - Stop?”

As if sarcastically suggesting I pack up and go home.

I look back up to my screen and I realise I don’t see anything beyond it - what is there to see?

At work I am defined by these six screens, two oversized headphones, an audio mixer, and the

two laptops sitting upon two desks. When someone asks for me, they point to the brightly neon

lit corner. Technology speaks for me.

Have I gone native? What is native? Perhaps native is existing within the mechanoidal world

we live in, our persons stitched together from smartphones, social media profiles, our watches,

our cars, our offices, our clothes. Technology makes us. Identity is spliced and stored amongst

millions of bytes and bits of data that move and pulsate within an incomprehensibly expansive

society of servers, computers and routers. It was never mine. I exist at the whims of

temperamental, ever shrinking, central processing units, memory banks and fibre optic cables.

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Is this going native? Or is this simply existence? That can only be speculated by those actants

scrambling towards the periphery of our assemblage, yet still looking inward, trying to

desperately remain detached. But, like you, the reader, they are as inexorably connected and

forever effected as you and I.

For me, it is time to venture back into the fold. While you have just begun your journey, I am

melding back into the virtual dreams of the past. That icon on the taskbar, its golden “W”

surrounded by a similarly golden ring, glows at me. The Azeroth I once knew over a decade

and a half ago again irresistibly calls, and my avatar and I heed. Like the Jaegers of Guillermo

del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013), I settle into my sea, and get ready to drift with my avatar.

Together we wade back into battle.

We are Edana, a mechanoid assemblage with the potential to shape the rest of both our

existences, and we’ll keep a seat warm for you in the Pig and Whistle.

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