Digital Culture, Play, and Identity : A World of Warcraft Reader (Hardcover)

World of Warcraft is the world's most popular massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), with (as of January 2008) more than ten million active subscribers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia who play the game an astonishing average of twenty hours a week. This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds. The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players (leading guilds and raids, exploring moneymaking possibilities in the in-game auction house, playing different factions, races, and classes), conducting interviews, and studying the game design—as created by Blizzard Entertainment, the game's developer, and as modified by player-created user interfaces. The analyses they offer are based on both the firsthand experience of being a resident of Azeroth and the data they have gathered and interpreted.

The contributors examine the ways that gameworlds reflect the real world—exploring such topics as World of Warcraft as a "capitalist fairytale" and the game's construction of gender; the cohesiveness of the gameworld in terms of geography, mythology, narrative, and the treatment of death as a temporary state; aspects of play, including "deviant strategies" perhaps not in line with the intentions of the designers; and character—both players' identification with their characters and the game's culture of naming characters. The varied perspectives of the contributors—who come from such fields as game studies, textual analysis, gender studies, and postcolonial studies—reflect the breadth and vitality of current interest in MMOGs.

Contributors:
Espen Aarseth, Hilde G. Corneliussen, Charlotte Hagström, Lisbeth Klastrup, Tanya Krzywinska, Jessica Langer, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, T. L. Taylor, Ragnhild Tronstad.

《魔獸世界》是全球最受歡迎的大型多人在線遊戲（MMOG），截至2008年1月，歐洲、北美、亞洲和澳洲共有超過一千萬活躍訂閱者，平均每週玩遊戲達到驚人的二十小時。本書從多個角度探討了《魔獸世界》的複雜性，探索了越來越複雜的數字遊戲世界的文化和社會影響。貢獻者們深入《魔獸世界》的宇宙中，作為玩家花費數百小時（領導公會和團隊，探索遊戲內拍賣行的賺錢可能性，玩不同的陣營、種族和職業），進行訪談，並研究遊戲設計 - 由遊戲開發商暴雪娛樂創建，並由玩家創建的用戶界面進行修改。他們提供的分析基於成為艾澤拉斯居民的第一手經驗以及他們收集和解釋的數據。

貢獻者們探討了遊戲世界如何反映現實世界 - 探索《魔獸世界》作為“資本主義童話”的主題，以及遊戲對性別的構建；遊戲世界在地理、神話、敘事和對待死亡作為暫時狀態方面的凝聚力；遊戲中的遊玩方式，包括“異常策略”，可能不符合設計師的意圖；以及角色 - 玩家對角色的認同以及遊戲的角色命名文化。貢獻者的多樣觀點來自遊戲研究、文本分析、性別研究和後殖民研究等領域，反映了當前對MMOG的廣泛興趣的廣度和活力。

貢獻者：埃斯彭·阿塞斯、希爾德·G·科內利森、夏洛特·哈格斯特倫、麗絲貝斯·克拉斯特魯普、塔尼婭·克日溫斯卡、潔西卡·蘭格、埃斯特·麥考姆-斯圖爾特、托里爾·埃爾維拉·莫滕森、吉爾·沃克·雷特伯格、斯科特·雷特伯格、T·L·泰勒、拉格尼爾·特隆斯塔德。