So….I’ve come yet again to a crossroads that I was desperately trying to avoid in my thesis! I’ve been struggling for such a long while now…trying to find the right approach to talking about governmentality and the individual’s rights in MMORPGs. I’ve now come to the conclusion that excluding game theory seems irresponsible as actual game design acts as a governmental force in MMORPGs. So the interesting thing is combining it all…to analyse The Sims Online (TSO). And this is where my thoughts are at the moment.
I’ve really fallen under the spell of Klabber’s taxonomy for classifying games and simulations, which has helped me map out my own interepretation of the design aspect of TSO. I suppose the crossroad I’m at is using this model to further interpret what is actually going on in these online worlds, maybe I can go so far as to say that I want to analyse how the game is actually played. There’s a meta game going on here, of course there’s the actual question of the classification of game, but that aside….how do I even start to interpret the social organisations being spawned from these games? I was mesmerised by Javier Salazar’s paper On the Ontology of MMORPG Beings: A Theoretical Model for Research that I feel lays out these problems so well and proposes some interesting new outlooks and then there’s the genious Nicholas Yee’s Motivations of Play in MMORPGs. Both of these papers look at the player’s relationship to these virtual worlds and lay out some interesting methodological approaches that I feel are useful for looking at the socio-economic ontology of MMORPGs.
Although, by writing this post….I’m even more confused than ever….the method of keeping things simple has eluded me yet again! Back to the drawing board I think!!!!