RYZOM NAMED BOSS MACRO CODE
This project identifies eight elements that make this inclusive, friendly, and casual community successful in virtual worlds that tend to be dominated by communities that have a competitive, strict, and exclusive approach to online gaming (social interaction, code of values, leadership, rank system, events, community building, population size, gameplay). It provides an ethnographic account of an online gaming community that is open to any player without skill or time commitment requirements, but still maintains high status within the game world. This study examines the social organization of Gaiscíoch, a large online gaming community that exists within the simulated world of a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). Chapter Six concludes with a discussion of power-gamers as a neo-liberal workforce. Chapter Five explores narrative structure in games, and their relation to power-gaming practices. Chapter Four examines reality in relation to virtual worlds, and how players in virtual worlds explore and unpack their surroundings, which mirrors many scientific practices in the real world. Chapter Three explores how different cultures globally choose to play-games, and the forms of sociability involved in this play. Chapter Two explores facets of technical hobbies, masculinity, skill, and how they relate to power-gaming. Chapter One analyzes how ethnographic fieldwork is performed in virtual worlds, and the necessary frameworks inherent to this. Through ethnographic fieldwork and exploration this thesis examines what constitutes “power-gaming” and seeks to unpack the differences between skill, fun, and labour. This thesis studies a subset of players of video games called “power-gamers” who play games in a way that mirrors labour as opposed to leisure. Game designers need to appreciate that MMORPGs represent messy assemblages combining gameplay and social elements, meaning that changes they make impact on players lives. Therefore, RuneScape, as an MMORPG, is not addictive in and of itself, because of a mix of gameplay and social factors binding players to it. Players are bound to these communities and RuneScape as a whole through a messy assemblage of bondage, comprising of gameplay and social bonds. In actuality the community is fragmented into thematic sub-community groups catalysing around the RuneScape clan system, which closely parallels communities of practice structures. The main findings of the study are that the overall community of RuneScape is like that of a nation, with an 'imagined' notion of itself. However, comparative ethnography by proxy was achieved through the structure of interviews.
The two limitations of this approach are bias towards the 'main' version of the game, RuneScape3, and the lack of direct comparative ethnography through participant observation. This is accomplish using a survey of around 1200 players, semi-structured interviews with over 40 of the respondents. This study looks to detail the notion of community and social structures that support RuneScape as a social entity. These intelligence activities portend a general colonisation by the state of previously unregulated interstices of the sociotechnical Internet and their analysis contributes to our understanding of the relationship between government and the Internet in the early 21st century. As such, the articulations of the IC with virtual worlds express the anticipatory and pre-emptive logics of state security and surveillance. Reconstructing the activities of the IC shows how virtual worlds have been drawn into the ambit of state surveillance practices, particularly as a means to generate intelligence from virtual world behaviours that correlate with and predict ‘real-world’ behaviours indicative of terrorism and other subversive activities.
This article introduces virtual worlds as sociological sites in the matrix of international politics and explores how the intelligence community (IC) has conducted operations in these environments, principally for counter-terrorism purposes. Documents disclosed by Edward Snowden in December 2013 suggest that intelligence agencies, including the National Security and GCHQ, have not been so reticent in exploring and exploiting these environments, specifically for gathering signals and human intelligence. Virtual worlds, persistent online spaces of social interaction and emergent game-play, have hitherto been neglected in international studies.
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