|
Role-playing
games create fictional spaces within which
imaginary, exotic, and often heroic identities can
be acted out. MMORPGs, Massive Multiplayer
Role-Playing Games with virtually unlimited numbers
of participants, offer increasingly complex and
complicated networks of player interaction - here
playing becomes especially time-consuming and at
times even boring. I want to look at two
multiplayer role-playing games, the action-centered
Diablo II and the massive multiplayer game
Dark Age of Camelot, comparing their ways of
corporeally immersing players. I want to introduce
the following hypothesis: multiplayer role-playing
computer games, usually considered to form a
relatively homogeneous genre, offer very
diversified, indeed in some aspects oppositional,
playing experiences.
|