Patrick Prax

In digital games and virtual worlds, like in other digital media, the structure of the medium, its code, influences the emerging interaction and culture. A deliberate modification of this code to facilitate democratic decision making might thus lead to more meaningful interaction in games. If we see virtual worlds as learning environments this might even help players to understand and question real-world power structures. A way to modify the code of a virtual world is by extending its interface with an add-on that interacts with the application programming interface of the game. In this paper we present the design vision and theoretical framework of a digital tool for ethical decision making that will be implemented in the virtual world World of Warcraft. Its purpose will be to supply players with means to modify the power structure built into the code of this virtual world and to support more ethical and democratic decision making in the game.

This paper critically analyzes the real money market place, a feature of the game Diablo 3. To do so I compare the concepts of the audience commodity, prosumption, produsage and playbour to the model of Diablo’s real money market place. The conclusion is that the market place is not fully described by any of the proposed models but is something in-between. Using interview, participant observation and online media this paper then explains the consequences of this feature on the game and the emerging game culture of Diablo. With letting the business model of Diablo 3 influence the game design Blizzard is not acting according to its own core value but instead following suggestions from marketing research and let the design follow the business model. (Hamari and Lehdonvirtä, 2010)
This behavior of a company does fit the first filter of the propaganda model. (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) Game companies as media producers are in a capitalist system forced to act according to financial considerations and not artistic or ethical ones. It marks the departure of even AAA games from a focus on producing the best possible product for their audience to abusing audience labor and to forging games after a monetization model instead of vice versa.

This article argues that the innovation in the interface design of the MMORPG World of Warcraft is to a substantial part originating in the user-created interface modifications called add-ons. This is shown in an analysis of the connection of the development in interface design to the creation of interface modification add-ons by players. The analysis is informed by interviews with specialists in the community of add-on programmers and focuses on the content and functionality of the add-ons mapped against the respective standard interface elements including an explanation of the problem they solve for the player and a measure of the similarity between them. The article also gives an outlook on the influence of these interface-modifications on the actual practice of game play as well as on game design and interface design by the game producer.

This paper uses the Teron Gorefiend Simulator, a community training tool for a raid boss in World of Warcraft, as an example to test if Gee's theories (Gee, 2003) about learning in computer games are usable for understanding and analyzing learning in MMOGs and ...