We call ourselves players– as opposed to “gamers,” a herd of junkies doing rather well squandering their time.

We see no connection between truly exhilarating flow and the cunning and calculation of the profiteers.

We consider the psychological Euro-American MMO-reward drama weighed down with needy apparitions and childhood greed– an absurdity.

To the synthetic frontier with its showy geography and to the mythification of Tolkien lore the players say thanks for the rapid territory transitions and the quests. Good … but disorderly, not based on precise study of locality and immersion. A cut above the psychological raid drama, but still lacking in foundation. A cliché. A copy of a replicant.

“Seeing these technoloiges and practices over and over in our popular culture, and particularly in cinema, we witness a scorn for the boundaries between the public and the private, between the interior and the exterior. And in doing so popular culture has created the sense that surveillance is normal–the aesthetic accompaniment to the end of privacy. Films that feature surveillance as a vehicle for spectacle, suspense, and violence demonstrate how we are no longer affected or unsettled by the video gaze or bodily intrusion. They have become ordinary images.”
-John Turner

Since the birth of cinema, film and cultural critics have noted the emergence of the spectacle as a challenge to traditional rituals of art – especially concerning the medium’s capacity to “distract” the masses. In 1936 Walter Benjamin famously warned of the loss of artwork’s so called “aura” in the age of technological reproducibility

Blizzard Denies RMT Profitability, eBaying continues

“The Spectacle steals every experience and sells it back to us, but only symbolically, so that we are never satisfied: via this mechanism we support the machine of endless consumption over and over.”
-Laura Marz

More than a medium is at stake, but the very fabric of nation and cultural formation. In the wake of Blizzcon 2007, RMT resistance continues under the guise that the sanctity of American play is under attack by Asian trends in the MMO sphere.

Counterveiling Forces
Irvine, CA- If we have indeed entered an era of mechanical repeatability, what is to be said of  players’ balancing interactions and developers’ gradual acceptance of emergent forms of cultural play? With Blizzcon just hours away, how do we account for the feedback loops in place to facilitate metaversal community interests and concerns? When gnomes and orcs of the world unite, do anti-social contracts melt into Azerothian air? Do we see a reinstatement of bilateral social relations? I don’t fully expect to answer such ambitious questions here: rather this post seeks to explore the process by which value is created in and around virtual worlds by means of economic, yet highly cultural checks and balances at the fringe of commercial norms.