The latest issue (volume 1, number 4) of the journal Games & Culture is devoted entirely to this popular massively multiplayer online game (MMO) which has more than six million individual player accounts worldwide.
Why devote a whole issue of a scholarly journal to a single game? As guest editors Tanya Krzywinska and Henry Lowood say in the introduction to the issue:
"Unlike many other digital games that are played alone or in small groups, World of Warcraft puts players into a vibrant and busy social world and an equally engaging set of culturally conditioned practices."It's a mixture of game, virtual world, and online community, they say, and the authors in this issue show
"....that participation in such synthetic worlds is an important phenomenon in contemporary popular culture and aspects of that participation put certain established assumptions, categories, and concepts about “virtual” as well as “real life” under pressure."What do you think? DoWorld of Warcraft and other online games have something to tell us about the way we communicate?
You can read this latest issue or check out the contents of all issues of Games & Culture, one of the latest editions to BC's collection of communication journals online.
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