TY  - CHAP
A1  - Hoffstadt, Christian
A1  - Nagenborg, Michael
T1  - The concept of war in the World of Warcraft
N2  - MMORPGs such as WORLD OF WARCRAFT can be understood as interactive representations of war. Within the frame provided by the program the players experience martial conflicts and thus a “virtual war.” The game world however requires a technical and as far as possible invisible infrastructure which has to be protected against attacks: Infrastructure means e.g. the servers on which the data of the player characters and the game’s world are saved, as well as the user accounts, which have to be protected, among other things, from “identity theft.” Besides the war on the virtual surface of the program we will therefore describe the invisible war concerning the infrastructure, the outbreak of which is always feared by the developers and operators of online-worlds, requiring them to take precautions. Furthermore we would like to focus on “virtual game worlds” as places of complete surveillance. Since action in these worlds is always associated with the production of data, total observation is theoretically possible and put into practice by the so-called “game master.” The observation of different communication channels (including user forums) serves to monitor and direct the actions on the virtual battlefield subtly, without the player feeling that his freedom is being limited. Finally, we will compare the fictional theater of war in WORLD OF WARCRAFT to the vision of “Network-Centric Warfare,” since it has often been observed that the analysis of MMORPGs is useful to the real trade of war. However, we point out what an unrealistic theater of war WORLD OF WARCRAFT really is.
Y1  - 2008
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24674
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Müller, Petra
A1  - Coppock, Patrick
A1  - Liebe, Michael
A1  - Mersch, Dieter
A1  - Bogost, Ian
A1  - Bartle, Richard
A1  - Juul, Jesper
A1  - Løvlie, Anders Sundnes
A1  - Pohl, Kirsten
A1  - Schrape, Niklas
A1  - Hoffstadt, Christian
A1  - Nagenborg, Michael
A1  - Liboriussen, Bjarke
A1  - Meldgaard, Betty Li
A1  - Günzel, Stephan
A1  - Ljungström, Mattias
A1  - Jennett, Charlene
A1  - Cox, Anna L.
A1  - Cairns, Paul
A1  - Mukherjee, Souvik
A1  - Pinchbeck, Dan
A1  - Glashüttner, Robert
ED  - Günzel, Stephan
ED  - Liebe, Michael
ED  - Mersch, Dieter
T1  - Conference proceedings of The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008
N2  - This first volume of the DIGAREC Series holds the proceedings of the conference “The Philosophy of Computer Games”, held at the University of Potsdam from May 8-10, 2008. The contributions of the conference address three fields of computer game research that are philosophically relevant and, likewise, to which philosophical reflection is crucial. These are: ethics and politics, the action-space of games, and the magic circle. All three topics are interlinked and constitute the paradigmatic object of computer games: Whereas the first describes computer games on the outside, looking at the cultural effects of games as well as on moral practices acted out with them, the second describes computer games on the inside, i.e. how they are constituted as a medium. The latter finally discusses the way in which a border between these two realms, games and non-games, persists or is already transgressed in respect to a general performativity.
T3  - DIGAREC Series - 01 
Y1  - 2008
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-20072
SN  - 978-3-940793-49-2
PB  - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY  - Potsdam
ER  -