Paper Abstract - Gitte Stald

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PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE:
DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS
IN COMPUTER GAMING

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ABSTRACT

Meeting in the Combat Zone. Online Multiplayer Computer Games as
Spaces for Social and Cultural Encounters

Gitte Stald

The popularity of online multiplayer computer games is growing explosively. Unknown numbers of enthusiasts and semi-professionals as well as happy amateur players - often young and male - engage themselves for hours and days in virtual worlds of never ending challenges in combat, fight for survival and strategic planning. The challenge and dynamics of the game, the narratives set in adventurous or otherwise exotic universes, the 3D graphics and the role-playing are essential elements of fascination to the players. Another area of specific academic interest, however, is how online computer playing creates social and cultural rooms for formation and stimulation of personal relations in the game as well as around it. In the game you kill your enemies, make alliances, think out strategies, fight to survive and to develop your skills and characters to add to the joy and challenge of the game. Around the game the super-users to whom playing and gaming culture is the meaning of life, participate in organised gaming groups that also meet IR. Most players, however, are groups of joy riders who occasionally decide to spend some hours or a night in the combat zone.

This paper discusses the social and cultural interactions of online computer gaming. It points to the relations between online gaming cultures and everyday living with Internet, computers and computer games and with everyday search for position and identity.

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