Interfaces: Bodies and Technologies in Multiplayer Role-Playing Games

Abstract

Role-playing games create fictional spaces within which imaginary, exotic, and often heroic identities can be acted out. MMORPGs, Massive Multiplayer Role-Playing Games with virtually unlimited numbers of participants, offer increasingly complex and complicated networks of player interaction - here playing becomes especially time-consuming and at times even boring. I want to look at two multiplayer role-playing games, the action-centered Diablo II and the massive multiplayer game Dark Age of Camelot, comparing their ways of corporeally immersing players. I want to introduce the following hypothesis: multiplayer role-playing computer games, usually considered to form a relatively homogeneous genre, offer very diversified, indeed in some aspects oppositional, playing experiences.