(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Games have a long customary relation and association with play concept. The concept of play, which
is a common Western symbol of modernity, is ‘semibounded and socially legitimate domain of
contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes’ (Mallaby, 2007). Games and their play
is composed of intricately interwoven players of technological infrastructure system and software
technologies, the hardware, virtual spaces, game genre, the social world infused in them, its
ludology, game narratives, institutional framework of the game, legal structures, our personal
histories and aesthetic experiences.
Back in 1993, Julian Dibbel wrote an article “A Rape in Cyberspace” which became the scholastic
marker of the first generation of virtual worlds studies. The virtual world referred to by Dibbel
during that time was a world represented entirely by alphanumeric texts in which every depiction of
rooms, objects and players is described without elaborate graphical avatars and images. Dibbel was
able to show how compelling an abstract database of textual descriptions can be to some people. In
the sexual “act” that happened in LamdaMOO, a fictional mansion composed of words, Dibbel
(1993) argued that “when it comes to sex, perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all,
but its psychic double, the bodylike self-representation we carry around in our heads”. In this present
time when virtual worlds are composed of three-dimensional images and sound, it presents a
satisfying and immersive gaming experience. Back in the mid-1990s, people were amazed by how
databases could turn into worlds while in present time, virtual worlds turned it back into a database
through the community that it forms.
This study deals about the knowledge formed in a group raiding that happens inside the virtual
community of World of Warcraft where players join a coordinated form of “slaying” the bosses as an
end form of accomplishment in every dungeon. This form of knowledge creation in the hopes of
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