The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space in the MMORPG

Despite offering themselves as universes vastly alternative to our own, the majority of 3D Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games work to a strict profi le of reward systems which serve to group players and places around sets of action types. In contradiction to the promised inexhaustibility of a “VR,” today’s MMORPGs are designed and held together by amplifi ed constructions of passage rights, role archetypes, resource management and the threat of death. Yet MMORPGs are by far the preferred “virtual” experience today. Statistics are revealing ongoing and consistent growth in MMORPG gaming. We are seeing MMORPGs succeed as busy cultural landscapes within a network infrastructure originally designed to support transfer of scientifi c papers, a framework often criticized for being too pointillistic in nature to support the complex needs of human interaction (let alone “public space”). Generations of scholars and artists have dedicated plenty of thought to what constitutes public space, so just what makes us believe that some game developers can even come close to manifesting it in a virtual setting? This paper illustrates how and why we must begin to think of the MMORPG as a public space. More importantly it provides tools for thinking how this rich platform for human interaction is actually