Towards a Socio-Cultural Cartography of In-Game Protests

In-game protests are a dynamic part of a burgeoning global cartography of activism and mass mobilisation unfolding across virtual worlds. Such protests nonetheless deserve to be negotiated on their own specific terms if only because these situational inter-plays of political, social, and gaming practices provide a unique means to gain insight into the socio-cultural contexts and imperatives that variously provoke, animate, and enable these acts. By focusing on two extended case study analyses—(1) U.S. artist Joseph DeLappe’s online war memorial and protest project, dead-in-iraq; and (2) the mass protest triggered by the sighting of a Japanese military flag in the Chinese online game Fantasy Westward Journey—this paper is illustrative of interpretive approaches for tentatively mapping and negotiating the sociocultural constituencies of in-game protests. The chosen case studies exemplify how Web 2.0 participatory culture remains informed at base by an acute sense of locality and placespecificity. Such are the grounded premises and possibilities for developing future and further theorisations on the global cartography of in-game protests. Author