The Concept of Space & MMOG’s
Reading Simmel‘s article on Spatial and Urban Culture for my Sociology of Culture class, and it got me thinking about how we preceive space in the digital context, and even more specifically in the context of mmog’s. When looking over my play experience in EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft, the space experienced, although visual, is still an abstraction of space. Yes, boundaries and ‘zone walls’ are created by design, but this is usually for design limitation and technical issues. Simmel’s article focuses on the three predominant qualities of space for social formations and interactions. In many cases then, there is no difference between Simmel’s 19th century concept of space and today’s virtual space found in mmog’s. Both are conceptual spaces that exist within the physical realm that concerns itself with localization (cities, states etc / servers, shards etc.)
More on this later …
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