The document discusses MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) as potential utopian or dystopian spaces. It explores how concepts from novels like textuality, narrativity, dialogism, and realism can be applied to MMOGs. While MMOGs could create utopian social spaces, they may also devolve into dystopias if players' rights are not respected or the virtual world is not well-designed by administrators. MMOGs thus walk a line between upholding player agency and preventing corruption like cheating.

1. Julian Kücklich
MMOGs als soziale
Utopieräume
re:publica 07, Berlin
13. April 2007

2. Utopie und Virtualität

3. Von der Utopie zur Dystopie

4. MMOGs: Utopie ...

5. ... Dystopie ...

6. ... oder Spiegel der Zeit?

7. Der Roman als Modell
Textualität
Narrativität
Dialogizität
Realismus

8. Der Roman als Modell
Textualität

9. Der Roman als Modell
Textualität
Narrativität

10. Der Tod des Autors?
„For the traditional reader
electronic writing offers
little comfort; it will in
fact confirm much of what
the deconstructionists […]
have been saying about Jay D. Bolter
the instability of the text
and decreasing authority
of the author“

11. Der Roman als Modell
Narrativität
„Wir haben festge-
stellt, daß die
Tragödie die Nach-
ahmung einer in
sich geschlossenen
und ganzen Hand-
lung ist [...]. Ein
Ganzes ist, was Aristoteles
Anfang, Mitte und
Ende hat.“

12. Der Roman als Modell
Narrativität
„Wir haben festge-
stellt, daß die
Tragödie die Nach-
ahmung einer in
sich geschlossenen
und ganzen Hand-
lung ist [...]. Ein
Ganzes ist, was Aristoteles
Anfang, Mitte und
Ende hat.“

13. Der Roman als Modell
Narrativität
„Narrative has
something to do
with timebounded-
ness, and plot is
the internal logic of
the discourse of
mortality“
Peter Brooks

14. Der Roman als Modell
Narrativität
Dialogizität
„A cybertext is a
machine for the
production of a
variety of
expressions“
Espen Aarseth
Espen Aarseth

15. Der Roman als Modell
Dialogizität
Scutter, he
cried thickly
She has it, she got it,
Wherever she put it
The leg of the duck.
Vidi aquam egre-
dientem de templo a
latere dextro. Alleluia

16. Der Roman als Modell
Dialogizität
lol ME ME ME!
it saves
ur !@#
we lived to fight
another day!

17. Der Roman als Modell
„When heteroglossia enters the
novel it becomes subject to an
artistic reworking. The social and
historical voices populating
language, all its words and all its
forms, which provide language
with its particular concrete
conceptualizations, are organized
in the novel into a structured
stylistic system that expresses the M. Bachtin
differentiated socio-ideological
position of the author amid the
heteroglossia of his epoch.“

18. Der Roman als Modell
Dialogizität
Realismus
lol ME ME ME!
it saves
ur !@#
we lived to fight
another day!

19. Der Roman als Modell
Realismus
„Realistic-ness
and realism are
most certainly
not the same
thing“
A. Galloway

20. Der Roman als Modell
Realismus
„[The realist novel‘s]
greatness and practical
usefulness lay in its
unremitting work of
involving the reader
himself in the moral
life, inviting him to put
his own motives under
examination, suggest- Lionel Trilling
ing that reality is not as
his conventional edu-
cation has led him to
see it.“

21. Der Roman als Modell
Utopie?
Textualität
Narrativität
Dystopie?
Dialogizität
Realismus

22. Utopie oder Dystopie?
we lived to fight
another day!
lol ME ME ME! By pressing the
‚I accept‘ button,
you accept the
it saves terms and con-
ur !@# ditions below
Dialogizität

23. Utopie oder Dystopie?
„But one new and interesting thing
in this EULA [...] is the fact that
you will be giving up your rights of
ownership over anything that you
build and leave in the world.
Moreover if something goes wrong
with the world, or if the powers that
E. Castronova
be decide to change some part of
the code, and as a result you lose
something important to you, you
have no right to expect
compensation. [...]“

24. Utopie oder Dystopie?
39,99

25. Utopie oder Dystopie?
„Player activity is productive in a number of
ways. The basic ergodic nature of the game
text requires player input in order to
advance the game. In emergent games like
EverQuest this can be a creative process
39,99
which leads to unexpected or unpredictable
results [...]. Players are also a source of
feedback and suggestions; act as quasi
bug-testers; are active on game bulletin
boards. […] Finally there are the social and
community investment of players that build
important structural features such as the
social networks found in guilds, and the
long-term friendships and team-like
relationships that lead to player retention in
the game“ (Sal Humphries)

26. Utopie oder Dystopie?
„There‘s no way to measure the
reasonableness of virtual world
design decisions [...]. Artists do
what artists do.“
Richard Bartle
„The nature of virtual spaces is
such that there must [...] be a
higher power or administrator. [...]
By declaring that avatars have
rights, we‘re abrogating that
administrator‘s right to personal
Raph Koster
property.“

27. Utopie oder Dystopie?
I don‘t want to
surrender control. I
hate the notion of
rights for players.

28. Utopie oder Dystopie?
„Game fictions are all about testing of ‚hypotheses‘,
‚options‘, and ‚imaginative alternatives, all about offering
the ‚contents‘ and not the authored and fixed meaning of a
single imaginative possibility“ (Barry Atkins)

29. julian@kuecklich.de

30. Utopie oder Dystopie?
“Then the cheaters came. As a
social construct, despite being
virtual, the online world of
Diablo was just as susceptible
to cheaters as the real world.
[…] New players had found
ways of illegitimately altering
their characters. Using a
technique called 'duping', they
could duplicate any item they
owned, or even fabricate them
out of thin air.” (Andy Kuo)