What Keeps Designers and Players Apart? Thinking How an Online Game World is Shared.

Abstract

Considering both play and design as world building activities, this paper offers to think the question of the distribution of authority on online game worlds through a sociotechnical perspective, and investigate the paradoxical relationship between designers and players of an online roleplaying game universe. The analysis is grounded on long- term investigations led on the project of an online multiplayer role playing game universe. This material allows to describe and question the complex agencement of mediations which keep apart design and play activities in the building of the game world.