I can’t believe the national Popular Culture Association conference is upon us again — I feel like I was just putting my paper together for last year’s conference. I’m excited to be presenting on a Game Studies panel dedicated to (Re)defining Gaming. The presentation is coming together and I’m ready to hop in the car for this long ride to Indianapolis. (I’m just hoping that I can fight off this cold!)
For those interested…
The Logistics:
Time: Friday, March 30, 2018 – 8:00am to 9:30am
Place: White River H, J.W. Marriott in Indianapolis, IN (Popular Culture Association)
Panel: GAMESTUDIES XI: (Re)Defining Gaming
Title: Vaguely Oriental: Engineering Asian Architecture in Fantasy MMORPGs
Abstract:
In his seminal work Orientalism (1978), Edward Said famously described the reified concept of the “Orient” as “the stage on which the whole East is confined.” He explains that, “On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.”
This paper pursues Said’s original line of thinking in massively multiplayer online role-playing games within the fantasy genre. When immersing one’s self in an MMORPG, the city and the backdrop forms a kind of “stage.” Reading Said literally in this sense, I will analyze the construction of these theatrical spaces with an approach that combines architectural analysis from the field of art history with the study of race representation in game studies. I will offer a different analysis of race representation that transcends the roles of in-game characters. The visual settings of MMORPGs like Ragnarok Online, The World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood challenge us by creating specific locales that are read by the player as “Asian” or “vaguely Oriental” within story narratives that harken back to fantasy worlds based in the Western tradition. I want to envision the stakes as well as the creative possibilities enabled by such design.
