Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning by et al. & Drew Davidson

Author:et al. & Drew Davidson [al., et & Davidson, Drew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Comparative, Non-Fiction, Education, vl-nfcompvg
ISBN: 9780557844517
Amazon: 0557844517
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2010-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Discovering Uru:Hard Fun and the Sublime Pleasures of Impossible Gameplay

Celia Pearce

Introduction

Since 2004, I have spent many hours studying players of the game Uru, a Myst-based MMOG that has opened and closed several times since its initial beta in 2003. I have written a Ph.D. thesis, numerous papers and book chapters, as well as an entire book on the members of the Uru diaspora, players of the game who dispersed to other games and virtual worlds after its initial closure (2009). The closest I have come to writing an article about the game itself was a 2008 paper for the Future of Digital Games (FROG) conference in Vienna entitled “Spatial Literacy: Reading (and Writing) Game Space,” in which I analyzed the way players “read” story and space in Uru (2008). Although it was ostensibly “about” the game, it still viewed Uru through the eyes of its players. One of the reasons for this is that when I began studying Uru, the game no longer existed. Thus my initial experience of Uru was entirely as a ghost, a chimera, a memory of the lost “homeland” (their term) from which the community I studied had been expelled. I learned of Uru through their documentation and stories, as well its player-created artifacts and instantiations in other virtual worlds. I listened to them tearfully recount the last moments of their game, many reporting a sense of post traumatic stress from the experience. If anyone ever tells you a video game can’t make you cry, all I can say is, they aren’t playing the right games or talking to the right players.

Uru: Ages Beyond Myst was born the same year as World of Warcraft (WoW), the game-changer that brought massively multiplayer games (MMOGs) out of a niche market and into the mainstream. At its peak, Uru had less than one thousandth the players that WoW has at this writing. A massively multiplayer game based on the Myst franchise and the brainchild of one of its originators, Uru is the closest thing we have to a multiplayer variation on the adventure game, a genre that, in spite of its continued popularity, is considered to have been pronounced dead at the end of the last century.

Originally shut down by its publisher, Ubisoft, after a mere six-month beta test, Uru is and was, by any standards of commercial and critical success, an unmitigated flop. Reviews of the game are almost nonexistent, and few gamers I talk to, including the majority of game scholars, have never heard of the game except through my writings and presentations, and to-date, I am the only academic researcher I am aware of who has written about it. For all intents and purposes, Uru would be one more corpse in the MMOG graveyard, alongside Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call, The Sims Online, and a plethora of other ill-fated online worlds, all of which failed with a higher player count and public awareness than Uru. Except for one little problem: Uru’s players won’t let it die. Including

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.