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Full-Text Articles in Social and Cultural Anthropology
The Caretaking Of Eve Online: Institutional Ethics And Enactments At Ccp Games, Joshua William Rivers
The Caretaking Of Eve Online: Institutional Ethics And Enactments At Ccp Games, Joshua William Rivers
Theses and Dissertations
This ethnography examines the Icelandic video game developer CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online—a massively-multiplayer online game (MMO) that takes place in a star cluster far, far away. Through my exploration of CCP Games as an institution over the span of fourteen months, I highlight how corporations are culturally-situated, enacted entities. Simultaneously, I demonstrate that these culturally-located actors who serve as the architects of our digital infrastructures undertake such efforts from their situated vantage points, thereby embedding particular ethical commitments into the digital landscapes they craft and within which we live our social lives. Created with the intent to …
Incipient Games: Restoring The Past Through Play In Historical Reenactment, Luke Konkol
Incipient Games: Restoring The Past Through Play In Historical Reenactment, Luke Konkol
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is an ethnography of an historical reenactment group which stewards a living history village portraying the nineteenth-century “Wisconsin frontier.” It analyzes productions from improvisations, to scripted vignettes, to a “whodunit” mystery game. Across their practice, reenactors are met with a host of challenges including ‘authenticity,’ balancing constructionism and objectivism, visitor engagement, educating the public, and the bleeding together of period techniques and modern thinking. Such challenges push against the boundaries of analyzing the project of reenactment (or larger social life) as theatre. Given terms like “play-acting” and “role-playing” in the space of reenactment, this thesis examines this phenomenon …