Patch Notes: Playing the Selves in Gamespace

Digital gaming is a theatricalized activity in the wider spheres of performance studies research. When we play games we trace out our personal experiences through digital participation, narrative simulation, enactment, and spectatorship. Traditionally thought of as dimensionally collapsed puppet play that assumes a direct relationship between player and avatar, player experiences in gaming have been transformed by social networks featuring online play. In MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), gaming becomes an embodied practice that projects corporeality into digital space. This is the expanding “atopian” realm of what Mackenzie Wark calls “gamespace,” which supersedes Guy Debord’s “spectacle” as the cultural logic of our time. Written from a gamer perspective, this article explores how the recent dominance of MMORPGS has shifted understandings of role-play in gaming. It critiques the models of player types proposed by John Bartle and Nick Yee for their inability to consider the multi-dimensionality of distributed selves in gamespace.