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Power games: Rules and roles in Second Life
Blekinge Institute of Technology.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-9212-8551
2011 (English)Doctoral thesis, monograph (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

This study investigates how the members of four different role-playing communities on the online platform Second Life perform social as well as dramatic roles within their community. The trajectories of power influencing these roles are my main focus. Theoretically I am relying primarily on performance scholar Richard Schechner, sociologist, Erving Goffman, and post-structuralists Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felìx Guattari. My methodological stance has its origin primarily within literature studies using text analysis as my preferred method, but I also draw on the (cyber)ethnographical works of T.L. Taylor, Celia Pearce, and Mikael Jakobsson. In this dissertation my focus is on the relationship of the role-player to their chosen role especially in terms of the boundary between being in character, and as such removed from "reality," and the popping out of character, which instead highlights the negotiations of the social, sometimes make-belief, roles. Destabilising and problematising the dichotomy between the notion of the online as virtual and the offline as real, as well as the idea that everything is "real" regardless of context, my aim is to understand role-play in a digital realm in a new way, in which two modes of performance, dramatic and social, take place in a digital context online.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Karlskrona: Blekinge tekniska högskola. Sektionen för planering och mediedesign , 2011. , p. 228
Series
Blekinge Institute of Technology doctoral dissertation series, ISSN 1653-2090 ; 2011:09
Keywords [en]
power, digital games, online world, Second Life, virtuality, reality, role-play, hierarchy, authority, governing, subversion
National Category
Human Aspects of ICT
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-59643Libris ID: 12202711ISBN: 978-91-7295-209-6 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hj-59643DiVA, id: diva2:1735611
Available from: 2013-11-30 Created: 2023-02-09Bibliographically approved

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Bäcke, Maria

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
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Output format
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