WHO GOVERNS THE VIRTUAL WORLDS: TENSIONS BETWEEN DEVELOPERS AND PLAYERS AS FORMS OF CULTURAL GOVERNANCE IN MMO VIDEOGAMES

This study focuses on tensions and conflicts between the developers and the players of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), that emerge while developers struggle to regulate the public and the cultural domains of the virtual worlds and players generate methods to resist these regulations. Apart from deconstructional interventions like cheating and exploitation, players also stay at odds with the developers within the domains of intellectual properties, fan culture and other cultural behaviors. The study appropriates these tensions as collaterals of cultural governance in digital domains and discusses them with case studies