Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/9012
Title: “It’s like my life but more, and better!” - Playing with the Cathaby Shark Girls: MMORPGs, young people and fantasy-based social play
Authors: Crowe, N
Keywords: Gaming;MMORPGs;Young people;Fantasy;Social play
Issue Date: 2011
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Citation: International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 16(2), 201 - 223, 2012
Abstract: Digital technology has opened up a range of new on-line leisure spaces for young people. Despite their popularity, on-line games and Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games in particular are still a comparatively under-researched area in the fields of both Education and more broadly Youth Studies. Drawing on a Five year ethnographic study, this paper considers the ways that young people use the virtual spaces offered by MMORPGs. This paper suggests that MMORPGs represent significant arenas within which young people act out a range of social narratives through gaming. It argues that MMORPG have become important fantasy spaces which offer young people possibilities to engage in what were formally material practices. Although this form of play is grounded in the everyday it also extends material practices and offers new and unique forms of symbolic experimentation, thus I argue that game-play narratives cannot be divorced from the everyday lives of their participants.
Description: This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2011 A B Academic Publishers.
URI: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02673843.2011.9748055
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/9012
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2011.9748055
ISSN: 2164-4527
Appears in Collections:Education
Dept of Education Research Papers

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