Taiwan
From GamesCultures.org
[edit] Game Cultures
- Game Tips as Gifts: Social Interactions and Rational Calculations in Computer Gaming [1]
- Sun Chuen-Tsai, Lin Holin, and Ho Cheng-Hong look at online tip exchanges as parts of gift economies created by the players and designers of console and online role-playing games in Taiwan. A group of experienced players and tip contributors agreed to be interviewed about the mechanisms and processes of providing free strategy guides on the Internet. Their comments reveal needs for social approval and networking in addition to their perceptions of rational exchange in the interest of completing games. The authors speculate on the social norms behind tip cultures, and their influences on game play and management.
- An Irrational Black Market? Boundary Work Perspective on the Stigma of in-game Asset Transactions [2]
- This article looks at the negative images on cash trades of in-game assets in Taiwan, through interview of participants in this activity, we believe the blurring of boundaries between work and play, adulthood and adolescence, real and virtual is what distinguishes this market from previous markets of virtual goods, resulting in its social stigma. We then discuss how the participants confront this stigma and the ambiguity in their social status, through performing various strategies of redefining marginality or constructing alternative boundaries, the participants raise their sense of selfhood and also reflect the inadequacy of the present social categories.
- The ‘White-eyed’ Player Culture: Grief Play and Construction of Deviance in MMORPGs [The ‘White-eyed’ Player Culture: Grief Play and Construction of Deviance in MMORPGs]
- This study explores the social process governing the nature, emergence, application, and consequences of labeling the ‘white-eyed’ or grief players in massively multiplayer online role playing games in Taiwan. We found that two types of ‘white-eyed’ players exist in MMORPGs. The explicit type, who come out and organize themselves into griefer pledges, can be understood as players who rebel against game rules. Most of the common players are actually the second type, or implicit griefers. They play grief in an unidentifiable way with weak self-awareness, and put the griefer stigma on other age-groups to alleviate their anxiety in a cross-age co-playing era.
[edit] Event and Conference
