Introduction.

I've made this blog to create a space for shared research and reflection on a specific massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG): Final Fantasy XI. There do exist blogs that discuss theoretical and practical concerns about MMORPG design, and sites which study the sociology of MMORPGs, but to date there's been less work (though by no means none) on MMORPGs as cultural artifacts, as texts, and as aesthetic spaces. I'm interested on both sides of the production/consumption divide: how MMORPGs are designed and developed (usually collectively and iteratively), and how they are played, perceived, navigated, documented, discussed, and re-interpreted by the player-audience.

Starting from the perspective of the artifact itself motivates a kind of interdisciplinarity, even a hybrid approach which crosses boundaries between visual culture and media studies, anthropology and sociology, and even a certain amount of cognitive science and human-computer interface theory.

Though initially I suspect that I'll be posting ideas-in-progress here, I'm hoping to open this up to contributors.