Interações estratégicas em games massivos online: visibilidade de simulacros identitários e a axiologia do Transmog em World of Warcraft

• Main Author: Razera, Bruno Ayres
• Publication Date: 2018
• Format: Master thesis
• Language: por
• Source: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_SP
• Download full: https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/21357
• topic: Jogos eletrônicos; Semiótica; Regimes de sentido e de interação; Electronic games; Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game; World of Warcraft; Regiment of meaning and interaction; CNPQ::CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::COMUNICACAO

The research investigates how the game mode Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), by strategic concomitance, directs the player to operate by the visibility, to build the meaning of their simulacra identity. Concomitance, according to linguistics, is the designation of one or more actions, things or facts that occur simultaneously; coexistence or simultaneity. In this study the strategic concomitance has the coexistence as the relation of a strategist sender with the subject that provides his own tactic in simultaneity, working values in a same logical line. The most popular game of the genre, World of Warcraft (WOW), is taken as an object, as the immersion of its players is sanctioned by its great geographic reach and number of users who remain, year after year, faithful to the product, generating a movement large volume financial instrument, as well as employing new electronic technology tools and practices. The act of playing keeps the subject in interaction with other subjects and in the operation of this visibility that they construct identity simulations, shaped by the enunciative choices to make-see. In the analysis of the game, the use of the device called "transmog" was used to transform the appearance of the player's equipment. Syntagmatic operations call the device in its placement in discourse and thus build the axiology that makes the subject have to be, a simulacrum of socialized doing that establishes visibility as its main value. The theoretical-methodological support for the analysis is given by the discursive semiotic theory of Greimas (2014, 2007, 2002), which structures the generative path of meaning, the basis of the construction of meaning. It is also supported by Landowski's (1992, 1997, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) socio-demographic concept that, through the regimes of meaning and interaction, as well as through the regimes of visibility, allows to elucidate lived practices of the participants and their simulacrums built in the game. The theories of other semioticians are also bases for the elaboration of the axiological taxonomy of transmog. The bibliographical references also include a review of the history of the games and the survey of works with this theme. To carry out the study, there are analyzes of the transmog phenomenon, highlighting the dynamics of the interactions of the audience of World of Warcraft; in short, the study of the discursive practices of this device in the game, surrounded by the regimes of visibility, meaning and interaction. It was possible, with this, to verify the hypothesis that the visibility values in the game allow to maintain and extend the immersion of the players in a continuity, corresponding to the social practices: transmog, this device in game, does not determine the values in game, as facilitator and computer of an axiological exchange shared to the player. In addition, this work contributed to the theoretical basis for the area of communication that deals with the strategies of the gaming industry