An Analysis Of Men’s Language And Behaving Patterns In Online Game

Because of the level of social interaction available to players, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games) have become an important part of on-line culture. Their increasing sophistication and the addition of such tools as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) have made these games attractive to an ever-expanding segment of the Internet users. A common oversight in current scholarly research of MMORPGs is a lack of attention to how gaming culture affects players’in-game relationships. To help address this gap in game studies, this thesis examines how members of an end-game guild communicate over VoIP while playing World of Warcraft, currently the largest MMORPG on the market. This dissertation draws on Deborah Tannen’s work on gendered speech styles and Judith Butler’s theories on the performativity of gender to examine how game culture affects the ways male players perform their gender within the game.By focusing on a small, close-knit group of men, this paper hopes to determine what is changing in the ways they build communities and how those constructions are shaped by the virtual environment of World of Warcraft. Employing a quantitative approach, it uses Deborah Tannen’s studies of male linguistic behavior to establish that this group of players are using gendered speech in atypical ways. To consider the significance of these findings, this dissertation incorporate Judith Butler’s theory that gender is performative in my analysis. It argues that the nature of on-line games forces players to inhabit a postmodern self and perhaps offers a way out of a system of gender which depends on unified subjects. This increased identity flexibility challenges how gendered behavior is categorized and reveals the artificial nature of "masculine" and "feminine". It is through the virtual environment’s challenges to identity as a unified concept that normative definitions of gender can begin to be unraveled. These games, with their potential for gender play, perhaps provide spaces where young men can redefine masculinity. Although postmodernists have argued for years that the self is multiple and fractured, on-line games, especially World of Warcraft, are bringing this concept into the homes of millions of people outside of academia.