The game world is not only a richly animated “world” like all MMOs, but the aggregate of these animations also produce a sense of life, a “living world”. The most oft-cited distinctive properties of Ryzom in the MMO world is the way creates not only an immersive sense of “worldness”, but a living, breathing, organic world. In addition to their value for anthropology, social psychology and communication studies, these findings are particularly useful for game developers and UX designers, who have to find ways to accommodate and support these relationships/interactions via game design, alternative media or marketing strategies.Ryzom is a long-running (from 2004–present) science fantasy MMORPG (henceforth MMO) set in the science fantasy game world of the planet Atys, an entirely organic “rootball” teeming with alien life forms. Thus, many gamers play computer games not only for their gameplay, but also for the relationships/interactions established and/or maintained through them. These new meanings include those centered on relationships/social interactions and identity. Within this framework, ritual and ritualized play (but also ritualization as a process) were defined as referring to practices through which the game is enriched with new meanings that go beyond the game being `just a game'. ![]() To achieve this aim, an ethnographic study was conducted (using participant observation and semi-structured interviews) and the data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively through a ritualisation framework inspired by a multidisciplinary perspective on secular ritual (coming from anthropology, communication and media studies and social psychology). Specifically, I investigated the emerging practices of playing together with fellow players, friends, family and romantic partners and their functions in an integrated fashion. ![]() In this context, my research focused on exploring social aspects within and around two online games, World of Warcraft and Star Kingdoms. However, currently, these practices of playing together and their roles for gameplay and the relationships of the players are not presented and explained in an integrated manner. Online computer games are increasingly seen by game studies and industry as `more than games', i.e., places where players form and maintain relationships by playing together. We close by demonstrating a successful application of role detection in a free to play MMORPG. We present and discuss various approaches towards virtual world role detection, showing that performance close to that of human judges can be achieved. We give an introduction into virtual worlds and formalize the task of virtual world role detection as well as evaluating its performance against a manually annotated large-scale corpus. This work describes an automatic means of inferring such roles based on textual communication. Knowledge about users' roles within a virtual world can be of socio-economical and scientific interest. Without ``living" in any given virtual world it is hard to get insights about that world and its inhabitants. Virtual worlds typically provide a high degree of complexity, which in some areas approaches the real world's richness of detail. ![]() ![]() Some of the providers report user numbers that exceed the population of entire nations in the real world. Virtual worlds are a topic of steadily growing relevance.
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