Each month 11 million people pay about 14 euros to participate in World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, which since its inception in 2004 has no rivals. The phenomenon of real-time aion kinah over the Internet has reached such a magnitude that has even created parallel economies, from the sale of military use, such as night vision goggles, to the black market for gold farmers, gatherers gold. These professional players, often Chinese, selling power and skills that would take months to get rookies rapidly reached a level more fun and participatory game.
World of Warcraft is one of the stars of virtual companies. Gamer’s Edition, an open exhibition at the Arts Center Santa Monica in Barcelona until 11 April, which offers a journey from the first war game, invented in Prussia in 1827, through the great landmarks of various kinds, to Wheelman , a video game of 2009, set in a Barcelona deconstructed, that is, they are all typical architectural elements, but in another place.
“The game itself is a symbolic language of every age, to analyze the evolution of society,” says Ricard Mas, curator of the exhibition, which unfolds in a “passable film library, dark and apparently closed. However, careful to go with the fun frenzy, because a strategically-placed webcams, capture the faces of visitors, players and projected in real time on the faculty of the center.
The role play was born in 1974, when Americans Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, specialists in war games and fans of J. R. Tolkien, edited the instructions of Dungeons & Dragons, shifting the logic of hosts to a group of individuals of fantasy races and supernatural powers. Certainly not imagined that his model would remain in force over three decades and that would incorporate the new technological resources, reaching massive RPGs online.
Although the military culture and language of the game have always enjoyed a special relationship, the desire for a society eager for virtual lives is also reflected in other formats. Are virtual worlds aion gold kinah oriented media, such as Habbo Hotel and Second Life, evolution of God games, in which the player, become a demiurge, create and manipulate beings and civilizations, favor or impede their lives. As in the saga that Will Wrigh opened in 1989 with the urban simulation game SimCity. Or the case of most moralists games Peter Molyneux, as Black & White and Fable, where the player is faced with the dichotomy between good and evil in key roles. Heirs of the hippy culture, these authors used the Sanskrit name of the reincarnations of the god Vishnu, avatar, virtual alias to christen the player: a person in The Sims, an animated character in Habbo Hotel, a penguin in Club Penguin.
Supporters and detractors of videogames will be able to clash swords in front of controversial documentaries like Playing Columbine: a true story of a videogame controversy, in which Danny Ledonne the controversy has sparked his game set in the school of the slaughter.
According Ledonne, the intent of the game was to provoke reflection on identification mechanisms that trigger these productions beyond simplistic analysis.