Dissonance, truth and the political limits of possibility in MMOs

This article argues and synthesizes two fundamental points about the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMO), with World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic serving as the chief examples of the genre. The first is that the use of ethical dilemmas in MMOs is a content-level manifestation of their unique fit to the current moment of late capitalism insofar as such dilemmas stage freedom of choice and action within a structure that restricts autonomy. The second is that the ludonarrative dissonance (via both Lukacs and Hocking) instigated by the merger of the closed, ‘epic’ form of the video game and the open-ended social aspects introduced in the MMO is a formal aesthetic response to late capitalism. These two threads of argument dovetail into a conclusion on the status of the MMO as a tool of hegemony – a cultural product that manifests and reinforces the norms of the present moment and at the same time has the potential to be repurposed for liberatory ends.