Abstract
Why do people spend time in massively multiplayer online games? This article aims to complement games studies’ analytical toolkit with a material causal perspective on players’ time spent in Chinese World of Warcraft ( WoW). I argue that the WoW gameworld is atypically rich in stimuli that have a strong, or supernormal, capacity to activate the moral cognition reasoning systems identified by Haidt and Joseph’s “moral foundations theory.” Testimonial data gathered during long-term fieldwork in Wuhan, China, and data from a survey of 545 Chinese WoW players, wherein combat role (healer, tank) predicts frequency and type of in-game moral experience, are presented in support of this argument. Finally, the causal perspectives outlined in this article are styled in a steampunk aesthetic ( Hornbeck, 2014 ), which I use as “playful” aid to interdisciplinary discourse.
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