William Huber: "Fictive Affinities in Final Fantasy XI: Complicit and Critical Play in Fantastic Nations"

(In Worlds in Play)

- How does FFXI generate space/tasks of play and situate the player?
- Altman's genre theory: semantically fantasy, syntactically an MMO (why does everyone ignore pragmatics?!)
- Fantasy as a fictional geography for working out questions of race, nation, ethnos, etc.
- Playable as procedure in games (actualization)
- Fantasy as an episteme created by always-ideological processes of replacement, subtraction and augmentation
- In-game races reference real-world ethnicities, relationships (and hybridize)
- Mechanisms of complicity: relation between nation-state and aboriginal/subaltern enemies; conquest, dominance of regions in the game; necessity of coordinated efforts (ie: partying up) that overshadows individual choice/agency
- This inescapable complicity is revealed through backstories, etc., but there is still no "real" historical agency
- So where, then, is the critical play promised by the title? (Expansive gameplay could be an example of this.)