MMOGs and the Future of Literature

Key insights

4 slides

The core argument

Massively multiplayer games are presented as a modern realist novel.

The report presents EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies as textual works that can be read as an extension of the realist novel. Their meaning arises from thousands of players' actions.

Central conclusion

Publisher control is said to leave MMOGs' social potential largely unrealized.

The report concludes that MMOGs have dialogic potential for multiple voices and shared meaning. It argues that publisher control over intellectual property and player citizenship suppresses this potential.

Stated limit. The theoretical argument is not backed by empirical data, so its conclusions rest on conceptual reasoning rather than measured evidence.

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Summary

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies are presented as textual works that can be read as a modern extension of the realist novel. Their meaning arises from the interweaving of thousands of players' actions, which together generate narrative and social significance, mirroring and commenting on the societies that produce them. Drawing on literary and critical theory, the analysis argues that MMOGs are textual, intertextual, and literary in that they make things happen through non-referential signs, and it introduces social realism in games as a topic that has only recently begun to attract scholarly attention despite its prominence in popular gaming discourse.

The argument rests on the resemblance between virtual worlds and the real one: both lack a fixed plot, and both are shaped by complex social dynamics. Examples include Costello's novel The Big If, Sony's interventions against cheating and property disputes in EverQuest and Diablo, and the account termination of a player in The Sims Online. These cases illustrate that virtual worlds can function as social critique and as models for society. The central conclusion is that MMOGs possess dialogic potential, allowing multiple voices and shared meaning to emerge, but that publishers' monologic control over intellectual property and player "citizenship" suppresses this potential, leaving their realism and social possibilities largely unrealized.

A more theoretical claim follows. MMOGs are real social constructs, still constrained by power structures that prevent players from becoming fully social beings, yet capable of serving as spaces for social experimentation in the manner of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Occupying a liminal zone between social fact and social fiction, they are presented as having assumed the social simulation function once held by literature, which underpins the claim that MMOGs are the future of literature. This portion of the work is primarily theoretical and offers no empirical data, so its conclusions rest on conceptual argument rather than measured evidence. The scope is thus broad in theoretical reach and focused on a specific set of prominent titles.