Emergent Systems: Virtuality, Legality, Formality

Emergent Systems: Virtuality, Legality, Formality

As online worlds increasingly embrace artificial life and emergent systems in place of traditional static technologies, their legal form as captured by the ‘magic circle theory’ has become insufficient for an ordinary understanding of what now counts as a videogame. Nowhere is this bold thesis more apparent than in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) where it is immersion in virtuality itself that is at stake. The magic circle theory was imagined against a cultural background of static game boundaries. In such games, the geometric lines of a tennis court or soccer field are simultaneously distinct from and representative of the formal rules of these games. In this context, any changes to the visual appearance of a field of play will necessarily reformulate the rules. In an exciting move, this deeply traditional obscuritanist problem of games’ spatiotemporal geometry lapsing into the mass consensual hallucination of the formal rules of the game itself is radically reorganised by the virtuality of contemporary MMORPGs that is more akin to the psychoanalytic concept of psychosis. This chapter will reconsider the legal form of emergent systems in recent contributions to the MMORPG subgenre of videogames.

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