The Orc—Playing the “Wholly Other”
Investigations of Kant's Sublime and The Technological Sublime in Blizzard Entertainment's Massive Multiplayer Online Game World of Warcraft
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18949136 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bo Kampmann Walther (0000-0003-0600-1779, University of Southern Denmark), L J Larsen (0000-0001-6765-6811, University of Southern Denmark, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 868-888 |
| Publication date | 2023-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Games and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1555-4120 • E-ISSN: 1555-4139 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/15554120221139217 |
| OpenAlex | W4311622337 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 17 |
While the complicated scheme of the philosophical sublime may at first hand seem mere platitude when brought to life in computer games, this article claims that the action/adventure game World of Warcraft wedges open a space in which to operate the sublime and navigate radically “other” subjectivities. The hypothesis is that the assembly of fantastic elements in World of Warcraft duplicates the Kantian sublime while at the same time commenting upon and even radicalizing it. The Romantic tradition of the sublime as it unfolds in Immanuel Kant's third Critique is outlined followed by an attempt to topologize elements of the fantastic in Blizzard's game design philosophy leading to a clarification of what we call “the knotted point of play” where game object, game interaction, and game subject intervene. Finally, we explore how the notion of the technological sublime relates to World of Warcraft and beyond
Adventure · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Entertainment · Epistemology · Literature · Romance · Sociology · Sublime · Visual arts · World Wide Web · Artificial Intelligence in Games · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Philosophy · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant
The Cultural Logic of Computation
Women's Liberation and the Sublime
The Invention of the Object
Who's Afraid of Anacoluthon
The philosophy of horror, or, Paradoxes of the heart
Introducción a la literatura fantástica
Object-oriented ontology, or programming's creative fold
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |