Nested Selves, Networked Communities: A Case Study of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction as an Agent of Cultural Change

A seasoned warrior, you enter the Rogue Encampment, only to hear news of strange disturbances and monstrous uprisings in the surrounding countryside. You gather your group of fellow fighters and trek into the dangerous landscape, working together to vanquish evil. After a series of stunning victories, you gain even greater battle prowess, able to face the grimmest odds. Then, the next Monday night, you meet your comrades in the chat channel to organize another game and do it all over again. Welcome to the world of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. The gaming world has been largely exempt from the serious analysis devoted to other contemporary media. In this article, however, I plan to use Diablo II as a case study for an analysis of the larger cultural implications of multiplayer gaming. What is the appeal of such games? How do such games transform contemporary conceptions of both self and community? Online role-playing games (RPGs) like Diablo II, I argue, offer an alternative social framework that provides the player with an escape from modernity (and an exciting gaming experience). First I consider Diablo IFs pseudomedieval landscape; how and why do RPGs strive to elicit nostalgia for a seemingly lost era of epic? In answering this question, I suggest that Diablo II allows people to connect in a new way that paradoxically hearkens back to medieval and early modern social constructs. Second, I consider how this new cultural paradigm changes our contemporary definitions of community and self. Unlike face-to-face gaming, online players only know as much about each other as each person chooses to share. In his analysis of pen-and-paper RPGs, Gary Alan Fine wrote, "For the game to work as an aesthetic experience players must be willing to 'bracket' their 'natural' selves and enact a fantasy self. They must lose themselves to the game. This engrossment is not total or continuous, but it is what provides for the 'fun' within the game" (4). Fine calls this form of self-fashioning the "framed self" (4), an appropriate term because it gets at the nested selves inherent in online gaming. At least three distinct "selves" overlap within the context of the Diablo II gaming environment: 1. The "real life" self (henceforth called RL self). 2. The online identity (that is, how one is known on gaming bulletin boards, within guilds, and on the main http://www.battle, net network). 3. The character within the game. In addition, Diablo II players often develop and control many characters; each account can hold up to eight characters, and each player can have multiple accounts. For example, when I play Diahlo II, I am negotiating several plastic identities: my real life identity, Thelestis (my moniker on the Amazon Basin, a gaming community and forum); my account name on http://www.battle.net; and Duessa (a level eighty-six Frozen Orb/Hydra sorceress). The RL self controls these alternative identities, but the alternative identities are not merely circumscribed within the borders of the RL self. As Miroslaw Filiciak, one video game theorist, characterized it, "We are existing in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction" (98). Finally, I consider how these uniquely nested, self-fashioned personae interact in the form of gaming guilds and forums. Diahlo II is a hack-and-slash role-playing game, originally released in June 2000, that allows for both single-player and multiplayer gaming. Blizzard Entertainment runs a free online system, http://www.battle.net, to which gamers can connect and play with people from around the world. When I checked on a random weekday afternoon, 74,570 players were engaged in 46,196 games on the USEast realm alone.1 Blizzard has since released an Expansion Pack, Lord of Destruction, which adds an extra "act" to the four acts already present in the game, and has added two new character classes. In addition, Blizzard has released numerous "patches" to the http:// www. …