This book helps readers better understand their own relationships - as players, designers, consumers, and citizens - with digital role playing games. "Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens" is a collection of scholarly essays that seeks to represent the far-reaching scope and implications of digital role-playing games as both cultural and academic artifacts. As a genre, digital role playing games have undergone constant and radical revision, pushing not only multiple boundaries of game development, but also the playing strategies and experiences of players. Divided into three distinct sections, this premiere volume captures the distinctiveness of different game types, the forms of play they engender and their social and cultural implications. Contributors examine a range of games, from classics like Final Fantasy to blockbusters like World of Warcraft to obscure genre bending titles like Lux Pain. Working from a broad range of disciplines such as ecocritism, rhetoric, performance, gender, and communication, these essays yield insights that enrich the field of game studies and further illuminate the cultural, psychological and philosophical implications of a society that increasingly produces, plays and discourses about role playing games. "Approaches to Digital Game Studies" examines the medium of digital games and brings together a range of voices from different disciplines to ask questions fundamental to game studies. This innovative series advances ongoing conversations and initiates new areas of inquiry in the field. Each volume consists of a collection of essays organized around a single ludic, functional or thematic genre of digital game.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements; Series Introduction - Genre and Disciplinarity in the Study of Games; Gerald Voorhees, Josh Call and Katie Whitlock; Introduction - From Dungeons to Digital Denizens; Josh Call, Katie Whitlock and Gerald Voorhees; Section One - Game Master; Eco-Performance in the Digital RPG Gamescape; Adele H. Bealer; The Pathways of Time: Temporality and Procedures in MMORPGs; Joshua Abboud; Game and Narrative in Dragon Age: Origins: Playing the Archive in Digital RPGs; Alice Henton; When Language Goes Bad: The Localization's Effect on the Gameplay of Japanese RPGs; Douglas Schules; The Lord of the Rings Online: Issues in the Adaptation of MMORPGs; Neil Randall and Kathleen Murphy; Section Two - In-Character; Traumatic Origins: Memory, Crisis and Identity in Digital RPGs; Katie Whitlock; Risky Business: Neoliberal Rationality and the Computer RPG; Andrew Baerg; Postcards from the Other Side: Interactive Revelation in Post-Apocalyptic RPGs; Zachary McDowell; Constructing a Powerful Identity in World of Warcraft: A Sociolinguistic Approach to MMORPGs; Benjamin E. Friedline and Lauren B. Collister; In the Blood of Dragon Age: Origins: Metaphor and Identity in Digital RPGs; Karen Zook; Epic Style: Re-compositional Performance in the Bioware Digital RPG; Roger Travis; Section Three - Out-of-Character; Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Mass Effect: The Government of Difference in Digital RPGs; Gerald Voorhees; 'Simply Fighting to Preserve Their Way of Life': Multiculturalism in World of Warcraft; Christopher Douglas; From Meaning to Experience: Teaching Fiction Writing with Digital RPGs; Trent Hergenrader; Gaming the Meta: Metagame Culture and Player Motivation in RPGs; Josh Call; The Generalization of Configurable Being: From RPGs to Facebook; Chuk Moran; About the Contributors.