http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/services/Feed ${session.getAttribute("locale")} 5 http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:19062 The First-Person Shooter (FPS) is a popular game form, with examples appearing on many different platforms. The genre has an almost two decade history and is represented by hundreds of commercial titles. While there has been extensive study of the FPS genre, this has tended to focus on particular games, or at best a limited set of examples. In order to provide a wider context for such work this paper surveys 566 separate FPS titles, across a range of platforms. The titles are compared by year of release, platform and game setting. Characteristics of avatars within the surveyed titles are also examined, including race, gender and background, and how these vary across platform and time. The analysis reveals definite trends, both historically and by platform. 2012-05-08T16:20:55.988Z ]]> http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:13619 This article seeks to explore the relationship between the concept of Blizzard's World of Warcraft in legal terms, in Blizzard's End-User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use (TOU), and the concept of the game as conceived by the players of the game. Blizzard present their product as a service, and themselves as a service provider, in the EULA/TOU. Meanwhile, the product itself seems to be more akin to a space or place, which subjective players move about in. This conflict is essentially a difference between a passive viewer accessing certain content within a range available to him, and an individual who inhabits a space and acts within that space as an agent. The meaning of this subjectivity-in-space (or denial of the same) problematizes the relationship Blizzard has with its customers, and the relationships between those customers and Blizzard's product. An evolution of the governance of these spaces is inevitable. Where Castronova and Lessig's answers differ, their basic assertion that the virtual political landscape can and will change seems clear. These changes will be influenced by the values placed on the social capital generated within the spaces themselves. The identities as per Turkle, Koster, and Dibble are human identities. Arguments as to why we should pay attention to synthetic worlds have been made by these authors already, so this article seeks to actually pay that attention. This is one practical example of the work that must be done around synthetic/virtual worlds, which directly affects tens of millions of people. 2011-06-14T07:50:21.427Z ]]>