ABSTRACT
Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) are a technology in their infancy. In the fall of 2006, in his own small corner of the Internet, cartoonist and MMO industry pundit, Woody Hearn, enacted a ritual lament repeated countless times before on forums, websites, and blogs. For a cartoonist whose very livelihood has, in large part, depended on his insider knowledge of MMOs, it was a powerful statement. A self-styled voice of the MMO-playing public, Hearn has often illustrated the peculiarities, frustrations, and small victories of playing MMOs with a cultivated humor and a fair for visual puns. MMOs and role-playing games (RPGs) are entirely different creatures, representing different media altogether. Role playing, here understood as a measure of immersion and the extent to which a player can actively create belief and benefit from the mythic and existential meaning making offered by the MMO, is intimately connected with what the author have posited as the second tenet of open space: identity experimentation.
