Discourses of Departure in Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs)
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Departure is an activity of great significance in MMORPGs. Each week, players commit an average of 33 hours of in-game and ‘offgame’ time to their chosen MMORPG, and the vast majority participate in game communities, either within the game or outside it. Thus when players leave the game and/or their game community, it is a meaningful activity. Departures can be a natural and happy end to a long-term association, but they can also serve as communication between a departing player and others, signifying, for example, annoyance or unhappiness. The ways that players announce, conduct and mark their departures from games and communities, and the ways that communities respond to those departures, offer insights into both game culture and online culture more generally. Indeed, there is something almost performative about some departures, and a number of departing players generate cultural texts, such as lengthy forum posts or videos, which reveal much about the way players value games, game communities, and one another. This chapter seeks to examine discourses of departure, through the analysis of a number of game-related artefacts, including ‘quit threads,’ player discussions, and goodbye videos. It seeks to consider the difficulty of reconciling what is, for a large community, a fairly mundane activity with its clear importance in the context of the individual player. It reflects on the often temporary nature of player departures, the contradictions that these create, and the concomitant implications of departing in anger - so-called ragequitting - for a player’s reputation and social capital. Lastly, it considers the memorialising process through which players evoke their very best memories of a game or of a community at the moment in which they leave it.