Discipline and Dragon Kill Points in the Online Power Game

This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP) system as an example for thinking about Foucauldian conceptions of disciplinary power and the production of gamer subjectivity in the contexts of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) power gaming. The argument considers the generalized hyperrationalism of DKP-based gaming as both an ideal digital form of panoptic control as well as a kind of ironic form of play with the limits of the possibility of control within digital culture.

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