Ludic Dynamics
This article treats the relation to time, space, and action involved in practising a game and acquiring the associated social codes in a Massive Multiplayer Online Game. It represents an intervention in an emerging area of research in Game Studies by proposing an ethnographic exploration of the virtual world by disabled people. The examination of these forms of involvement and related considerations highlights the anthropological tension between the game (the game as a device) and playing (the integration of the framework of the game involved in the action of playing). The player, by inventing him or herself (with the creation of an avatar) and by experiencing a ludic framework is driven to negotiate his growing familiarity with the knowledge and know-how that help to assess his capacity to act. Playing means being played, but also means outplaying the limitations existing in the necessary governance of a cyberspace. From this anthropological perspective, the dynamic linking the player and the technical device invite us to reconsider the dialectic between virtual and real in order to conceptualize the processes of « acting by proxy » that characterize this kind of experience.