Virtual landscapes in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games: an approach for Runes of Magic

Immersive digital technologies are becoming more common and more access to different types of users, and virtual landscapes are protagonists. The main reason that motivated this research was to analyze the landscape of virtualized worlds of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), from an examination of the case of Runes of Magic. The virtual-geo-ethnography was crucial to peer into this world, defining its general characteristics and analyzing maps built there from the observation of its composition, topology and relevant elements for user interaction and the virtual world. The lack of consistency among scenarios and topology, the use of place names to generate fear or affection with digital places, the use of real-world objects in this fantasy land and extractive importance of many objects can be considered as basic guidelines for possible future analysis.