Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) present fantastic, persistent worlds and narratives for a community of players to experience through pre-defined rules, roles, and environments. To be able to offer the opportunity for every player to try the same experiences, many game developers have opted to create elaborate virtual theme parks: scripted experiences within static worlds that cannot be affected or changed through player actions. Within these games, some players have turned to role-playing to establish meaningful connections to these worlds by expanding upon and subverting the game's expectations to assume a limited sense of agency within the world. The interaction between role-players and the locations they occupy within these worlds is a notable marker of this narrative layering; specific locations inform social codes of conduct, designed by developers, and then repurposed by players for their characters and stories. Through a qualitative case study in World of Warcraft on public role-playing events, this thesis considers how the design of in-game locations inform their use for role-playing, and how locations are altered through storytelling as a result.

<p>In April and May 2015 Nepal suffered two massive earthquakes of 7.5 and 6 5 magnitudes in the Richter scale, killing 8856 and injuring 22309. Two years later in September 2017, Puerto Rico underwent the Category 5 Hurricane Maria, killing an estimate of 800 to 8000 people and displacing hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans (Kishore et al., 2018). This dissertation project is the comparative study of Nepal’s and Puerto Rico’s networked communities, their actors, participants (Potts, 2014), and the users (Ingraham, 2015; Johnson, 1998) who used crisis communication practices to address the havoc created by the disaster. Using a mixed-methods research approach and with framework created with the Assemblage Theory (DeLanda, 2016), I argue that disasters create situations in which various networked communities are formed into transnational assemblages along with an emergence of innovative digital technical and professional communication practices.</p>