Source:
Nardi, B. A. (2010). My life as a night elf priest: An anthropological account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Excerpts:
Prologue
Chapter One: What is World of Warcraft and Who Plays It?
Chapter Two: An Ethnographic Investigation of World of Warcraft
Overview & Synthesis:
In the prologue, Nardi (2010) discusses the importance of games in penetrating “unlikely arenas of human activity” such as education, business, the military, and religious organizations (p. 5). She introduces World of Warcraft and emphasizes is technological value in constituting new human relationships and collaborations. She sets the stage for the rest of the book by telling the reader it will serve as an account of her ethnographic study to reveal the player’s perspective in the game. Here, Nardi (2010) aims to examine play as an active aesthetic experience, understand play in its contemporary digital manifestations, and provide an interpretative ethnographic reportage (p. 6, 7).
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| The World of Warcraft logo |
Chapter one provides a background to WoW, its world and its workings, introduces key terms, and discusses some of the social aspects associated with the game. Nardi starts off the chapter with an anecdote of one of the raids she was involved in to help give the reader a sense of what it is like.
Following this she delves right into the background of the game. Based on a fantasy theme, WoW takes place in a medieval setting where players battle monsters, gain treasure, conduct business, practice crafts, and improve their characters. Characters are divided into races. Players are able to create multiple characters that join “guilds,” or groups with officers and a chat channel. There are different channels, such as general chat which broadcasts to a large area, “yelling” for a smaller local area, and “say” for a small local area. It is a game of movement and everything within the world is to human scale. As a virtual world, or a set of linked activities chosen by the player and carried out within a three-dimensional virtual space, the game offers a focused experience that provides a refuge or “escape” from modernity for some players (Nardi, 2010, p. 13). Like most games, play here involves a contest, but is simply a way to keep score and is not violent with the graphic visceral realism found in some other games. “Parties” and “raids” are temporary groups formed to accomplish a goal; this is how players are able to word together in the contest. The core contest in the game is the battle of killing computer-generated monsters. However, there is also player vs player, where players can attack and kill the characters of others.
As a MMORRPG, or massively multi-player online role-playing game, Nardi reasons that WoW is a social world as much as a game. She argues against the negative stereotype of the gamer as a young, self-absorbed male with few social skills as the WoW population has considerable variance in demographics such as age, gender, and social class. Nardi (2010) describes WoW players as generally “active people looking for intense, engaging, online experiences that complemented similarly engaging offline activities” (p. 24). She comments that one of the most striking aspects of the game is how it can bring together social classes for authentic shared activity. She believes this diverse mix of players is a positive aspect of the game, helping not only play but the negotiation of the language and boundaries within the game as well. Nardi points out how playing together allows people to draw on existing social connections as well as using the virtual world as a stimulus to real world interaction. WoW has also been able to bring people together by joining families, groups with shared characteristics like religion or sexual orientation, and others through the game.
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| People playing WoW at BlizzCon 2008 |
Chapter two outlines her efforts in composing this ethnography. Nardi (2010) feels that the new cultural forms emerging in virtual worlds offer a chance to take an anthropological perspective on fresh sets of natives and their exotic ways (p. 28). In her research, she observes the WoW culture through the “participant-observation” method, where she played around 20 hours per week in addition to reading her guild’s website and reading about the game on the Internet. Her research methods consisted of interviews, observations, participant-observation, informal conversation, document analysis, and outside media. She analyzes WoW through two strategies: activity theory and by looking at the “accretion of a multitude of details that impart a sense of the everyday texture of experiences in a culture” (Nardi, 2010, p. 30). Nardi’s goal is to understand the culture, the native, and to try and make sense of their activities.
Questions & Reflections:
I’ve studied anthropology before and something that has intrigued me by it is the act of immersion by the anthropologist completely in a culture they can never really be a part of. They are not native to that culture, and while they can assimilate, it will never be the same because they were not born into it. What interests me here is how World of Warcraft differs. In the game world, no one is born into it. Everyone creates their own life through their character. Not everyone is equal in this game culture, but they have the possibility to be – since everyone starts out the same and grows. In WoW, the anthropologist could be just another character, whereas is they were to travel to the remote Amazonian rainforest or desert of Africa they would stand out as an outsider.
When first starting this book, I was skeptical about the idea of the game as a culture. But here, Nardi describes how guilds had interpersonal conflicts and a sense of ethos, just like groups would in any other culture. That helped me to relate it to real-life cultures and I’m much more open to the possibility that it could be a culture and could be studied anthropologically.
1. On page 16, Nardi comments that selecting a race, gender, and cosmetic attributes are important decisions. She says this matters because players will be looking at their characters a lot. But this isn’t a good enough explanation for me. Why is it so important? If you didn’t like the way your character looked or if you got bored, couldn’t you simply create a new one? She says you are able to create more than one, so why not? And also, how do these cosmetic attributes play a role in the player’s identification with the character?
2. On page 15, in her discussion of sociable chat, Nardi metnions that although most is game-related, some supply small details reveling something of their personal lives and a feeling of intimacy may develop. This reminds me of an interpersonal communication theory I once studied called social penetration theory. This theory basically says that relational closeness develops from the superficial to intimate through self-disclosure. I have looked at this through regular contact, but I am interested in seeing how it plays out in the virtual world. How do relationships develop differently in WoW? Does the rate of development or intensity of relationships differ here? If so, what makes that process different?
3. On page 32, Nardi asks the question that plagues the discipline of anthropology “are you perturbing the culture you are studying by your very presence?” In response to this, she points out that so far she believes she has not caused any perturbations apart from stimulating some players to reflect more on their experiences and she can not identify any risks posed by the research. This makes me wonder, is the virtual world the way out of all of these unwanted effects caused when studying other cultures? Can we study online cultures without any side effects?
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