Readings for 10/20/11: Play in WoW: Aesthetic Experience, Rules and Performance, and Work vs. Play

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:

Part Two Active Aesthetic Experience:

            Chapter 3: Play as Aesthetic Experience

            Chapter 4: A New Medium

Chapter 5: Work, Play and the Magic Circle

Overview & Synthesis:

Chapter 3

Nardi uses the term aesthetic experience to “express an active, participatory relation to artful material and collective activity” (41). Also associated with activity theory are the three levels of activity of a human subject: action, object, and activity (42). She mentions how in WoW, play is rewarded with advancement and the intermittent reinforcement of unpredictable rewards.

Dimensions of aesthetic experience

Aesthetic experience is a subjective disposition toward activity that is complexly phased where both the journey and destination are rewards and within which we can be fully present (43, 49). It is composed of means-end relations, phases, and collective expression. Means-end relations means activity flows toward a satisfying completion and its own fulfillment or ends. It requires an internal structure of differentiated phases. And in terms of collective expression, it connects us to others in relations of community and ‘common life’ (48). Thus, aesthetic experience is “participatory engagement in activity that is organized in distinctive stages and in which a satisfying completion is the end point of actions which are themselves pleasurable” (48).

Chapter 4

Accodrding to Nardi, WoW constitutes a new digital media combining visual experience and performance (52). The visual is constituted of various things including the game world, characters, and attire, while the performance has competitive contests such as quests, raids, duels, and battlegrounds.

Performance

Performance is central to WoW, take for example the importance of raiding and different performance tools such as gear and guild progression. The scrutiny of player performance is deployed to direct and improve, as the character in virtual world is only known to others through performance. Other issues of performance include mastery, agency, and empowerment

The software artifact

Nardi refers to the visual-performative medium as a “digital entity encoded in rules” (61). While players attend to the precise ways in which digital rules shape experience,

interpretation and reshaping can take place only within those narrow limits allowed for by the constitution of technology (72). Rules are enforced automatically through software and remove a source of social authority with whom to negotiate rules of play. Software has the force to shape online life and the relationship between games and people must be understood in more complex terms (63, 64). While WoW was engineered to require sociability for the most challenging content, it weakly developed community as shared commitments and durable social bonds. Therefore, she argues, rules direct and motivate the activity of players and quality of experience is produced by the rules in dynamic interplay with human action (70, 73).

Rules may nuture

Nardi mentions that with some effort the ill effects of digital rules can be managed, for example by using hacking to transform rules or by cheating, such as faking rolls or ninja-ing. However, she argues that rules are good as resources preserving good design and artistic imagination. Rules can be nurturing, protective, and caring as they conserve a rich complex play experience (76). She also illustrates WoW’s design as a work of art that contributes to the participatory aesthetic experience and the sense of community (79).

Performance and participation

Nardi characterizes video game participation as comprised of 3 elements: interpretation (figuring out how game rules work), reconfiguration (builds the player’s game world by selecting objects and actions from a fixed set offered by the game), and construction (adds new game elements such as player-created software modification) (85).

The spectacle of images

The visual is an important part of game experience. Vivid artwork includes colors, character images, animations, buildings, game geography, and more. However, textual representation is also very important. In WoW, visual elements don’t need filling in because they are intact and complete in themselves (89). These visual can operate as theatrical performances on a virtual stage because players do not merely watch but themselves act.

Visuals here work double duty – players can gaze appreciatively at surroundings and simultaneously these features invite them to participatory activity (92). Nardi argues that “video games afford arenas of activity in which visual experience is unified with active performance” (93). Therefore, participation in virtual worlds is not simulation but performance.

Chapter 5

Work and play

Nardi discusses the connect and disconnect between work and play and how these boundaries are not simple. She says, “shifting subjective boundaries between voluntary and involuntary, work and play, problematize a simple dichotomy” (97) In a gaming context, nuances of work are context dependent (99). She defines game play as “an identifiable human activity whose structure includes both subjective dispositions, such as a sense of freedom, and specific cultural constructs such as rules” (104). While WoW is a voluntary activity, some players experience certain aspects of play as worklike such as farming, pressures of raiding, etc. The elements of work can enter in two ways either through the seriousness and dedication which players refer to as work or the obligatory actions necessary to accommodate the larger play activity (102).

A partial separation of play and not play

Play has consequences outside itself and cannot be entirely separate It can be interrupted by bodily needs or social needs, and can provide professional ideas. Play is a “complex activity expressive of a duality in its relation to ordinary life (113). Nardi points out that play may be subversive, moving to arenas in which its modes of activity suggest new ways of acting”(110). Additionally, gaming also allows players to take up the challenges and disappointments of contemporary life to work through them in fantasy.

The magic circle

Magic circle is a protected space defended against the encroachments of everyday life (94). Within the circle, the meaningfulness of play is bound within the activity of those who actually play. It creates its own collective social order and creates a feeling of being apart together (116). This is constituted in 3 ways: through knowledge about structures and activities that occur inside its enclosure, in specialized discourse, and in designated spaces of play that mark and confine it (117) The circle is productive of considerable geniality, intimacy, amiability and positive sociality. Nardi says “Players cross the threshold out of ordinary life to engage distinctive kinds of performative activity in a game space in which the rules are different, the culture unique, the rewards sensible only within the enclosure” (120).

Questions & Reflections:

1. Nardi offers a discussion on cheating on rules in video games, such as hacking or faking rolls and ninja-ing in WoW. Do you think that this is morally wrong or just player intervention and part of regular game interaction? Would you cheat in the game? What about in games other than video games, is that okay?

2. Related to the discussion on work vs. play, how do you think games are portrayed when they are studied for academic reasons? Is this work or play? For example, when playing WoW in our class, how do you feel about it?

3. Thinking about the separation of the boundaries between work and play and other aspects according to what Nardi said, what do you think are some clear examples of work and play? What are some things that can be misconstrued as both?