In the world of gaming, I am more of a tourist than a participant. I have friends who game. I have watched “Let’s Play” videos on YouTube, in which gamers record themselves playing video games for others to watch. For instance, Noah Antwiler from The Spoony Experiment did a series called “Let’s Play SWAT 4.” It basically combined information on SWAT 4, a video game that simulated police SWAT team missions, with comedy. As the series progressed, Noah would tell us, “I die. . . a lot.” You can watch other episodes from the series (be forewarned, it is pretty realistic and violent for a video game) here, here and here. My game is Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I liked Miami Vice growing up and I enjoy the subversive nature of the game. I’ve never played a massively multi-player online game though. I remember talking to my friend Harold, a person I considered a hardcore gamer, and asking him about World of Warcraft.
He looked at me as if I had suggested smoking crack as a way to stay awake to study. His advice was simply this: “Don’t. It’s a timesuck.” Then he gave a look, a look that I had only seen one other time in the eyes of drug addicts in recovery. That was over ten years ago and while I have managed to find other ways to have my time sucked away online, World of Warcraft was not one of them.
Before the semester started, I specifically chose to lead the discussion on Bonnie Nardi’s My Life As a Night Elf Priest because I wanted to learn about what many gamers have anecdotally told me is the ultimate timesuck. However, I am also interested the idea of identity mediated through technology, such as what was discussed in the article we read a few weeks ago by Danah Michele Boyd, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. In that article, an online identity was said to be constructed in many ways that converged on the one online body such as the bio on your profile, interactions with other members of the community and how others in the community interacted with you. Nardi takes interaction to now mean not just sharing ideas through text, but also through play. While there is a sense of sharing in social media, it is usually in the spirit of sharing the inner self. In online gaming, the sharing is towards achieving some kind of outside goal. Also, while Boyd said that “[h]ow people represent themselves and interact online is fundamentally influenced by their embodied [offline] experience” (126-27), in a fantasy game like WoW, there is no “RL” experience to compare to fighting mobs and killing bosses for XPs and loot.
While social media like Facebook and LinkedIn represent mediated platforms where one can interact with friends and coworkers in spaces that have analogues to spaces in RL, games like WoW are more like manifestations of the fantasy spaces one would imagine when playing with friends at a younger age. As a kid in the 80s, it made perfect sense to have friends bring over different toys from different toylines like Transformers and GI Joe to stage battles.
Technology now allows the players to all play and interact in a space that has rules and lets people from all over the world interact. “WoW is a virtual world—a set of linked activities chosen by the player and carried out within a three-dimensional virtual space. The goal of most WoW activities is to develop a character, enabling it to perform more and more difficult challenges” (Nardi 13). Further, “The notion that one’s ‘character’ can be shaped and refined through deliberate activity is a powerful motivational field in which cultures, or subcultures, may organize themselves” (Nardi 13). Games like WoW are like the fictional stories from childhood, like The Hobbit or even It, in which a party is brought together to fight a monster or achieve a goal and all members of the party are enriched by the experience. The the members of the party bond as friends from sharing battles together. In WoW, Nardi tells us that different guilds don’t just fight and raid together, but also share moments of triumph together, posting pictures of their victories on the guild websites outside of the games (11).
While I think that social media is a powerful tool that helps others to network and navigate through the web of connections we form as human beings, online gaming like WoW gives that connectivity a purpose in a way that taps into our need to belong as well as our primal need to play. In the real world, our purpose is pretty mundane. We work so we can pay bills and avoid living on the street. We have to deal with the roles others have placed on us. And none of this is fun or engaging. The appeal to actively engage the imagination in a realm where one has purpose and works with others to achieve that purpose is appealing. In a way, because this world is so different, it is the visual and experiential equivalent of what the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky would call defamiliarization in the sense that our preconceptions of what is and is not possible are now put into a new light of examination (Bressler 52). This might be why Harold told me WoW is a timesuck. It’s hard to leave a world that awakens something so deeply rooted in human nature.
How important is play? Is it something we should relegate to childhood or can play be useful in adulthood as well? How can shared online experiences towards common goals help a gamer offline in the real world?
Work Cited
Boyd, Danah Michele. Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. Diss. UC Berkley, 2008. Web.
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.
Nardi, Bonnie. My Life As a Night Elf Priest. Digitalculturebooks (University of Michigan Press), 2010. https://www.press.umich.edu/1597570/my_life_as_a_night_elf_priest
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Thanks for the connection to defamiliarization–which seems to line up with Nardi’s discussion of Dewey and the aesthetics of play, as well as his more general delving into the necessity for an aesthetics of daily life and ordinary production. You mentioned the drudgery of most daily routines and jobs, which Nardi also talks about and in fact devotes a section to in the book. I can also verify that this was an experience in my guilds for many people who had dull jobs or difficult personal circumstances that they felt the need to escape. Even those with more rewarding careers (like the young surgeon in my current guild–that’s right, doctors can find the time to play WoW somehow–or myself even) sometimes used the game as a different kind of escape from responsibilities, stresses, and drudgery of routines. Yet grinds and boredom are a part of playing WoW and similar games. I think Nardi does a very good job of pointing out why these grinds and boredoms are more tolerable than the real life ones can be. Defamiliarization probably has something to do with that. Being a surgeon probably seems like a fantasy for those who might have less coveted jobs (see Gee for the in-depth look at how game-thinking can be related to professional identity-building). One can imagine a role-playing game that allows a player to build credibility as a doctor or a professor (do these exist? possibly, with all the indie games being developed). Professions in WoW (alchemy, inscription, leatherworking, tailoring, enchanting, blacksmithing, engineering, jewelcrafting, and gathering professions like herbalism and mining) are decidedly personal; one is one’s own boss always, and often making items for oneself or one’s “family” of alts. When bartering, the terms are set by oneself or the server’s community. For many players who will probably never experience that kind of autonomy in their jobs, it is refreshing to have that kind of control. It also explains why the forums blow up when the developers make changes to the game structure.
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