My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft

245 Pages·2010·1.58 MB·English

by  Bonnie Nardi

My Life as a Night Elf Priest
technologies of the imagination new media in everyday life
Ellen Seiter and Mimi Ito, Series Editors
This book series showcases the best ethnographic research today on engagement with digital and
convergent media. Taking up in-depth portraits of different aspects of living and growing up in
a media-saturated era, the series takes an innovative approach to the genre of the ethnographic
monograph. Through detailed case studies, the books explore practices at the forefront of media
change through vivid description analyzed in relation to social, cultural, and historical context.
New media practice is embedded in the routines, rituals, and institutions—both public and domes-
tic—of everyday life. The books portray both average and exceptional practices but all grounded
in a descriptive frame that renders even exotic practices understandable. Rather than taking media
content or technology as determining, the books focus on the productive dimensions of everyday
media practice, particularly of children and youth. The emphasis is on how specific communities
make meanings in their engagement with convergent media in the context of everyday life, focus-
ing on how media is a site of agency rather than passivity. This ethnographic approach means
that the subject matter is accessible and engaging for a curious layperson, as well as providing rich
empirical material for an interdisciplinary scholarly community examining new media.
Ellen Seiter is Professor of Critical Studies and Stephen K. Nenno Chair in Television Studies,
School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Her many publications include The
Internet Playground: Children’s Access, Entertainment, and Mis-Education; Television and New Media
Audiences; and Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture.
Mimi Ito is Research Scientist, Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine, and
Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Media and Governance of Keio University,
Kanagawa, Japan. She has published widely on new media and youth and led a recently completed
three-year project, Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media, an ethnographic study of digital
youth funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
TITLES IN THE SERIES
Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity by Emily Chivers Yochim
My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft by Bonnie A. Nardi
DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office
of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new
media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication.
My LifE as a
Night ELf PriEst
An Anthropological Account
of World of Warcraft
Bonnie A. Nardi
the university of michigan press and
the university of michigan library
Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2010
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press and
The University of Michigan Library
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
2013 2012 2011 2010 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or
otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nardi, Bonnie A.
My life as a night elf priest : an anthropological account of world of warcraft /
Bonnie A. Nardi.
p. cm. — (Technologies of the imagination and digital culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-472-07098-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-472-05098-7
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. World of Warcraft. 2. Computer games — Social aspects.
3. Korea (South) — Social aspects. 4. Virtual reality — Social aspects.
5. Visual anthropology. I. Title.
GV1469.25.W64N37 2010
793.93—dc22 2010007914
ISBN 978-0-472-02671-5 (e-book)
Acknowledgments
Although writing is a solitary pursuit, the influences of others are con-
stantly present. I was fortunate in the guidance, advice, and encouragement
generously extended by colleagues, friends, and family.
At the University of Michigan Press, I am grateful to Tom Dwyer, who
helped shaped the manuscript from our earliest conversations. Series edi-
tor Mimi Ito suggested useful means of restructuring the flow of the book
and provided sound advice about what to leave out as well as in. Heather
Newman and Christopher Lehr produced images used in the book.
Anonymous reviewers made invaluable suggestions on reworking criti-
cal arguments and improving the prose. Many, many thanks—you know
who you are.
I very much appreciate the feedback on various chapters provided
by Trina Choontanom, Russell Crispin, Christopher Darrouzet-Nardi,
Jeanette Darrouzet-Nardi, Scott Ditch, Alison Fish, He Jing, Yong Ming
Kow, Wenjing Liang, Thomas Malaby, Linda Polin, and Celia Pearce.
Participants at the Productive Play Workshop hosted by Jason Ellis,
Celia Pearce, and me at the University of California, Irvine, in May 2008,
engaged in lively debate and discussion from which I profited.
I thank the Intel Corporation, which, at the behest of Eleanor Wynn,
provided funding for the research I conducted in China. The National
Science Foundation funded a separate study in China conducted by my
student Yong Ming Kow (grant no. 446680-21260), as well as sponsoring
the Productive Play Workshop.
I have many guildmates to thank—for good times as well as insights
about game play. The guilds in which I conducted research must remain
anonymous, but Terror Nova, a guild of colleagues with whom I play, was a
source of scholarly input as well as friendly mayhem. My family guild, the
Hoodoos, blasted through Azeroth with the tight coordination of people
who know each other very well.
I would like to thank the players who agreed to be interviewed. They
offered thoughtful commentary on their play experiences and called my
attention to important matters that I did not pick up on from observations
of game play. Many undergraduate students at the University of California,
Irvine, where I teach, talked to me informally about their play, and I learned
from, and very much enjoyed, those conversations.
Throughout my career, nearly all of my research has been about the use
of technology at work. Moving to play, with its elements of whimsy, fan-
tasy, freedom, and fun, was a pleasing turn to a novel arena of activity. But
it entailed facing an unfamiliar literature going back 80 years. Surprisingly,
very little of what I read was trite or uninteresting. I acknowledge with
appreciation the analysis and theorizing of scholars from older traditions
whose work remains fresh and pertinent, as well as those on the contem-
porary scene who are picking up and extending foundational work and
moving ahead to lay out new paths of investigation.
At the present moment, we may well be in a golden age of games schol-
arship. Some amazing social scientists, computer scientists, educators, phi-
losophers, media scholars, legal scholars, and journalists, many of whom
you will meet in the pages of this book, have turned their attention to
elucidating the import and meanings of play and games. I appreciate the
quality of the work they have produced and their remarkable efforts to
shape concerns about play and games into a rich multidisciplinary stream
of scholarship.
Finally, I am grateful to the complex assemblage that is the World of
Warcraft—players, designers, corporate purveyors, software artifacts—
which has proved an endlessly fascinating object of discovery and inquiry.
Contents
part one. Introduction to World of Warcraft
Prologue / 3
chapter one. What Is World of Warcraft and Who Plays It? / 8
chapter two. An Ethnographic Investigation of World of Warcraft / 27
part two. Active Aesthetic Experience
chapter three. Play as Aesthetic Experience / 39
chapter four. A New Medium / 52
chapter five. Work, Play, and the Magic Circle / 94
part three. Cultural Logics of World of Warcraft
chapter six. Addiction / 123
chapter seven. Theorycraft and Mods / 137
chapter eight. Gender / 152
chapter nine. Culture: WoW in China . . . and North America / 176
Coda / 197
Notes / 205
References / 213
Index / 227

part one
introduction to World of Warcraft