When I originally stated that I would review Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, I had no idea how phenomenally silly that statement is. To tell you the truth, I had just peeked in it, and after reading a few lines, thought, ‘I should talk about this book.’
I was completely unaware just how rich this text is. It was published by the MIT Press in Cambridge, to begin with, and all of the contributors are distinguished academics in their own right. To even attempt to provide feed back on par with the original texts is a bit presumptuous. (I do have an academic vein in my body, but I do not, as of yet, have a degree. One day, I hope.)
But I don’t like backing out of a promise, so I’ll try to provide at least an overview regarding this book.
Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader was inspired by a group of researchers posing as the in-game guild “The Truants”. Together, they spent hundreds of hours immersed in the game world, collecting, sharing, and revising data for their individual theses.
The book’s prologue, humorously entitled “Introduction: ‘Orc Professor LFG,’ or Researching in Azeroth” and written by researchers Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, provides a general background as far as how the project began, the basics of the World of Warcraft game, and an introduction to the current trends of thought in game theory.
And yes, the introduction is worth reading, because it contains all sorts of crunchy interesting statistics – ones that are useful for quoting back later to that relative who’s always questioning why you play ‘that there kid’s video game’. Try this one for size:
“Nick Yee… a scholar who explored MMOS for a number of years… says it is ‘easy to dismiss video games as pointless activities that only teenagers indulge in. The truth is that the average age of MMORPG players is around 26. In fact, only 25% of MMORPG players are teenagers. About 50% of MMORPG players work full time. About 36 percent of players are married, and 22 percent have children.’”
Included is a reader’s guide, which has two main purposes: explaining the four categories of essays into which the book has been divided (Culture, World, Play, and Identity), and providing summaries of each chapter within that category.
Culture is concerned with, you guessed it, in-game culture, specifically how the game socializes and trains us – for example, in the first essay entitled “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft”, researcher Scott Rettberg examines how the game economy shapes us to believe in the “capitalist fairytale”, where hard work equals pay off.
The Culture section also compares, contrasts, and incorporates various out of game cultural elements and what they mean in game – think feminism, post-colonialism, and gender construction, for starters. The essays in this chapter are unanimous in, as the authors’ put it, “…their rejection of the idea of an innocent game…”
And man, is there nothing I love talking about more than the fact that WoW isn’t an innocent game. Sing it, Truants, sing it.
The second section, World, focuses on the structure of the gameworld: how “real” it is, how to define reality, and whether “real-ness” is even desirable to start with. The main topics were myth narrative, geography and the role of death.
Play deals primarily with how users act within the world, especially role-players, and what “play” means to the users. It raises a series of related questions: What actions can we define as play? What is considering “cheating”? Do different players have different goals? What is the point of role-playing in an unchanging world?
What I especially enjoyed from this section was Torill Mortensen’s essay, “Humans Playing World of Warcraft”, in which she examines player deviance: the facts that many users play the game in ways that don’t line up with the goals the game designers have set for us. And yes, role-players are part of that bunch: perhaps the most prominent of deviants, since role-play is only minimally supported by the game environment and drains time away from the all-important process of leveling.
Oh, you deviants, you.
Finally, the closing section of Identity scrutinizes the relationship between player and character. How much can we, as players, empathize with our creations? How do players choose their names – a decision that represents them within the game world even more than character appearance? Can a player ever feel that they “are” their character?
As I said before, it’s virtually impossible to discuss every single question this anthology raises. And yes, the authors are not necessarily the voice of god on these subjects – game theory is, if this anthology is an indication, a new and rapidly evolving field. But I can tell you it’s an utterly fascinating read, and it’s quite satisfying to see WoW get the “adult” treatment, instead of being treated as a mindless diversion. If you can get your paws on this book, by all means, do so.
Overall Rating: 4.0
P.S. This book mentions a variety of blogs for those interested in reading similar material. Terra Nova is one of them, and it’s so good it’s on my permanent reading list.
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