And I was all like…Virilio!

This book was awesome. I’m always arguing for the humanities (more specifically English departments [even more specifically rhetoric]) to get involved with physics in order to start moving toward reference metaphors that get us beyond Newtonian laws of physics. We spend SO much time coming up against these metaphors in terms of gravity, in terms of time, and in terms of materiality, and until we’re able to take advantage of the three re-inventions of physics (relativistic, quantum, and astronomical) then we’re never going to employ the full power of what the humanities are able to teach us about our everyday experience.

Virilio totally goes there. =)

While Virilio covers a ton of ground, his main argument comes back to the way the concept of time and space is mutating into privileging of only time, which is to say that we are becoming less interested in the “here and now” and more interested in in the “now.” This focus on speed, Virilio argues, ultimately throws our perception of reality into a type of conceptual centrifuge in which the world will lose its “color.” In this grey reality we lose a handle on our relationship to the light (the unfocused light of the sun and electricity) which has for so long structured our considerations of reality, meaning, and matter. The faster we go, the closer we get to the generalized accident, which is to say a complete loss of the physical at the hands of an abstracted electromagnetic “radiation.” Though it would take some time to outline the nuances of Virilio’s argument, I will instead focus on the key losses/wreckage of this accident.

The first kind of loss or problem comes with the idea of a generalized period of time in which the world is always present with itself. While our conception of time used to be derived from sunlight, and we measure time according to the earth’s rotation in relation to the sun, the ability for the world to be immediately present through the use of screens means that we are evaporating that aspect, that time itself becomes one long course of presence. To this extent Einstein and Virilio clarify our move from a chronology (first, second, third) to a dromology (underexposed to overexposed) in order to consider the way time is always with us in the immediate moment.

Virilio’s warning about this disconnect from time is that the world becomes wrapped in a certain kind of intertia of the City to the extreme, where the “haves” and the “have nots” live in complete difference, as those that have the technology would technically live in “real time” and those in third world countries would technically always be “behind.” This is a type of re-presentation of the pitfalls of the urban environment, but in a virtual space rather than in a physical space. Interestingly enough, Virilio points to how the physical cities themselves, in that they contain the majority of the working class, will become an obsolete idea as “presence” ceases to be a function of location as much as it is a function of speed.

Likewise, Virilio examines the implications for “placeless-ness” not only in terms of the astronomic or the development of urban planning, but goes as far as outlining the implications of this shift all the way back to the (human?) animal body. There are 3 chapters to this extent, one on proximity, one on the place of the optical unit, and one on sexuality and perversion. While the last two were very cool, the first was the one that I had thought the least about in terms of the idea of speed and matter, and thus it’s the one that I’m going to relate to here.

In his discussion of proximity, Virilio considers the way the mechanical becomes not only an extension of the body, but a transplant for the body’s very nature. He looks into how this abstracted discussion of light and time comes back to the way we see the body as something that needs to be always present to itself. Furthermore, the notion of the body in terms of its inside and outside properties blend into one mode of simply existing, and keeps us from the relationships of movement which have become so central to human existence. The use of Newton’s laws has brought us to try to define (kill) the physical environment, but Einstein relativity leads us all the way down to the control of the microphysical properties, which is to say the very construction of molecules as a character of our organic function.

To bring this level of control into the body is to consider override the relationship between thought and action, and to remove the relationship between movement and the mind in an important capacity. Our understanding of our subjectivity, whereby we might see our arms move and think “I made those arms move” (without stumbling in the slightest across the moment of questioning the I) changes to the way that the machine has caused my our arms to move, or our blood to flow, or our temperature to regulate. And this move, then, relates to how we remove ourselves (distance ourselves?) from the mental powers of action. 

Questions:


Images @:

http://youtu.be/ESc8V1-OTGo

http://worldofelfi.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/funny-pictures-the-internet-is-a-series-of-tubes2.jpg

http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2010/11/18/26700c7c-3554-439f-9059-958cddb2bfcc.jpg

Ulmer Rounds it Out: Oh We Are Going to Make a Movie about Mike Utley’s Title Now!

Chapter 7: Miranda Has Her/It’s Way

In chapter 7 Ulmer outlines the way we might extend the concept of justice to electracy by using a pun on the word/name Miranda. Ulmer starts by talking about the history and mechanism of the Turing test, which is a test designed in order to see if a computer can disguise it’s language to sound like a normal human, thus proving that machines can basically replicate what it means to be human (at least in some defintions). Ulmer harkens back to the ways that the original test that this method is based off of comes from a test on gender where a man and a woman stand behind a curtain and both try to convince the audience that they are a woman.

The question, then, is which one of these choices falls into the “correct” category? Ulmer takes this question and expands it out to the ways that we think about the “right” decision in a given situation, or what is justice. This question, Ulmer shows, is how we can be sure of what is just if justice is rhetorical, that is, if justice is something that we can be convinced of. This problem of justice and rhetoric then connects to Ulmer’s first reference to the Miranda puncept in the form of Miranda rights. Miranda rights are created to protect criminals from incriminating themselves under pressure from the police. This is to say that we want the criminals to be naturally guilty, not to be convinced that they’re guilty.

Ulmer’s second vein of meaning is to the idea of dealing with meanings as if they were a samba dance. This helps us to think about how meanings and justice are made not as a kind of verdict that we place upon things and people, but as a way of entering into a motion which is acting with the decision, not just acting on it. This vein comes to bear on the subject of Carmen Miranda, who is said to have brought the popularity of samba dancing in America. Ulmer then draws out Miranda’s image as it was replicated, as well as the kind of historical and social consciousness that made her what she was.

To this, Ulmer brings in the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein as a counter mode to Carmen Miranda. Wittgenstien detested ornamentation, and was a key logician in the ultimate creation of the Turing Test. It is this opposing standpoint which Ulmer finds most interesting, and tries to elaborate on the ways Wittgenstein was obsessed with things like detective novels and jokes in order to get to the more affective side of Wittgenstein. In this capacity, Ulmer unleashes a dialogue between Carmen Miranda and Ludwig Wittgenstein where they ultimately dance the samba together. This dance signifies a Turing Test of a different kind, where we are meant to find the difference between these two methodologies.

Throughout all of this discussion, Ulmer weaves the story of how Turing decoded the enigma machine, which also connects back to its fair share of gender roles and stereotypes. To decode the machine, Turing took the punch card that the machine was coded on and fitted them on top of one another based on their “gender” properties. When fitted together the cards had certain holes that lined up, and using the knowledge of the holes and patterns Turing was able to break down the code. Ulmer then urges us to think about this method of looking for patterns as a sort of dance between the two sides of Wittgenstein and Miranda, and between the need to remain silent and the need to testify our experiences.

Chapter 8: Pom-Poms a Plenty

In the eighth chapter Ulmer highlights a specific MEmorial to the process of building memorials to 9/11. Ulmer follows Will Pappenhiemer’s proposal through to its completion in order to show how creating a MEmorial quickly becomes a collaborative effort. On one level this collaboration is indicative of the material needs that were going on at the time. Pappenhiemer needed many tiny pom-poms in order to achieve his MEmorial, and he also needed an extensive camera crew to document the experience. But the collaboration also extends to the bystanders that became a part of the MEmorial as they gazed upon its construction, or politely moved out of the way. It also extends to the way the chapter is written, as it contains mostly Will Pappenhiemer’s messages that were sent out during the creation of the MEmorial, as well as the messages that were sent to him. This demonstrates how the Y, the branching out and extension of ideas, can be carried on by multiple groups at once. While these groups react simultaneously to the image sense of the MEmorial, they all remain connected in their own obtuse point of contact. 


Questions:


If the internet databases exist as a point of collective wisdom, what are the possibilities and limitations of using wikipedia as the way into creating an archive of images, terms, and meaning?


Considering the age of electracy, to what extent should/can entertainment function as a part of the academic classroom?


Do egents need to have the bandwith and phone data plan to move at the fastest speeds available? Or are we already moving at those speeds outside of the material devices in ways that it can be useful to tap into? 


images used:


http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNjA5NjExODc4OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNzYwMTM2._V1._SY314_CR16,0,214,314_.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Turing_Test_Version_1.png/220px-Turing_Test_Version_1.png

http://manhattanlaw.info/images/MirandaRights.jpg

Ulmer and Bradley McGee: Monumentality, Emblems, and Egency

In the two chapters for this week, Ulmer discusses the way emblems are supposed to be considered for the monument, as well as the way we might some new form of agency in the age of electracy. Ulmer also draws out the MEmorial for Bradley McGee, a two year old boy who was tortured and killed by his father for soiling his pants. Ulmer weaves the abjection of child abuse throughout these two chapters while continuing to expand on the method for creating a MEmorial, oftentimes quickly oscillating between the two. The effect, it seems, is purposeful: to draw us into the chorography by so quickly switching between these two distinct narratives.

The Emblem

In some ways the emblem is the same kind of logics Ulmer has been working with all though the book, except in this case the productive element is more imagistic than verbal or technological. The idea is to mix a motto, a picture, and an epigram in order to create/illuminate meanings that might not be captured through traditional narratives. This relationship, or this disruption, comes from semiological reasoning where words become connected to visual items, most famously a tree in the case of Saussure. The meanings of each of the parts need to correlate with the meanings held by an audience, so it seems like the emblem (for the moment?) is less about the ME and the punctum, and more about the production of new relationships and ideas between these items in order to translate the narrative forms of literal argument to the tangled meanings of an electrate creation.

Where this does connect back to the ME in the MEmorial is that to create an emblem it takes a step toward the testimonial, which is to say a step toward an electrate documentation of the disaster. Part of both the chapters move to Maurice Blanchot’s Writing the Disaster in order to talk about violence in the way we typically do, as people getting hurt or killed, and the violence that is inherent in language, which is to say the way defining words is an act of confinement (and even etymologically, death). This connection between writing and disasters brings an interesting point of contact between literacy and electracy as they function toward violence.

In an extension of writing metaphors, as well as the Brian McGee story, Ulmer draws out the connection between writing, excrement, and childhood. Fecal matter, in some ways, is deeply personal in that it comes from inside of us, plus it allows for us to enter into a relationship with our bodies where we are both putting intense pressure on our bodies and relieving ourselves—this can be seen as a pleasurable thing. All through the chapter, Ulmer highlights stories of children who were tortured for “soiling” themselves, and helps us make the inference between the abuse and the fecal matter. But the analogy doesn’t stop there. Ulmer also works through some of the ways that pooping and writing can exist as a similar process. With great difficulty and social pressure we push our writing excrement into the world, and then we take this deeply personal thing and push it as far as we can away from ourselves. This connection, and possibly the lesson that we’re supposed to learn from these connections between abuse, feces, and writing, is that we need to connect the abject emblem together through the concept of “formless value.” This is to say that we should not force the parts together because we want or need them to go together, but allow them to more naturally come together in order to create the emblem, or the memorial.

The Agency of the Image (Upsilon Alarm)

This chapter, for me, appears to further elaborate on the theme of what is “formless” but in order to talk about how we, as individuals, create a sense of agency, and less about how the bits exist together on their own. It is not our own agency that constructs the connections, then, but the image itself. In line with the idea of puncepts and conductive reasoning, Ulmer advocates for inventing via the crossover between the mood in our state of mind and the mood in our language. This brings Ulmer to talk about the letter Y at length, ultimately to intertwine the letter with the word “why.” This connection works to talk about the letter Y as a metaphor for the separation and re-tangling that happens when the concepts come back together. The project is to not aim for a “w/hole” that memorialized the abject in totality, nor is it to separate off the different parts of the abject into “branches.” Instead, we must turn to the tangle of meanings that work together.

Questions:

What is the difference between what is “spiritual” and what is “felt”?

How are we “letting the being be” if the MEmorial is always our application of the disaster to our selves?

If the writing process can be compared to the digestive process, how do online spaces work to remove the “poop”?


photos @:


 http://www.needlenthread.com/Images/patterns/Monograms/monogram_1_y.gif

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/toilet-new.jpg

Ulmer Week 2: The Projects Keep On Coming

In the Ulmer reading for this week we went through “The Call” and “Transversal.” Both of them interspersed the theories throughout with assignments which mean to help bring practical application to the reading. “The Call” had more to do with a new way of thinking about how we are hailed by the objects that we need to be “punctured” by. “Transveral” seemed to deal more with reconsidering the way we conceived of the relationship of our subjectivities (in whatever capacity that might be) to the images that they take in. There also seemed to be a greater emphasis on the postmodern (electrate) turn in “Transversal.”

The Call

One of the interesting moments in this chapter was the way that it dealt with a turn from images as a news source to images as an advertisement in the concept of the reasoneon. The reasoneon is a puncept from the words “reason” and “neon” in order to combine a hybrid between the things that we think about and the things that catch our attention. The specific example in the text is that it is not the neon itself that interests us, and that shapes us. Instead it is the shimmer of the neon light in a puddle that truly has an impact. This relates to the relationship between reason and advertising, where the images have reason included, but have only appropriated reason in order to accomplish other ends.

Speaking of impact, Ulmer sets up another concept is with Roland Barthes breakdown of images. One of these necessary concepts is the punctum, which is how the image pierces through cynicism and critical distance in order to impact the viewer. Ulmer also appropriates Barthes in the concept of the obtuse which is a third way of looking at an image that is indirect and more importantly involuntary. In taking an obtuse perspective to an image, especially one which reaches out to the punctum, images have the potential to “open wounds” in Ulmer’s definition. This connects the spectacle of tragedy to the social machine of public action, which can be a good thing. MEmorials are supposed to open up the space for those wounds.

The chapter is also critically connected to the idea of news, and Ulmer’s assignment for the chapter involves finding a news article that has “punctured” you and creating a website around the news story. As the chapter progresses, Ulmer goes into several examples of these kinds of news stories and ways to give a small memorial to them. There is another assignment that asks the reader to then try to turn the news story into a “scene.” This turn is fascinating in that it seeks to take a tragic even or circumstance (or maybe not tragic, but at least one that has a little punctum) and turns the event into a form of scene, which, for me, is most interesting in the case of the proposal for New York City’s homeless population. The example goes into some detail on the way that the homeless are created as a characteristic of space, specifically in conjunction with the tall skyscrapers. In the end the author, Krysztof Wodiczko, proposes making models of the homeless that are as tall as skyscrapers in order to accomplish a number of tasks.

Transversal

Though Ulmer starts this chapter at a place I understand, that news only a sub-genre of entertainment, the chapter heads in a direction that I don’t fully understand. He considers the simulacrum, which is the way images are expanded as a series of repetitions instead of as a set group of “wholes” in a category. Ulmer then goes on to demonstrate this simulacrum in the form of four different stories, each of them relating to a transgender moment, and the majority relating to the story of a gay man who robbed a bank in order to get money for a sex change operation. One of the articles is about the event itself, one is about a different incident with transgendered experience, and the other two took different lenses on the bankrobbery, the “place,” and the “person” respectively. The assignment then follows that the reader is supposed to compare these four textual moments and then expand on the move by performing the same motion with their example from the previous chapter.

Ulmer also puts a fair amount of emphasis on the relationship between images and identities, claiming that “the move to transverse [the real] has less to do with technology itself than a desire to transcend the body.” Though there was some important work going on here to talk about the relationship between images and identities, I couldn’t quite grasp where Ulmer was taking the idea. Also confusing were the two columns of words which seemed to correspond to a new vocabulary that reflected our appropriation of old categorical elements into new positions

Questions:

1)     

To what extent does Ulmers reference to the “optical unconscious” throw off a number of faulty visual associations, and it what way is he expanding those associations past purely the realm of the image?

2)      What does Ulmer mean in saying that news is “something that I already know or should know”?

 Why is that chapter named transversal? 

The Internet Accident and the Memorial

While these chapters by Ulmer were difficult to negotiate at times, one place to start might be the idea of the accident. Ulmer draws upon the notion that we are entering into a new age of communication which differs from either orality or literacy in important ways. Ulmer briefly outlines a few ways in which the age of literacy, in terms of the consideration of reading and writing texts, is coming to a close, and that the age of electracy, which is based on instant communication and visual communication, is coming into play. Ulmer’s goal in Electronic Monuments is to rethink our conceptions of education along these new lines of electracy.

One of the byproducts of dawn of electracy is the ability for there to be what Paul Virilio calls a “general accident” which is to say that the accident occurs immediately and across the entire world. This type of accident, then, makes the processes of democracy impossible, since the new modes of communication are leaving us unable to consider the idea of community in the same way. We then need to rethink the way that spaces and places interact, the way we compose and connect the different abstract machines in our environment. The idea of the abstract machine is especially pervasive throughout Ulmer’s consideration of electronic monuments, possibly because electracy involves a turn from the usual models of representation to a conception to the processes that underlie events and issues.

Toward this task, Ulmer points to an EmerAgency, which seems to be an electronic site for collecting and demonstrating the idea of deconsulting (which is the combination of deconstruction and consulting). This EmerAgency then creates MEmorials, which seem to be concerned with connecting elements of the individual with the group in order to enable a revisioning of the public sphere. MEmorials, then, are places for community to grow and respond to, and have a similar structure to what we normally consider in the building of a memorial in terms of what we often think of in terms of entertainment as well as the way that we consider tourism. MEmorials, then, build off the concepts that we already know, but often apply a new consideration of processes and technology with respect to the unconscious.

Examples of Disasters, Memorials, MEmorials

As a way of introducing the idea of these accidents/disasters Ulmer points to the idea of tourism. It starts by connecting disciplinarily to a move against tourism, in that once a person studies within a specific discipline they are given less reign to think outside of it. He connects the earliest theorists to tourists with the Greek term theoria, which connects our considerations of space, cognition, and ethics. The literate view, Ulmer contends, wants us to write in order to represent the sense of place as a certain kind of user interface that is problematic in that it separates the things being written about from the writing itself. When we are faced with an accident, we create memorials which in some ways try to operate on this same logic. We go to the memorial in order to mourn what happened on that day and thus get some kind of false catharsis from our false experience. What we are truly experiencing in those instances is the (w)hole of the accident, not the whole accident. The confusion, as usual, comes from our training in literacy.

One of the next places that Ulmer points us toward is the holograph as a way of making composite images which will not recede into being simply presentations of a happening. For Ulmer this is a way to consider the unconscious processes that push through the holographic composite by presenting an image that is both clear and unclear at once. It is this step into the unconscious which seems to get us beyond the problems of the individual to the problems of the collective as well, though his argument at that point is a bit more difficult to parse through.

Through the end of these chapters Ulmer also considers the relationship between sinkholes as a “karst topography” and human facial expression. This might be a connection between the idea of tourism as a consideration of geographic places and tourism as a consideration of expression. Indeed, one of the first examples of a MEmorial includes holographic faces which fade in and out of one another, much like we might think about a sinkhole. Through this description, Ulmer moves us farther away from what we typically think of as a memorial, since memorials are often thought of as constructed buildings in the memory of some great ideal or purpose. Ulmer, in pushing us toward the MEmorial, wants us to think of the concept of absence and the abject values as more important place for (de?)constructing, as (it seems) this will call greater attention to the “global” accident.          

Questions: 

So how does the process of constructing (?) a MEmorial help us to think about the idea of immediate accidents?

Why/how does Ulmer reference a "global America"?

Nadi and the Generalized World of Warcraft Experience

In the second part of the book Nardi goes into a deeper discussion of the ways that WoW exists within a larger framework of games, play, and activity. The chapters are filled with difficult moves, as it relates the WoW not only to larger frameworks, but to frameworks of knowledge that have little experience with placing games in the light of serious study. Nardi’s task is to make WoW seem both rational and muddy, tenable yet unattainable, so that we feel like this great expanse of culture and technology is readable and worth reading.

Activity Theory

The question that Nardi tries to answer is a relevant question for many people in their first encounter with games: why do people spend so much time playing games? What is the appeal? To this Nardi turns to activity theory, which is a way of talking about the way people are attracted to tasks and work at the until completion. The theoy is differentiates between conscious and unconscious processing of goals, as well as the way that people respond to the completion of those goals. At this point Nardi also brings in John Dewey’s definition of aesthetic experience to describe the way players not only want to complete the goals, but the way that gamers become emotionally satisfied through the process of playing.

In terms of this satisfaction, Nardi brings in multiple elements of Dewey’s aesthetic experience while continuing to relate it back to activity theory. One of these elements is that relationship between “means” and “ends” which is a complicated relationship when talking about activities. While some current theorists (or even outsiders to gaming) talk about the main goal of the gamers as the “ends” of the game in terms of the gaining a level or beating the game, Nardi points to the way that this model overlooks the experience that just “playing” gives the gamer. On the other hand, to put the main weight on “means” is to overlook the fact that players are playing toward a specific goal.  

Games as a New Medium

In the next Chapter Nardi focuses on how player’s relationship to the game, and specifically the MMORPG format, is different than other forms of media. On the one hand, it’s not quite like tv or film media, but on the other hand it isn’t quite like a sport, though there are strong correlations between these mediums.

The main point of much of this chapter is to talk about how WoW entails a specific type of performance. This is not the kind of performance where the actors are fully unaware of their performance (as might be considered with things like the way we are always already “performing”) but where the actors are aware that they are performing a certain identity the whole time. This ends up correlating with the way players aren’t simply watching what’s going on on the screen but are participating in the performance that’s taking place in the screen. In this careful delineation Nardi allows games to not only exist on a different level than other media, but to entail an automatic theatrical element implicit into stepping into the game in the first place. In this way gameplay encourages us into predisposed positions where everyone is “acting.”

In another way, Nardi talks about these performances as “honest” at some fundamental level. She claims that you can either level up or not, equip the gear or not, or perform the right actions or not, but either way those actions impinge on the situation in ways which cannot be “lied.” I’m not quite sure that this claim in particular is supposed to be a condition of the rules of the game, or of the way that the players then conceive of these rules, but the point felt tenuous at best.   

The Relationship Between Games as Work/Play

The last element that Nardi has to discuss is the relationship between WoW and theoretical notions of play. She employs a concept called the “magic circle” where we place certain duties/responsibilities within the notion of “work” and others in the concept of “play.” This distinction, Nardi attests, has a practical use, since there are some very real consequences to many of our “work” endeavors, including making an income, and the typical game does not satisfy that usual responsibility. But Nardi also discusses the points where games can become “work” and defines a number of spaces where the structures of work and play are less simple to identify. For example, in Korea there are professional gamers who make their living through gaming competitions and there are many points in the game called “gaming” and “farming” that are more like work than play. Some define these elements as a way for game companies to employ traditional power structures that “keep the gamer docile.” But Nardi is quick to consider alternatives, such as that this farming element is a central component to games in general in order to prolong gameplay and allow developers to work on further development.

Questions: What does Nardi mean when she says that the game performance makes play more “honest”? Is this honesty a function of the game conditions, of the players, or of games in general? In what ways does this concept of honesty problematize gameplay when acts are assumed to be concrete and simple when the actions themselves are always located with the complexities of a social matrix?

To what extent has your gameplay in WoW so far been considered as an aesthetic engagement? How would the early portion of adopting the game change if the initial game structures were built on an aesthetics of “bars”?

Considering Nardi’s definition of gamers as performers, what do we make of NPCs? To what extent do these in game entities exist in a coterminous space between “performer” and “environment” that is reminiscent of Turkle’s problems with robotic interaction?


images @
http://fonesocial.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/WCG.jpg
http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2011/06/29/alg_team_kiaeneto_tyler.jpg

Opening a Can of Nardi Up In Here

Nardi opens the book with a chapter to dispel some of the common misconceptions about WoW players, and then follows this with a chapter on her methodology. The majority of this information wasn’t particularly new to me, as I’ve taken a seminar on serious games already and I read this book for the Serious Games Colloquium last year. Still, I’ll run through some of the basic demystifications in the opening chapter, and then highlight a few pertinent aspects of Nardi’s methodology.

           One of the key characteristics that Nardi tries to dispel in the opening chapters is that people who play WoW, whether this relate to our sense of a “gamer” or a “true gamer” or a WoW player, is not a limited collection of individuals. Nardi highlights how people of a variety of age ranges play the game, and how one of her guilds is a “mature” guild, in that there is the built in ethos that the members might need to leave in the middle of the game to take care of their kids. Nardi also highlights how people who play WoW (and indeed a variety of games) come from many locations and backgrounds. Nardi considers all the lifestyles that inflect back on her experience playing WoW, and the way the game attracted such a diverse population. Data even shows that around fifteen to twenty percent of the players are female, which, while not extravagant, is a higher percentage than many people might think.

          Nardi also discusses the gameplay itself, which is strongly informed by the concept of “raiding.” Raiding is when a group of players go into a location together in order to kill some monster. A raid is both a noun for the activity of raiding as well as for the group of people performing that activity. These raids are sometimes performed with players that the user knows, but are also easily performed with strangers who need to accomplish the same task. Players can organize into “guilds” which are communities of varying sizes that put forth the same work ethic towards raiding. Some guilds require members to log a certain amount of time raiding, while others take the activity of raiding less seriously.

              The gameplay also reflects on the experience in terms of what users see and do in comparison to similar games. For example in terms of violence, Nardi characterizes WoW as an environment that deals with the violence in an abstract way. The monsters all look disgusting and non-human (even non-animal) in order to help the play disassociate this violence with actual violence. There is also not a great deal of blood and gore in WoW despite the amount of monsters that must be “slain.” This helps Nardi to argue for how WoW is a more inviting game environment than the typical gory first person shooter.

             On a similar note, Nardi briefly addresses the issue of griefing that goes on within the game (though she doesn’t specifically call it that). On many servers, players can kill each other, which leads to questionable game ethics. For instance the practice of “ganking” is when a much stronger player kills a weak player, waits for them to revive, and then kills their ghost before the player can recover their things. This can continue infinitely, and the only solution seems to be to have a guild that comes in to kill the “ganker.” Even outside this practice, however, there are other modes of problematic gameplay. Players are able to log out if a slain monster does not drop the desired items. Players are given this freedom within the codes of the game.

              In terms of methodology, Nardi performs a fairly standard ethnography, which is where the observer collects data about a community via interviews, observations, and documents. Nardi compares this ethnography to others that she has experienced where she traveled with her husband, and remarks with interest about how she was similarly enveloped into the world without going terribly far from home or spending a considerable amount of money. The strane/interesting moment, however, is that Nardi does not consider her actions within the game to have affected the play at all. She did not tell the other players that she was a researcher as she played, as her logic suggests that because she did not stick out, she did not change the gameplay any more than if she had just been another player. So while, in other games, the community has had an active role in the discussion, here it almost seems like her observations are the main evidence. And while most of the research took place through her computer in the United States, Nardi’s research also covers how the game is received in China, as she traveled there with some graduate students to find out more about the culture surrounding WoW.

 Questions:

To what extent does the presence of the researcher, both in the subjectivity of Nardi and in the environment that she studied, force us into more discussion about the participant-observer model than Nardi gives credit?

In what ways might we think about calling WoW an “open world” game as a more inclusive term than as a mmorpg, as the latter connotes a level of communal activity that isn’t all together necessary in other games where the very presence of “being in the world” sets off a set of activities that one might not attempt in a first person shooter?

In what ways does voice chat connect us to technology and each other in different ways than text based communication? The answer to this question leads us to connect the themes of Turkle with Nardi’s description of the way voice chat “gives away” certain qualities of a person’s identity while muddling others.  

Images From:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvdIr9P8gHdo0xxH-ekXGGr9BYAEfd97nGbLNGTmjKTnyYhG35hnN2bWyyt3iYyJ72xe15ELYEuI1w2nDTVx8eBJ9BWL6pFutV-bkGKgn3Qc9OIdpZXrB-5dIDjF7BDJsfsPg8Eom7cbI/s1600/funny-world-of-warcraft-pictures.jpg

http://gethacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/max_lvl_891.jpg

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2009/3/22/128822339577848834.jpg