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?


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