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.
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