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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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.  

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As Time With Turkle Comes To An End

In the last chapters of Alone Together, Turkle continues the conversation about our relationship to teachnology in an interesting way, as she transitions away from criticism of robots, and towards criticism of media technologies. In this turn, Turkle interestingly relates the two together in that machines that we tended to also tended to us, in that the more people took care of the robots, the more that they felt like the robot filled a void in their lives. In a similar way, Turkle talks about social media as something that we are forced to “take care” of, and that in taking care of it, it seems to take care of us.

“Taking Care” of our technology

Turkle starts with talking about how our media becomes something that we have to “tend” in a similar way to how we would tend to a pet, except that tending the Net means tending our very identites. There are several stories from adolescents about how they have to manage their profiles in order to seem a certain way, and how the adolescents have to learn to negotiate stressful decisions about what to post on their pages. This type of personality management is, in Turkle’s opinion, overwhelming. This also goes for not only web media in terms of text messaging, where the constancy of being available to be messaged further forces us to “tend” the media. To some extent this was a comment that applied to radio, television, and the ubiquity of the mobile phone, but Turkle points out how it isn’t so much how the technology has changed, but how the social regulations have changed with the technology. Whether someone is in a meeting, or in a conversation, or what have you, the prevalence of texting has forced an expectation that the recipient will answer quickly.

As Turkle further interrogates this connection to texting technology, she points to more stories of teens and the negative repercussions of connectivity. There are many stories about what teens expect out of their conversations, which attempt to limit the excessiveness of conversation by converting sound and expression into typed letters. There were interesting stories about how teens try to send the right message with their texts. Their image as the “in” crowd, or being sexually sophisticated come from their texts, texts that can be sent from other people, that can be copy pasted off the Net. Part of the worry here is back to a thread of worry about authenticity and identity. How do these young kids know if the person talking to them is really the one that thought up the text?

Identity Ambiguity

Stemming from this worry about online identity, Turkle highlights the way teens shrug off the harmful effects of connectivity. In terms of identity, there is some trouble to the way new users to technology don’t care if the people they talk to online are “real.” This means real in terms of being who they say they are, what they say they feel, or even (as we saw in the section about robots) if they’re actually real at all. Teens seem to shrug off the responsibility to care about who actually is on the other side of the screen, as they experience the malleable indetity politics from their own seat. For example one girl has a completely different identity on an Italian chat site, where she can speak more promiscuously and post more risqué pictures. Turkle then talks about a how some people see these alternate spaces for identity as completely free, while ignoring the fact that the users become emotionally invested in these identities. For Turkle, identity play in itself isn’t dangerous, but it is dangerous to think that there are no consequences or connections that are made when we play with identity.

Ambivalence to Privacy

Another element that Turkle finds particularly problematic is how privacy is treated by the social media faithful. Not only adolescents, but even major players in industry are finding fewer and fewer reasons to include features that enable the privacy of their users, and even then it’s almost as if it is a privilege, and not a right. Many seem to think that their privacy is just something taken for granted, or that there will be an acceptance for inappropriate material that surfaces later in their lives. In the end these new users not only know that their posts are read, but expect that their posts will be read. Some even go so far as to claim that this loss of privacy is a good thing, as “we shouldn’t have anything to hide.” But in the end the breakdown of attention to privacy brings up important questions about our relationship to our words. If our Facebook walls are going to be up forever, then what should we be writing about? Should we be thinking about the way a wall post today will change the future 20 years down the line? In the end, Turkle has few answers, other than to point to our ability to be alone with ourselves, to disconnect on occasion. But these references to Thoreau speak poorly to a generation raised on Pokémon, so that while this message might work to persuade those that are already critical, it seems inconsiderate of how to speak to the actual mass of networked users. 


Questions: 
1. This book uses a multitude of interviews with adolescents, but uses those interviews to reference cultural emblems (Cyrano for example) that have little connection with these groups. Understanding that this is an academic text aimed primarily at the field of media scholarship, how does this book serve more to reinforce the mindset of anxious parents than to change the mindset of adolescents?
2. Turkle describes a dismal future for those that "grow up tethered," in what ways is this future a different argument than one's we have heard before against media, and in what ways is it another generalized concern for a younger generation that we do not have the tools to evaluate?
3. In what ways does Turkle's status as a psychoanalyst come to bear on the book in both fruitful and problematic ways?


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