My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft

Front matter

ix MAnthropological Account of a WORLD oF ~ WARCRAFT

TECHNOLOGIES OF THE IMAGINATION [RAWAM Si oo AN I AA ee a

Ellen Seiter and Mimi Ito, Series Editors

Contents

PART ONE. Introduction to World of Warcraft Prologue / 3 CHAPTER ONE. What Is World of Warcraft and Who Plays It? / 8 CHAPTER TWO. An Ethnographic Investigation of World of Warcraft / 27

PART Two. Active Aesthetic Experience CHAPTER THREE. Play as Aesthetic Experience / 39 CHAPTER FOUR. A New Medium / 52 CHAPTER FIVE. Work, Play, and the Magic Circle / 94

PART THREE. Cultural Logics of World of Warcraft CHAPTER SIX. Addiction / 123 CHAPTER SEVEN. [heorycraft and Mods / 137 CHAPTER EIGHT. Gender / 152 CHAPTER NINE. Culture: WoW in China ...and North America / 176 Coda / 197

Prologue

0/12 19:36:38.533 [Raid] Loro: Now Slams and I have been talking about a lot of events regarding our guild and how it can be improved.

0/12 19:37:14.349 [Raid] Robertoh: rofl why is everyone on tables

0/12 19:38:13.848 [Raid] Slams: I have always found that

0/12 19:38:23.224 Robertoh yells: I will be the right hand of loro. :)

0/12 19:38:47.301 [Raid] Slams: a guild that melds together as friends is one that essentially succeeds.

0/12 19:38:55.099 Noth kneels before Slams.

0/12 19:38:58.342 [Raid] Loro: Exactly slams.

0/12 19:39:15.218 [Raid] Leanallah: i agree

0/12 19:39:18.516 [Raid] Slams: you could essentially play this game alone

0/12 19:39:18.341 Robertoh bursts into dance.

0/12 19:39:34.315 [Raid] Aziki: cant to endgame alone tho :/

0/12 19:39:35.935 [Raid] Eleanor: uhh, Robertoh, did you forget your valium?

0/12 19:39:42.314 [Raid] Loro: Robertoh please settle down.

0/12 19:40:05.021 [Raid] Slams: While leveling up to get to higher level content is crucical—a strong sense of community is crucial as well.

0/12 19:40:11.816 [Raid] Loro: I find that by partying and questing together, we make the game a little more fun.

0/12 19:41:34.032 [Raid] Loro: social events tend to be successful in attracting other members.

0/12 19:45:49.638 [Raid] Slams: See, if our goal as a guild is to have a constant flow of 5 man raids . . . we’ve reached that goal.

0/12 19:46:08.531 [Raid] Slams: If we want to be able to do 40 man raids consistently . . . we haven't reached that.

0/12 19:46:52.846 Robertoh begins to eat in front of Sasha.

0/12 19:46:53.222 Noth flirts with Aziki.

0/12 19:46:59.508 [Raid] Eleanor: i think doing raids could be enjoyable

0/12 19:46:59.213 Noth blows Aziki a kiss.

In the spring of 2005, I taught an undergraduate course on social aspects of digital technologies. The students worked in teams on research projects. One team reported on massively multiplayer online role-playing games. I knew nothing of these games. But the students’ presentation impressed me—artistic screenshots, the students’ excitement as players, the discussion the topic sparked in class. Note to self: find out what this is about.

I listened when students talked about video games in casual conversation. Colorful but unfamiliar names jangled in my brain: EverQuest, Ultima Online, Final Fantasy, Guild Wars. The game that kept coming up was World of Warcraft. Based on this highly unscientific sampling, I decided to try out WoW, as it is known, to further my broad research goal of studying social life on the Internet. In December of 2005, I signed up for an account with Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of the game, and began to play. I planned to play for a few months until I knew enough to conduct some interviews. I didn’t expect to like the game—I had played board games as a child and found them uninteresting. I tried to prevent my own children from playing video games, which I considered a waste of time.

When I sat down with World of Warcraft, I had no idea what to do. Luckily my son Christopher was home from college for Christmas break. He helped me create an animated character with which to adventure in the three-dimensional virtual world. Despite my antigame campaign, Christopher had played text-based online role-playing games, and, although he was not familiar with World of Warcraft, he seemed to understand basic game semantics. We set forth on a quest. “Click on the monster and right click!” he suggested. I obeyed. My frantic clicking produced the salutary

Prologue 5 effect of killing the monster (which would soon have killed my character). Such activity seemed inordinately silly, but I was secretly smitten with the beautiful WoW graphics and charmed to be a character called a Night Elf.

The moment I began to find World of Warcraft truly interesting was when two small icons appeared on the top right portion of my screen. I had not placed them there, nor was I killing monsters; in fact I was relaxing in the woodsy hometown of the Night Elves, Shadowglen. My son explained that another player had caused the icons to appear—they were “buffs,” or temporary magic spells to enhance my powers. In that moment I became aware of other players. I was not alone in the Night Elves’ Garden of Eden but surrounded by real human players who would interact with me. I was touched that another player had given me something for free, without my asking or even having a way to thank him.

My son’s brief tutelage ended as he returned to college. Unlike many players, I was not playing with friends or family members who could guide me through the new virtual world. I was a “newbie” (noob, n00b, nub, more derisively) of the first order. I soon learned that I could have thanked the player who buffed me in a couple ways—by typing a message into the chat window or by clicking on his character and typing a command, /ty, which would inform him of my gratitude. I was very happy to know this when I ran out of game money and had to ask a strange player what to do. He promptly gave me some coppers so I could repair my damaged equipment and go forth once more to slay the Webwood spiders lurking in the forest outside the village.

I have given many hours to the study of World of Warcraft since the Shadowglen days. I believe World of Warcraft is an exemplar of a new means of forming and sustaining human relationships and collaborations through digital technology. While video games might seem a frivolous footnote to modern technology (and video games researchers still get pitying stares from colleagues), the games have penetrated unlikely arenas of human activity, stirring interest in education, business, the military, and even religious organizations. Educators argue that video games have pedagogical value (Gee 2003; Squire 2005; Steinkuehler 2006; Barab et al. 2007; Fields and Kafai 2007; Ang and Zaphiris 2008; Hayes and Games 2008; Polin 2008; Sharritt 2009). Experiments with gamelike environments for work are under way at the world’s largest multinational corporations, including Intel, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems (Cefkin et al.

2009; Nardi et al. 2009; Yee 2009). Many organizations have applications in Second Life, a 3D virtual world in which participants themselves build applications. An article in the Harvard Business Review reported research suggesting that people with experience in World of Warcraft make better corporate managers (Reeves et al. 2008). The U.S. Army produced and distributed, free on the Internet, a successful multiplayer video game, America’s Army, designed as a recruiting and public relations tool (Delwiche 2007). DARPA, the research wing of the U.S. Army, funds research in the use of multiplayer games for combat and noncombat applications. Christian evangelists recruit new members through video games such as America’s Army (Li 2004) and other games. In short, video games have entered the culture.

Some readers will have encountered WoW through media accounts that report the unusual, the sensational, the surprising—addicted players, Chinese gold farmers, online marriages, griefers, hackers, gender swappers. While these memes are not without interest, they do not embody the texture of the everyday experiences and emotions of the millions of players who constitute World of Warcraft. I will use the vehicle of the ethnographic monograph to provide a perspective on player experience that taps the ordinary, the mundane, the normal, the commonplace in and around World of Warcraft.

WoW players will recognize that references to the game belong to a moment in time. World of Warcraft is always changing, with software updates that extend the game with new content. The research for the book began in December 2005 and ended on October 11, 2008, when I attended the final day of BlizzCon 2008 (Blizzard’s annual conference). I continued to study WoW, but BlizzCon marked the completion of the first phase of the research, and it is that which is reported in this book (with a few exceptions, which are noted).

Aims of the Book

For all that has been written about play, it remains a contentious subject. The first aim of the book is to develop an argument about World of Warcraft that examines play as active aesthetic experience, drawing on activity theory (Leontiev 1974) and the work of philosopher John Dewey. I am interested

Prologue 7 in the peculiarities of human play. Play links us to the upper reaches of the animal kingdom while at the same time generating distinctive cultural constructs. Sports, gambling, and a multitude of games, from mah-jongg to Monopoly to World of Warcraft, are some of Homo sapiens most curious productions.

Understanding play in its contemporary digital manifestations is a second aim of the book. I argue that video games such as WoW are a new visual-performative medium enabled, and strongly shaped, by the capacities of digital technology, in particular the execution of digital rules powerful enough to call forth complex worlds of activity. This new medium orients human activity in a stimulating visual environment that makes possible a release of creativity and a sense of empowerment in conditions of autonomy, sociality, and positive reward. The importance and impact of design on human activities undertaken in the visual-performative medium is a key theme.

A third aim of the book is ethnographic reportage—interpreting experiences of playing World of Warcraft for those who will never play but wish to understand something of the role of video games in our culture. This aim shapes Part three in particular, which examines topics such as addiction and gender about which I am often asked when describing my work.

The research was carried out in three locales: the virtual world of the game itself, Southern California, where my students and I conducted interviews; and China, where my research assistants and I spent a month observing players in Internet cafes and talking to them about World of Warcraft.

CHAPTER ONE What Is World of Warcraft and Who Plays It?

Once I got over my initial disorientation in the game, I developed a strong sensation that I had woken up inside an animated fairy tale. I was not just watching and listening though; I played a starring role. WoW is a virtual experience like reading a book or watching a movie, but also an active experience like playing a sport. The digital universe couples the richness of the experience of viewing the action in a film or play with the participatory experience of athletics. Many video games are structured around this powerful combination, so perhaps it is not surprising that they have surpassed film in revenue (Bainbridge 2007). Video games have global appeal; some of the most popular titles are from Asia. World of Warcraft, produced in California, has more Chinese players than any other national group. WoW is played in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. It is available in English, two versions of Chinese, Korean, German, French, two versions of Spanish, and Russian.

As someone entirely new to video games when I began the research, I am aware of how foreign they seem to many, even how pointless, simplistic, fatuous. I will attempt to build a picture of the captivation and fascination it is possible to experience in World of Warcraft, mindful that the visual allure, and sense of discovery and serendipity that imbue WoW play, cannot be captured in descriptive prose. Like Borges’s cartographers, one desires to create a map that coincides “point for point” with the richness of the real geography. But that is neither possible nor wise, so I will fall back ona selective portrayal that communicates some, at least, of what it was that got the undergraduates so excited.

A Day in the Life of a Night Elf Priest

To begin, I recount a day in the life of my character Innikka (a pseudonym). She belongs to a “guild” or club of players with whom she plays and socializes. The priest character type in World of Warcraft heals players being attacked by monsters or other players, restoring them so that they may defeat their opponents and avoid a trip to the graveyard, the penalty for death. Dead players must run back to the spot where they died to be resurrected.

It is 6:00 a.m. Before facing my emails, I login to WoW. Pm checking the stock of a computer character that sells herbs I need for potions produced in the alchemy profession. Dealer Sadaqat, who vends “Potent Potables,” has rock-bottom prices. It’s early, and no one else is around. Sadaqat has dreaming glory, felweed, and netherbloom, as well as some potions I can buy and resell for a profit at the Auction House. I spend about five seconds selecting and purchasing the herbs and logoff.

5:30 p.m. Time for a raid. It’s early in the evening for me, but many people in the guild are on the East Coast, so we have to get moving before it’s too late for them. The raid won't start until 6:00, but “invites” go out 30 minutes in advance. To make sure I get a spot in the raid, I login promptly.

Raiding is one of the most complex activities in World of Warcraft, involving 10 to 40 people who join together to defeat difficult monsters. Careful preparation and tight coordination are necessary. Raiders communicate through WoW’s text chat and nearly always use voice chat as well.

I still have fifteen minutes before the raid. I fly into the Terrokar Forest and locate some good fishing spots. In a few minutes I have lots of the Golden Darters needed for the Golden Fish Sticks buff. I cook them up and feel prepared for the raid.

It’s time to head to Serpentshrine Cavern, the site of the raid, for our first attempt at “SSC.” Most of us have read up on the SSC fights in out-of-game forums, blogs, and wikis created and maintained by players. Some of us have watched player-created YouTube videos to get a sense of what lies ahead.

We are nervous and excited. There’s lots of silly banter in the guild chat channel. Players invoke small commands called emotes to dance, flirt, kiss, hug, and execute other amusing actions. I exchange “whispers,” or private

A Player’s Bags Carry Their Items: Items in bag slots are labeled with the number of each. A player’s gold is displayed; Innikka A ; fi had 560 gold, 61 sil- i af “OR a @ ver, and 65 copper at I F15' 205 À the time the picture chats, with several guildmates. We will encounter difficult raid “bosses,” that is, high-level monsters with tricky, powerful abilities. The bosses will “drop” very good “loot”—or treasure—valuable pieces of equipment that empower characters to perform their roles more effectively.

SSC is situated behind an enormous waterfall that players can penetrate only when formally grouped in a raid. We run through the waterfall. Promptly someone is comically killed by the “elevator boss”—the player has dashed into an open elevator shaft and fallen to his death. I have read about the elevator in player descriptions of SSC and step carefully to wait for it to rise to our level.

Once on the elevator, we descend deep into the cavern. Finally we are facing the first “trash mobs,” that is, guards who must be killed on the way to the bosses. (Mob is a generic name for monster, derived from mobile.) Players call them trash because, while powerful, they rarely yield good treasure. We buff the raid with several life-giving, damage-enhancing, mobdefeating spells and proceed.

We immediately “wipe” on the trash—that is, the whole raid is killed. Everyone runs back from the graveyard for another try. We pull ourselves together and successfully kill the guards.

Now we are at the first boss we will attempt, a creature called the Lurker Below. He lives in a pool and must be fished up. We stand on platforms surrounding his pool. We catch the Lurker on a fishing line and begin battle. The raid erupts into a chaos of loud, frenetic activity. WoW’s sound effects layer the roars of the monsters, a mélange of auditory signals associated with player actions, the noises of special events such as explosions, and a musical sound track.

Things are going pretty well until the Lurker issues a “spout,” during which we are supposed to dive off the platforms into the water. Some dive too late and are killed. We try to keep going with a diminished raid but lack the resources to bring down Lurker. We wipe and run back yet again.

After wiping, it takes time to reassemble, rebuff, and discuss what went wrong. In voice chat, the raid leaders tell us what to do and provide assessments of our mistakes. We ask questions and crack jokes. My guild, “Scarlet Raven,” is a “casual raiding guild,” so, while people are intent on performing well, there are no recriminations.

After one more wipe, we are getting the hang of the Lurker. We know when to jump into the water and how to coordinate so the minions he summons will not kill us.

This time the Lurker goes down. The raid is deliriously happy. Through teamwork and personal skill, we have survived the Lurker’s deadly spouts, geysers, and water bolts—or at least most of us have. The fallen are raised by the healers. A group screenshot is taken of us surrounding the dead Lurker and will be posted later to the Scarlet Raven website.

We roll virtual dice on the Lurker’s loot to see who will win it. Miraculously, I win the Earring of Soulful Meditation, a very fine trinket. We congratulate those who won loot and exult in our first kill in Serpentshrine Cavern.

Now it’s time to try Hydross the Unstable, so named because he has lost his mind under the duress of a lengthy imprisonment in SSC. The crazed Hydross has several powerful allies at his behest, which must be quickly dispatched. We get ready for a very different kind of fight. The same cycle of wipes and retries ensues. Finally we defeat Hydross.

It has been an amazing evening. It’s 10:00 p.m. for me but 1:00 a.m. for

East Coast guildmates. We must end the raid even though there are more bosses to kill in Serpentshrine Cavern. Guildmates say good night.

After all the excitement, I fly back to my quiet post in Stormspire to resume the vigil of the Potent Potables vendor.

A Short WoW Primer

Based on a long line of fantasy themes derived from a variety of sources, including Lord of the Rings and its predecessors, World of Warcraft is staged in a medieval setting. Players create animated fantasy characters that adventure in a landscape of castles, dungeons, ogres, dragons, and beasts (Fawcett 2006; Tschang 2007). Players battle monsters, amass treasure, conduct business at an auction house, practice crafts such as alchemy and blacksmithing, and seek to improve their characters through the acquisition of ever better weapons and armor. Players start at level 1 and can advance to level 80, in a process known as “leveling,” by slaying monsters and completing quests (minigames) that award “experience points.” The character is seen in the third person, usually from behind.'

WoW is a game of movement. The game geography is huge. Characters travel on foot or by beast, boat, or air through fields, farms, forests, jungles, deserts, mountains, seas, and other distinctive scenery for which Blizzard artists have won many awards. Players quest to find and slay hundreds of different types of creatures from the game’s “bestiary’—creatures dwelling throughout the varied landscapes of the world.

The construction of the world has strong appeal to the modern consciousness—everything is human scale. No building is more than a few stories high. (Some areas are reached by elevator but are only one or two levels once one arrives.) The objects players wear, wield, win, buy, and sell, including weapons, vials of magical potions, fishing poles, armor, crafting implements such as mining picks, and resources like herbs, cloth, and precious stones, are easily handled by the (virtual) human hand.

WoW provides respite from the incessant advertising which is the backdrop of so much contemporary activity. Most of the Internet can no longer be experienced without a barrage of ads; WoW has none. It is restful, even old-fashioned. The only claim on the player’s consciousness is the game itself, allowing the kind of immersion one imagines Victorians attained

Innikka with their hefty novels into which they could sink for hours of commercefree entertainment. This focused experience provides a refuge—an “escape,” as players say—from modernity. It is one of the ways in which the game creates its own reality apart from contemporary life, moving the player away from the ordinary into the alternative reality of a fantasy space.

WoW is a virtual world—a set of linked activities chosen by the player and carried out within a three-dimensional virtual space.” The goal of most WoW activities is to develop a character, enabling it to perform more and more difficult challenges. The orientation toward character development oddly echoes another Victorian meme; Victorians also worked at “character development,” which for them meant striving to improve moral sensibilities. The notion that one’s “character” can be shaped and refined through deliberate activity is a powerful motivational field in which cultures, or subcultures, may organize themselves. Many video games take up this theme; Hunter and Lastowka (2004) observed that in games such as EverQuest,

Dark Age of Camelot, and Ultima Online “the clear goal is to become a more powerful [player].”

WoW researchers are often asked, “But isn’t WoW just killing monsters”? Media discourse around video games often centers on questions of violence, so it is a natural question. While my work is not about violence, I want to clarify for those not familiar with World of Warcraft that it is not a violent game in the tradition of first-person shooters or certain strategy games in which realistic violence is central to the games’ visceral appeal.’ Killing monsters is an important activity in WoW, but it is in some sense an abstraction, a way to keep score. Play theorists observe that play often involves a contest. The Anglo-Saxon plega meant game, sport, fight, or battle (Turner 1982). A game requires something to battle against. WoW monsters are cartoonish, often silly, and in no way terrifying or realistic. They waddle, many are corpulent and ungainly, they emit gurgling noises when they die—and of course they will soon be back for the next encounter. WoW has none of the graphic visceral realism found in other video games such as blood spatters or frightening weaponry.*

Taylor’s comment (2003a) about violence in EverQuest could also describe World of Warcraft:

While combat in the game is on the one hand quite extreme (you kill monsters and potentially other players) and on the other also muted (there is graphically no blood or gore), my sense is that the enjoyment of violence takes place at an abstract level. It is closely tied to the skills involved to take down a mob, the precise timings and movements required, the skill of playing your class well in a battle situation, the adrenaline rush involved with a fight and the general ability to even engage in this type of activity . . . In this way the actual fight is as much an opportunity to demonstrate the valued qualities of game mastery as anything.

Players can create multiple characters. Ducheneaut et al. (2009) found an average of eight characters per WoW account. Usually one is the “main” character and the rest “alts” or alternative characters. Eight characters may sound like a lot, but many players focus on their main and play other characters only briefly to try them out or occasionally for a change.

Players may join guilds—named groups with officers and a chat channel—so they will have others with whom to play. In the opening vignette in the Prologue, Innikka’s guild is having a meeting. Guilds range in size from a small handful to several hundred players (Ducheneaut et al. 2006). A character can belong to only one guild. Many players are guildless at the lower levels (and some beyond). Guilds become more important as players gain interest in certain of the more challenging activities in the game or in leveling quickly by grouping with others. Officers control guild membership. They can induct new members as well as remove players. In the vignette, Loro and Slams are guild officers trying to move the guild toward more organized activities to engage new game experiences.

Much sociable chat takes place in the guild channel. Most is game related although players may remark on their local weather, mention that they have a test to study for, or supply other small details revealing something of their personal lives. World of Warcraft is not a chat room, however, and personal information in the guild channel is limited. Some guilds have websites with forums and player profiles, some with photos and personal information, so players may get to know quite a bit about each other. Many players know each other in real life; however, they speak infrequently about their real lives in public chat channels. Players get to know more about one another through whispers. A feeling of intimacy may develop, but it remains private; the guild as a social unit is devoted to the game itself along with a lot of jokey banter.

Players may maintain a “friends list” that includes players inside and outside the guild. When a friend logs on or off, the system notifies the player with a small sound and a text message.

Parties and raids are temporary groups formed to accomplish a goal such as a quest or raid. They are composed of players with different, interdependent skills. Players choose a “class”—priest, paladin, mage, warlock, rogue, hunter, shaman, druid, warrior, or death knight—each of which has its own distinctive skills. Skills are divided into damage classes, whose powerful weapons and spells kill the monsters; heavily armored sank classes which use their abilities to gain the attention of the monsters to keep them from attacking others; and ealing classes which restore players as they are attacked. Healers must ensure the survival of tanks, without whom the group will almost certainly perish (see Taylor 2006).

WoW vernacular names the various groupings with a masculine adjective: 5-man parties and 10-, 20-, 25-, and 40-man raids. Raids are conducted in “dungeons”—elaborate fantasy structures such as a school for necromancy, a decrepit mansion, the underground control room of a vast reservoir.

Parties and raids have their own chat channels. WoW has several chat channels, including general chat which broadcasts to a fairly large geographic area in the game, “yelling” which reaches a smaller local area, and “say” for a small local area.

Characters are divided into races. Medievally accented, WoW races are rooted in earlier games such as the paper and pencil Dungeons and Dragons and Blizzard’s Warcraft series. Race is largely cosmetic (although each race has a few abilities players may deem useful). Players are divided into two “factions,” each with its own races. The Alliance races—Night Elf, Gnome, Human, Dwarf, and Draenei—are generally considered more genial. The Horde faction is a bit scruffier; the Orc, Tauren, Troll, Undead, and Blood Elf races are (except for Blood Elves), rougher, bigger, or more depraved (e.g., Undead cannibalize). Selecting a race is an important decision; players will be looking at their characters a lot. Players consider some races ugly and some beautiful. Ducheneaut et al. (2009) reported that players were very aware of the looks of their characters, noting that “hair matters” and that players carefully chose among interesting features such as horns or facial tattoos (see also Noél et al. 2009). Gender is also an important cosmetic attribute with implications discussed in chapter 8.

The core battle experience in World of Warcraft is killing computer-generated monsters. But another kind of contest is popular among a segment of the population—player vs player. In PvP, players can attack and kill the characters of other players.

This style of play is abhorred by some and adored by others. Blizzard thus created two types of servers: “normal” or PvE (player vs environment) servers, where PvP is not permitted except in limited areas, and PvP servers where players can be attacked by other players in most (but not all) of the game geography. Players choose their server type when creating a character. In PvP, players enjoy “pwning” opponents, that is, defeating them, in heated contests. The term pwn (pronounced “pone”) comes from own, slang for defeat, and is said to have originated when a player mistakenly typed a “p” instead of an “o,” the two being adjacent on the QWERTY keyboard. (Pwning is possible in many contexts, not just PvP.)

PvP increases contingency, ratchetting the game experience up a level— players must be constantly aware of surrounding players and ready to do battle (or flee) at any moment. Nonplayer characters (NPCs) are predictable and can usually be avoided if the player is not ready to fight. But human players bring cunning, sneakiness, and what I can only call orneriness to the game. Players trying to complete quests may be attacked and killed, slowing their progress. “Ganking” is the practice of attacking players at a lower level than oneself (and hence easy to kill) or attacking at sensitive times such as when a player is trying to complete a difficult quest or is almost dead from a fight. An extreme form of ganking is “corpse camping,” wherein a player kills another player and remains by the corpse, “camping” it, killing the player after he resurrects and is in a weakened condition (sometimes repeatedly). These actions are perfectly legal in the game; the prescribed remedy is to get a posse of guildmates and friends to kill the ganker.