Worlds of Warcraft and Community: a review of _My Life as a Night Elf Prince_

A lonely teenager sits in front of his super computer. The shades are pulled. Pop cans litter the floor. He’s immersed. He’s addicted. He’s playing the popular, massively multi-player role-play game, World of Warcraft (WoW). He’s got no friends and stops playing only for what’s biologically necessary.

These images - the stereotypes we often associate with serious gamers, especially those who play WoW - are not only debunked in Bonnie Nardi's book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: an anthropological account of World of Warcraft, they're totally supplanted. Instead of the lonely nerd, Nardi's book paints WoW as a vibrant, diverse space with as many happy couples and burgeoning professionals as maladjusted gamer freaks.

Nardi's account is based on her months of playing the game, and the successes of this book are many, especially for those interested in "new means of forming and sustaining human relationships and collaborations through digital technology" (5).

That an anthropologist is able to compile a book length work on a digital environment is evidence alone that our social worlds are changing. Digital environments are robust, complex and fertile, and Nardi documents how WoW is successful in creating one of the largest online communities on the planet.

As an aspiring teacher, one with aims of teaching in both the real and digital worlds, Nardi's account is as inspiring as it is informative. More than just debunking classic stereotypes, Nardi's ethnography lays bare how a "stimulating visual environment" can not only sustain but create communities. Using activity theory and the work of John Dewey, Nardi chronicles how a central artifact - in this case software - creates an aesthetic experience shared by diverse peoples worldwide. Her account blends her own personal experiences with those of her guildmates and other WoWers, and what results is a glimpse into the possibilities of digital communities and video games as spaces where diverse people doing diverse things come together under one digital roof.

First and foremost, Nardi succinctly and thoroughly introduces what she calls a “new medium:” video games. Characterizing them as performative (not in the Judith Butler sense, but in the Tiger Woods sense), immersive (but not necessarily addictive), and beautiful, Nardi develops an argument that WoW builds a sustainable community through its software.

Nardi's account turned my previous assumption about videos games on its head. In the past I thought of video games as simply a "fun" platform for educational activities. With bright colors, interesting graphics and enticing game play, I saw video games as being deployed to make the most menial tasks in education more fun (e.g. multiplication tables, grammar, etc.). What we see as we trace Nardi's narrative is a much more complex and nuanced view of video games, one that affords some important educational concepts and strategies.

Video games become much more than a way of making menial tasks fun - though they are capable of just that; they also become places that facilitate the making and managing of community. Video games (WoW in particular) motivate people to accomplish tasks and create relationships, resulting in the well known “passion” of WoWers (41). Like many human activities, WoW entices its participants to continue playing by dangling a carrot in front their mouth. But that's not all. More than just a linear quest for lunch, WoW uses its expansive, social world and rewards to keep players playing.

In this way, WoW possesses the powerful ability to motivate performance, an ability largely attributable to WoW's rules and paratemers which allow users to interact within Raessen's activity hierarchy of interpretation, reconfiguration and construction. It's in this hierarchy that users first familiarize themselves with the rules (either through the game's built-in tutorials or through the help of other players), configure their world from existing objects and possibilities, and then, if they're savvy and willing, construct things they want/need to make their experience better.

Nardi’s depiction of WoW clearly illustrates what this hierarchy looks like in real-time, and her illustration uses heavy doses of legitimate peripheral participation and peer scaffolding. Here’s an example: users generally start out as “noobs” -- more on this phrasing later -- and as they slowly gain their bearings become more and more acclimated with the interworkings of WoW. Over time, as their literacy of the game increases, they learn how to manipulate the game and its interface to fit their needs, sometimes revealing holes or problems along the way. This process, however, does not happen alone, rendering that initial image of the lonely high schooler too busy to eat untrue. Instead, communities large and small, planned and haphazard, help each other through the various stages of interaction. Message boards, guilds, personal websites all invite and host player-to-player interaction and activity. What results is new knowledge and a more enjoyable experience for those participating in the activity.

Nardi’s account also demonstrates how members of seemingly disparate communities can be soldered together if there’s a hot enough heat source: in this case, game play. Nardi and others describe this phenomenon as the “magic circle,” wherein an experience can only be fully understood by those who are involved in it, which is the theoretical answer to the question: Why in the world do you play that silly game for hours? Players enter this magic circle - this escape from the real world - and simultaneously enter an experience that only other players can relate to, which again creates a sense of community between players.

A byproduct of this magic circle community is the WoW vernacular that rears its head early and often in Nardi's work. Immersed in the world of the game, players create their own short-hand language that allows them to communicate with others who are equally immersed. In this way, players, because of the software-created-community devise their own discourse to describe various phenomena in the game (e.g. new players [noobs], reaching a new level [leveling], or being brought back to life by fellow players [resing]).

One of Nardi’s most interesting points is her comparison between WoW and SecondLife which are often spoke of in the same breath. Nardi describes how the built-in rules of each software largely dictate the types of interactions that occur. SecondLife, owned by Linden Labs, is, for lack of a better term, a free-for-all. Users are allowed and encouraged to build new spaces and content for the game and there’s generally an “anything goes” frame of mind; hence, SL is viewed as a sort of ideal world where social norms are vacated, yielding super-sexualized people, places and things. WoW, on the other hand, is very selective and restrictive about what happens. Equally expansive, WoW is considerably less democratic in the way that the software is maintained. But this isn’t a problem, according to Nardi, who speculates that WoW’s presence in so many distinct cultures might make it impossible to keep every member happy: another important lesson for teachers working in the digital realm, I’d say.

More than anything, Nardi’s account lays bare how important moderation (i.e. moderating content, rules, etc.) and community are in creating an engaging artifact. Though her access to WoW’s parent company Blizzard was non-existent, she makes a pretty strong argument that they pull the right strings, a fact that’s materially supported by the millions of world-wide members. The major takeaway of this book is that digital spaces (and video games), when calibrated correctly and designed intelligently, can cast a much wider net than previously envisioned. Nardi’s demographic and ethnographic data suggest that most people can benefit from the sorts of community building that happens in WoW, it’s just a matter of creating a space where it's not only possible, but encouraged.

However, because this is an anthropological account, not all of the book is germane to teaching. Later sections deal with phenomena generally outside of that scope like addiction, but still provide interesting reading.