Bonnie Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of War Craft, is, first of all, a much easier read once the reader has immersed him or herself into the virtual world of WoW. In the second section of the book, concerned primarily with Active Aesthetic Experience, Nardi performance, as do many video games theorists. One of the most interesting aspects of her discussion is, however, the she takes a different approach to the understanding of the performative. In Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other she discusses performativity as something similar to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity: “…that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (Butler). This idea has been particularly interesting to me in regards to the performance of gender within videogames. Nardi is, at least in this chapter, not interested the understanding of performance in this way. She writes, “I do not use ‘performance’ as a metaphor for the reproduction of culture through certain actions (see, e.g., Butler 1990) in which people are unaware that they are ‘performing’ but rather as it is used in sports or theater, where participants engage in specific, recognizable instances of performative activity” (54). Nardio explains that WoW is very much like “normal” visual-performative activities that occur in the real world such as dancing, theater, etc. Though to the untrained eye gaming may seem to better embody Butler’s understanding of the performative, it also allows for performance of activities within the game.
Nardi explains that “situational awareness” (originally a military term) is particularly important to playing World of Warcraft (which I learned first hand last night while participating in my first duel). Situational awareness, she explains, denotes “the ability to mentally process rapid multidimensional environmental changes” which is also necessary in team sports (55). Furthermore, it seems more likely that characters within these games know your performance better than they know you: first, they will know your performance of your avatar (gender, attitude, etc.), and secondly as the character’s “performance of its actions” (56). Interestingly, both of these aspects of the performative as ultimately controlled by the owners of such games. Nardi points out that “activity theory and actor-network theory posit that technology embodies a powerful agency not strictly under human control” (62). Because only certain actions are allowed in the game, performance is ultimately controlled by this agency. Nardi calls this type of activity “regulated performance.”
Further into the section, Nardi draws a parallel between performance and participation, which I believe is an important distinction. This better describes the difference between Butler (and other theorists’) notion of the performative and the way in which Nardi is using the term. As Nardi discussed in “Play as Aesthetic Experience,” John Dewey argued that aesthetic experience is participatory, and World of Warcraft is most certainly an example of an aesthetic experience, despite the fact that Huisman and Marckmann disagree that WoW’s type of participation is “interesting” because of the number of players (85).
When considering games the size of World of Warcraft, ideas about the difference between “work” and “play” begin to take on new meaning—there is certainly a lot of work to be done regarding games such as these. Nardi points out that theorists have struggled to define the two and that “whole seemingly straightforward notions, when scrutinized, they seem to dissolve into inconsistency and contradiction” (94). (She also notes that the discussion of these concepts “maintains a distinction between ‘game-play’—i.e., the performance of a game—and ‘games’ as cultural entities such as hide-and-seek or World of Warcraft” [94].) Nardi uses and interesting example to illustrate the difference (and lack thereof) between work and play: Mark Twain’s Tom Saywer chapter entitled “Tom Sawyer Whitewashing the Fence.” While describing the scene, Nardi writes, “Freedom and necessity, work and play, seem to inhabit clear categories. But Tom knows that these categories are open to manipulation precisely because they are subjective” (98). One of the ways World of Warcraft players distinguish work from play, for example, is by defining work as an obligation and play as something enjoyable, but as Nardi points out, the two often intersect. (We see this in her interview of Pen, Chiu, and Lefen, who describe mandatory WoW raids as work.) And yet, terms such as “hard work” appear frequently throughout gameplay. After successful raids, players congratulate each other on the “good work” they’ve done. Nardi sums this up by saying that “play is, at the highest level, a freely chosen activity while at the same time opening the potential for worklike results. A notion of freedom must be understood in its social matrix, not as a philosophical absolute” (101). I feel like this idea is one of the most important we’ve read in games theory. Because games, gaming, and gamers are so often misunderstood, it’s important to take into account the fact that our ideas on the topics should be understood in context rather as absolutes.
Questions:
How are the different ideas of performance seen in WoW?
How can the quotes “technology embodies a powerful agency not strictly under human control” (62) relate to the readings from Turkle?
In what ways has “situational awareness” come into play in your WoW experience?
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