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

Description

"Ever since the creators of the animated television show South Park turned their lovingly sardonic gaze on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for an entire episode, WoW's status as an icon of digital culture has been secure. My Life as a Night Elf Priest digs deep beneath the surface of that icon to explore the rich particulars of the World of Warcraft player's experience." —Julian Dibbell, Wired "World of Warcraft is the best representative of a significant new technology, art form, and sector of society: the theme-oriented virtual world. Bonnie Nardi's pioneering transnational ethnography explores this game both sensitively and systematically using the methods of cultural anthropology and aesthetics with intensive personal experience as a guild member, media teacher, and magical quest Elf." —William Sims Bainbridge, author of The Warcraft Civilization and editor of Online Worlds “Nardi skillfully covers all of the hot button issues that come to mind when people think of video games like World of Warcraft such as game addiction, sexism, and violence. What gives this book its value are its unexpected gems of rare and beautifully detailed research on less sensationalized topics of interest such as the World of Warcraft player community in China, game modding, the increasingly blurred line between play and work, and the rich and fascinating lives of players and player cultures. Nardi brings World of Warcraft down to earth for non-players and ties it to social and cultural theory for scholars. . . . the best ethnography of a single virtual world produced so far.” —Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants. In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes. Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer. Bonnie A. Nardi is an anthropologist by training and a professor in the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focus is the social implications of digital technologies. She is the author of A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing and the coauthor of Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart and Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. Cover art by Jessica Damsky

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account...

  • 2010-05-25
  • - pages
  • Paperback
  • University of Michigan Press
• 

  My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account...

  • 2010-05-25
  • 244 pages
  • Ebook
  • University of Michigan Press

Similar books

• 

  Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method

  By Celia Pearce, Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi

  I love this book."--Lori Kendall, author of Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub "Written by a very authoritative team, this is a distinctive guide, rich in practical advice grounded in the authors' experiences.

• 

  The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World

  By William Sims Bainbridge

  In The Warcraft Civilization, sociologist William Sims Bainbridge goes further, arguing that WoW can be seen not only as an allegory of today but also as a virtual prototype of tomorrow, of a real human future in which tribe-like groups ...

• 

  DOOM: SCARYDARKFAST

  By Dan Pinchbeck

  Daniel Pinchbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time. This book takes a look at the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system.

• 

  eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming

  By William Sims Bainbridge

  This book and its topic are enmeshed in a eulture weir. The two sides are not clearly drawn, but on one side we can vaguely see conservative forces that want to preserve traditional American culture including old-time religion, ...

• 

  Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader

  By Jill Walker Rettberg, Hilde Corneliussen

  This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds.

• 

  The Straitjacket Society: A Rebel Bureaucrat Tells All

  By Masao Miyamoto

  Almost overnight Masao Miyamoto attracted worldwide attention by pointing out the arcane - and often archaic - code of life inside one of the world's most powerful institutions, the Japanese bureaucracy.

• 

  Skate Life: Re-imagining White Masculinity

  By Emily Chivers Yochim

  An in-depth look at skateboarding culture by a promising young scholar

• 

  Wolf in the Snow

  By Matthew Cordell

  Paintings rich with feeling tell this satisfying story of friendship and trust. Wolf in the Snow is a book set on a wintry night that will spark imaginations and warm hearts, from Matthew Cordell, author of Trouble Gum and Another Brother.

• 

  Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism

  By Bonnie A. Nardi, Hamid R. Ekbia

  Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological ...

• 

  Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader

  By Marcus Carter, Kelly Bergstrom, Darryl Woodford

  It's important to note that Talk to Me did not present interaction itself but rather objects and designs that facilitate or enhance interaction. This selection ranged from computer interfaces and data visualizations to experimental ...