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

World of Warcraft is the world's most popular massively multiplayeronline game (MMOG), with (as of March 2007) more than eight million activesubscribers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, who play the game anastonishing average of twenty hours a week. This book examines the complexity ofWorld of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultura

World of Warcraft is the world's most popular massively multiplayeronline game (MMOG), with (as of March 2007) more than eight million activesubscribers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, who play the game anastonishing average of twenty hours a week. This book examines the complexity ofWorld of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and socialimplications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds. Thecontributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spendinghundreds of hours as players (leading guilds and raids, exploring moneymakingpossibilities in the in-game auction house, playing different factions, races, andclasses), conducting interviews, and studying the game design--as created byBlizzard Entertainment, the game's developer, and as modified by player-created userinterfaces. The analyses they offer are based on both the firsthand experience ofbeing a resident of Azeroth and the data they have gathered and interpreted. Thecontributors examine the ways that gameworlds reflect the real world--exploring suchtopics as World of Warcraft as a "capitalist fairytale" and the game'sconstruction of gender; the cohesiveness of the gameworld in terms of geography, mythology, narrative, and the treatment of death as a temporary state; aspects ofplay, including "deviant strategies" perhaps not in line with theintentions of the designers; and character--both players' identification with theircharacters and the game's culture of naming characters. The varied perspectives ofthe contributors--who come from such fields as game studies, textual analysis, gender studies, and postcolonial studies--reflect the breadth and vitality ofcurrent interest in MMOGs.Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg are bothAssociate Professors of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, Norway.