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31 Jul 12
Todd Suomela"Well, it’s not too complicated: My Life As A Night Elf Priest by Bonnie Nardi is the best ethnography of World of Warcraft out there. And that’s not likely to change soon."
book review ethnography anthropology virtual world games online information-science
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Nardi has a long background in studying how people interact with technology. If I understand this correctly, people originally studied usability: how people interacted with computers and how you could change computers to make them more usable. Then they realized that what people wanted to use technology for was affected by the form that technology itself took. Nardi was one of the people who took this insight and developed ‘activity theory’, a generalized approach which made action rather than the actors the center of its approach. It’s a bit like actor network theory in that it considers humans and nonhuman equally, and like ANT it articulates slightly with American Pragmatism. But Nardi’s lodestar is Vygotsky, and activity theory has no truck with the bizarre epistemological and ontological exuberances of ANT. It is scientific in its study of action, but it not in a sterile way. Frankly, its a very impressive way to think about the world.
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Nardi’s main claim in her book is that activity theory, expanded by a reading of Dewey’s aesthetic theory, can make sense of what it means to play WoW. In his book Art and Experience Dewey provides an account of art which is tied to Western aesthetic theory but which is not tied to decrepit Victorian theories of the sublime, beautiful, otherworldly, etc. Specifically, he argues that aesthetic experience is the result of a kind of engaged activity in the world that occurs when people’s capacities are challenged but not overwhelmed. Nardi takes this up and argues that playing WoW can be an aesthetic experience — absorbing, pleasurable, and fun. It’s sort of an account of flow tied to a description of human flourishing. Nardi’s exposition of the concept in the second section of the book is detailed but not pedantic. She really uses theory to get to where she needs to go, which is the best way to do it.
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