Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively
Multiplayer Online Game
Alex Golub
University of Hawaii
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 17–46, ISSN 0003-549. © 2010 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
Abstract
This paper discusses two main claims made about virtual worlds: first, that people become “immersed”
in virtual worlds because of their sensorial realism, and second, because virtual worlds appear to be
“places” they can be studied without reference to the lives that their inhabitants live in the actual world.
This paper argues against both of these claims by using data from an ethnographic study of knowledge
production in World of Warcraft. First, this data demonstrates that highly-committed (“immersed”)
players of World of Warcraft make their interfaces less sensorially realistic (rather than more so) in
order to obtain useable knowledge about the game world. In this case, immersion and sensorial realism
may be inversely correlated. Second, their commitment to the game leads them to engage in
knowledge-making activities outside of it. Drawing loosely on phenomenology and contemporary
theorizations of Oceania, I argue that what makes games truly “real” for players is the extent to which
they create collective projects of action that people care about, not their imitation of sensorial qualia.
Additionally, I argue that while purely in-game research is methodologically legitimate, a full account
of member’s lives must study the articulation of in-game and out-of-game worlds and trace people’s
engagement with virtual worlds across multiple domains, some virtual and some actual. [Keywords:
knowledge production, phenomenology, virtual worlds, World of Warcraft, Second Life, video games,
raiding]
Personally I really enjoy pushing the pace, challenging myself: how hard, how efficient I could
be, how much I could push damage, how I could survive. That sort of thing was the first reason
why I chose to raid, and that continues to be a motivating factor. Eventually it really became
about when you achieve common goals, as a group you really build strong camaraderie and
strong connections. When you’re raiding in Molten Core and you’re killing bosses for the first
time and doing server firsts or close to server firsts, it was [sic] an incredible high. And the
amount of people yelling on vent when we killed Ragnaros was amazing. It was like nothing
has even been louder. There will always be those first kills that I remember.
— HolyHealz, raid leader of Power Aeternus
We affirm the specificity of the human act, which cuts across the social milieu while still
holding on to its determinations, and which transforms the world on the basis of given
conditions. For us, man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what
he succeeds in making of what he has been made.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method
In retrospect, Julian Dibbell’s 1993 Village Voice piece “A Rape in Cyberspace” was the beginning of a
high-water mark in the first generation of studies of virtual worlds. The worlds Dibbell wrote about
were alphanumeric contraptions in which people’s sociality consisted of great walls of texts flowing
across their screens. His achievement was to demonstrate that something as abstract as a database of
typed descriptions of rooms could become a world which was deeply compelling for those who
inhabited it. While many remember the content of Dibbel’s piece, few remember the original subtitle:
“How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database
Into a Society” (Dibbell 1993). Indeed, sixteen years later, visually realistic, three dimensional,
persistent virtual worlds have become so successful and ubiquitous that we have trouble remembering
how surprising people found it in the mid-1990s that databases could be turned into worlds at all (for a
history of virtual worlds, see Bartle 2004:4-31).
In this article, I seek to turn the table on Dibbell’s original piece. Rather than describe people who turn
databases into worlds, I will describe a community which has taken a virtual world and turned it back
into a database. My topic is the lives of medium-core raiders in World of Warcraft, the most popular
massively multiplayer online game in the United States. Raiding (large-scale set piece battles
between a team of twenty-five players and computer-controlled monsters called “bosses”) requires
players to overcome contingency-filled encounters through coordinated action. In order to “down”
(kill) bosses effectively, raiders decompose the realistic visual and audio fields of the game into simpler
models of the underlying game state, creating useful forms of knowledge (Chen 2009).
This example of knowledge creation in the service of goal attainment challenges existing
understandings of the realism and placeness of virtual worlds. Many have argued that virtual worlds are
compelling to their inhabitants because of the sensorial realism of these worlds. On this account,
virtual worlds are immersive because they look and sound (and perhaps one day will taste, feel, and
smell) like ours (for a brief review of “realism” as a term of art in art history and its relation to three
dimensional virtual spaces, see Poole 2000:112-136). Other theories, implicitly undergirded by this
commitment to sensorial realism, argue that virtual worlds are “places” and hence legitimate research
locations for academic fieldwork which can be conducted “in its own terms” and without reference to
other locations, both virtual and actual.
In contrast to approaches which speak a language of sensorial realism, I draw loosely on
phenomenology to develop the concept of “project” in order to better understand raiding. Raiders
become committed to the collective project of raiding, I argue, and this structure of care in turn leads to
a proliferation of sociotechnical systems which break down the graphical realism of the game and
create forms of knowledge. It is this commitment to the group project of raiding, rather than sensorial
immersion in virtual worlds, which is the true cause of the remarkable dedication of the raiders I will
describe below.
My argument is particularly relevant as anthropology turns its attention to virtual worlds. In one
recent influential book, Boellstorff has argued that we ought to imagine virtual worlds as being like
Pacific islands, and thus amenable to study using traditional anthropological methods (Boellstorff
2008), creating a fieldwork imaginary which legitimates both virtual worlds and the anthropologists
who study them, by hearkening back to the canonical ethnographies of Firth, Malinowski, and Mead.
But such a comparison misrepresents both the ethnographic ambitions of Pacific anthropologists and
the dynamic, multiply-connected nature of Pacific Islanders themselves.
In contrast, I will argue that the sociotechnical systems created and deployed by raiders ramify beyond
the magic circle of World of Warcraft onto websites, Internet telephony servers, and actual-world
gatherings. Bringing contemporary theorizations of Oceania into dialogue with a phenomenological
account of projects of action, I argue, will lead us to a more complete understanding of virtual worlds
—one that will help us recapture the insights of Dibbell’s original work, which showed so clearly and
powerfully that a world does not have to look like our own to matter to us, and that our care for it
becomes part and parcel of our biography as a whole. In doing so, I argue that an anthropology of
virtual worlds should learn from studies of Oceania and imagine its subject to be systems of meanings
and commitments which spread across multiple locations, rather than discrete places which have a
“culture.”
Realism, Immersion, Place, Field
Dibbell’s “A Rape In Cyberspace” was set in a MUD, or multiple-user dungeon: one of many text-only
virtual worlds which proliferated throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, and spawned a large and
sophisticated literature (for example, Smith and Kollock 1999, Cherney and Weise 1996, Kendall 2002;
for literature reviews on virtual worlds see Wellman 2004, Wilson and Peterson 2003, Boellstorff
2008:32-60). No sooner had text-only worlds blossomed before it appeared they would be replaced by
immersive “virtual realities,” which would produce qualia as realistic as those experienced in the actual
world. Envisioned first in science fiction classics such as True Names (Vinge 1981), Neuromancer
(Gibson 1984), and Snowcrash (Stephenson 1992), the idea of sensorially realistic virtual worlds grew
in popularity in the early nineties as authors such as Howard Rheingold popularized emergent
technologies which seemed to promise the imminent feasibility of their construction (Rheingold 1992).
By the late nineties, however, the development of haptic interfaces and virtual reality goggles sputtered
out, and it became increasingly clear that science fiction’s vision of a future world littered with virtual
realities would not come to pass. At the same time, the rise of the Internet and the blogs, wikis, and
social network sites it supported indicated that “cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant
environment” and “the almost mystical euphoria” that surrounded “DataGloves, head-mounted
displays, special-purpose rendering engines” was “both excessive and misplaced” (Morningstar and
Farmer 1991). Relationships, not realism, seemed to be central to future technologies. Rheingold
himself concurred. In his 2003 review of emerging technologies, he admitted that “the past ten years of
VR have not been as exciting as the original idea was or as I had thought they would be” (Rheingold
2003:89). Rather, the “world of the twenty-first century” would be one in which “computers would be
built into reality rather than the other way around” (Rheingold 2003:82) via technologies such as
ubiquitous and tangible computing and mobile telephony. “Science fiction has disserved us,” wrote
Philip Agre presciently. “Gibson famously defined cyberspace as a space apart from the corporeal
world— a hallucination. But the Internet is not growing apart from the world, but to the contrary is
increasingly embedded in it” (Agre 1999). Realistic, separated virtual worlds were off the menu.
Even as Rheingold was disavowing virtual reality, however, attention was refocusing on it. In 2001,
Edwards Castronova’s seminal paper on the economy of Everquest (Castronova 2001) demonstrated
(in typical “American” fashion) that these worlds were important and worthy of study because the
objects in them were worth money. The strategy of monetization as a method of moral valorization
continued, and in 2006, Businessweek’s cover story featured Second Life’s first millionaire, who made
her fortune buying and selling virtual real estate (Hoff 2006). Second Life quickly became an
exemplar of a “world” rather than a “game” where people could express themselves through creating
in-world objects and sell them—an ethic of “creative capitalism” (Boellstorff 2007:205-211) that
spoke to “American” concerns with self expression, authenticity, and wealth.
The visual and aural realism of these virtual worlds and the high commitment they inspire in many
players—some of whom spend more than forty hours a week in-world—have lead some to see them as
the inheritors of old dreams of virtual realities. For those influenced by laments about the erosion of US
civic life (Putnam 2001) and narrowly biomedical models of human psychology (Young 1998), these
virtual realities are dystopic nightmares of addiction and isolation which can never replace genuine
face-to-face human consociation. For others, they are emancipatory spaces where players can free
themselves from the crushing anomie of modern life. An extreme version of this position can be found
in the work of Edward Castronova. Drawing on images of the Star Trek’s holodeck, which “allows
users to enter into a deeply accurate simulation of any environment” (Castronova 2007:3), Castronova
has argued that virtual worlds represent “a new technology…that is shockingly close to the holodeck.
Already today, a person with a reasonably well-equipped personal computer and an Internet connection
can disappear for hours and hours into vast realms of fantasy. These computer-generated virtual
worlds are undoubtedly the holodeck’s predecessors.” (Castronova 2007:4-5) Here, massively
multiplayer on-line games are figured as the successors of the completely immersive virtual worlds
imagined in the late eighties and early nineties.
These worlds are not only sensorially realistic, they are on Castronova’s account deeply separate from
the actual world. “Despite the fact that the virtual worlds and the real world intersect with and impact
one another,” he writes, “these two domains are in competition with one another” (Castronova
2007:7). This exclusivity is the result of increasing sensorial realism: immersion in one requires
disattention to the other, and Castronova envisions a world in which we pay only the biologically
minimal amount of time necessary to our bodies since, as he puts it, “it doesn’t take much to support a
human body at a level sufficient to allow the mind to live synthetically. A room, a bed, a computer,
Internet, some food, and a toilet.” (Castronova 2007:13). As people choose meaningful virtual worlds
over the actual, un-fun one, Castronova predicts that “the exodus of…people from the real world, from
our normal daily life of living rooms, cubicles, and shopping malls, will create a change in social
climate that makes global warming look like a tempest in a teacup” (Castronova 2007:xiv-xv). Even
more dramatically, Philip Rosedale, a key creator of Second Life, has argued that “the real world will
become like a museum very soon. So it’ll be fantastically cool to go to New York, but in the same way
that it’s cool to go see the Mayan ruins. Because the big buildings will still be there, but they’ll be
covered in dust. Because no one will bother too much with them anymore.” (Rosedale in Guest
2007:268-269).
Several authors have been critical of positions such as the ones held by Castronova and Rosedale. Salen
and Zimmerman (2004) have argued that engagement with computer games requires an awareness,
rather than forgetfulness, of the bracketed nature of game experiences. Thomas Malaby has argued
that positions such as these are “exceptionalist.” Tracing their genealogy back to the work of Huizinga
(1971), he argues that these exceptionalist positions implicitly rely on the idea that they are surrounded
by a “magic circle” or sometimes a “membrane” which delineates them from the “real world.” In doing
so, they “hold games at arm’s length from what matters, from where ‘real’ things happen,” in order to
“cast them as potential utopias promising new transformative possibilities for society, but ultimately
just as removed from everyday experience” (Malaby 2007:4).
The reification of virtual worlds as “places” similar to and exclusive of the actual world can also be
detected in Tom Boellstorff’s much more careful book Coming of Age in Second Life. Boellstorff, like
Malaby, seeks to move beyond positions which trivialize human meaning-making in virtual spaces. He
insists that all human existence is “virtual”—that is, culturally mediated—and that we ought to speak of
“virtual” and “actual” worlds, rather than “virtual” and “real” ones, since both in-game and out-of-
game worlds are “real,” and “the sociality of virtual worlds develops on its own terms; it references the
actual world but is not simply derivative of it” (Boellstorff 2008:63). These are excellent points (and I
have used the virtual/actual dichotomy throughout this article). Nevertheless, in his quest to
legitimize virtual worlds both morally and empirically, Boellstorff relies on an exceptionalist
position which overemphasizes the autonomy of Second Life from the actual world by arguing too
strongly against the claim that “online cultures are ultimately predicated upon actual-world cultures”
(Boellstorff 2008:62).
In fact, Second Life is ultimately predicated on actual world cultures, even though, as Boellstorff
correctly notes, this predication is a necessary but not sufficient condition for in-game sociality. The
actual world is where future Second Lifers are socialized and learn language, and it is the origin of the
complex technical protocols regarding voltage, material standards for cabling, and packet encoding
which undergird the virtual worlds’ technical systems. The actual world really is the paramount reality
for human beings, and our deaths in it have a finality and reality that the deaths of our avatars do not.
At base all segments of the lifeworld are “actual” because they are all finite provinces of reality
embedded in the deeper and more primary experience of everyday life that serves as paramount reality
for most humans (Schutz 1973).
The question then arises of how best to understand the relationship of virtual worlds to the other
lifeworld contexts in which members find themselves. Boellstorff’s solution is to bracket out the actual
world lives of Second Lifers from research, focusing only on their in-game activities. As a result,
Boellstorff claims that he “did not try to verify any aspect of residents’ actual-world lives” (Boellstorff
2008:81), and although he collected “ten thousand pages of blogs, newsletters, and other websites”
(Boellstorff 2008:75), he does not discuss the way Second Lifers communicate in online forums.
While Boellstorff is right to insist that Second Life is a “legitimate site of culture” (Boellstorff
2008:61) and I believe in-game fieldwork to be a legitimate method, I would resist Boellstorff’s
conflation of a valid methodological decision (to conduct research entirely in-game) with a wider
epistemological one (to bracket out of analysis all other lifeworld contexts in which Second Lifers
participate). This approach legitimizes virtual worlds as fieldsites, but the cost is a narrow focus on
only one aspect of members’ lives, rather than a fuller understanding, exemplified in Dibbell’s
autobiographical work, of the connection of virtual spaces with other domains of experience. While it
is true that Boellstorff does rely on information about people’s actual-world identities (without seeking
to verify their self-reports) in order to examine how these are incorporated and made manifest in-world,
these brief discussions ultimately do not provide as complete a picture of members’ lives as a study
which examined the many contexts in which they lived.
Such an argument is not merely a revanchist revaluation of the actual against the virtual. Rather, I
would argue that Boellstorff’s decision to exclude from his study the websites, blogs, and other online
sites where Second Lifers interact is as problematic as his decision to bracket out their actual world
lives. Even when Boellstoff does briefly touch on websites important to Second Lifers (Boellstorff
2008:198-2001), he sees them as “virtual virtual worlds” (Boellstorf 2008:199). The hierarchicalization
of worlds that Boellstorff sought to avoid in the virtual/actual dichotomy is here imposed amongst
virtual spaces, which results in a focus on the true “placeness” of Second Life at the expense of other
locations where Second Lifers might congregate.
Boellstorff argues that visual realism is key to Second Lifers’ conception of Second Life as a “place”
(Boellstorff 2008:92), and the rhetorical strategy of his text also relies on sensorial realism to make it
easy to imagine Second Life as a legitimate fieldsite. Indeed, Boellstorff casts himself as a modern-day
Malinowski by quoting the opening of the famous third section of the first chapter of Argonauts of the
Western Pacific:
Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close
to a native village while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.
You have nothing to do, but to start at once on your ethnographic work. Imagine further that you
are a beginner, without previous experience, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you.