Identity and Collaboration in World of Warcraft

A Identity and Collaboration in World of Warcraft tells the story lexander of what happens when a Cherokee gamer, using a storyteller’s perspective and a methodology built from equal parts Indigenous tradition and cur- rent academic field knowledge, spends a year in what was at-the-time the largest online video game in the world. Following from work by James Paul Gee and Bonnie Nardi, Phillip Michael Alexander ventured forth into the game world to see what someone who was a gamer long before I he was an academic might see in this same fascinating virtual space. In dentity and working with, playing with, and sharing the stories of a ten-person “raid” group—players performing at the highest level within the game—he set out to determine how those gamers most invested in success built iden- Identity and tities and communities. The resulting work is a reader-friendly, theory informed, virtual-boots-on-the-virtual-ground look at how gamers craft C in-game identities, find like-minded gamers to form group identities, ollaboration in Collaboration in then organize to do staggering amounts of work in a virtual world. For anyone who ever wondered what the appeal of World of Warcraft is, Phillip Michael Alexander illustrates how some of the most active, most engaged, OF and most talented players spend their time in that virtual world. Phillip Michael Alexander is Assistant Professor of Games in the WORLD Armstrong Institute of Interactive Media Studies at Miami University W in Oxford, Ohio. A native of the Midwest and a mixed-blood Cherokee, orld of Alexander’s work has appeared in Kairos, Computers & Composition, and in various edited collections including Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writ- ing and Games and World of Warcraft and Philosophy. W Warcraft AR Electracy and Transmedia Studies C RAFT Edited by Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes P Phillip Michael Alexander 3015 Brackenberry Drive arlor Anderson, South Carolina 29621 http://www.parlorpress.com P S A N: 2 5 4 – 8 8 7 9 ress ISBN: 978-1-60235-622-1 Identity and Collaboration in World of Warcraft Electracy and Transmedia Studies Series Editors: Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes The Electracy and Transmedia Studies Series publishes research that examines the mixed realities that emerge through electracy, play, rhe- torical knowledge, game design, community, code, and transmedia artifacts. This book series aims to augment traditional artistic and literate forms with examinations of electrate and literate play in the age of transmedia. Writing about play should, in other words, be grounded in playing with writing. The distinction between play and reflection, as Stuart Moulthrop argues, is a false dichotomy. Cultural transmedia artifacts that are interactive, that move, that are situated in real time, call for inventive/electrate means of creating new scholarly traction in transdisciplinary fields. The series publishes research that produces such traction through innovative processes that move research forward across its own limiting surfaces (surfaces that create static friction). The series exemplifies extreme points of contact where increased electrate traction might occur. The series also aims to broaden how scholarly treatments of electracy and transmedia can include both academic and general audiences in an effort to create points of contact between a wide range of readers. The Electracy and Transmedia Series follows what Gregory Ulmer calls an image logic based upon a wide scope— “an aesthetic embodiment of one’s attunement with the world.” Books in the Series Identity and Collaboration in World of Warcraft by Phillip Michael Alexander (2018) Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies, edited by Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn (2016) Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games, edited by Douglas Ey- man and Andréa D. Davis (2016) IDENTITY AND COLLABORATION IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT Phillip Michael Alexander Parlor Press Anderson, South Carolina www.parlorpress.com Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA © 2018 by Parlor Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File 978-1-60235-605-4 (paperback) 978-1-60235-611-5 (hardcover) 978-1-60235-622-1 (PDF) 978-1-60235-625-2 (ePub) 978-1-60235-711-2 (Kindle) 1 2 3 4 5 Electracy and Transmedia Studies Series Editors: Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes Cover image: Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash. Used by permission. https://unsplash.com/photos/JvgLz2UmXsQ Copyeditor: Jared Jameson. Cover design: David Blakesley Index by Meagan Blakesley Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www. parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [email protected]. Contents Preface: Adventures in Raiding ix 1 What Happens in Azeroth Can’t Seem to Stay in Azeroth 3 2 He’s Still the Kind of Girl Who Likes Matching Daggers 30 3 “Know Your Role and (probably never) Shut Your Mouth”: Digital Identity in World of Warcraft 45 4 “Don’t Be a Double Dotting Douche:” Group Identity in World of Warcraft 62 5 Dances with Fire Maggots: When It’s All Good 80 6 Failure? Or, “Once We Down Her on Normal, We Go Do It on Heroic” 101 7 Conclusion: We Don’t Live Here Anymore 110 Notes 119 References 123 Index 127 About the Author 133 For my mother, who never doubted for one sec- ond that I could write a book. And for Julie, who loved and supported me through a year plus of playing World of Warcraft incessantly and years of writing afterward. Hey, I did it. I made it. Preface: Adventures in Raiding s I sit now, years removed from the period when I conducted this A research, it strikes me that even though the span of time I devoted to being a war-bound goblin seems so long ago, I still vividly remember those experiences and all those that participated in them with me. What you are about to read is an account of that period in my life, which con- sisted of almost a year’s worth of research with a group of gamers. It’s a group I became so much a part of that I raided from academic conference hotels, from a hospital waiting room, while watching over the sick, and while being bedridden myself. This endeavor was a large part of my life. Over the course of the next several pages I will share what I’ve learned, and what I think our field can learn, from a group of dedicated World of Warcraft (WoW ) raiders. From digital identity to collaborative work, from learning through failure to growing to have a sense of groupness, Flashpoint—my participant guild (a pseudonym, as are the participants’ names)—has much to offer all of us. I want to take a moment here to acknowledge the friendships I formed, and to offer my sincere thanks to Iceman, Leah, Lint, Sally, Salty, and the others who played smaller roles but never the less learned to cope with a writer and researcher invading their world. I want to thank my mother, who was there during my exhausted hours post-raid to make sure I was doing things like sleeping and cleaning up and remem- bering to go to work. I want to thank my partner, Julie Alexander, for understanding that I would never rate raiding over her but had a research obligation all those many nights. And I’d like to thank Dànielle DeVoss, Bill Hart-Davidson, Jeff Grabill and Malea Powell for coping with my dogged insistence that I’d found something with these gamers and for their help extracting and explaining that information. As you read, I hope that as readers you can see and respect my at- tempts to preserve the voice and vibe of the raid group; at times this leads ix to lengthy descriptions, quirky narratives and more than one phrase I’d never utter were I not quoting someone. But over the course of this book, I want you to feel, as much as possible, like we are walking together within the World of Warcraft. I hope I prove a worthy storyteller. x Identity and Collaboration in The World of Warcraft 1 1 What Happens in Azeroth Can’t Seem to Stay in Azeroth This is a story. I’m almost four feet tall. Taller if you count the helmet. The huge guy standing in front of me goes by the name Ragnaros. Okay, he’s not a guy. He’s an Artificial Intelligence. An AI. He’s the “boss” of this raid—the Firelands—and in the inexplicable way that combat happens in an MMO, he just mocked me but will stand there, staring at me, until I initiate battle. He spends a great deal of time mocking me while our raid prepares to attack. A little bit about Rags: this is not the Ragnaros that Mark Danger Chen (2010) and his thirty-nine compatriots fought in Leet Noobs. Ragnaros, who is the final encounter in the level 60 Molten Core raid that Chen stud- ied, is also the final boss of Firelands, the place we’re currently campaigning. This Ragnaros is kind of the same as the one Chen’s group fought, only he’s totally different.

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