Sociality and Materiality in World of Warcraft Nicholas Anthony Gadsby University College London Department of Anthropology A thesis re-submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2016 1 Declaration I, Nicholas Anthony Gadsby, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I conform this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract The focus of my thesis is the role and status of control in the MMO World of Warcraft where one of the primary motivations for player engagement was to eliminate and marginalise contingency at sites across the game that were perceived to be prone to the negative effects of contingency, a process that its developers were to a significant degree complicit in. My field sites traced the activities and lives of gamers across the physical location of London and the south east of the United Kingdom and their online game locations that constituted World of Warcraft and occasionally other online games which included the guild they were a member of that was called ‘Helkpo’. It examines how the transparency attributed to the game’s code, its ‘architectural rules’, framed the unpredictability of players as problematic and how codified ‘social rules’ attempted to correct this shortcoming. In my thesis I dive into the lives of the members of Helkpo as both guild members and as part of the expansive network that constituted their social lives in London. It demonstrates how the indeterminate nature of information in the relations in their social network contrasted with the modes of accountability that World of Warcraft offered, defined by different forms of information termed ‘knowing’ and ‘knowledge’. This chapter considers how the certainties of the game produced a more reliable space for the enactment of English culture’s social dualism of public and private. I develop the argument that control should be considered as a legitimate issue of concern for studies of games and more broadly within processual anthropologies. I suggest that where contingency is ascribed cultural classification there is always the possibility that cultural forms of control may be employed to eliminate it. Importantly, I argue that as anthropologists the recognition of control as a meaningful product of culture, even under the indeterminate conditions of modernity, remains critical for the discipline. 3 Table of Contents List of figures 6 1. Introduction: control and games 1.1. Introduction 8 1.2. Defining Control 12 1.3. Control in Games 15 1.4. Culture 23 1.5. Disenchantment and Enchantment 30 1.6. Enter the World of Warcraft 32 1.7. Structure of the Chapters 39 1.8. Methodology 43 2. Control defined: problematic subjects, transparent design 50 2.1. World of Warcraft 50 2.2. Dungeon Crawl Classics 57 2.3. The Subject in Games 62 2.4. Architectural Rules and Social Rules 67 2.5. Transparency and Design 74 2.6. Performance and Transparency 78 2.7. Shadow Lord Iskar: Code and Codification 88 2.8. The Asymmetry of Rules 99 2.9. Addons: The Aesthetics of Rules 103 2.10. The Negation of ‘Deep Play’ 116 2.11. Conclusion 121 3. An architecture of Englishness: being close and distant at the same time 123 3.1. The Beginning of the End 123 3.2. New Beginnings 127 3.3. Explaining ‘Knowing’ and ‘Knowledge’ 132 3.4. Englishness with no ‘Alternative’ 138 3.5. The Complexities of Networks 146 3.6. Contingent Information 149 3.7. Lost in the Network 154 3.8. Performativity and Prescription in Friendship 162 3.9. Impersonalism in World of Warcraft 174 3.10. Finding the Player 180 3.11. Mechanographic Accounts 187 3.12. An Architecture of Englishness 201 3.13. Conclusion 203 4. Fantasy and the production of privacy 205 4.1. Overview 205 4 4.2. The Concealment of Fantasy 208 4.3. Fantasy and the Collective Imagination 210 4.4. Everyday Enchantment 215 4.5. Childhood and the Tradition of Fantasy 220 4.6. The Rise of the Fantasy Genre 228 4.7. ‘The Unreachable Frontier’ 234 4.8. The Public Place of Fantasy in World of Warcraft 241 4.9. The Value of Enchantment 246 4.10. Engagements with the Rational 252 4.11. Conclusion 257 5. Governance through certainty 258 5.1. Framing Governance 258 5.2. Control as Certainty 264 5.3. Re-coding Sociality 269 5.4. Player Power 274 5.5. Designer/Players 278 5.6. The Certainty of Change 283 5.7. Conclusion 288 6. Conclusion: control in process 289 6.1. Overview of the Thesis Goals 289 6.2. Overview of the Argument 290 6.3. Control in Games: Beyond Cheating 303 6.4. Control in Processual Anthropology 308 Bibliography 314 5 List of Figures 1. Figure 1. Unmodified World of Warcraft UI 109 2. Figure 2. Very cluttered World of Warcraft UI 111 3. Figure 3. Slightly cluttered World of Warcraft UI 112 4. Figure 4. Division of screen World of Warcraft UI 113 5. Figure 5. Minimalist World of Warcraft UI 115 6. Figure 6. Diagram showing a rough history of guilds prior to Helkpo 125 7. Figure 7. An example of 'collectibles' in glass display cases 216 8. Figure 8. Example of a pile of fantasy books 220 6 Acknowledgements First of all, thank you to all the guild members of Helkpo, past and present for putting up with me for so many years through thick and thin. Thanks must also go to the ever-expanding role-playing group for their time also. I’m incredibly grateful to Danny Miller for his brilliant supervision for the past four years, helping me develop my ideas, providing the most helpful criticism, his enthusiasm for my ideas which gave me growing confidence in what I was doing and putting up with my occasional extended absences and silences. Thank you so much to the great insights and guidance from my examiners Haidy Geismar and Thomas Malaby for inspiring me to try something different with my amendments. Thank you also to Lane DeNicola and Stefana Broadbent, for providing thoughts and ideas along the way and also Victor Buchli, Ludovic Coupaye and Susanne Kuechler who were always very enthusiastic about what I was doing. A general thanks must also go out to the Material Culture and Digital Anthropology departments as a whole for providing me with so much inspiration, even before I began my PhD and some truly excellent seminars. Thanks also to all the dinner group members for discussing, critiquing my work and encouraging me – you all said the nicest things – Razvan Nicolescu, Alesya Krit, Tom MacDonald, Jo Sinanan, Dia Flores, Carol Balthazar, Julie Boticello, Julie Shackleford, Wallis Motta, Ivana Bajic, Roxana Morosanu, Aleksi Nutilla, Tiziana Traldi, Elizabthe D’Antonio and all the others who were involved. Other PhD students who were excellent friends – Gabi Ackroyd, Jeeva D and Aaron Parkhurst, timothy Carroll. I also need to thank all the one-time Masters students and friends – Nitasha Kapoor, Kat Braybrooke, Juliano Spyer and Thais Rocha, Andrew and Alysse Merrill, Ragnhild Freng Dale, Dale Simmons, Chloe Cook, Brian Schroer, Raissa Botterman, Lida Papmatthaiaki, Luiz Gabriel Vera, Peter Westman, Rafaela Peteanu, Kelly and Johnny Dance , Ian Williamson, Carl Storm, Matt Voigts, Puya Vakili, Anna Wojnarovska, Giustina Trevisi, Arnand Pilay, Cosimo Lupo, Susanna Inzoli, Angie Kim, Jen Robinson, Astrid Grue, Melissa Stelzer Reeve, Nina Train Chao and all the others I met along the way. My biggest thank you goes to my wife, Phoebe for her eternal patience and tolerance with my study, I could not have done it without her. And my second biggest thank you goes to my daughter, Margot, who probably wonders why she never saw me at weekends. 7 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: CONTROL AND GAMES 1.1. Introduction I was hunched over a large coffee table in the lounge of a top floor flat located beside a busy main road in south London watching its tenants, Will and Theresa, carefully place on it a series of almost uniformly black game components. Outside the summer sun blazed and the sound of the passing traffic was just about audible over the buzz of the music that strove to create its own, more chilling, ambience. We were about to embark on a game of Cave Evil , a board game that pitted ‘necromancer’ against ‘necromancer’ through the creation of various monstrosities such as demons and the undead. The game had become something of a cult hit not least because of its artwork that drew openly on the genre of extreme heavy metal called ‘Black Metal’ – rendered in stark white on black, ‘hand-drawn’ in style, striving for an aesthetic of ‘DIY’ authenticity that harkened back to the fanzines and ‘demo tapes’ of the 1980s and early 90s. Visually it was a striking game that on the one occasion we had played in a pub in east London had gathered a small crowd of onlookers. But there was a more pressing matter at hand. As Will began dealing out the necessary pieces to each player, he explained that we’d been ‘playing it wrong’. He paused and picked up the rulebook – a similarly grim-toned document of 44 pages titled ‘Rules of War’ - flicked through it, then pointed to a series of spaced-apart hexagons that ran around the edge of the game’s board marked with a swirling ‘maelstrom’ known as the ‘Awaken Track’. Will was resolute in his attempts to grasp the rules. This was the third time I had played the game and Will had played several times more, yet each session it seemed that we had misinterpreted at least one of the rules or some ambiguity arose that necessitated a detailed investigation of the rulebook so a decision might be made concerning the ‘proper’ way it should be played.