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Conference Report
Yoel Bergman, "Thirty-Eighth Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology"

Essay Reviews
Simon A. Cole, "The Faces of Biometrics: Lisa S. Nelson, America Identified; Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future"

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Philip Mirowski, "Minding the Cybernetic Gap: Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain"

Megan Mullen, "Demystifying Some Momentous Changes: Richard R. John, Network Nation"

Casey O'Donnell, "On the Back of a Flying Gryphon: Soaring
Over/Through the Global Game Industry: Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire; Bonnie A. Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest; William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization"

Technology and Culture
January 2012

On the Back of a Flying Gryphon:
Soaring Over/Through the Global Game Industry

Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire
Bonnie A. Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest
William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization

Casey O'Donnell
After more than thirty years as a thing that can be called "an industry," the video-game industry now finds itself in its middle ages, as well as the object of critical and scholarly inquiry. The global game industry and the virtual game worlds it creates are sprawling, historically situated, socio-technical assemblages that continue to offer promise and peril to researchers. Too often, however, context and the link between game worlds and developer worlds go uninterrogated: a divide remains between the world of game creators and games/game worlds themselves. Research tends to focus exclusively on content or on production, with a few notable exceptions linking the two.

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter's Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. xxxvi+298. $20) undertakes a complex analysis of the game industry through the lens of "empire," as read through Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (p. xx). In many respects, this account is the most effective, as it connects production and content through this framework, focusing on "immaterial labor" both inside the game production "engine" and throughout the "gameplay" worlds it produces.

The resulting text provides a theoretically rich and compelling analytic framework that draws the reader into the networked "immaterial" worlds of game producers and game worlds. At the same time, one is also left feeling as if one was "on the back of a flying gryphon" (p. 123), flying over the landscape of the global game industry. One cannot help but wonder what a more focused empirical lens might have brought the text. EA_Spouse, actual Electronic Arts Employees, China, Chinese World of Warcraft (WoW) gold farmers, and even brief historical accounts of technologies and regions collide in an account whose sheer breadth does seem to imply a kind of empire. Due to such breadth, a certain empirical depth is never reached. One feels ferried from site to site just when the story was getting interesting, rather than being allowed to gain enough context, historical or otherwise, to engage deeply with the overarching argument.

Further, the reader is left wondering whether the theme of empire emerged from the source material (I suspect it did), or was imposed upon the material. It is difficult to determine which was the case from the flow and structure of the text, yet it is an important question. If it was brought to the material by the author, then no matter how persuasive a reading of the game industry it is, one must ask if there are other, better readings. If it emerged from the material, on the other hand, then that needs to be foregrounded. In my own work with game developers I can certainly understand the reading of empire, but can also imagine alternative readings that are less pessimistic. The rise of independent game development, for example, suggests that the empire is no inflexible despotism, but a more adaptable kind of hegemony.

In contrast, Bonnie A. Nardi's My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. 236. $28) and William Sims Bainbridge's The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Pp. 248. $28) focus almost exclusively on the sprawling virtual world of Azeroth and the game world of WoW. Each of these texts largely brackets the world of game production and game industry from its analysis, which is reasonable, given the depth in which both cover WoW. Oddly enough, they both, for reasons that are not clear, make continual comparisons of WoW to Second Life, which seems a poor analogy. Missions, raiding, and all the play that emerges in these texts occur within structures dictated by game designers. Each component demonstrates how truly distant WoW is from Second Life. Yet time and again Second Life serves as a referent, although other virtual world games—Everquest, Eve Online, MUDs, MOOs, and so on—would make greater analytic sense.

One of the better aspects of Bainbridge's account is that he takes care to introduce readers to the in-game historical context of WoW. Many accounts of WoW neglect its parent world, Azeroth. While the history of WoW could be considered short, with its original release in 2004, the virtual world has its own significant history, going back to 1994 with the release of the game WarCraft: Orcs & Humans for MS-DOS-based computers. This history is referenced throughout the games produced by Blizzard—Warcraft 2, the expansion Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal, Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos, the expansion Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne—numerous novels, and Blizzard's publicly available historical timeline. Each of these provides a cultural and historical foundation for the world of Azeroth, a context that is important for participants in the game and that, therefore, seems crucial to any sociological or anthropological analysis of WoW. Bainbridge's analysis, however, gets lost adrift the massive amount of play narrative found in the text. Where Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter bring close theoretical readings to bear on their massive project, Bainbridge's analysis is drowned out by his own voice as a player. If a reader were interested in getting a sense of what WoW is like for a player, without sitting down and playing the game, then this text could be appealing. However, that person may quickly become mired in the Warcraft-ese of the text, wondering at the meaning of so many words when removed from their virtual context.

My Life as a Night Elf Priest, on the other hand, maintains a beautiful balance between empirical depth and analytic care. Nardi's clear care for her informants, both virtual and human, and the world they play within is clear throughout the text. Her analytic framework, "activity theory" coupled with John Dewey's notion of aesthetic experience, mobilizes the exploration of her empirical material. Nardi's analysis references the extensive work of others in the fields of game studies, science and technology studies, and communication. It clearly positions itself in relation with this work in ways that push her analysis and the study of WoW forward in meaningful ways.

My primary critique of Nardi's text is more theoretical. How did the analysis of WoW push activity theory outside of its comfort zone? At what point did WoW, Azeroth, or the players move activity theory in new directions? Did gameplay itself reflect upon activity theory? A truly experimental theory should evolve through contact with new situations, and an experimental system is only as useful as its ability to allow for these kinds of noisy answers.

While WoW unites these three texts, much more divides them. In Games of Empire we view the vast empires of the global game industry through divergent lenses. In The Warcraft Civilization we have a highly descriptive account of the world of Azeroth. In My Life as a Night Elf Priest we come to better understand how players experience the world and community of Azeroth and the activities that play out in this space. While each gives us perspective on the broad "thing" that is the global game industry, each struggles in its own way with this broad empirical territory. In many respects the division of production and play/consumption/use is reified in the analytical choices of the authors, for even in Games of Empire we encounter production and play disconnected from each other. This is the very partitioning that scholars in the fields of science and technology studies and the history of technology have contested for so long.

As analysts continue to gain access to the halls of video-game-development studios, hardware manufacturers, and game publishing companies, undoubtedly they will map the links among these worlds. While it is reasonable for analysts to study the worlds as bounded field-sites "on their own," a player undoubtedly encounters the externality of the game world and its intersections with the global game industry. Nardi's text in particular seems to capture the essence and sociality of WoW, while Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter attempt to unravel the threads of empire throughout the game industry. Although they largely reify the divide between the studies of production and game worlds, each demonstrates empirical and conceptual rigor that should interest readers in the global game industry.

Dr. O'Donnell is an assistant professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

©2012 by the Society for the History of Technology.