Birthdays all around. I already noted how it we were in the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the game that changed all our lives. One of the ways it did so was by inspiring the invention of RPG computer games, among them World of Warcraft. In my book, Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, I traced some of the history of how TTRPG players were the ones who brought us MMORPGs like WoW. My main goal was to talk about how such games operate in lieu of traditional religion for many people in the 21st century.
As I noted in Virtually Sacred, WoW and Second Life “have revolutionized virtual worlds and have made their mark on online culture. Subsequent virtual worlds will unquestionably borrow from the accomplishments of these two, even should they eventually lose their reigning status” (p.2). Indeed, many games have far more players than WoW, but its impact has been indelible and it remains relevant to contemporary gaming. In its 20th year, it prepares for a new expansion and celebrates a profound contribution to global culture.
Yup. Culture. I know: games are entertainment! they are fun! they have no place in the news that regularly tells about big budget movie flops even though videogames net more revenue than film, music, and books combined. Serious folks might maintain the pretense of their seriousness by looking down on gaming; but gaming is not just serious business, it’s a generator of real cultural life. That’s partly why I’ve written briefly about the impact of games like Dungeons & Dragons on our understanding of things like religion.
My own work has been profoundly assisted by the folks who wanted to trace histories of gaming, starting with the absolutely vital ethnographic work Shared Fantasy by Gary Fine and Dungeons & Dreamers by Brad King and John Borland. Since that book, Jon Peterson has done us all an immense favor with the in-depth histories he has composed. Books like Game Wizards were so important that Wizards of the Coast just couldn’t help bring him on board for official histories like the Art & Arcana volume. I’ve got two copies of that latter, mostly because I wanted to leave one unopened. 🙂
But lots of folks have gotten involved in thinking through videogames like WoW, including the sociologist Bill Bainbridge, anthropologist Bonnie Nardi, all the folks in Corneliussen and Rettberg’s Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, and probably hundreds, perhaps thousands, of scholars who have produced scholarly journal articles. I offer this all-too-brief bibliography by way of expressing my irritation that the New York Times managed to find their way to celebrate the importance of World of Warcraft‘s birthday by utterly failing to note the contributions of the folks who helped make the game culturally coherent and even acceptable to mainstream journalists. Yeah, I’m annoyed by that kind of thing. It feels too much like someone came stomping across my lawn.
Along with Dungeons & Dragons, and I guess even World of Warcraft, I’m getting old. 🙂
Happy Birthday to all the folks who ever helped make WoW a success: the dreamers, the devs, the support teams, and all the folks playing.
Robert M Geraci 