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Running with newbies: understanding online communities through the eyes of second-generation gamers

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RUNNING WITH NEWBIES:
UNDERSTANDING ONLINE COMMUNITIES
THROUGH THE EYES OF SECOND-GENERATION GAMERS

by

Shawna Kathleen Kelly

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Shawna Kathleen Kelly
ii
Dedication
To my family who encouraged and supported me throughout this process,
especially to my father, whose wisdom helped me through the tough times, and to my
mother, who was always ready to fight battles at my side. To Elizabeth McPartland, Jeff
Allen, Jim Yoder, Jason Bowen, Anthony Ellisor, Chad Weber, David Alicea, Rob
Liddell, M. Hammam Alsafrjalani and all of the friends and colleagues who encouraged
me. Thank you for knowing when to give me space and when to make me get out of my
head.

iii
Acknowledgements
This dissertation would not have existed without the insights of Dr. Doug
Thomas, who encouraged me to pursue research I was passionate about and provided a
guiding hand when I hit walls. In addition, Drs. Anne Basalmo and Tara McPherson
offered invaluable advice during this process. I would also like to thank the faculty and
administration of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and
particularly Drs. Randall Lake and Stephen O’Leary for their advice and support.
I would especially like to thank the first- and second-generation gamers who each
showed me why other people were “playing the game wrong.” Thank you for letting me
into your world and letting me see it through your eyes.
iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Introduction 1
Methodology 1
Data Collection 5
Subjects 7
Chapters Overview 11
Chapter 1: Understanding the Disposition of Second-Generation Gamers 20
Understanding Gameplay as a Disposition 21
The (First-Generation) “Gamer Disposition” 23
The Second-Generation Gamer Disposition 24
Who are Second-Generation Gamers? 31
Second-Generation Gamers and Gaming Goals 32
Second-Generation Gamers and Achievement 43
Second-Generation Gamers and Other Players 52
Gamer Culture and the Gamer Disposition 53
Conclusion 55
Chapter 2: Online identity performance 57
Identity performance as a Theoretical Framework 57
MMOs Facilitate Identity Research 60
MMOs take place within the context of a larger discourse of identity 67
Chapter 3: Crafting a Gamer Identity 70
The First-Generation Gamer Stereotype 70
“Gamers are male”: Performing Gender 74
“Gamers are Caucasian”: Performing Ethnicity 80
“Gamers are adolescent”: Performing Age 85
Conclusion 92
Chapter 4: Performing a Social Identity in an Online Community 93
Evolving Theories about Online Communities 93
Online Communities as Contexts for Social Identity Performance 96
Developing a Social Identity 103
The Compelling Intimacy of Social Identity Performance 113
Conclusion 119
v
Chapter 5: Negotiating with the “Addictive” Characteristics of Online Games 121
Digital Games are Increasingly Accessible 121
Research on Digital Game “Addiction” 124
Representations of the “Addicted Gamer” in Popular Culture 127
Second-Generation Gamers and the Third-Person Effect 130
Second-Generation Player Responses to “Addiction” 132
The Hidden Cost of “Addiction” as a Framework 136
Conclusion 140
Chapter 6: Significance and directions for future research 141
Differentiation Between First- and Second-Generation Gamers 141
A Longitudinal Examination of Identity Performance in an MMO 146
The Hidden Costs of the “Addiction” Framework 152
Conclusion 161
Gameography 162
Comprehensive References 163
Appendix: Figures 175

vi
List of Figures
Figure 1: Second-generation players can learn a first-generation gaming disposition 175
Figure 2: A caricature of the older male gamer who is “addicted” to digital games 176
Figure 3: The cast of South Park after their characters have morphed into gamers 177

vii
Abstract
The growing popularity of video games is introducing a new generation of video
game players to online communities and the communicative behaviors of these second-
generation gamers open new ways to understand the social impacts of interactive
entertainment. This dissertation examines how second-generation gamers offer insights
into dispositions, identity performance, community membership, and video game
addiction. Ethnographic research of players entering the online gaming community of
World of Warcraft suggests that second-generation gamers are neither “hardcore” nor
“casual” players, but have developed a different disposition from those described by
previous games researchers. The five key attributes of the second-generation gaming
disposition are that they are ease-of-use oriented, embody diversity, thrive on
consistency, learn only what is necessary and rely on proven solutions. Second-
generation gamers are also more likely to fall outside of the “typical gamer” stereotype in
terms of gender, age, and ethnicity. They respond to the dominant gamer culture by
making performance decisions for both their personal and social identities. After entering
the online community, second-generation gamers must decide how to present themselves
to other players and learn their role in the community. For some second-generation
players, online interactions with other players and with the gaming community take on a
deeply meaningful role in their everyday lives. Lastly, in response to the popular
discourse of video game addiction, second-generation players develop play-limiting
strategies which suggest that “addiction” is not a useful framework for understanding
their motivations for playing video games.
1
Introduction
This dissertation documents an exploration of the continuing social impact of
online communication through examining the everyday practices of people who play
online digital games for entertainment. Throughout the dissertation, digital games are
used to demonstrate how media consumers interact with each other through online
communication technologies. The chapters focus on four key areas: learned behavior,
personal and social identity performance, and user “addiction.” The data was collected
from interviews with players of the popular online digital game, World of Warcraft,
about the social behaviors of “hardcore” and “casual” digital game players. The players’
stories, related within, are meant to help understand how individuals wrestle with the role
technology takes in their lives and to give deeper insight into current and future directions
for communication technologies.
Methodology
This dissertation is being submitted as partial fulfillment of a Doctorate of
Philosophy in Communication from the University of Southern California, Annenberg
School for Communication and Journalism. Through the lens of Communication, this
dissertation connects research trajectories from Media Studies, Performance Studies,
online communities research, and Game Studies in order to better understand the social
impact of online communication. The mixed methods used throughout were collected
from the work of previous scholars in sociology, anthropology, performance studies, and
communication, and where specifically combined for this project. This section will
2
outline the methodological decisions that were made regarding locating the research in
World of Warcraft, choosing appropriate subjects and collecting useful data.
Online games as a space for inquiry.
People choosing to interact with technologies for entertainment purposes are often
playful – willing to explore and try new things. Entertainment is often a social activity
with friends and family either sharing or discussing media such as movies, music, or
games. Digital games offer a useful medium for exploring online communication because
of their history, popularity, ability to develop community, and the insights offered
through their technical affordances.
In terms of history, arcade games entered popular culture almost sixty years ago,
and video games and text-based multi-user domains have provided some of the earliest
forms of popular entertainment available through networked communication (Malliet &
de Meyer, 2005). In the early 2000s, digital games became even more popular as
entertainment, including games for dedicated consoles like the Sony Playstation series,
Microsoft X-Box series or Nintendo’s GameCube and Wii consoles, or computer-based
games for PCs and Macs. McGonigal (2011), compiled statistics from a number of
sources to talk about the growth of the digital game phenomenon:
“In the United States alone, there are 183 million active gamers
(individuals who, in surveys, report that they play computer or video
games ‘regularly’ – on average, thirteen hours a week). Globally, the
online gamer community – including console, PC, and mobile phone
gaming – counts more than 4 million gamers in the Middle East, 10
3
million in Russia, 105 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 10 million
in Mexico, 13 million in Central and South America, 15 million in
Australia, 17 million in South Korea, 100 million in Europe, and 200
million in China” (p. 3).
In addition to the numbers of players, people sometimes play digital games for
hours at a time while chatting and interacting with other players. This can lead to players
becoming invested in an identifiable community with distinct patterns of behavior and an
active social component. Rheingold (1993) described this community culture formation
as “…a kind of speeded-up social evolution” (p. xvi). The culture of each digital game
and of digital games as a whole offers rich data for social theorists to study.
Lastly, by being a mediating technology, the technical affordances of digital
games both encourage and limit social interaction. For example, the visual component of
avatars adds to a sense of social interaction in online spaces while still maintaining a
sense of anonymity. The predominance of text-based communication is another technical
affordance, although one that is shifting as VoIP (Voice over IP) software, which allows
players to speak and hear one another, has become more accessible and is creating new
online communicative norms. The mediated communication available through the
technological affordances of online games, as well as the history, popularity and strength
of community within digital games make them a valuable site in which to base research
on the social impact of Internet technologies.
4
World of Warcraft as a representative online game.
This dissertation focuses on World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online
digital game (MMO), as a case study for examining social online communication
behaviors. World of Warcraft is a popular game with a well-developed game culture.
McGonigal (2011) noted that World of Warcraft fans “…are so intent on mastering the
challenges of their favorite game that, collectively, they’ve written a quarter of a million
wiki articles on the WoWWiki – creating the single largest wiki after Wikipedia” (p. 2).
While the active player community makes World of Warcraft an enticing object of study,
the game is also the most popular MMO in the history of the genre. Following its release
in late 2004, World of Warcraft received a larger number of subscriptions than was
anticipated. In Castronova’s (2005) book, he noted that “Blizzard’s World of Warcraft
broke single-day PC game sales records at its release on November 23, 2004. As this
book goes to press, it is on target to reach several hundred thousand subscribers” (p. 134).
After this successful release, Blizzard Entertainment continued to refine the game,
especially the initial interactions that players experienced during entry to the game, and
included incentives for people who might not normally play an MMO to try the game. By
2010, when the data collection for this project had been completed, Blizzard
Entertainment announced that they had 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers
worldwide (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010c). Although Castronova was only estimating
the potential popularity of the game, his guess actually suggests the number of gamers
who would be likely to play a game like this—the first-generation gamers who are deeply
immersed in gamer culture. When compared to the total number of players, even if
5
“several hundred thousand” is interpreted as 400,000 players, that number of first-
generation players is less than 5% of the whole. This begs the question: Who are the
other 95%? These “newbie” second-generation gamers are a strong presence within
World of Warcraft, making this particular game an excellent space within which to
examine this understudied group of players.
Data Collection
In this dissertation, I used ethnographic data-collection tools and relied on
research findings from several academic disciplines including Communication, Cultural
Studies, Performance Studies, Education, and Game Studies. In referencing other
academic work, I strove to make connections between the setting, subjects, or
methodology of the research and my own study.
Data for this paper was collected utilizing online ethnographic methods of
participant observation and interviews. An online digital game like World of Warcraft
emphasizes participation, meaning that the ethnographer cannot simply sit in a corner and
observe activities, but must actively participate with the group performing the activities.
In practice, the researcher has to become proficient enough at the game to be asked to
participate in the complicated behaviors she is trying to study. The emphasis on
participation in digital games has made ethnographers wrestle with what it means to be
observing, recording and analyzing social behaviors at the same time that the researcher
is also engaging in the behaviors. Nardi (2010) comments that “it would be impossible to
penetrate the game without becoming engaged as a player” (p. 28). Pearce (2009) frames
her ethnographic research in a game space as “participant engagement.” So, like a
6
traditional ethnographic observation, becoming a legitimate member of the space requires
hours of immersion.
Another methodological consideration is that player behaviors are shaped in
response to the game design of an MMO, which is not static. Taylor notes that, “The
game I began playing is not the same game that exists now. The experiences I had that
first week, month, even year were only a slice of what life was like in the space over the
long run” (p. 17). While the data for this dissertation was being collected between 2004
and 2009, World of Warcraft evolved through patches
1
and expansions released by
Blizzard Entertainment, and the game culture changed some behaviors in response.
It is also important to point out that my experiences with World of Warcraft over
time changed my own impressions and understanding of the game and game culture.
Throughout this dissertation, I have tried to recreate some of the layers of complexity
possible within the game space and then to unwrap and examine the details more closely,
in order to present both the massive amount of information flung at the players during
gameplay, but also to explain how the information is organized and understood. One of
the main tools used during the data-collection process was to look at behaviors within the
game that did not fit my expectations nor those of other players. Following the example
of Nardi (2010), I attempted to “follow the interesting and the unexpected as they [were]
encountered in the field” (p. 27). After having identified patterns of behavior through
participant-observation, I explored concepts more deeply through one-on-one interviews.

1
“Patches” are updates to software that Blizzard Entertainment provides for free, as opposed to an
expansion which includes major updates and needs to be purchased.
7
The majority of the interviews were performed through in-game text chat, but also
included IM chats (using third-partly clients like MSN Live, AIM, Yahoo and Skype) and
voiced interviews using VoIP software like Ventrilo or, occasionally, by telephone.
Subjects
As mentioned previously, the study of digital games, especially massively
multiplayer online (MMO) games like World of Warcraft, has attracted researchers from
a variety of fields. However, a good portion of those studies focus on the most commonly
occurring behaviors and statistics in order to develop an understanding of the
stereotypical traits among players and a predictive model for “gamer” behavior. Other
studies, such as Taylor (2006b), Nardi (2010), and Chen (2010) are more exploratory in
nature, but they also seek to describe the motivations of the typical gamer. In contrast,
subjects for this dissertation are second-generation gamers—those players who are not
immersed in first-generation “typical” gamer culture and playing habits. The specific
subjects were selected through a combination of two elements: identifiable game play
habits made apparent by the structure of play in World of Warcraft and my own game
play choices.
First, the structure of game play in World of Warcraft is such that every new
character created by players starts at level 1, with limited skills and weak weapons and
armor. Computer-controlled, non-player characters (NPCs) are immediately visible,
asking the player to complete quests for experience and other rewards. Nearby animals
are weak and easy to kill. Level 2 is gained in minutes, with each successive level being
more difficult to attain. Levels 1 through 10 introduce new features of the game and new
8
character abilities and culminate in travelling to a new, slightly more difficult area. The
first part of the game is mainly spent leveling
2
characters up to the level cap. With the
initial release of World of Warcraft in November of 2004, characters could be leveled to
60, with each successive release of game expansions raising the level cap to 70, then 80,
then 85. While leveling, players can choose to explore other aspects of the game such as
developing crafting skills, gathering reputation with various game factions, or competing
in player versus player matches. During their other activities, the character continues to
gain experience in order to reach the next level, which may open access to new character
skills or new quests. When players complete the “level grind” and reach the level cap,
they start the second part of the game and are eligible for “end-game content.” End-game
content includes difficult challenges requiring coordinated actions by large groups of
people, known as raids
3
. Games researchers have collected a lot of information about
group behavior (e.g. Chen, 2010; Williams, Ducheneaut, Xiong, Zhang, Yee & Nickell,
2006), culture creation (Taylor, 2006b), and gaming dispositions (Brown & Thomas,
2008; Thomas & Brown, 2007, 2009) from studying raids.
Many first-generation gamers hurry through the leveling to get to the challenging
end-game content. In contrast, the subjects of this project were identified by their focus
on leveling, rather than end-game content. For many of the interviewees, the World of

2
Collecting enough experience points to attain the next character level. The amount of required experience
is tiered so that later levels are more difficult to complete and take longer to attain.
3
During the initial “vanilla” release of World of Warcraft, end-game “raiding” involved the coordinated
actions of 40 players. It was time-consuming, challenging, and made for hardcore players. During the
Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions, raiding became progressively more striated for
different levels of challenge. 5, 10, 20, and 25 players could participate in group raids and receive
appropriate rewards.
9
Warcraft game consisted only of leveling or other activities like crafting
4
and they would
play several lower-level alternate characters (alts) instead of leveling one character for
raiding. Others would level a character and casually explore raiding, generally without
the skills or knowledge required for these complex coordinated activities. The second-
generation gamers interviewed throughout this project were identified because their
gameplay focused on exploring the first part of the game rather than leveling as
efficiently as possible in order to access the second part of the game.
The second factor that allowed me access to second-generation gamers was my
game-play choices. During my data collection in World of Warcraft between 2004 and
2009, I switched servers
5
many times for personal and professional reasons and I played
both Horde and Alliance
6
characters of every class. I enjoyed the game aspect of World
of Warcraft and was fascinated by the complex social structures I watched develop, but,
especially as a graduate student with limited free time, I often resented the demands on
my time made by the game structure and by the people within the game. I repeatedly
created new characters (alts) that no one knew were played by me, and several times I
shifted to a new server in order to ‘play the game in peace.’ Although I had a number of

4
“Crafting” is, in essence, a mini-game that players can play within World of Warcraft. Characters can
learn to craft useful, but non-essential items such as armor, weapons, vehicles, or potions. Collecting craft
materials, learning new recipes, and slowly increasing the crafting skill of the character becomes a game
within the game.
5
The World of Warcraft game is accessible online on a number of servers, which hold ~5,000 players each.
The servers are divided by the type of player interaction desired by the players: PvE (Player versus
Environment, where players only attack each other in specified situations), PvP (Player versus Player,
where players have more opportunities to attack each other), or RP (Role-Playing, where players create
personae for their characters and interact with each other through those personae).
6
World of Warcraft separates players into two factions, Horde or Alliance. Each faction has its own history
and idiosyncrasies and is at war with the other, inducing school-spirit-style fandom and opening
opportunities for player versus player actions within the game.
10
characters, I initially resisted letting characters reach the level cap, thereby keeping them
ineligible for time-consuming end-game content. Later, some of my characters reached
the level cap alongside second-generation players so I was able to participate in their
exploration of raiding.
The choices I made to limit my deep connections to servers, guilds
7
, or characters
became an integral component of my research methodology and contained several
benefits. First, I spent a lot of time “pugging” – playing with pick-up groups (PUGs) of
random players in the area or with players doing the same activity I wanted to do. This
meant I was frequently exposed to new players, rather than maintaining a more consistent
relationship with a fixed set of players. Second, I was often a solo player, which made me
appear more available for conversation and for joining forces with other people in the
same in-game area. Third, while leveling new characters, I met a large number of my
subjects in areas of the game geared toward characters in the 40s and 50s levels
8
, or, after
the level caps had been raised, in the 60s or 70s levels
9
. Players who were just trying the
game and did not like it rarely made it to these levels, whereas the first-generation players
already knew the most efficient means of gaining experience and quickly leveled out of

7
According to Blizzard Entertainment, “Guilds offer many benefits including free items, opportunities for
groups, access to trade skill masters, quest items, and readily available trade skill ingredients through
gathering guild members. You may discover that a guild greatly enhances your gameplay experience. You
can meet friends, share adventures, and find people to protect you if you fight in faction versus faction
combat. Typically, players in good guilds can go places and do things that players in poor guilds or no
guild can't. This is especially the case at maximum character level (80), where the dungeons become very
challenging,” (2010b, “Joining Guilds”).
8
Specifically, Tanaris, Southern Stranglethorn Vale, Un’Goro Crater and Feralas.
9
Specifically Zangarmarsh, although level progression in The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich
King expansions included a wider range of areas in which to level.
11
these areas, often recruiting a higher level member of their guild to help them level faster.
That left players who did not know the areas or the quests because they were hitting this
level for the first time, often because they had purchased World of Warcraft late, after
hearing friends/siblings/significant others talking enthusiastically about what a fun game
it was. These second-generation gamers, who did not behave like traditional gamers and,
in many cases, seemed to be playing a different game than the one my first-generation
gamer friends discussed, became the subjects of this dissertation.
Countless World of Warcraft players were my guides to gamer culture, but 105
subjects were specifically observed and interviewed for this research over a period of
several years. The subjects were 27 women and 78 men residing in North American or
choosing to play on U.S. servers
10
. The length of their participation in this study varied,
although all of the interviews involved multiple conversations over time. The personal
stories, experiences and stated opinions will be presented in the form of an ethnographic
allegory (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) throughout this dissertation. The following stories
and experiences happened to individuals that I observed or interviewed; however, the
subjects’ personal details have been changed so that their stories are still representative
but their personal anonymity is maintained.
Chapters Overview
Researchers, the media, concerned citizens and politicians have attempted to
unravel the social implications of online communication technologies in order to

10
As of March 2011, 241 servers were accessible to U.S. and Australian players, while a separate set of
servers were available for European and Asian players. The majority of the players on U.S. servers are
American, but international players also play on U.S. server, including players I met from Singapore,
United Arab Emirates, Poland, Canada, Korea, Australia and Japan.
12
understand and control their potential, but the social and cultural discussion about what
role communication technologies should have in our lives is ongoing. The key areas
addressed in this dissertation – learned behavior, personal and social identity
performance, and “addiction” – are so central to communication technologies that they
each have their own bodies of research that span several disciplines. Four of the chapters
of this dissertation will each address one key area of research about the intersection of
technology and society. The discussions are exploratory in nature, built on the premise
that the second-generation research subjects, by being in the process of entering first-
generation gaming culture, can offer new insights into these areas.
Chapter 1: Understanding the disposition of second-generation gamers.
Both the academy and the media continue to question the connections between
technology and learning: What are digital game players really learning when they spend
hours playing games like Breakout (Sudnow, 1983) or playing puzzle games? Can games
where you are shooting things (Gee, 2003) teach something more constructive than
violence? Concerns over the content and structure of network communication
technologies are a continuing point of contention between consumers and regulators.
There is a strong rhetoric of games as behavioral modifiers, e.g., that playing a war-
simulation game involving shooting soldiers will make players more likely to pick up a
real gun and shoot people. This rhetoric is technologically deterministic and is often
associated with portrayals of violence, aggression, and disconnection from reality
(Goldstein, 2005). Rather than focusing on the impact of digital game content, this
chapter looks at dispositions that are learned through the merging of play and learning
13
within the socially created environment of the game space (Thomas & Brown, 2009).
“More than simply a means to learning, play is a way of thinking about more than what
we know. It is, following Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) notion of mind, a disposition toward the
world, a way of not only seeing the world but of seeing ourselves in it and the various
possibilities that the world presents” (Thomas & Brown, 2007, p. 156).
In contrast to first-generation gamers, second-generation gamers generally do not
react to the game or to other players like more experienced players and are often labeled
as “newbies,” in reference to their poor playing skills. To first-generation gamers,
second-generation gamers are simply playing the game wrong, a sentiment that has
happened with previous technologies when they became more commonly used. The
friction between first- and second-generation gamers allows insights not only into what
behaviors are expected (and are missing on the part of the second-generation gamers), but
also the general dispositions of thinking that first-generation gamers have learned through
game play and which the second-generation gamers lack. This chapter discusses the play
habits and identifying characteristics of second-generation gamers by contrasting the
dispositions developed by first-generation gamers (Brown & Thomas, 2008; Thomas &
Brown, 2007, 2009) with the dispositions of second-generation gamers.
Chapter 2: Online identity performance.
This chapter explores the key research surrounding the performance of identity in
online spaces and provides a framework for the two following chapters. While many
researchers have explored how mediated communication aids in the thoughtful creation
of an online personae (cf. Turkle, 1995; Nakamura, 2002, 2008), the research in game
14
spaces has often focused on the visual appearance of the avatar as representative of
identity (e.g. Leonard, 2006). This chapter explicates the usefulness of performance
studies for understanding how second-generation gamers are struggling to create and
maintain both their individual and social identities and discusses how massively
multiplayer online games are a logical next step for identity research. I examine the larger
context of identity discourse within which digital games take place and set the framework
for understanding how second-generation players explore their personal identities and
respond to the online community of other players.
Chapter 3: Crafting a gamer identity.
Internet technologies support many new forms of communication such as the
affordance that users may choose how they are represented in an online space, including
the potential to falsely represent themselves. Validity of identity is a major concern on
modern social networking sites that allow users to create an online profile (verbal and
picture description of themselves) that is visible to other users. However, there are no
MySpace police or Facebook security to make sure that the information on profiles is
accurate, leading to mainstream concerns that online profiles encourage liars, cheaters,
and sexual predators. In 2006, news stories reported on the role of MySpace in the death
of Megan Meier. The 13-year-old girl committed suicide after befriending a good-looking
boy her age through his MySpace profile and eventually receiving harassing and hateful
messages from him. What caught the media’s attention was that the boy’s profile had
been created by a neighbor, an adult woman, mother of another teen girl. This woman
had sent the messages that led to Megan’s suicide (Associated Press, 2007, 2008). In
15
another news story, a nineteen-year-old girl was charged with murder after allegedly
using a social networking site to lure the victim to a vacant home where two accomplices
were waiting (Shoichet, 2010).
The chapter also looks at how second-generation gamers, who are more familiar
with social-networking sites than with online games, perform individual identity through
online communication in the game space. Research into online identities often focuses on
affordances of mediated communication that allows anonymity or filtering of personal
information. “One of the most often-repeated claims about virtual reality is that it
provides the technological means to construct personal realities free from the
determination of body-based (‘real’) identities” (Balsamo, 1999, p. 123). Without a
connection to the physical characteristics of players bodies, categories such as
race/ethnicity, age, education level, and gender could potentially be invalidated.
However, gender is not only a physical representation, but a social one. “In cyberspace,
we can talk, exchange ideas, and assume personae of our own creation” (Turkle, 1995, p.
9). Expectations about gendered, or race- or age-associated behaviors follow users into
online spaces, and online spaces have both represented and misrepresented gender (e.g.,
Balsamo, 1999; Burrill, 2008; Cassell and Jenkins, 2000), race (e.g., Kolko, Nakamura &
Rodman, 2000; Leonard, 2006), as well as age (e.g. Pearce, 2008). Turkle (1995) argues
that the very act of changing unconscious representation of physical characteristics (what
we display with our bodies) into a conscious, actively chosen representation in a
mediated space changes how we think about our identity. The representations are not
only visual or textual, but are also enacted through behaviors of users in the online space.
16
The identity performances of second-generation gamers are highlighted when they do not
maintain the kinds of gamer identities expected by first-generation players.
The chapter also examines how second-generation gamers craft a gamer identity
for themselves. From its earliest iterations, the Internet’s ability to filter personal
information allowing a user to potentially craft an identity has been a source both of fear
(e.g. Steiner, 1993) and freedom (e.g. Gross, 2004). Given the extensive discussions both
in the popular press and within technological and academic circles, second-generation
gamers are familiar with the rhetoric about the negative (and positive) affordances that
mediated communication can impart to online identities. Specifically, this chapter
discusses the conscious choices and sacrifices made by second-generation players who
are struggling to define their individual gamer identity.
Chapter 4: Performing a social identity in an online community.
Contrary to fears about isolation, researchers have found that Internet
technologies create new forms of connection between people resulting in both friendships
and romantic relationships. Researchers have found a wide variety of both types and
quality of the social interactions in online spaces (e.g. Chen, 2010; Nardi, 2010; Taylor,
2006b; Williams, Ducheneaut, Xiong, Zhang, Yee & Nickell, 2006) from deep
friendships to intense conflicts.
“But while conflict and rivalry both seem to come with the on-line
territory, so does romance. A general fascination with the romantic
possibilities of the new technology has been a feature of both the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries: On-line weddings have taken place
17
over both the telegraph and the Internet. In 1996, Sue Helle and Lynn
Bottoms were married on-line by a minister 10 miles away in Seattle,
echoing the story of Philip Reade and Clara Choate, who were married by
telegraph 120 years earlier by a minister 650 miles away. Both
technologies have also been directly blamed for causing romantic
problems. In 1996, a New Jersey man filed for divorce when he
discovered that his wife had been exchanging explicit e-mail with another
man, a case that was widely reported as the first example of ‘Internet
divorce.’” (Standage, 1998, p. 209).
Romance is not the only kind of connection that people make online. Many users develop
deep friendships through community participation in the online space, but as much as
second-generation players need to develop a personal “gamer identity,” they must also
decide what their membership in the gamer community should look like.
This chapter addresses how second-generation players perform a social identity
through mediated interactions with other people. What Rheingold (1993/2000) called a
virtual community develops in online spaces as participants share experiences and
interact through text and other interfaces. The cultural norms and idiosyncrasies of these
spontaneous communities have been a point of entry for many researchers, myself
included (e.g. Boellstorff, 2008; Chen, 2010; Kelly, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2011a, 2011b;
Taylor, 2006a, 2006b); however, the popular press often focuses on the negative impacts
of forming friendships and romantic relationships in an online setting (e.g. Alter, 2007).
For second-generation players, the performance of identity in social interactions is
18
influenced both by their perceptions of their personal identity and by their understanding
of what it means to be a member of an online community. The ways that second-
generation gamers value and respond to online interactions suggest the ways society
values communication mediated by networked technologies. As second-generation
players develop social identities, they also recreate the game community to meet their
social needs.
Chapter 5: Negotiating with the “addictive” characteristics of digital games.
Although addiction is generally a physiological symptom, application of the term
to compulsive gamblers created an opening for extending the understanding of the word
to the Internet, what Griffiths (1995) calls “technological addiction,” a non-chemical,
behavioral compulsion (Griffiths, 1995, 2000; Griffiths & Davies, 2005). The threat of
addiction can be understood in terms of the breakdown of social interactions. Beginning
with “EverQuest widows”
11
and including numerous news stories about the seductive and
destructive nature of online relationships (e.g. Alter, 2007; Scheeres, 2001), there are
many examples of people neglecting their physical-world relationships for online social
interactions. The Wall Street Journal reported on a man who not only spent the majority
of his time at the computer, playing Second Life, but also met and had his avatar “marry”
a woman there (Alter, 2007), despite his already being married in the physical world. The

11
A “widow” is the significant other of an avid game player, one who feels the amount of time and
attention focused on digital games detracts from their interpersonal relationship. In a backlash against the
popularity of MMOGs, early Yahoo groups such as Spouses against EverQuest
(http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/ spousesagainsteverquest/) and EverQuest Widows
(http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/EverQuest-Widows/) and website blogs such as Everquest Daily
Grind (http://eqdailygrind.blogspot.com/) and Gamer Widow (http://gamerwidow.com/) gathered the
spouses and girl- or boyfriends of gamers and allowed them to share stories and commiserate.
19
term, “addiction,” is connected to prior moral panics and anxieties about technology.
Rhetoric about users developing Internet addiction and video game addiction is persistent
despite researchers questioning the validity of the label (e.g. Williams, Yee & Caplan,
2008).
This chapter addresses the rhetoric of addiction to describe people voluntarily
spending extended periods of time at a computer and engaged in an online space. Using
the term “addiction” evokes a particular understanding of digital games as something that
is potentially harmful and needs to be controlled and regulated. Given the political
inquiries and extensive discussions of addiction in the popular press and within academic
circles, second-generation gamers are well aware of the rhetoric of addiction as potential
result of playing online digital games. This chapter explores the range of responses from
second-generation players to the rhetoric of addiction and what this suggests about the
needs that online communication can fill.
Chapter 6: Significance and directions for future research.
This final chapter explicates the key contributions of this dissertation to the
Communication field and to related research in Game Studies, Performance Studies,
online communities research, and Media Studies. The chapter closely examines how the
contributions of the research offer explanations for the everyday behaviors of digital
game players. In addition, the chapter identifies directions for future exploration into the
social implications of networked communication technologies.
20
Chapter 1: Understanding the Disposition of Second-Generation Gamers
Much of the discussion about learning and digital games centers around content,
for example violence depicted in a game (e.g. Weber, Ritterfeld & Kostygina, 2006)
12
.
Inspired by thinking similar to McLuhan’s (1967/2004) famous mantra, “The medium is
the message,” recent games researchers have dug deeper than game content to explore
how the structure of a game itself can promote learning (e.g., Gee, 2003). Taking this line
of reasoning one step further, Thomas and Brown (2007) changed the discussion from
listing the skills learned through gameplay to examining the disposition that is
encouraged by play.
In this chapter, I look at differences in dispositions between “first-generation”
gamers and the newer “second-generation” game players who are entering World of
Warcraft without a firm grasp of gaming culture. The friction between first- and second-
generation gamers offer insights not only into what behaviors are expected of “gamers,”
and are missing on the part of the second-generation gamers, but also suggests that the
friction may be caused by two separate dispositions. This chapter is divided into the
following sections:
• Understanding gameplay as a disposition
• The (first-generation) “gamer disposition”
• The second-generation gamer disposition
• Who are second-generation gamers?
• Second-generation gamers and gaming goals

12
For a thoughtful overview of violence and digital games, see Goldstein, 2005.
21
• Second-generation gamers and achievement
• Second-generation gamers and other players
• Gamer culture and the gamer disposition
Understanding Gameplay as a Disposition
In recent years, digital games have become a popular and lucrative entertainment
form and are widely seen as a gateway for teaching future tech-savvy generations (cf.
McGonigal, 2011). At the same time, there is the fear that players are being indoctrinated
with a false view of reality. “In the United States, this fear and fascination [with digital
games] goes back to the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan extolled the virtues of games
to create a generation of highly skilled cold war warriors, while U.S. Surgeon General C.
Everett Koop proclaimed games among the top health risks facing Americans” (Squire,
2002, ¶1).
A positive discourse about learning and digital games has inspired a genre of
educational games to teach skills and information to players. Thomas and Brown (2007)
note that the renowned social theorists, Vygotsky, Huizinga, and Piaget all discuss how
learning and play are intricately connected. Thomas and Brown (2007, 2009) and Brown
and Thomas (2008) suggest that dispositions can be understood at a deeper level of
understanding, that they organize your attitudes, beliefs, and values. Moving the
discussion from content to disposition shifts the conversation away from a specific game
or game genre toward looking at the activity of playing a digital game. “More than
simply a means to learning, play is a way of thinking about more than what we know. It
is, following Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) notion of mind, a disposition toward the world, a way
22
of not only seeing the world but of seeing ourselves in it and the various possibilities that
the world presents” (Thomas & Brown, 2007, p. 105). The question becomes, then, can
games cultivate a particular disposition among players, and, if so, what defines that
disposition? Contrary to the fears that gamers become mindless, violent, and antisocial,
Brown and Thomas (2008) found that the merging of play and learning within the
socially created environment of the game space encouraged a “gamer disposition” that is
goal-oriented, engaged, creative, and dedicated.
Brown and Thomas describe a “disposition” as a way of seeing the world.
“…Being a gamer is a disposition that sheds light on how particular practices work,
acquire meaning and value, and are shared within and among various communities and
networks,” (Brown & Thomas, 2007 p. 106). An example of World of Warcraft being a
lens for viewing the world appeared when a new MMO, Lord of the Rings Online
(Turbine, Inc., 2007), was released. A large number of World of Warcraft players
purchased and began exploring the new game, and then reported back to their fellow
World of Warcraft players about their experiences. Conversations in the public channels
of World of Warcraft centered around the differences between the two games, especially
focusing on the new abilities and features designed to make Lord of the Rings Online
standout from its competitor. Almost overnight, character guides were created to
“translate” the gameplay experience in World of Warcraft to Lord of the Rings Online,
e.g., if you were used to playing a Holy Priest in World of Warcraft, then you should play
a Minstrel character in Lord of the Rings Online. These “translations” were meant to help
players who were familiar with a particular role in group settings find characters with a
23
similar role in the new game. If, as in the example, their worldview of MMO gameplay
involved being able to “heal” other characters, the character guide showed them which
class of Lord of the Rings Online characters would best fit their expectations. The guides
were designed for people who viewed other MMOs through the lens of World of
Warcraft. So if playing one MMO creates a disposition for understanding other MMOs,
how might games teach players to think differently about the physical world?
The (First-Generation) “Gamer Disposition”
While others have focused on the skills that players were learning in the large-
scale coordinated play that takes place within World of Warcraft (e.g., Reeves, Malone &
O’Driscoll, 2008), Brown and Thomas (2008) examined the disposition that is
encouraged within these settings. Brown and Thomas describe the gamer disposition as
“more than attitudes or beliefs, these attributes are character traits that players bring into
the gamer worlds and that those worlds reinforce” (¶2). According to Brown and
Thomas, the gamer disposition has five key attributes:
• “They are bottom-line oriented” (¶3).
• “They understand the power of diversity” (¶5).
• “They thrive on change” (¶7).
• “They see learning as fun” (¶9).
• “They marinate on the ‘edge’” (¶11), i.e., experiment with “crazy” solutions to
problems.
Brown and Thomas findings contradicted many of the stereotypes about first-generation
gamers being unreliable and antisocial people. The authors argue that gamers are goal-
24
oriented, engaged, creative, and dedicated, and make the kind of committed and creative
employees that businesses should look for in their hiring practices.
Using Brown and Thomas’ framework as a guide, I examined the gameplay
behaviors of the players observed and interviewed for this dissertation and found that
player behaviors exhibited two distinct dispositions. The players that Brown and Thomas
described were one group, whom I call first-generation gamers. They are steeped in
gamer culture and are representative of what Juul (2010) calls a “specialized audience of
fans” (p. 2). Their gameplay behaviors are most closely associated with hardcore gamers.
The second group and the majority of the players interviewed for this dissertation are
what I call second-generation players. Unlike first-generation gamers, second-generation
players generally do not react to the game or to other players like more experienced
players and are often labeled as “newbies” by first-generation gamers. Second-generation
gamers are those players who have not yet assimilated gamer culture and acquired the
first-generation gamer disposition.
The Second-Generation Gamer Disposition
First-generation gamers often think second-generation gamers are playing the
game wrong. The contrast in their approaches to playing can be understood as a
difference in dispositions. Unlike the first-generation gamers described by Brown and
Thomas (2008), second-generation gamers have very different expectations about how
the game world should work. Following the five-key-attributes structure of Brown and
Thomas’s (2008) analysis, the disposition of second-generation gamers can be described
25
as having these attributes: ease-of-use oriented, embody diversity, thrive on consistency,
learn only what is necessary and rely on proven solutions.
They are ease-of-use oriented.
Second-generation gamers prefer to find a balance between the game and their
other activities. They have full-time jobs, families, and friends, and their primary
motivation for playing World of Warcraft is entertainment. They are looking for an
enjoyable diversion from life, something they can plug into when they have free time, but
they are not looking for the commitment of consistent playing or the dedication of nightly
raiding. They resent anything that interferes with the entertainment elements of the game.
This includes technical factors like Internet connectivity problems and program glitches,
or design features like “grinding”
13
for long periods of time, or social factors like
“griefers”
14
or spammers
15
. They are willing to consider shortcuts to success that first-
generation gamers find offensive. Gold farmers
16
sell gold to second-generation gamers.

13
“Grinding” is the term used when a player must perform repetitive acts to progress through the game.
The “level grind” is when a player must collect experience to raise a character’s level. Crafting (see
reference below) also requires “grinding” to gain experience and move up in craft skill levels.
14
“Griefers” are players who deliberately interfere with other players in the game, killing them, preventing
them from completing quests and generally playing havoc.
15
Like spam email, “spammers” are people who advertise or make comments repeatedly in a public
channel or visible location. Because much of the communication in World of Warcraft is text-based, a
character who repeats the same phrase over and over can overfill the chat box on the user interface window
and effectively prevent anyone else’s comments from being readable.
16
Gold farmers are players who play the game solely to acquire in-game wealth and items that they can sell
to other players for physical-world money. This behavior breaks the End-User License Agreement of
World of Warcraft and many other MMOs, but is a lucrative practice which has inspired international
trading in virtual goods. For an overview of the gold-farming phenomenon, see Dibbell (2006, 2007) and
Keegan, Ahmad, Srivastava, Williams, and Contractor (2010).
26
They embody diversity, but practice autonomy.
Physically, second-generation gamers are more diverse from the stereotype.
While there have always been exceptions to the young, Caucasian male “gamer”
stereotype, second-generation gamers push the edges in terms of age, gender, sexual
orientation, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. Second-generation gamers also embody
in-game diversity in the number and types of characters they play. They try many
different character classes and gravitate toward balanced, self-sufficient classes that can
“solo.” They create “alts”
17
to level all of the crafts to limit reliance on other players.
Where the structure of World of Warcraft encourages and enforces collaboration through
group quests or through crafting
18
, second-generation gamers want to play the game on
their own.
On the surface, dabbling in many character classes and trying different aspects of
the game seems similar to the “Explorer” player type described by Bartle (1996).
“Explorers” are driven to fully map out aspects of the game. The difference lies in the
depth of exploration. When talking about first-generation gamers, these kinds of players
might fill in the entire world map, level three different versions of the same character
class to try all the available options, or challenge themselves by repeatedly attacking x+1

17
An “alt” is short for “alternate” and is used to refer to additional characters other than a player’s “main”
character.
18
The primary craft professions in World of Warcraft were initially: alchemy, blacksmithing, enchanting,
engineering, herbalism, leatherworking, mining, skinning, and tailoring. Later, inscription, jewelcrafting,
and archaeology were added. Each character may learn up to two primary professions. Through “crafting” a
player refines and combines raw materials into useful items. A key aspect of crafting is that a player cannot
complete upper-level recipes in any craft without components from other crafts.
27
number of mobs
19
to determine just how many they can defeat and to push the limits of
their character’s abilities. In contrast, second-generation gamers are driven more by
curiosity and the desire to be self-sufficient. They explore multiple character classes, but
not fully – they will often have multiple characters at low to mid-levels. They learn
different crafting skills with their characters in order to trade items among their own
characters. They wander through questing areas, but are generally not methodical or
efficient about their progress.
In an example of both “ease of use” orientation and embodying diversity, many of
the second-generation players I interviewed played multiple characters in one sitting,
changing between classes and levels depending on their mood and on their perceived
reward. If a second-generation player’s level 49 hunter was close to reaching the level 50,
they were more likely to continue playing their hunter than to switch to another character.
However, a level 12 character can reach level 13 in much less time
20
and the easier
achievements encourages playing lower level characters. Because second-generation
players have limited time for fun in their busy lives, having multiple characters helps
them avoid getting stuck in a difficult area or level until they have the time or inclination
to tackle a longer challenge.

19
“Mob” is a term used for any attackable computer-controlled character and is thought to be derived from
“mobile object.”
20
The experience required to reach the next level becomes larger with each consecutive level. One of the
important elements of game structure is a tiered level of challenge that gradually increases the difficulty
level as the game progresses (Koster, 2004).
28
They thrive on consistency.
For second-generation gamers, digital games are a chance to relax and unwind,
not a foray into the unknown. Changes to the game system are upsetting and frustrating.
First-generation gamers eagerly anticipate the release of new content, explore it,
complain about it, and generally see it as part of the natural progression of a game.
Second-generation players are also interested in new content, but at the same time
complain bitterly about anything that upsets their understanding of how the game works.
A 60-year-old player told me she quit World of Warcraft and had no interest in playing
again, despite the fact that her son and husband both continued to play. Her major
complaint was the geographical changes in the latest expansion. She said, “They changed
the maps again. I had enough trouble getting around before without them changing the
maps on me.” For this player, complaining about the new and rearranged layout of
Stormwind
21
was one way she expressed frustration with change. Because second-
generation players focus on entertainment and achievable goals, they resent changes that
force them to re-learn hard-earned knowledge about the game.
They learn only what is necessary.
Second-generation gamers want to learn how something works quickly, and then
to not have to think about that knowledge again. Second-generation gamers have little
desire to explore the underlying structures of the game and many players are happy to
follow the lead of experienced players. They are more concerned with overcoming the

21
Stormwind is one of the main Alliance cities from the first (vanilla) release of World of Warcraft. During
the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, one section was extensively renovated to include a harbor with boats
to other cities, replacing portal-based travel.
29
obstacle than in learning why or how the challenge was defeated. For example, very few
second-generation gamers are familiar with the World of Warcraft game lore because the
storyline is not integral to playing the game. Each race and location within World of
Warcraft has an intricate history that is often referenced in the quests available at each
location, but the players may not even notice. When a farmer says that the government of
Stormwind has abandoned Westfall and asks the player to defend their land from the
thieving Defias Brotherhood
22
, players do not need to know that when Stormwind was
decimated by orcs, the government did not pay the stonemasons who rebuilt the city, and
the angry stonemasons grew to hate the Stormwind populace and formed the Defias
Brotherhood to terrorize them
23
. Instead, to complete the quest players just need to locate
and defeat 15 mobs labeled Defias Trapper and 15 labeled Defias Smuggler before
starting the next quest in the quest chain involving Defias Pillagers and Defias Looters.
Because the game lore is not necessary to complete quests like “The People’s Militia,”
few second-generation gamers become curious enough to seek the stories behind the
quests. In this form, the game is a long series of short quests and activities, rather than a
complex interweaving of events, activities and progression in the game.
They rely on proven solutions.
Second-generation gamers trust that first-generation gamers have already
generated answers and strategies for in-game challenges. They utilize guild chat and
general chat as a forum for questions on where to find items or how to complete quests. If

22
World of Warcraft Quest chain: The People’s Militia.
23
For more information, see http://wow.joystiq.com/2008/04/04/know-your-lore-the-wrynn-dynasty/.
30
they are more comfortable with technology, they pick a knowledge database like
www.wowwiki.com and refer to this website to answer all of their questions, but they
rarely contribute information or comment on forums.
When first-generation gamers were playing the first release of World of Warcraft,
now called the “vanilla” version, the general chat was full of conversations discussing
where to find elusive items or how to complete difficult or confusing quests. Many of
these points of confusion were later clarified through software patches introduced by
Blizzard and through the development of third-party knowledge databases that collected
and stored this kind of information, e.g. www.thottbot.com or www.wowhead.com. By
the time second-generation gamers started playing World of Warcraft, questions in the
general chat were often answered with derision, implying that the askers are stupid for (a)
not already knowing the answer and being a “newbie” and (b) not knowing to look up
information in a knowledge database. Many second-generation gamers would also rather
experience how to overcome an obstacle than researching the solution. They prefer
learning on the fly or having a more experienced player walk them through the process,
an inefficient form of knowledge transfer from a first-generation perspective, but one that
appeals to the ease-of-use orientation of second-generation players.
Relying on the skill of others becomes a central source of friction between first-
and second-generation players in raiding. Second-generation players join groups
attempting complicated battles without the preparation that would make them more
useful members of the team. With multiple locations to find written explanations of
31
battles and videos showing walkthroughs of battles, first-generation players have little
patience with the uninformed and inexperienced players.
Who are Second-Generation Gamers?
The differences between the dispositions of first- and second-generation gamers
become more apparent in the different playing styles of the two generations, but game
study researchers focus mainly on first-generation gamers when discussing “gamer
culture.” From its advent, games researchers have described the culture that develops
within an online community of game players (e.g. Rheingold, 1993/2000; Turkle, 1995).
Online game culture is the topic of in-depth anthropological inquiries (e.g. Boellstorff,
2008; Nardi, 2010; Taylor, 2006b), as well as academic journals, e.g. Games and Culture
(SAGE) and ELUDAMOS Journal of Computer Game Culture (Singapore-MIT
GAMBIT Game Lab). However, within the past five years, the number of digital game
players has increased as well as news and media coverage increasing the public’s
awareness of “gamer culture” (cf. McGonigal, 2011). In this dissertation I argue that as
digital games have become a more popular and accessible form of entertainment, the
majority of players in even the MMO games are no longer “hardcore” gamers who have a
strong connection with “gamer culture.” This dissertation makes a distinction between
first-generation “hardcore” gamers who play games within the cultural framework
described by previous games studies scholars, and second-generation gamers who are
only familiar with the culture and conventions of gaming from an outsider’s perspective.
The defining characteristics of second-generation players are based, not on the
amount of time they spend playing, e.g., Juul’s (2010) “casual” gamer, but on their
32
gameplay behaviors and their interest in and ability to immerse themselves in the
dominant “gamer culture” of the first-generation gamers. Second-generation gamers:
• Are not “hardcore” gamers. World of Warcraft is generally their first massively
multiplayer online game.
• Don’t have the latest computers and may not have a fast Internet connection.
• Focus on leveling, “questing” and exploration, rather than complex end-game
content.
• Have little to no understanding of game mechanics.
• Feel disconnected from gamer stereotypes about gender, age, and ethnicity.
Second-generation gamers are parents, grandparents, Caucasian, Asians, Latinos,
African Americans, heterosexual, lesbian, and gay.
• Often break the norms of gamer culture in language and actions.
• Are the vast majority of World of Warcraft players.
The difference between dispositions is a good way to differentiate between first-
and second-generation players. Exploring other aspects of the second-generation gamer
disposition suggests a way of understanding how second-generation players see the game
world and the other players in it. Compared to first-generation players, second-generation
players have different perception of the goals of the game, measuring achievement within
the game, and their relationship to other players.
Second-Generation Gamers and Gaming Goals
There is an inherent conflict between the basic approaches to playing the game of
first- and second-generation gamers. First-generation gamers have little patience for
33
players who do not know what they should be doing, hence they refer to second-
generation gamers as “newbies”—noobs, nubs, n00bs, newbs, etc. In a response similar
to third-person effect “…in the sense that others are seen as being influenced more than
oneself” (Conners, 2005, p. 3), second-generation gamers generally see newbies as
someone else because although they may be new, they do not consider themselves
newbies after even a limited amount of playtime. As individuals, second-generation
gamers grapple with the reality that they are new to the game versus their ego which says
that World of Warcraft is “just a game” and should be easy to play. These unrealistic self-
perceptions of the second-generation players’ understanding of the game are a source of
conflict between first- and second-generation gamers, as has been the case with other
technologies:
“Another parallel [between the telegraph and the Internet] is the eternal
enmity between new, inexperienced users and experienced old hands.
Highly skilled telegraphers in city offices would lose their temper when
forced to deal with hopelessly inept operators in remote villages; the same
phenomenon was widespread on the Internet when the masses first surged
on-line in the early 1990s, unaware of customs and traditions that had held
sway on the Internet for years and capable of what, to experienced users,
seemed unbelievable stupidity, gullibility, and impoliteness” (Standage,
1998, p. 209).
The friction between first- and second-generation gamers is especially apparent
when second-generation gamers fail to react to in-game situations the way that first-
34
generation “customs and traditions” demand. First-generation gamers see themselves as
the elite, dedicated few who have watched their game from its birthing pains to the
present. To them, second-generation gamers are interlopers, people jumping onto the
bandwagon after World of Warcraft has become “cool.” First-generation gamers are not
subtle about their feelings of superiority, but second-generation gamers bring their own
interests to the game and play the game their own way. Why “crunch the numbers” and
do all the “math stuff” to make your character better when someone else has already done
it? Why collect multiple pieces of rare equipment to compare their “stats” when other
users have already compiled “Best in Slot” gear lists
24
? The challenge is not about
exploring the “min-max”
25
aspects of the game, but about experiencing the richness of
gameplay to the fullest. Second-generation gamers are, essentially, playing the same
game but with a different disposition.
Number of hours played does not make an experienced player.
Some of the differences between first- and second-generation dispositions toward
the game can be illustrated by the story of Karl
26
. Karl usually solos—meaning that he
plays World of Warcraft by himself without interacting with other players. He plays a

24
First-generation players do calculations to compile the optimal combination of items for each character
class and spec, then publish these lists so that other players can set goals and do quick equipment
comparisons.
25
“Min-max” refers to using the minimum effort to product the maximum outcome. For example, “min-
maxers” would, for a dps (damage per second) class, compare the amount of damage done by each attack,
considering the length of time it took to perform the attack and the delay before using the attack again, in
order to create a “spell rotation” list showing in which order to use attacks.
26
“Karl,” as with all the specifically named players in this dissertation, is a pseudonym. As discussed in the
introduction, the identifying characteristics of the players have been changed, including their character
names. Instead, I have chosen to substitute with common Anglo-Saxon names.
35
hunter-class character who performs long-range attacks and has a pet that can be used to
distract monsters. Hunters are an easy class to solo. Karl rarely PUGs (plays with a Pick-
Up Group of random players), although, as he became a more active player, he began
offering to group with members of his small guild
27
. After a few interactions, several of
the more experienced guild members began avoiding groups where he might be included.
One evening, several first-generation players from the guild and I were running an
instance dungeon
28
and needed one more character with his class-type
29
. In the instance,
Karl’s behavior made apparent the fact that he was not familiar with the strategies used
by players working in a group, such as maximizing group efforts by focusing attacks on
the same target at the same time. Four of the group members, including me, were using
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) software to speak to each other using headsets with a

27
Similar to a community sports team, a group of players can start a guild with a unique name and logo.
According to Blizzard Entertainment, “Guilds offer many benefits including free items, opportunities for
groups, access to trade skill masters, quest items, and readily available trade skill ingredients through
gathering guild members. You may discover that a guild greatly enhances your gameplay experience. You
can meet friends, share adventures, and find people to protect you if you fight in faction versus faction
combat. Typically, players in good guilds can go places and do things that players in poor guilds or no
guild can't. This is especially the case at maximum character level (80), where the dungeons become very
challenging,” (2010b, “Joining Guilds”)
28
“…dungeons are areas set up specifically for more private group adventures. These areas, called
"instanced zones," allow you and a group of friends to have a more personal experience, exploring,
adventuring, or completing quests in your own private dungeon. You also have the ability to invite others
into your instanced zone to join you. The monsters in instanced zones are typically more powerful, so
groups of players will have to work together to defeat them, but with greater dangers come greater
rewards!” (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010b, “Dungeons”)
29
At this time, successfully completing dungeons depended on a group’s ability to control multiple
monsters (mobs) at the same time, systematically focusing mob attacks on the well-armored “tank”
character while the “dps” (damage per second) characters attack each mob in turn and the “healer”
character both heals and avoids damage. Specific classes such as Karl’s hunter have spells, attacks, or
abilities that incapacitate mobs for short periods of time, allowing the players to concentrate on other mobs.
Later expansions of World of Warcraft did not focus as heavily on crowd control.
36
microphone. Karl, however, did not login to the VoIP, so the other members of the group
talked openly about his lack of experience.
The players engage in a disorganized battle against a small group of mobs.
(spoken)
30
“He
31
just broke the sheep again
32
.”
(typed) “Hey Karl, kill skull, then X, then star
33
” “k
34
”
Another in-game battle ensues.
(spoken) “He did it again. I think he’s using multishot
35
.”
(typed) “Karl, are u using multishot?”
(typed) “no” (pause) “o wait” (pause) “yes”
(spoken) “duh”
Karl’s uncertainty here strongly indicates that he is an inexperienced player because he
does not know what kind of attack he is using. Most likely, he uses the same buttons for
every battle, rather than efficiently choosing attacks that fit a specific situation. All four

30
For the sake of brevity, the spoken conversation is not broken down into individual comments. Typed
conversation between two people is separated by quotation marks.
31
“He” refers to Karl.
32
One of the crowd-control techniques is for a mage-class character to cast the spell, “Polymorph,” which
transforms a mob into a sheep that wanders aimlessly effectively removing it from the fight for a time. The
mob remains as a sheep until the spell wears off or until it receives damage from one of the players. In this
case, the speaker is complaining because Karl’s attack has hit the polymorphed monster, cancelling the
pacifying spell and adding it back into the fight.
33
The group leader can mark individual monsters within a group with one of eight symbols (Raid Target
Icons) that will appear over their head. Marking is used to organize strategies like in this case where the
party leader is using the marking symbols to indicate which mob Karl should be attacking.
34
“k” or “kk” is often typed as a short version of ‘okay’ or ‘yes.’ Occasionally, players will type “y”
instead.
35
Multi-Shot is a hunter-specific attack which, “Fires several missiles, hitting 3 targets (for an additional X
damage)” (Hunter User Interface, World of Warcraft, Blizzard, 2004).
37
of the other players in the group realize that Karl is using a particular attack, but he is not
aware until they point it out to him.
(typed) “okay, multishot breaks the sheep. please dont use it.” “k”
Several pulls
36
later, the group is faced with four targets instead of three. In situations
like this, hunters are often used for “crowd control” because they can temporarily pacify
a target by freezing them (preventing any movement or any attacks) with a pre-set trap
37
.
Karl was invited to this group specifically because they needed another player with the
ability to incapacitate a mob.
(spoken) “Have Karl cube
38
one.” “ahh. cool.”
(typed) “Karl. youre on the blue square. trap him, k?” “then skull, X, blue, then
sheep.”
39

(typed) “kk”
40

When the group attacks the targets, Karl sets down an Immolation Trap
41
instead of a
Freezing Trap. The mob, not incapacitated, attacks Karl who fights the blue-square-

36
In most instance dungeons, several mobs will be linked together so that an attack on one will incite a
response from all of them. A skillful group of players will “pull” one set of mobs and resolve fights with
them before pulling a second set.
37
“Freezing Trap” is a hunter-class-specific spell which allows a player to “Launch a frost trap to the target
location that freezes the first enemy that approaches, preventing all action for up to 1 min. Any damage
caused will break the ice.” (Hunter User Interface, World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, 2004).
38
The graphical representation of “Freezing Trap” makes the pacified mob appear to be encased in ice as if
they had been frozen in an ice cube. These players use the nickname “cube”.
39
The colors and shapes refer to the Raid Target Icons with which the guild leader has marked individual
mobs. The second sentence indicates the order in which the mobs should be attacked. The “kill order” does
not change, so the fact that it is typed out for Karl is the equivalent of explaining something to a child that
is obvious to the adults.
40
Okay.
41
A trap that unleashes a fire-based attack that does damage to a mob but does not incapacitate the mob.
38
marked mob with hand-to-hand combat.
42
While this kept the target from attacking the
other party members, Karl fighting with one mob meant that we were not all focusing on
the same target, our group damage was fragmented, and the healer had to heal both the
tank (player with a high amount of armor) and Karl.
After the mobs were subdued, the tank types “what happened?”
This conversation is all typed rather than spoken to include Karl in the conversation. The
players are typing what is obvious to them, but not to Karl. This is a “gentle” way of
pointing out to Karl that he screwed up and needs to correct his actions for the next battle.
Paul, playing another DPS
43
character, types “I think we had the wrong trap
down.”
Here, Paul is using the inclusive “we” even though Karl’s is the only character with the
ability to set traps. This particular guild prided itself on being inclusive of players, rather
than exclusive like hardcore raiding guilds, and this may have been Paul’s way of kindly
pointing out that Karl had made a mistake.
Karl types “yea. sorry.” (pause) “I don’t use traps.”
No one responded immediately in text, but the four other players jumped back to a
spoken conversation.
(spoken) “He doesn’t use traps?” (shocked)

42
Because hunters have strong ranged attacks, their melee attacks are very weak and they do not have
strong armor, so Karl fighting a mob in hand-to-hand combat was not an effective attack.
43
“Dps” means damage per second. This designation is used for classes and specs that are optimized to
attack over healing or defending.
39
(spoken) “He’s a hunter and he doesn’t use traps? That’s like a mage refusing to
sheep or a priest who doesn’t heal.”
(spoken) “Hey!” I said, since one of my characters is a priest class who is
specialized to do damage, not healing.
(spoken) “You know what I mean—a holy priest.”
The players are shocked because trapping is a specialized skill of the hunter class and, at
the time, was a major contribution that hunters made to group activities. They are
shocked because playing a hunter without using traps not only seems inefficient to the
other players, but shows a lack of knowledge of and curiosity about the hunter class from
someone who has spent many hours playing that character.
(spoken) “Paul – you’ve gotta work with him.”
(spoken) Paul: “I’m on it. I’ll have a class.”
(typed by Paul) “hey Karl, I’m gonna have a trapping 101 class”
(typed by Karl) “yea?”
(typed by Paul) “yep. we’re gonna have you trapping like [he types the name of
his hunter-class character]”
(typed by Paul) “Paul’s school of traps”
(typed by Karl) “ok”
(whispered
44
by Karl to me) “I tried trapping, but people yelled at me, so I
stopped.”

44
A “whispered” text message is visible only to the sender and receiver, not to the group.
40
(whispered by me to Karl) “no worries, Karl. If you want to learn how, Paul’d be
a good teacher, but only if you want to”
(whispered by Karl to me) “I do! That would be fun!!!!”
(whispered by Karl to me) “You and Paul are so nice to me”
In essence, Karl has a very different approach to playing World of Warcraft than
the other players. He participates in the same activities—leveling, completing quests,
learning professions—but he is not driven to explore, to be efficient, or to understand his
character as a part of a larger whole. Karl’s lack of experience doing group activities was
not what surprised the other players. They were shocked because Karl had, by this time,
played his character for several hundred hours and yet understood very little about its
abilities. He did not exhibit the curiosity and explorative learning that is a large
component of the first-generation gamer disposition. When confronted with something
difficult or confusing, rather than puzzling out how Hunters worked, he simply stopped
engaging in that aspect of his character class.
Dispositions are more than how people learn, but also define the expectations
players have about the (virtual) world they inhabit and their role in that world. First-
generation gamers understand the gamespace, in part, as an agreement with the
developers—nothing exists in the game world that does not have some purpose. If a wall
is covered in the same graphics everywhere except in one corner, then that corner is
different for a reason and the player should, therefore, investigate and discover what she
can interact with in that particular corner.
41
Second-generation players do not yet see the game world in this way and rely on
first-generation players to show them where the interesting parts of the game can be
found. When confronted about his lack of knowledge about trapping in the “safe” space
of a guild run, Karl was happy to learn something new and grateful not to be ridiculed for
his lack of knowledge. In a raiding guild, first-generation players would be more likely to
expect players to supplement their lack of knowledge by seeking answers themselves.
Karl, being a second-generation player, preferred being “mentored” by a more
experienced player.
Performing an action does not mean understanding the action.
Karen reached level 60 on her highest level character after almost half a year of
playing
45
. Until level 54, she did not know that to generate the most experience (which
needed to be obtained to reach the next level) a player needs to accept and complete
quests from in-game non-player characters (NPCs). Instead, Karen had been exploring
areas and attacking whatever monsters were in the area for small amounts of experience
for each kill. On the surface, Karen’s playing habits are similar to an “Explorer” (Bartle,
1996) mindset; however, Bartle was talking about first-generation gamers who are more
likely to systematically explore: “Explorers delight in having the game expose its internal
machinations to them” (Bartle, 1996, ¶24). Karen was merely engaged in the repetitive
actions of running and attacking targets, looting the bodies and, eventually, selling the
items for in-game currency.

45
Level 60 was originally the highest level achievable. Two expansions later, leveling guides, which tell
you where to go and what to do, advertise that they can get you to level 60 in two weeks.
42
Another significant feature of Karen’s gameplay is that she did not engage in the
in-game auction-house system. This auction system, built similar to eBay
46
, automates
the selling, bidding, and purchasing features and allows players to buy and sell rare or
useful items without having to be logged in and at the same in-game location. For
example, players sell items required for quests or material necessary for crafting, as well
as other rare or useful items. Auction prices are set by the market, meaning that they can
fluctuate dramatically as players make and spend virtual fortunes. Items also have a set
price when sold to an NPC vender, which is generally very small. To encourage players
to sell to each other, rare items on the auction house might sell for 200 times (or more)
the “vendor price.” Karen, on the other hand, sold exclusively to vendors. When she
collected rare armor that her character could not wear, she sold the armor to a vendor.
When she collected high-level leather materials through the Skinning craft, she sold the
stacks of leather to a vendor. She collected copper (the smallest form of World of
Warcraft currency) for items worth gold (the largest currency) to other players. To Karen,
selling to an NPC vendor was quick and easy and the value of the item was clearly listed.
Because she did not engage fully in the culture of the game, she did not understand that
these same items might have a different value to other players. To Karen, the auction
house was confusing and required work. Like Karl and a host of other second-generation
gamers, Karen showed little interest in refining her character’s skills or in engaging in the
game space as more than simple entertainment.

46
A peer-to-peer online auction website available at www.ebay.com.
43
Second-Generation Gamers and Achievement
Massively multiplayer games maintain a continuously evolving narrative—you
are on a journey to acquire status/items/money to help out different individuals and
groups in the game. World of Warcraft is designed with a level cap (maximum level) to
keep people from getting too powerful. Then, in order to perpetuate the experience of the
game (and provide a reason to continue the $15/month subscription) there needs to be
activities for maximum-level characters. Raids serve in this capacity, because raids
require complex coordination of multiple people.
Most group activities, such as dungeons, require the coordination of the whole
group and one underperforming player could easily result in the deaths of all members of
the group. First-generation gamers use a variety of methods to weed out deficient players,
including running third-party programs that track the activities and contribution of
individual players during fights (Chen, 2010; Taylor, 2006a). Players are expected to be
on time, prepared with whatever materials they need for that specific fight, and with a
basic understanding of their specific role during that fight
47
. First and foremost, the raid
needs to be efficient and the raid leader reserves the right to replace players who are not
performing well.
Second-generation gamers tend to see World of Warcraft as social, entertainment
space. They often do not know how or where to obtain information outside of the game
structure, but rely on in-game prompts and what other players tell them to do.

47
Online knowledge databases such as www.tankspot.com contain detailed fight information including
videos of boss fights which outline effective strategies for defeating specific bosses.
44
A good way to illuminate the differences between first- and second-generation
approaches to achievement is to examine the behaviors of both in the same situation. On
a consecutive Friday and Sunday from 6pm to 9pm, I participated in two different raids
of Karazhan
48
. The Friday-night group consisted of mostly second-generation gamers,
while the Sunday night group was mostly first-generation gamers.
Karazhan is a ten-person “instance,” meaning that the location is entered through
a special entry point and that, in this virtual space, you are in a unique instance of that
dungeon – the actions you take in this space are only associated with your group. So, in
effect, twenty “instances” of Karazhan might be running for twenty different ten-man
groups, but the actions of each group do not influence the experience of the other
nineteen groups. The instances are hosted on a different server from the rest of the game,
so technical issues that affect the main server does not always affect the instance servers.
A raid is a difficult challenge and requires delicate coordination—meaning that
the all group members must work to complement each other. Karazhan is one of around
thirty instances in the game
49
, each of which have their own themes with unique graphics,
maps, mobs and bosses (creatures that need to be defeated in order to complete the tasks
and clear the instance). At the time of this event, Karazhan was the lowest-level 10-
person raid
50
, so many groups attempted Karazhan with the hopes of getting good items

48
Karazhan is a dungeon instance in World of Warcraft (see footnote 17).
49
This number changes as new expansions of World of Warcraft are released and new dungeons are added.
50
At this time, many guilds had moved from Karazhan to harder challenges. Blizzard Entertainment had
changed the entrance requirements for Karazhan so that raiders no longer had to complete a complicated
quest line to retrieve [The Master’s Key], if at least one of them had the key. Previously, every member of
the raid needed to have the key. Thus, the dungeon was accessible to a larger number of players, many of
them second-generation gamers.
45
from the bosses
51
, learning how to raid and then going on to more difficult instances.
Karazhan has a complex map with a dungeon theme – the space looks like a large castle
and you move from room to room. From the entrance, you have some choices in
direction, but you always have “trash mobs” (mobs that are somewhat difficult to defeat
and often come in groups). Defeating these mobs awards experience, gold, and reputation
points that can be used to get in-game items. They also occasionally drop useful “rare”
items. In order to reach a boss – a mob who has unique attacks, strengths, and
weaknesses and is very difficult to defeat – the group must first defeat a series of trash
mobs and then the boss. Part of the challenge of raiding is to deduce a successful strategy
for defeating each boss. These strategies are then shared via websites, forums, or even
YouTube videos. A high level of the excitement and prestige goes with being the first
guild to take down (successfully defeat) a boss which means finding or creating a
winning strategy. Karazhan hosts around 13 bosses, each with specific strategies to
overcome them.
Initially, end-game content (activities designed specifically for groups of
maximum-level players) in World of Warcraft was extremely complex. Something like
2% of the player-base attempted the easier raids and less than that succeeded (See

51
When boss-level mobs are defeated in Karazhan, they drop two pieces of “epic” gear from a list of items
possibly dropped by this boss. An item that has been picked up is “soulbound,” and cannot be transferred to
any other player. During the initial (vanilla) release of World of Warcraft, players developed complicated
rules for determining which player should have the item. The “loot rules” involved a rolling of in-game
dice or were organized around credit for participation, called DKP (Dragon Kill Points) and involved
detailed record-keeping and trust. For overviews on the social capital around DKP systems, see Malone
(2009) or Silverman and Simon (2009). Later updates to World of Warcraft included semi-automated dice-
rolling and loot-distribution options, therefore few second-generation players used DKP systems or the
“/random” in-game rolling that required all participants to rely on the integrity of other players.
46
statistics in Mayra, 2008). When World of Warcraft released its first expansion, Burning
Crusade, the design included much more accessible end-game content.
Raiding is designed to be difficult and to require extensive cooperation, including
finding the optimal combination of character classes. When players create an avatar, they
choose from eight classes. These classes fall into three categories, loosely referred to as
Tank, Healer, and DPS (damage per second). To defeat a boss, the Tank, who has a lot of
armor and can take a lot of damage before dying, must keep the boss’ attention and
absorb most of the damage. Meanwhile, the DPS players must attack the boss and slowly
lower his health without attracting the boss’ attention because DPS-category characters
can do a lot of damage, but if they receive very much damage, they die. Finally, the
Healer-category characters need to keep the tank from dying from all the damage he is
taking, and also keep the DPS and other Healers alive, while also trying to not get the
boss’ attention. In essence, the character categories are pieces of a whole and cannot
succeed by themselves: the Tank does minimal damage and cannot heal efficiently, the
DPS cannot receive much damage, nor can they heal efficiently, and the Healers die from
a minimal amount of damage and cannot inflict damage efficiently. Tanks are often in the
position of leader, healers must be very focused on the other members of the group, and
DPS classes have varying levels of usefulness and flexibility, including melee (short-
range) classes and ranged-attack classes.
The group on Friday consisted of two healers, two tanks, and six DPS. The Friday
group defeated the Opera event (which randomly involves one of three possible bosses or
boss groups) and attempted the boss, Maiden. The Sunday group consisted of three
47
healers, two tanks and five DPS and the group defeated five bosses: Attunmen (the
Hunter), Moroes, The Opera event, Maiden, and Curator.
The Friday event.
The Friday-night Karazhan run started badly with two of the ten members losing
connection and not being able to get past the authentification server
52
. The Raid Leader
decided to continue without them with the hopes that they would join in when they could.
I was playing one of the DPS classes. The Raid Leader, also a DPS class, began the raid
by pulling (attacking the group of mobs) before everyone else was ready, so the mobs
killed us and we had to revive
53
the entire party, which took about ten minutes. By this
time, the two missing members had reconnected and everyone was more prepared to start
attacking mobs. There were a few more deaths on trash mobs before we got to the Opera
event.
In this event, you fight on a large stage and your opponent is selected from one of
three plays – Little Red Riding Hood, Romeo & Juliet, or The Wizard of Oz. On this
night, our play was Little Red Riding Hood and our boss opponent was the Big Bad Wolf
(BBW). One of the unique parts of this fight is that the boss periodically turns one of the
party members into a gnome with a red cloak and very little armor and then the BBW

52
This refers to the login screen used by Blizzard to associate each player with their particular set of
characters. Access is controlled by a username and password. Frequently, after entering the correct
information, the login page would say, “Authenticating,” and never complete the login process, making the
player cancel the attempt and start over again.
53
The punishment for death in World of Warcraft is that you are transformed into a ghostly version of
yourself and transported to the nearest graveyard. The player must then have another player “rez”
(resurrect) them, or the dead player must run their character back to the location of their death in order to
“recover their corpse” and have a physical body again. Either option takes time. In addition, players’ armor
and gear accrue damage which must be repaired at a vendor in exchange for in-game currency.
48
attacks that person. The ingenious strategy for avoiding instant death is to run as quickly
as possible all the way around the edges of the stage. The BBW runs after you and (if you
are lucky) does not catch you. This lasts for 15 or 20 seconds before you are back to
normal and the Tank can reacquire the BBW’s attention and stop the BBW’s single-
minded attack on one player.
Unfortunately the Friday group was filled with second-generation gamers who
were inexperienced with this fight and they struggled with the strategy. When turned into
Red Riding Hood, the player marked for death needs to run immediately, which means all
of the players must be paying attention and have good timing. If the player does not run
and is killed, the group no longer has that player’s healing or dps, which makes it harder
for them to defeat the boss. After three attempts, each of which took recovery time,
everyone was very frustrated, but the group laughed their frustration off, joking about the
guild leader’s habit of dying early.
Before beginning the final attempt, the raid leader stressed that the player turned
into Red Riding Hood needed to run as fast as possible. The first transformed player died
quickly. The second player (me) survived. By the third transformation, the whole group
started chiming in on VoIP, “Run, Joe
54
, run!!!!!!” and “Go Kar! Run like the little girl
you are!” Meanwhile, the group continued to attack the boss and slowly watched his
health go down. Other players started dying, but the remainder kept at it, and the dead
players participated verbally, encouraging the remaining players and making it seem like

54
The players generally referred to each other by shortened versions of their character names. They rarely
used real names even when using VoIP.
49
a group effort. Finally, the group killed the boss with 3 players remaining (one Healer,
the Tank, and a DPS). All of the players, dead and alive, were cheering and laughing and
excited that they had finally defeated the Big Bad Wolf.
Flush with this victory, the group decided to go on to another boss, Maiden. On
the way, one player needed to leave, so another guild member was invited to replace him.
A second player took a wrong turn and ended up dead and needed to be revived. In all, it
took about 20 minutes to get everyone in the same location and prepared to start killing
the trash mobs that led to Maiden. The excitement of the Opera event victory had worn
off and the group became disorganized and died multiple times on the way to Maiden.
Finally, the group reached Maiden, and died quickly on the first attempt. The group
attempted her twice more before deciding to call it for the night. People expressed their
tiredness from the previous fight and their frustration with the expense of repairing their
armor and weapons from so many deaths
55
. At the same time, the players were happy
with the camaraderie of the Opera event and one woman even said, “I had so much fun
tonight! ‘Run Joe Run!’” and laughed.
The Sunday event.
The Sunday group had a few of the same participants, but on different, better-
equipped characters. In this group, I was playing a Healer class. In addition, we had a
different, more-experienced Tank and two other experienced Healers. There was little
verbal discussion, although a few jokes were made. This group was more about business

55
World of Warcraft’s additional punishment for death is wear and tear on your equipment which the
player needs to pay to repair.
50
than the Friday group and a player who had been in both groups made the comment later
that this group was much more focused. There were very few deaths and most of those
happened during the boss fights. Attunmen and Moroes were defeated on the first
attempt. The Opera event (fighting Romulos and Juliana) wiped out the group once, but
the second attempt ended in victory. Maiden went down smoothly, but it was going on 3
hours by the time the group made it to Curator and people were getting tired and restless.
Curator was also a new fight for three of the party members. The first attempt was
unsuccessful, so the Tank calmly adjusted our strategy (pulling one of the melee DPSers
off of attacking Curator and having her attack the mobs that the boss summoned to
defend him). The second attempt was successful and the group ended the run after that.
The two experiences of the same in-game scenario are illustrative because they
were both fun, but also exemplified the different dispositions toward achievement. This
Sunday run was rewarding in terms of loot: five bosses down meant that the group had
ten epic
56
items to distribute among the party as well as nine reward badges which could
be exchanged for other pieces of rare armor or items. This fulfilled the expectations and
needs of those who were interested in loot, but the group did not attain the same sense of
connectedness, collaboration, or triumph as the Friday group. The Friday event was
unsuccessful by first-generation gamer standards: there were many deaths, the group
members did not play their roles well, and only a few pieces of epic gear were obtained.
However, the social experience had value for the second-generation players involved in

56
In the World of Warcraft game structure, epic items have purple descriptive writing and generally have
significantly better bonuses for your character than lower-level items.
51
the raid. They might have preferred to have defeated many bosses or acquired lots of loot,
but they also valued the experience for what it was: gameplay that built a social
connection across this group of players and a victory made sweeter through struggle and
sacrifice.
Second-generation gamers often measure their achievements on the same scale as
first-generation gamers, even though their approach to playing does not lend itself to
efficiently overcoming in-game challenges. In order to lower barriers to entry and make
the game easier to use, Blizzard Entertainment has implemented many changes to content
and game structures. Most notably, Blizzard made multiple changes to the user interface
to aid navigation. For example, Blizzard added icons on the in-game map to indicate
NPCs that would offer quests or to which you needed to turn in quests. Blizzard has also
repeatedly lowered the entrance requirements for difficult content, for example, the key
to Karazhan, which was mentioned earlier
57
, as well as making specific boss fights easier
within dungeons like Karazhan and Naxxramas. Game content is now more accessible to
larger numbers of people, specifically people who had not made the time or did not have
the skills to complete the earlier entrance requirements. By lowering the barriers to entry,
Blizzard is effectively pushing second-generation gamers into exploring the raiding
experience. Blizzard is able to “recycle” locations and bosses previously developed for
hardcore raiders and open old dungeons as “new” content for the vast numbers of second-
generation of World of Warcraft players.

57
See Footnote 50.
52
Blizzard’s changes have led to complaints from first-generation players that the
content was now “weakened” to let “sucky” guilds complete it, thereby devaluing the
hard work done by the hardcore raiders. The fear that the game developers were
“dumbing down” the game was vocalized at the second Blizzard Entertainment
Convention in 2007, when the Lead Content Designer of World of Warcraft described the
recently introduced rewards for Player-versus-Player competitions as “welfare epics,”
because “players received epics regardless of whether they won or lost the competitions
in which they engaged” (Paul, 2010, p. 159). Paul notes that, “One commentator assessed
tensions among players as ‘almost a blood feud’ with casual players, who typically play
individually and for shorter periods of time, and more serious players, who play in groups
for long periods of time, pitted against each other (Schiesel, 2006)” (Paul, 2010, p. 159)
Although I think his definition of casual players is limited, Paul’s term “welfare epics”
aptly describes how first-generation players view concessions made to second-generation
players.
Second-Generation Gamers and Other Players
Guilds full of second-generation players are often called “casual” or “family”
guilds in fan forum conversations. Like in any other game guild, there are lively in-guild
conversations and guild activities and the better players guide the more inexperienced
players. In terms of achievement, most first-generation players consider casual guilds to
be failures. Rather than working together to overcome progressively difficult
challenges—a key goal for raiding guilds—the second-generation guilds often struggle
53
with lower-level areas or the most basic collaborative challenges, because many second-
generation players are unfamiliar with group activities within the game.
Many second-generation players spend their play time individually leveling
multiple characters, rather than refining the skills and equipment of one character. Justin,
for example, intensely dislikes interacting with other players, but enjoys exploring all of
the facets of the game. His solution was to purchase two copies of World of Warcraft as
well as borrowing the accounts of his mother, stepfather, and girlfriend. He then
researched ways to control up to three characters from one keyboard and used his group
of characters to explore lower-level dungeons. Justin once told me that there should be
“instances” for resources
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so that he could collect them without being bothered by other
players, because he felt that other players interfered with his game. An ideal version of
World of Warcraft, for him, would be a solo digital game with an attached chat client that
would allow him to socialize with friends, but not interact with anyone in the game.
Although Justin is an extreme case, many second-generation players struggle with online
social interactions (see Chapter 4).
Gamer Culture and the Gamer Disposition
The second-generation version of the “gamer disposition” resembles general
media consumption more than a specialized mindset learned by playing digital games.
Second-generation gamers are, in essence, strangers coming into the gaming space and
slowly learning how to behave like a gamer. Some never learn, but others start investing

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Materials (mats) such as raw ore or herbs are used with crafting skills to make armor, potions, or other
useful objects. Crafting is another set of skills that can be trained and leveled for each character.
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themselves into gaming culture (Figure 1). Invested second-generation gamers begin to
understand what behaviors are expected of them, and learn about the underlying
mathematical calculations of the game structure. They are likely to join a guild and
eventually learn how to “walk” and “talk” like a first-generation gamer. As these second-
generations players become more immersed in gaming culture, they develop game play
behaviors that are more similar to Brown and Thomas’ (2008) gamer disposition.
Therefore, rather than contradicting Brown and Thomas’ research, this dissertation
supports their findings by suggesting that the “gamer disposition” can be taught to
players through the combination of play and learning found in World of Warcraft.
As second-generation gamers assimilate gamer culture, habits of the first-
generation “gamer disposition” rub off on the newbies; however, second-generation
gamers diverge in their engagement with the culture of the game. Some enter World of
Warcraft and start learning the norms of the space immediately. They quickly pick up on
the vocabulary necessary to play the game and learn who, how, and where to ask for
information. They excel at assimilation into the culture, absorb the patterns of behavior
and develop similar ways of thinking as Brown and Thomas’ “gamer disposition.”
Although these assimilators did not experience the gameplay that shaped the first-
generation disposition, by immersing themselves in gamer culture their “way of seeing”
the game world and the other players in shifts to a first-generation disposition.
Other second-generation gamers are resistant to change. They approach digital
games like any other form of entertainment media and resent the social pressure to
conform to first-generation “gamer culture” that may no longer be applicable to their
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playing experience. This dissertation includes stories about many of these players who
maintain a second-generation gamer disposition in their approach to playing digital
games.
Between these extremes, a range of dispositions develop. At one end are the
exploratory, problem-solving, participatory dispositions of first-generation gamers, and at
the other is the more passive, keep-it-simple, just-give-me-fun dispositions of second-
generation gamers. The space in-between the extremes suggest that consumption of
digital games happens with conscious thought about how and why someone chooses to
play digital games. People who truly want entertainment that requires no mental effort,
no social interaction and predictable results do not remain playing World of Warcraft for
long. Second-generation players who start and continue playing World of Warcraft do so
because the game offers greater challenge, interaction and, potentially, more fun than
other forms of entertainment media.
Conclusion
As the examples in this chapter suggest, second-generation gamers are distinct
from first-generation gamers in the ways they play, their motivations for playing, their
interaction with other players, and in their disposition. However, second-generation
gamers do not consider themselves to be different from other gamers, while also
acknowledging that they are not stereotypical gamers. They are motivated to enjoy World
of Warcraft, but not to take the game too seriously and they do not understand the first-
generation perceptions that there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to play the game, except
when other players infringe on their enjoyment of the game. Although media stories have
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repeatedly warned the public that digital games have the potential to indoctrinate
innocent players with violent or antisocial tendencies, when examined closely, the reality
is that second-generation players themselves are changing the structure and culture of
games, while at the same time absorbing some of the curiosity and drive essential to the
first-generation gamer disposition.

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Chapter 2: Online identity performance
In Chapter 1, I identified second-generation gamers as a group of players whose
gaming behaviors do not fit the norms of gaming culture. For the remaining chapters, I
explore how second-generation players offer insights into key areas of research in game
studies: identity, community, and addiction. While exploring the discussions surrounding
online identities (Chapter 3) and online communities (Chapter 4), I came to the
realization that these discourses being played out in a game space like World of Warcraft
are actually two aspects of the same behavior: second-generation gamers are struggling to
create and maintain both their individual and social identities. Using the framework of
performance studies, the behaviors of second-generation players within World of
Warcraft offer insights into how understandings of both individual and social online
identities are changing. In this chapter, I introduce identity performance theory and
discuss how massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) are a logical next step for
identity research. The sections of this chapter are as follows:
• Identity performance as a theoretical framework
• MMOs facilitate identity research
• MMOs take place within the context of a larger discourse of identity
Identity performance as a Theoretical Framework
Concepts around the performance of identity are rooted in work begun by cultural
theorists in the 1950s. Burke (1945, 1957) and Turner (1957, 1969, 1982) merged ideas
from theater with ideas from anthropology and sociology. Goffman (1959) and others
(e.g. Schechner, 1965, 1966, 1973) saw social behaviors through the lens of theater and
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looked at identity as a performance that we use to indicate our status in relationship to
others. Broader than an anthropological approach, exemplified by Geertz’ (1973)
suggestion to read culture as a text, performance studies pays attention “to behaviors, to
actions enacted, and of course to the complex social, political, ideological, and historical
contexts not merely surrounding behavior, but profoundly interacting with it. Meaning
radiates from these interactions, from what happens among performers and between
performers and performance contexts,” (Schechner, 2000, p. 4). Performance studies
offers a flexible framework for studying communication that takes place within a virtual
world because of the framework’s focus on constantly changing interactions.
More recent theorists have explored how new kinds of identity performance are
made possible by the affordances of online communication. Turkle’s (1995) Life on the
Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet looked at how the affordances of the Internet
encouraged certain modes of thinking about identity and representation. “In cyberspace,
we can talk, exchange ideas, and assume personae of our own creation” (Turkle, 1995, p.
9). She argues that the very act of changing unconscious representation of physical
characteristics (what we display with our bodies) into a conscious, actively chosen
representation in a mediated space changes how we think about our identity. The
representations are not only visual or textual, but are also enacted through interactions of
users in the online space—a behavioral performance of identity. Although her research
mostly focused on chat rooms and spaces where participants interacted through text,
Turkle’s work was instrumental in looking at virtual identities through the lens of
performance.
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Balsamo (1996) used biopolitics to examine representations of the gendered body
in both the virtual and physical worlds. She identified spaces where technology and the
physical body intersect and used these intersections as examples to explore larger social
discourses about women’s bodies. Like Turkle, Balsamo examined how the physical
body was reinterpreted and represented by virtual bodies in cyberspace. Balsamo focused
on the performance of gender, which is still an aspect of the gamer identity that is in
negotiation. Balsomo’s interest in the performance of a gendered identity is even more
relevant for second-generation gamers because second-generation players are more likely
to be women, transgendered and other gendered players (cf. Leonard, 2006; Williams, D.,
Yee, N., & Caplan, S.E., 2008) than first-generation gamers, who are still primarily male
(cf. Burrill, 2008; Griffiths, Davies & Chappell, 2003, 2004). Burrill (2008) did a close
examination of gamer culture and described it as a hypermasculine space closely aligned
with “boy culture” with clearly gendered roles—men are competitive and elitist, while
women are sexualized fantasies or competitive tomboys. Like ethnicity and age, the
performance of gender is just one facet of understanding how performance studies offers
insights into individual and social identities in World of Warcraft. Following in the
footsteps of the above cultural theorists, both Chapters 3 and 4 explore how first- and
second-generation gamers in World of Warcraft negotiate a performance of identity
individually and as a member of an online community. The affordances of computer-
generated avatars in a computer-generated world create opportunities for identity
performance unparalleled in the physical world.
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MMOs Facilitate Identity Research
An MMO like World of Warcraft is a rich space for inquiry into identity
performance. First, networked communication technologies allow communication to be
divorced from the physical body. Second, player identities are often understood through
the roles
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their characters play in the game and their behaviors toward other players.
Lastly, initial interactions are generally structured and task-oriented, which facilitates
communication between strangers.
Virtual identities are not directly tied to the body.
Many theorists have examined the potential of the Internet and online
communication for identity exploration because identities are not limited by physical
prejudices. “One of the most often-repeated claims about virtual reality is that it provides
the technological means to construct personal realities free from the determination of
body-based (‘real’) identities” (Balsamo, 1996, p. 123). Initial investigation of how
identity could be performed with online technologies was directly tied to concerns about
technology’s potential to aid deception (e.g. Donath, 1999). Others, like Turkle (1995)
saw this potential as freeing:
“On MUDs [text-based online communication platforms], one’s body is
represented by one’s own textual description, so the obese can be slender,
the beautiful plain, the ‘nerdy’ sophisticated. A New Yorker cartoon
captures the potential for MUDs as laboratories for experimenting with
one’s identity. In it, one dog, paw on a computer keyboard, explains to

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By roles, I mean the Tank, Healer, or DPS roles taken on by players in a group.
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another, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.’ The anonymity of
MUDs—one is known on the MUD only by the name of one’s character
or characters—gives people the chance to express multiple and often
unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out
new ones” (Turkle, 1995, p. 12).
Online communication creates a sense of anonymity and security, as if the user
was safely hidden behind layers of technology. Westecott (2009) describes the use of
performance studies to understand the relationship between players and their avatars as
puppetry, where the player is both the director and audience of the performance. At the
same time, scholars like Rheingold (1993/2000) recorded the deeply personal
connections and communities that can develop within online communities. As these two
different perspectives suggest, identities within digital mediated places are both
constrained and freed by their virtual setting.
Turkle and Rheingold were discussing text-based communication—some of the
earliest online communities. MMOs are a more sophisticated online community with a
visual component that is an integral part of the game experience. In the game space of an
MMO, players engage in actions and movements that are not all imagined and the visual
adds a strong element of immersion (cf. Mäyrä, 2008; Lee, 2004). Like the physical
world, choices that players make about their visual representation, such as choosing the
gender of their avatar, can play a role in their identity performance.
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Game structures facilitate performance.
The performance of identity both individual and social is reflected in our physical
communities and social institutions. Huizinga (1950/2006) suggested that social
institutions like law, religion, and warfare share a common structure that is very game-
like since they, like a game, are voluntary, take place outside of “ordinary” life, happen in
a distinct location for a distinct duration and have rules. Although they are serious
activities, Huizinga believes that social institutions contain a fundamentally playful
element (cf. Kelly, 2009).
Online communities such as Internet chatrooms, listservs, forums, social
networking sites, and virtual worlds are social spaces and can have playful elements, but
are not games. On the other hand, MMOs like World of Warcraft have an explicit game
structure. Online communities are a space for examining how people perform their
identity when “identity” itself is constrained by digital limitations, and MMOs are both
social digital spaces and games. Two examples of what the structure of MMOs offers for
research on identity performance are game avatars and the leveling system.
Identity performance through character creation.
When players install and choose to play World of Warcraft and many other
games, their first task is to create an avatar. During the creation process, players make
choices which then determine the options they have for their future interactions with the
game world and, more importantly, with each other. “In travelling through various virtual
cyberworlds, it no longer makes sense to ask whose reality or perspective is represented
in cyberspace; we should ask what reality is created therein, and how this reality
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articulates relationships among technologies, bodies, and narratives” (Balsamo, 1996, p.
14-15). Although Balsamo is speaking about “reading” the text of a cyberworld to
understand a larger social discourse about technology, another interpretation in a game
space is to look at how identity representation is constrained by the game structure and
how that structure creates new channels for understanding identity performance. For
example, ask any first-generation World of Warcraft player about their character and they
are likely to strongly identify with and be able to rattle off their character’s faction, race,
class, spec
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, and stats
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and/or gear score
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because these are deemed to be important
(and defining) characteristics of both their individual and social identities. Recently, I
asked a colleague about one of her friends that she had met through World of Warcraft.
Rather than telling me about his trustworthiness or his personality, she replied that he was
a raidleader
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and “his main
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is a druid
65
… (used to be a tauren, now a troll
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), who is

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A player’s “spec” is determined by the skills in which the character has (spec)ialized. Different classes
allow different kinds of specialization. For example, a mage will always cast spells, but he/she can
specialize in fire, arcane or frost spells.
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“Stats” is a quantitative number associated with a player’s effectiveness. A player is often judged by
his/her average output. For examples, a healer will be labeled by the total amount of healing he/she
contributed throughout a raid, or a tank will be judged on the sum of his/her total armor.
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“Gear score” is a number calculated using the total statistics of a player’s weapon, armor, enchants, and
inscriptions. Socially, it is used as a metric of a player’s potential contribution to a group.
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The role of “raidleader” in World of Warcraft is a position of authority within a guild. It requires the
leadership skills to coordinate large groups of people for several hours, and generally falls to people who
are reasonably charismatic, trustworthy, calm under pressure, and have integrity.
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Players may create up to ten characters per server, but each one is played individually and
accomplishments are not shared across characters. As developed in previous MMOs, a player generally has
one character that is their “main.” This is generally their most advanced character or the one which they
play most frequently. Second-generation players are more likely to have multiple less-well-developed
characters.
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“Druid” is a character class in World of Warcraft known for its ability to change forms. Druids are a
flexible class and can specialize to fill any of the roles of the tank-healer-dps (damage per second) triangle,
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usually a boomkin
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but has been known to tank and heal
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when necessary” (Brown, J.,
personal communication, June 23, 2011). From a first-generation gamer’s worldview,
knowing someone’s guild role, faction, class and spec also tells the basics about that
player’s personality as well as the types of interactions available in the game with that
player
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. Competing factions have the option of helping or hindering a player from the
opposing faction. The war between the Alliance and the Horde factions is entirely created
by the game structure. Each faction has its own in-game history and idiosyncrasies and is
at war with the other, inducing school-spirit-style fandom and opening opportunities for
player versus player actions within the game. However, each side, also, is represented as
a stereotype by members of the opposite faction: The Alliance describes the Horde as
mostly 15-year-old boys with no sense of fair play, while the Horde believes the Alliance
is full of unskilled n00bs and girls
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. These descriptions
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may seem puerile, but they are

although they must compete with classes that are less flexible and more clearly designed for a particular
role. The abilities and limitations of the druid class have been highly contested throughout class changes in
World of Warcraft over the years and their flexibility can make them a difficult class to play well.
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Both the “Tauren” and “Trolls” are races available to players from the Horde faction of World of
Warcraft.
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“Boomkin” is a colloquial term for a “dps-spec” druid, meaning one what is “spec”ialized for dps. In this
form, which looks like a chubby bird with antlers (called a moonkin in-game), the druid can cast spells, but
is not efficient at the tanking or healing roles. Players acquire specialized items to support their “spec.”
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In 2009, Blizzard released a game patch that allowed players to “dual spec,” meaning that at any given
time, players could choose between one of two specs in which their character had been trained. Prior to
this, many players had paid in-game gold (currency) in order reset their spec and switch from one spec to
another. Being able to play the same character well as both, for example, a tank and a dps, requires both
skill and a significant investment of time.
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Within the game, the Horde and Alliance factions have limited interactions with each other. Players who
create characters on the Horde side cannot type messages directly to the Alliance faction but both have
special options to attack players from the opposite faction that are not available within their own faction.
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“n00bs” are players new to the game, who don’t know what to do or how to play well. As with many
sports, “playing like a girl” is an insult to a player’s ability.
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an integral part of creating an ‘us versus them’ mentality which fosters both a sense of
community and of competition against the other side.
Within the game space, knowing information like faction, class, spec and level is
not only important in terms of instrumental interaction with a player (can this player help
me complete this quest?), but also in terms of social interaction with them (is this player
going to be skilled/fun to play with?). Each choice made during the World of Warcraft
character creation process becomes a space for expressing individual and social identities.
Game structures such as character creation offer rich material for performance studies
analysis.
Identity performance through task-oriented interactions.
World of Warcraft also includes separate ways of communicating across large
groups, small groups and individuals (sometimes all at the same time),
encouraged/enforced social interaction through group quests, crafting, and guilds and
end-game raiding
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. The game features of World of Warcraft both encourage and enforce
competitive and collaborative interaction. After building a new character, a player begins
the game dressed in basic clothing, carrying basic weapons, and in an area full of weak
animals and minor threats. To advance, the player must complete quests and defeat
enemies to gain experience and collect better armor and weapons. Gaining experience
also results in gaining levels and unlocking skills. No matter what kind of character a

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Variations on these themes for both Horde and Alliance players can be found throughout postings on the
World of Warcraft forums: previously available at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/forum, currently
available at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/.
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Group quests, crafting, guilds and end-game raiding are described in further detail in Chapter 1:
“Understanding the Dispositions of Second-Generation Gamers.”
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player creates, the beginning structure of the game is the same. After a few levels, the
player is asked to complete a more challenging quest
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that requires the assistance of
other players. These quests range from defeating a marauding raider to subduing political
dissidents to killing a beast that is threatening the local area, but they generally include a
tough opponent and several lackeys who all engage in the fight at the same time and
easily overwhelm a single player. Therefore, players band together by asking for help in
the local area chat channel, or by joining an automated “Looking for Group” system,
which has gone through many iterations in an effort to fill the need of players to form
groups.
Crafting
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is another game feature that nudges the player toward social
interaction. In the beginning of learning a craft, players can collect or purchase the
necessary items for their craft, whether it’s fabric for sewing clothes or herbs for brewing
potions. Once the player has progressed, he can learn recipes for making more complex
goods, which can require goods made by other crafting skills. For example, in order to
make the armor “Dark Leather Shoulders,” a Leatherworker must combine 12 Medium
Leather (produced by Skinners), 1 Gray Dye (purchased from vendors), 2 Fine Thread
(purchased from vendors), and 1 Elixir of Lesser Agility (produced by Alchemists). The
player who knows Leatherworking might also be a Skinner, but because characters can

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During one of the early patch updates to World of Warcraft, these kinds of quests were labeled “(Elite)”
to indicate that the player might need assistance to complete the quest. A later patch color-coded these
quests as red (meaning they were difficult at the first level that a player was eligible to complete the quest).
After Blizzard added more complex quest types, these kinds of quests were relabeled “(Group)”.
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Crafting is described in detail in Chapter 1: “Understanding the Dispositions of Second-Generation
Gamers.”
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only learn two primary skills, the Leatherworker cannot also be a Skinner and an
Alchemist. The necessity to trade for crafting ingredients creates another motivation for
social interactions and for a thriving economy of bartering, auctioning, and trading. As
Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Player’s Guide states, “In World of Warcraft, interacting
with other players is optional. You can reach the level cap without ever joining forces
with another player, without even saying hello to anyone on your realm. But by going it
alone, you won’t be able to master some of the game’s tougher challenges, you will likely
take longer to reach the endgame, and you won’t have access to the game’s most
powerful magical treasures.”
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On a more abstract level, initial interactions between players are often formulaic,
similar to Goffman’s (1959) sense of self presentation. For first-generation players who,
stereotypically, do not have a lot of social skills, the “scripted” instrumental nature of
first encounters in an MMO space make interactions go more smoothly. Other players
can be easily categorized by their skills, gear score, achievements, and guild affiliation as
a way of making sense of social interactions. A player’s contribution to group activities
can be accurately measured, recorded and contrasted with other players filling similar
roles. The intertwining of social interactions with quantitative valuation within MMOs
like World of Warcraft makes identity performance visible in an unusual way.
MMOs take place within the context of a larger discourse of identity
The performance of identity that happens within video games is not limited to in-
game interactions. Players make connections through shared experiences within the

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Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Players Guide is available at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/guide/.
68
game, shared interests, and hours of interaction during game play. Those connections are
reinforced through a larger context of participatory fandom (Jenkins, 2006a, 2006b)
outside the game. These out-of-game opportunities for self-identification include third-
party informational websites, fansites dedicated to everything from guilds to classes to
individual players, gameplay videos posted on sites like YouTube, machinima
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, fan
conventions, and fan-related accessories, like faction-specific baby clothes. World of
Warcraft references popular culture within the game, and, as will be discussed more fully
in later chapters, World of Warcraft is referenced by popular culture in turn.
Beyond discussions of fandom, World of Warcraft was produced within a broader
context. “Any given text within a discursive system is a symbolic enactment of the
cultural preoccupations of a particular historical conjunction” (Balsamo, 1996, p. 4). To
situate “gamer culture” in context, I look at what Balsamo describes as “a continuum of
discourses” (p. 4). Discourses about video games are built within discourses surrounding
leisure activities, technological expertise and mediated communication. Video game
playing is associated with other activities in those categories that have social elements,
such as television watching, social networking, and online dating websites. The
discourses about technology, communication, and leisure are connected to a larger
discourse around what it means to be a productive member of society. Players enacting
their identity within a video game are also expressing their understanding of who they are
as players, as consumers, as technology users, and as members of a larger society. While

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A genre of video where storylines are acted-out by game characters with an overlaid dialogue. These can
range from music videos “sung” by video game characters, to elaborate “movies”.
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this dissertation focuses on four main topics in game studies, it also seeks to create a
deeper understanding of the role technology takes in our society.
Through the lens of performance studies, in Chapter 3 I look closely at different
ways that individual characteristics of gender, race and age are enacted by players
through their interactions with the game and with other players. In Chapter 4, I explore
the social identities that players develop through their participation in the game
community and examine how this connects with their investment into other players.

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Chapter 3: Crafting a Gamer Identity
Second-generation gamers are not your typical gamer. They do not match the
physical stereotypes of a first-generation gamer— male, adolescent, and Caucasian—and
they bring a different disposition to their gameplay; however, the general discourse about
gamers and gamer culture is still focused on first-generation gamers (Griffiths, Davies &
Chappell, 2003, 2004). In this chapter, I examine how second-generation players perform
identity in World of Warcraft and how they individually craft their gamer identity by
choosing to highlight or hide aspects of their physical identities. The chapter is divided
into the following sections:
• The first-generation gamer stereotype
• “Gamers are male”: Performing gender
• “Gamers are Caucasian”: Performing ethnicity
• “Gamers are adolescent”: Performing age
The First-Generation Gamer Stereotype
First-generation gamer identities and gamer culture developed around a set of
conventions about who the players were, what roles
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the players took within the game
and how the players negotiate competition and team-based collaboration. First-generation
players are hobbyists. They spend time and money building computers that enhance their
gaming experience by, for example, improving graphics displays or increasing processing
power. During raids, they boast about ping speeds and calculate lag time. They are nerdy,
with all the associations that go with being nerdy. “In the United States, our collective

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By “role” I refer to the Tank, Healer, or DPS role that players take on when playing in a group.
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stereotype conjures up an immediate image: Isolated, pale-skinned teenage boys sit
hunched forward on a sofa in some dark basement space, obsessively mashing buttons”
(Williams, 2006, p. 229). Mainstream media represent the stereotypical gamer as a young
Caucasian male—someone who has the time and money to play computer games—or as
an older, dysfunctional adult still trapped in childhood.
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This stereotype is what second-
generation players expect when they start playing World of Warcraft; however, the social
structure of the game is not defined by the game, but is enacted by the players.
Social interaction in a game is goal oriented at its most basic level. Physical
identity does not determine the ability of an individual to contribute to achieving the goal.
Rather, identity is socially constructed around determining a player’s level of maturity
and expertise. If you need help slaying a dragon, it does not matter if your fellow raiders
are women or Asians or grandparents as long as they are competent players and won’t
steal all of the loot at the end of the raid. First-generation gamers understand that a
player’s performance of being a gamer is more important than their physical identity. For
example, one afternoon I was playing a level 13 female Night Elf warrior in Darkshore. I
was grouped with a PUG (pick up group) in order to complete a group quest to defeat
Murkdeep
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. Being a low-level area, these PUG members were still pretty new to the
game. Because they were not familiar with the quest, I began typing an explanation of
what would happen and what the group members needed to do. As I was typing the

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See Chapter 5 for a discussion of media representations of gamers.
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All mobs have descriptive names such as “Greymist Hunter” or “Greymist Netter,” but select mobs have
unique names like “Murkdeep” or “Xabraxxis.” “Named” mobs are usually either part of a quest or offer
some special loot and are usually more difficult to defeat than a regular mob.
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explanation in short sentences, I was interrupted by a player typing, “r u a girl”. I replied,
“yes,” and continued with the explanation. He then said, “no way ur a girl,” to which I
replied, “okay, I’m not,” and finished the explanation. The player then said, “wait r u
really a girl,” and I said, “yes,” and started the quest. The questioning player, being an
inexperienced gamer, was less interested in completing the task and more interested in
my gender, perhaps because common knowledge said that all female characters are
played by males, or possibly as a means of establishing whether my leadership was valid.
If the player were more seeped in first-generation gamer culture, he would have focused
more on completing the task and less on my character’s gender and what it suggested
about mine.
As discussed in Chapter 1, second-generation players are more diverse in terms of
age, race, and gender; however, stereotypes about gamers are still defined by first-
generation players and are aided by the affordances of mediated communication. In the
online setting, visual clues fade in importance for determining a person’s identity, and
their character’s statistics becomes more definitive of their gamer identity. In World of
Warcraft, clues to a player’s physical identity come through three communicative
channels:
(1) Typed. Typed conversation often expresses the player’s personality. Players will
consider word choice, punctuation, use of emoticons (smiley faces, etc.), and use
of gaming jargon when seeking clues about the person behind the avatar. For
example, when I am typing I spell out words like “you” rather than the simplified
“u” and I use punctuation. Based on those clues, other players have inferred that I
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was older than the stereotypical gamer and some have asked my age to confirm
their assumption.
(2) Spoken. In addition to third-party VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) software,
many online games
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offer in-game VoIP in conjunction with a headset or
speakers and microphone which allows players to speak to other players, and
voice is used to identify a person’s ethnicity, age, or other characteristic. For
example, any player who claimed to not have a microphone or does not speak is
suspected of being female and, therefore, might not be a skilled player. One deaf
player complained that he was discriminated against because he could not listen to
vocal instructions. Raid leaders did not want to take the time to type to him, so
they refused to add him to groups.
(3) Behaviors. Playing styles are scrutinized by other players not only in terms of
ability but also for clues about the player’s physical identity. Players who are
friendly, more cooperative and/or are playing characters that take on supporting
roles in groups, such as Healer classes, are more likely to be asked if they are
female, while Tanks and/or more competitive players are likely to be thought of
as male.
Gamers collect identity clues from to all three communicative channels when they
are interacting with new players. For example, Dan, a player with a thick Eastern-
European accent, knew that people had trouble understanding his English and felt like

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Examples include World of Warcraft and Second Life (Linden Lab, 2004), as well as games played on
Xbox consoles using Xbox Live or Playstation consoles using the Sony Entertainment Network.
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people treated him differently because of his accent. To prevent discrimination, Dan told
other players that he did not have a microphone. He would login to VoIP so that he could
listen to instructions, but would always respond in text. In addition, he was a laid-back,
helpful player and his main character was a healer-class resto shaman. As a result, many
players assumed that he was a girl. Sometimes he played along with that assumption for
fun, rather than argue with players who might insist on hearing his voice. He learned
quickly that it was easier to conform to the expectations of other players than to
emphasize his differences. Dan and other second-generation players struggle with
discrepancies between their own physical characteristics and gamer stereotypes about
gender, ethnicity, and age. This chapter looks at second-generation players’ development
and performance of their “gamer identity.”
“Gamers are male”: Performing Gender
Within World of Warcraft, the gender of the character has little
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impact on the
abilities of the character within the game. Male and female warriors do not do different
amounts of damage. Male and female holy priests do not heal better. Therefore, gender is
an entirely personal decision and the performance of gender is performed by the players,
not by the structure of the game.
First-generation representations of females fall into two categories: a
hypersexualized controllable character or a sexy tomboy player who’s “just one of the
guys”. The hypersexualization of females in video games is well documented (cf. Downs

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The differences between male and female characters are not about how well the characters can
accomplish goals in the game, but are the dance moves, the appearance of pieces of gear, and the jokes and
comments a character makes.
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& Smith, 2010) but alienating for many second-generation female gamers who complain
about their characters being virtual barbies. Female gamers can relate more closely to to
the tomboy identity. Jenkins (1998) described “gamer grrlz”
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as hardcore gamers who
assert their gender as an integral part of their gaming identity. Media representations of
gamer grrlz focus on young, attractive players who defeat male players at their own
games while wearing mini-skirts and full make-up. An example of this is the industry-
created gaming group, Frag Dolls. “The Frag Dolls are a team of professional female
gamers recruited by Ubisoft to promote their video games and represent the presence of
women in the game industry. These gamer girls play and promote games at industry and
game community events, compete in tournaments, and participate daily in online gamer
geek activities” (Ubisoft, 2010, “About Us”). This example of “girl gamers” is based on
first-generation gamer feminine ideals, which makes them difficult for second-generation
female players to identify with Frag Dolls.
Turkle (1995) believed that the affordances of online communication give users a
“chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their
identity and to try out new ones” (p. 12). Rather than exploring what it meant to “be
male,” second-generation gamers are more interested in developing a gamer identity that
allows them to be authentic without being ridiculed by first-generation players. The

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Several communities of female gamers exist outside of a specific game, offering video game commentary
and advice from a female perspective and highlighting female gamers and members of the game industry.
For example: Gamer grrlz (http://www.gamergrrlz.net/), Girl Gamer (http://www.girlgamer.com/), Gamer
Girls Unite (http://www.gamergirlsunite.com/), and Lady Gamers (http://www.ladygamers.com/) which
also includes a list of female-only gaming guilds or clans.
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gender dynamics of the guild Datarix
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offered insights into how second-generation
players perform gendered identities in World of Warcraft.
Brandon is the guild leader and founder of Datarix, whose small membership is full of
second-generation players. Brandon treats gender like a puzzle challenge, a mystery
mini-game within the game itself. When he needs to add an unknown player to fill a
group, he deliberately approaches female avatars. Brandon knows that females are more
likely to make female avatars
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, so he hopes that the players will also be female, but he
does not ask them immediately. Brandon looks for gender clues in text, voice and
behaviors while running quests or a dungeon with the unknown female character or
engaging them in extended conversation. If he thinks that the player might be physically
female, he sends the character a virtual rose through the in-game mail system. If he gets a
positive response to the rose, he decides that they are female and invites them to join his
guild. Because of this recruiting tactic, Datarix is predominantly populated by female
members, an unusual circumstance since women are still a minority among game players
(Williams, Yee, & Caplan, 2008; Griffiths, Davies & Chappell, 2003, 2004).
Interestingly, one of the enticements Brandon used to recruit new members was that there
were already so many other female players. One new recruit said, “i have [another] guild
i play with but i want to play with other women.” Within Datarix, the female players
could be more authentic to their physical identities without fear of being treated
differently.

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Like player names, references to guild names have been changed throughout this dissertation.
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Research supports Brandon’s observations, cf. Williams, Yee & Caplan, 2008 and Yee 2006.
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Second-generation players are conscious of the gender choices that they make and
that, similar to the physical world, expectations around behavior change based on gender.
Many second-generation gamers pass as a stereotypical player as a way to assert their
competency as gamers. The assumption that all players are male, regardless of their
avatar’s gender, creates a space for anyone who does not fit the stereotype to engage in
passing since “masking discreditable identities with more socially acceptable ones
through passing offers individuals the potential to escape the expectations others impose
on them because of their group membership and its related stigma” (Renfrow, 2004, p.
488). Much like a homosexual passing for a heterosexual in a heterosexual-centric world,
some female players use the technical affordances of the online setting to pass as males to
evade assumptions related to their physical gender. “Many individual identity deceptions
are acts of omission, rather than commission; they involve hiding one’s identity”
(Donath, 1999, p. 49).
Describing second-generation identity performance as passing is more accurate
than identity exploration. Although players may dabble with gender-swapping in their
social interaction, there is no incentive within the structure of the game for players to
perform a particular gender
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. Kendall (1998) found that her subjects, online MUD
participants, “dismiss the potential fluidity of online identity as illusory” (p. 130).
“Erving Goffman (1959), in his classic work The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life, distinguished between the ‘expressions given and the

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Specifically designated “role-playing” servers are one exception to this, although only social convention
enforces identity performance on these servers; the structure of the game remains the same.
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‘expressions given off.’ The former are the deliberately stated messages
indicating how the one wishes to be perceived; the latter are the much
more subtle—and sometimes unintentional—messages communicated via
action and nuance (Goffman 1959). Both forms of expression are subject
to deliberate manipulation, but the ‘expression given off’ may be much
harder to control. One can write ‘I am female,’ but sustaining a voice and
reactions that are convincingly a woman’s may prove to be quite difficult
for a man” (Donath, 1999, p. 36).
Most gender-swapping males were motivated more about spending hours staring
at a female avatar rather than identifying as female and exploring their femininity. Nick
explained that he created his beautiful female Night Elf
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avatar because, “after 2 yrs of
staring at a lizard butt, i wantted something nice to look at”
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. Fewer females played male
characters. Emily wanted to make a warrior-class character, so she made it male because
a big, buff male warrior made more sense to her than a slender female warrior. On the
other hand, Alexandra had all-male characters. She felt that she received more respect
from other players because she was playing a male avatar and was offered better playing
opportunities.

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In the initial release of World of Warcraft, players could choose from eight different “races” with their
own history, special abilities, and starting locations on the game map. All of the races were humanoid, but
the “Night Elf” race most closely resemboled a sexualized human female. Ducheanuet, Yee, Nickell and
Moore (2006) note “players clearly favoring the “sexy” female Night Elves (source of much derision in the
player community, with stories of male teenagers mesmerized by these characters’ “/dance” animation)…”
( pp. 296-297)
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When he says, “lizard butt” the player is referring to his reptilian non-human avatar in Star Wars
Galaxies (Sony Online Entertainment, 2003).
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Most female players claimed that they made conscious choices regarding
language, mannerisms, technology use, and sometimes character appearance in order to
avoid questions about their sexuality and also questions about their competence. While
digital game advertisers and researchers talk about increases in the number of female
gamers, the culture of digital games still reinforces gender roles and treats female players
as an anomaly. Carrie said, “we talk differently than men and they always know we're
women right away usually” and Abby said, “I try not to use girlie words.” Both women
feared that other (male) players would not accept them as accomplished players
otherwise. For them, passing was not a conscious choice, but a justification for being
recognized for their gaming skills, rather than their gender, the way they speak, or their
appearance. Social and cultural understandings of expected behaviors for genders move
from the physical world into online games, but virtual spaces create opportunities not
only for identity play, but for women to receive acceptance for expertise directly related
to their abilities and separate from their gender.
Other female players felt that acknowledging their gender allowed them to benefit
from gifts as well as easier demands on their game-playing ability and chose not to pass.
Oftentimes, the in-game guild structure was seen as a “safe” place where gender should
not be an issue. In contrast, interacting with non-guild members in raids or PUGs (pick-
up group) was when female players performed gendered identities, either through passing
or flaunting their femininity. All interviewees had developed a preferred coping strategy
to support, confront or evade perceived stereotypes about their gender and incorporated
this strategy into their everyday gaming habits.
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“Gamers are Caucasian”: Performing Ethnicity
Much of the discussion about representations (and misrepresentations) of race in
online spaces (e.g., Kolko, Nakamura & Rodman, 2000; Leonard, 2006) centers on the
visual aspects of games (e.g., Higgin, 2009; Kafai, Cook & Fields, 2010) and the fact that
basic avatars tend to be pink or light-skinned, with the exception of a non-human green,
blue, or purple. Within World of Warcraft, a character’s “race” is defined by both visual
appearance and “racial” skills available to that character. Other than the superficial
structures of the game, ethnicity as an identity, like gender, is performed through social
interactions.
Second-generation players are Caucasian, Asian, African-American, Latino, and
other ethnicities, but they decide how they will perform ethnicity in World of Warcraft.
For example, one player with the racially marked character name Josealvarez liked to go
to one of the main cities
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within the game and tell Latino racial jokes. When other
players complain (some more politely than others), Josealvarez replied that it was okay
for him
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to tell Latino jokes because he is Latino. Regardless of the validity of his
reasoning, his racial claims were not verifiable other than that he had chosen a Latino-
sounding name for his character and he self-identified as Latino. Josealvarez chose to
actively perform ethnicity in a way that deliberately disrupted social norms both within
and outside of the game.

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Because cities are hubs of activity and the location of supply vendors, many players gather in cities. This
means that the “public” channel reaches more eyes than in other locations.
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The player’s character was male, so I refer to the player in the masculine form.
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Other second-generation players are more hesitant to advertise their difference
from the gamer stereotype. While leveling a character in Zangermarsh, a mid- to high-
range area of the game, I met a group of Latino
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players. These players ran in a group of
3-4 players, depending on who was online at any given time, and would grab a PUG
player or two whenever they wanted or needed more people. This group of players
communicated with each other using headsets and microphones through VoIP
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, but they
did not include the PUG members. The VoIP access was, in part, limited to outsiders
because all of the members of this group spoke distinctly Spanish-accented English.
This group made decisions about game play vocally, i.e. where to go next or how
they were doing on quest progress. PUG members would often express confusion,
impatience or frustration since they could not hear the directions and, from their
perspective, everyone would suddenly head in one direction and they would have to race
to catch up. Most of the time when there was no VoIP, PUGs communicate by text. In
this situation, because all of the usual members of this group would be talking by voice,
they ignored conventions and neither typed commands nor responded to typing from
PUG members. More than one PUG member left the group abruptly, sometimes after
vehemently expressing their anger with the lack of communication from the rest of the
group.

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The term Latino is not an accurate representation of race or ethnicity. I use it here because almost all the
members of this group acknowledged a Latin heritage although one member was Philipino/Puerto Rican,
another was Mexican-American, and two were “from New York City, yo.”
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This particular group used a VoIP program called TeamSpeak (TS) which did not require a monthly fee,
but limited the number of people who could use it at one time. First-generation gamers generally preferred
a competing software called Ventrilo because the user limit made TS useless for raid groups. Therefore, TS
versus Ventrilo use was an indicator of the quality/expertise of a group of players.
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My introduction to this group broke their typical interactions with PUG members
in two aspects: (1) I was extremely knowledgeable about the quests we were completing,
so I was directing the activities of the group via text, rather than being excluded from
directions. (2) My avatar was female. Among these particular players, homophobia
and/or machismo meant that they did not play female avatars and they expressed disgust
for any males who did. They asked me directly about my gender and, as was my standard
policy, I replied truthfully that I was female. I believe it was the novelty of a
knowledgeable female player (or perhaps disbelief) that led them to invite me to join their
VoIP and to ask me to continue playing with them. As they grew more comfortable with
my presence, they began to call me “chica” and to toss Spanish words into their text and
spoken conversations. They overtly expressed their ethnicity only after I had earned their
trust. I played with this group for over a month and had intermittent conversations with
several of the players for the next two years.
Although they met within the game, for this group of players, being Latinos
created a bond greater than the social or game structures of World of Warcraft. The
members of this group were located in different parts of the country, only two knew each
other personally, and had different economic backgrounds. In addition to their cliquish
communicative behavior, this group exhibited other behaviors that prioritized their social
interactions with each other over being efficient game players. First, the characters of the
players were not all at the same level. The structure of World of Warcraft and many other
MMOs include tiered access to map locations and quests. This means that quests are
designed to be completed at a particular level, so, for example, characters level 1-10 will
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be questing in a “newbie” area and not competing with the characters level 11-20 in
another area who have quests involving level 11-20 monsters. It is unusual to have
players with a broad range of levels playing together because the game structure is
designed so that low-level characters cannot successfully attack high-level monsters, and
players of different levels cannot receive the same benefit from doing the same quests.
“The amount of experience you get for completing a quest will drop as you get to higher
levels. This prevents people from going back and doing a bunch of super easy quests with
high level characters,” (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010b, “Quests Basics”). This group,
although they gained levels throughout the time I played with them, consisted of three
lower levels, 61, 62, and 64, and one higher level 69. The area where I initially met them
is designed for levels 60-64, so the level 69 player, Joseph, was over the level for the
area. Completing quests in a lower-level area is the equivalent of having the same job as
a co-worker, but being paid $5/hour less that the other person. However, Joseph had set
up and was running the TeamSpeak (VoIP, TS) server used by the Latino group and he
genuinely seemed to enjoy playing with this group despite having already completed
many of the quests.
Another strikingly aspect was that each member of the group was in a different
guild
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. “A guild is a group of players that join together for companionship, adventure,

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Similar to a community sports team, a group of players can start a guild with a unique name and logo.
According to Blizzard Entertainment, “Guilds offer many benefits including free items, opportunities for
groups, access to trade skill masters, quest items, and readily available trade skill ingredients through
gathering guild members. You may discover that a guild greatly enhances your gameplay experience. You
can meet friends, share adventures, and find people to protect you if you fight in faction versus faction
combat. Typically, players in good guilds can go places and do things that players in poor guilds or no
guild can't. This is especially the case at maximum character level (80), where the dungeons become very
challenging,” (2010b, “Joining Guilds”).
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economic gain and more” (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010b, “Guilds”). Guilds are both
socially and technologically created in World of Warcraft and fill a complicated role in
the gameplay experience. They help players develop (1) social connections–people with
whom to play and socialize, (2) pride of name/belonging/identification–a group identity
of which they can be a member, (3) pooled resources–easier access to necessary pieces of
the game, and (4) layers of game structure–technically, being in a guild changes the
character’s name label and tabard, gives the player access to a guild bank as well as
opening a guild chat channel for intra-guild communication. Games researchers have
documented instances where first-generation gamers play a video game with a group of
friends and become socially invested in the members of the guild to the point that when a
new game is released, the majority of a guild may transfer to the new game and recreate
the guild community (e.g., Pearce, 2009). Often players will go on “guild runs” meaning
that all of the players engaging in the 5-person, 10-person, 25-person, or 40-person
activity are members of the same guild. Other times, guild members will play with
members of other guilds when running a PUG or if two guilds form an alliance, but
groups of friends who play together consistently generally form or join the same guild.
In contrast to the common perception of what it means to be a member of a guild,
the Latino group of players prioritized their interactions with each other more than their
interactions with guildmates. The Latinos were each in a different guild. They each spoke
well of their guild, but they did not exhibit a strong sense of connection to their
guildmates. Only one player, Joseph, actively played with his guild and would leave the
group of Latino players to raid or attempt more difficult activities with his guildmates.
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On more than one occasion, after Joseph completed the “guild run,” he left his guildmates
and returned to playing with the group of Latinos. For these second-generation players,
their gameplay needs were being met by other people within the game, but their social
needs were better served by finding players of the same ethnicity. Similar to Datarix
feeling like a safe place for female players to “be female,” the Latino group’s VoIP was a
safe place to talk without being judged for being Latino.
“Gamers are adolescent”: Performing Age
First-generation players have grown up with MMOs. In 1984, McClure and Mears
found that “Frequent video-game players were young, male, and liked competitive
activities, such as playing sports. They were bright and liked challenges and science
fiction movies,” (p. 271). Twenty years later, many of those bright, young videogame
players have become bright, adult video game players, but the stereotype remains about
gamers being young. Second-generation players, on the other hand, are many ages, young
and old, and part of developing their gamer identity is about how they perform maturity.
Players search for clues among communicative channels to determine the age of
other players as a context in which to situate their trustworthiness and expertise. For
example, impatient players who are constantly moving their avatar, sliding them side to
side, running in circles, or hopping up and down
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are often assumed to be young, as if
the fidgeting of impatient children translated into the virtual space. Players who engage in
this twitching of their characters are usually expressing a desire to get through the boring

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Movements in World of Warcraft are generally controlled by pressing and holding buttons on the
keyboard, so “nervous twitches” that are visually represented as jerky or repetitive movements of the
character are actually controlled by a player’s fingers.
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coordination of a group of people and on to the fun action part of the game. This suggests
to other players that the impatient player is not able to maintain focus and may not be
mature enough to be in positions of authority, such as leading a group.
Immaturity is not confined to the young; however, the young and the elderly are
held to lower expectations of expertise than adults. First-generation players used the
phrases “just a kid” and “like a girl” to belittle other players or to make excuses for a
deficient performance. Both younger and older players are sensitive to age discrimination
in the game. Travis, a first-generation gamer, spoke at length about his positive
experiences with the Star Wars Galaxies (Sony Online Entertainment, 2003) community
and how pale World of Warcraft players were by comparison. While playing Star Wars
Galaxies, Travis, who was then 15, only told his age to a couple of select players to
protect his reputation. In Star Wars Galaxies, Travis was known as a good source for in-
game information and as an excellent dispute mediator, and he believed that telling other
players his actual age would devalue the social capital he had created. In this way, Travis
and other young players were exploring the performance of maturity in a way that closely
aligns with Turkle’s (1995) identity exploration.
Another example of age-related exploration is Wayne, a 14-year-old boy. Within
the game, Wayne repeatedly broke the norms of gamer culture and was generally an
unpleasant personality. He would frequently ask other players for help or for money but
would never offer it in return. He often began a group activity and then left in the middle
of it, leaving the other players in a difficult situation. He was also a bad sport and would
verbally abuse other players, telling them “u suck.” Several times, members of other
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guilds contacted officers in Wayne’s guild to complain about his rude behavior and bad
attitude. Wayne’s membership in the guild was based on nepotism, because his mother
was also a member, so despite being removed from the guild several times, Wayne was
always re-invited. When Wayne was confronted, he used his age as an excuse, saying,
“im only 14.” For players like Wayne, age was a “get out of jail free” card they could use
to avoid being held accountable to adult standards of behavior.
Similar to youth being perceived as immature, the elderly are perceived as
enfeebled and held to lower expectations of expertise. Laura is a grandmother in her 60s
whose children and grandchildren played World of Warcraft and was an active player
herself. She occasionally played with her family members, but they were hardcore raiders
and driven to excel in a way Laura was not interested in, so she spent most of her time
playing with a second-generation guild that was only beginning to start raiding. Laura’s
character was a resto druid with high-level gear. Her character is a Healer class, which
was in demand on the server, so she always had invitations to join group activities.
Within her small guild, she was invited to every 10-man and 25-man raid that they
attempted.
Although Laura was one of the top healers in the guild, she was treated differently
by her guildmates because she was an elderly woman. They saved items of gear for her
and slowed down explanations. Occasionally, they would just say “you don’t have to
worry about it” when Laura did not seem to understand a strategy, and they generally
looked out for her. For example, Laura’s guild had started exploring Naxxramas, a raid
instance with multiple bosses similar to Karazhan, which included complicated boss
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battles. One evening, the guild was attempting to defeat Thaddius. The Thaddius fight
comes in two phases
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and in-between the phases, the entire raid must leap from a
platform surrounded by water onto a stage where Thaddius awaits. To successfully cross
the water, players must time their jump so that their character leaps within one step of the
edge. Jumping too soon or too late misses the stage and lands in the water where the
player then has to run back to the entrance of the room to climb back onto the platform
and try the jump again. As Laura’s guild was preparing to start the Thaddius battle, a
more experienced player walked the raid through the battle strategy, including the crucial
timing of the jump between phases. While those directions were being given, the raid
leader sent me a whisper
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:
Greg: uve done this right?
Me: yep
Greg: if we dont make the jump wer screwtd
Me: yep. want me to levatate
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someone?
Greg: ya. can u levatate [Laura]?
Me: kk

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Detailed walkthroughs of this boss fight are available online, including
http://www.wowwiki.com/Thaddius.
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Communication within a raid is often complex, mixing voice and text. Whispers between members of the
raid are common in order to clarify comments, make inside jokes, or have a private discussion. VoIP is
used for general announcements and discussions and is usually audible to the entire group. One raid group I
ran with used two VoIP channels simultaneously so that officers could debate strategies and complain
about other players without confusing or directly insulting the rest of the raid.
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Levitate is a Priest spell which “Allows the friendly party or raid target to levitate, floating a few feet
above the ground. While levitating, the target will fall at a reduced speed and travel over water.” (Priest
User Interface, World of Warcraft, Blizzard, 2004).
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Greg: I love her but shes [Laura]
Greg: no way she can do this
The raid leader was asking me to cast the spell “Levitate” on Laura between the
first and second phases of the fight. This would mean that when Laura attempted the
jump, she would gently float across the gap regardless of when she hit the jump button,
and it would be very difficult for Laura to miss the jump with Levitate on her. Because a
priest can cast only one Levitate at a time, the raid leader asked me to cast it on the player
he thought was most likely to fail the jump. This brief exchange is an example of ways
that Laura’s guildmates responded to her performance of age. They took steps to protect
her from herself and to protect her from gaining the enmity of other players. At the same
time, Laura chooses to play with a guild that lets her be herself, rather than playing with
her family’s hardcore raiding guild.
More than just being old or young, performance of age is also enacted through
acknowledging family relationships with other players within the game. World of
Warcraft can be a very family friendly game. Husbands and wives played side by side in
their homes. Grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren can all share a love of
playing. Engaging in game activities with another person can be a bonding experience for
players. For example, most of the players under 15 that I observed either played in groups
with a parent or, like Wayne, were in the same guild. Sometimes, family would
acknowledge their family connections – fathers and sons, sisters, or brothers – revealing
their age or gender through these relationships and adding their familial role to their
gamer identity.
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An example was a father and son I met while questing in the Redridge Mountains,
a low-level area. I had just reached an area where I could complete a number of quests,
when I noticed two characters in the same area. One was a paladin class – a combination
class that can both deal damage and absorb damage effectively. The other player was a
priest class – someone who could deal damage and heal themselves and other players, but
could not absorb very much damage. The two players were working together, so I
assumed they must be grouped.
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Knowing that there was a group quest
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nearby, I sent a
whisper to the paladin asking if they wanted to group with me for the quest. I received
no immediate response, so I continued attacking giant spiders and angry buzzards to
complete the quest I was working on. Several minutes later, I received a whisper from
the priest apologizing for the lack of response from the paladin. “He’s my son. He’s only
3 years old.” This surprised me and I opened a dialogue with the priest about how he
played World of Warcraft with such a young son. The father, his son and I played
together for about an hour while we completed quests. The three-year-old son could
neither type nor read typing – including the instructions within the game. However, the
child delighted in attacking the animals and other fantasy creatures required for the quests
and even knew to click on a defeated enemy to collect the loot. His father played with
him, managed his interactions with other players, and, by playing a supporting class
(priest), enabled his son to focus on attacking targets and not have to worry about health.

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“Grouped” players work together to complete difficult tasks and share or split the benefits and the
rewards.
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A group quest is designed to encourage social interaction through working together and is extremely
difficult for one player to complete.
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The son played on a computer next to his father, allowing his father to watch and respond
to the game information on both of their screens. I was very impressed with the son’s
playing skills despite not being able to read instructions or respond to typed commands.
More importantly, the father’s online identity was connected to his son’s. He was a
gamer, playing the game, completing the quests, and leveling his character, but he was
also performing fatherhood, both in the game and in the physical world.
Another intergenerational duo was Brian, a 12-year-old player, and his father.
Brian was an excellent and dedicated player and most PUG players assumed he was
much older than his 12 years. Brian and his father played in the same guild. One night, in
the middle of an instance, Brian and his father’s characters suddenly stopped moving and,
after a few minutes, they started to hearth
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. As their characters disappeared from the
instance, Brian typed, “sorry” and “my moms having a baby” in Guild chat. Everyone in
the guild started asking questions about the future sibling and Brian happily answered as
his father’s character logged out
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. After about 15 minutes, Brian’s father logged back in
and apologized to the guild for leaving the instance in such a hurry and leaving the group
two characters short. His guildmates told him not to worry and to get his wife to the
hospital. After a few more apologies and comments about the impending birth, Brian and
his father both logged off for the night. When he logged in the next day, Brian described
how excited he was to have a baby sister. Both Brian and his father were sharing the
excitement of the new baby with their guild friends. They brought the change in their

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Each character starts the game with a Hearthstone, an item which allows the character to teleport to their
home base once an hour. “Hearthing” is the term for when a character activates their Hearthstone.
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Players receive notifications when people on their friends list or in their guild login or logoff.
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family into the game space and added “brother” or “new father” to their gamer identities.
This also became part of their identity performance within the guild, because “the baby”
became a reason for changing the amount of time they spent in the game and the kinds of
activities in which they participated. By incorporating their family life into their gamer
identities, they changed their relationship to other players by changing the expectations
other players had about them.
Conclusion
Social norms around gender, ethnicity, and age are not only physical
characteristics, but also influence the how second-generation gamers develop their gamer
identity. First- and second-generation players look for typed, verbal, and behavioral clues
about other players’ identities, especially to determine a player’s levels of maturity and
expertise. Second-generation gamers find it difficult to identify with the gamer stereotype
and often find ways to pass as the stereotype and to circumvent gamer norms by creating
safe enclaves where they can express their gender or ethnicity. As second-generation
gamers explore World of Warcraft, they enact a performance of their personal gamer
identity. This identity is an outward projection of who they are and who they want to be
in the game space. In Chapter 4, I will explore how second-generation gamers respond to
others’ identity performances and begin to consider themselves as part of a community.

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Chapter 4: Performing a Social Identity in an Online Community
World of Warcraft is a member of the MMO genre, with attributes like online
play
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and being a persistent world
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. Unlike a video game which can be paused and
progress saved, each World of Warcraft server hosts a lively community of players, each
player contributing to the culture on that server. This chapter explores how second-
generation players perform social identities through their contributions and responses to
the community of players. The sections of this chapter are as follows:
• Evolving theories about online communities
• Online communities as a context for social identity performance
• Developing a social identity
• The compelling intimacy of social identity performance
Evolving Theories about Online Communities
One of the key characteristics of second-generation gamers is that they are not
steeped in gamer culture in contrast to first-generation gamers. First-generation gamers
have history with technology. They’ve played console games and MMOs and even text-
based MUD, MUSH, or MOOs
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. They have spent hours in IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
channels or AOL chat rooms or discussion forums. First-generation gamers know that

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In “online play,” the player’s computer must be connected to the Internet in order to play the game. The
game is hosted on a remote server which the players login to, allowing synchronous interaction of the
players within the game, visible on each player’s individual computer.
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A “persistent world” describes a game or virtual world in which events progress whether a player is
connected to the server or not.
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These are examples of online community platforms used to enable games and virtual spaces for social
interaction. MUD means simultaneously a Multi-User Dungeon and Multi-User Domain, MUSH is
commonly referred to as Multi-User Shared Hallucination or Multi-User Shared Hack, and MOO stands for
MUD, Object Oriented.
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there’s another player behind every avatar, and that actions in the game setting, just like
in the physical world, have social consequences. First-generation gamers are comfortable
knowing that there is a community of like-minded game players out there who, regardless
of the other things going on in their lives, make time to login and play and that their
participation is essential to the health of the community and of the game.
From the beginning, researchers have been drawn to the seemingly spontaneous
sense of community that develops in interactive online spaces. As technology has
changed, so have researchers’ understandings of what it means to be a citizen of an online
community. Rheingold’s (1993/2000) groundbreaking study of the text-based Whole
Earth ’Lectric Link (WELL) online community stretched our understanding of what was
possible through electronically mediated communication. “People in virtual communities
use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse,
conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans,
brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create
a little high art and a lot of idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about
everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind. You can’t kiss anybody
and nobody can punch you in the nose, but a lot can happen within those boundaries”
(Rheingold, 1993/2000, p. xvii). Rheingold endorsed the idea that a genuine community
with deeply personal connections could develop in cyberspace.
While Rheingold saw the authenticity of the community that developed in the
WELL, Turkle (1995) saw online communities as an inspiring place of identity
exploration. Community members were not limited by physical characteristics, but
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instead, could play with alternate identities. Members could explore how other people
treated them if they were a different gender, or age, or ethnicity. For examples, they
could create a persona who was wickedly blunt, or one who mothered everyone and
listened to their problems. Being part of an online community gave members a chance to
realize aspects of their personality that might otherwise be suppressed behind layers of
socialization.
As technologies for online communication improved, the cultures of online
communities became more vibrant. Boellstorf (2008) conducted an ethnographic study of
the graphical virtual world, Second Life (Linden Lab, 2004). He chose to treat Second
Life as if it were a location he had traveled to as an anthropologist and explored the
virtual space like he would have explored a physical space. Previous research had shown
the depth of connections people can make in an online community, that they were “a
place that people often end up revealing themselves far more intimately than they would
be inclined to do without the intermediation of screens and pseudonyms”
(Rheingold,1993/2000, p. 12). For Boellstorf, the connection between virtual and
physical-world identities was less interesting than identities which flourished within the
culture of Second Life. He made no attempt to “meet Second Life residents in the actual
world or learn their actual-world identities,” (Boellstorf, 2008, p. 61). It was enough that
these personalities existed within the community. This is a key distinction for the study of
virtual worlds – while an online community is filled with people who have identities in
the physical world, online personae are a performance, much like a theater production,
which can be examined as a performance within the confines of the performance space.
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Fandom was a starting point for many online communities, and Taylor’s (2006b)
ethnographic exploration of players in the MMO Everquest (Sony Entertainment, 1999)
was a first in-depth look at the community that develops within and around an MMO.
Unlike other online communities, the culture of a video game is more defined and
constrained by the structures of the game itself. As a contribution to online communities
research, Taylor documented and explored the meaningful relationships that players
develop with each other. As a contribution to game studies, Taylor showed how MMOs
facilitate an online community with a strong culture. Like Turkle, Taylor explored
questions of how players enacted their physical identities in the virtual world, but Taylor
also explored how game structures constrained and developed social interaction.
Other researchers (cf. Chen, 2010; Nardi, 2010) followed in Taylor’s footsteps,
exploring the culture of MMO players. This dissertation explores how negotiating an
individual identity is only one facet of identity performance. In World of Warcraft,
individual players perform not only individual identities, but also social identities. These
performed social identities shape the community as a whole. First-generation players
have a strong sense of what it means to be part of the “gamer” community, as
documented by previous researchers; however, second-generation players are still
wrestling with what their social identity should be.
Online Communities as Contexts for Social Identity Performance
Experience with social interaction in online spaces.
For most second-generation gamers, World of Warcraft was their first MMO, so
they were unfamiliar with the culture and habits of MMO communities because their
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exposure to them was limited. Second-generation gamers’ understanding of an “online
community” differs that of from first-generation players. Modern online communities are
made possible by specific technologies – blog-hosting sites, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,
FourSquare or YouTube, for some examples
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. The “online community” that Rheingold
imagined has splintered into many smaller online communities, aided by technologies
like the ones mentioned, but not tied to them. Second-generation gamers, like many non-
gamers, are members of multiple online communities. For example, just for their interest
in World of Warcraft, second-generation gamers may also read the official World of
Warcraft forums, or view the statistics of their characters on the WoW Armory
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. In
many cases, they’ve been told by other players to look up information about quests on
WoWwiki, WoWhead, or Thottbot,
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but they rarely add information to these third-party
knowledge databases. Occasionally, they will explore fansites dedicated to their specific
class
107
. They are quite likely to join a guild website or connect with their guild members
on MySpace
108
or Facebook. They may also watch humorous videos about World of

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Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) is a social-networking site originally associated with college
students. LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/) is a career-oriented social networking site. Twitter
(http://twitter.com/) is a status/micro-blogging information network focusing on “tweets” that are 140
characters or less. FourSquare (https://foursquare.com/) is a mobile application that allows users to interact
using GPS-based location data. YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) is a video-sharing website.
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A website built by Blizzard Activision that displays character, gear, achievement, etc., information for
each active character.
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WoWWiki (http://www.wowwiki.com/Portal:Main), Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com/), and
Thottbot (http://thottbot.com/).
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For examples, http://shadowpriest.com/ is dedicated to the priest class, specifically with a skill
specification to do damage, rather than to heal, while http://www.resto4life.com/ is dedicated to the druid
class, healing skill specification.
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Myspace (http://www.myspace.com/).
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Warcraft on Youtube
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, and possibly share them with friends. For second-generation
gamers, their online community is a string of micro-communities in which they may or
may not choose to become active participants and of which World of Warcraft is only a
portion.
First-generation gamers, on the other hand, are likely to maintain a strong sense of
community across technologies. They form guilds that move from game to game and
build guild websites where members can share useful or fun information, as well as
contribute to third-party knowledge databases. For first-generation gamers, it’s less about
a specific game, and more about the community they have developed within the game
space. “Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when
enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human
feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (Rheingold, 1993/2000, p.
xx). As documented repeatedly in game studies research, personal relationships are a key
element of the MMO experience. The culture of first-generation gamers is built around
the strong sense of community those personal relationships enable.
Performing social identity through audio participation.
As with any culture, particular behaviors can be used to identify members. Many
first- and second-generation World of Warcraft players use third-party voice-over-IP
(VOIP) software when playing in groups
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. It makes coordination easier and keeps the

109
As of November 27, 2011, a search of “World of Warcraft” on YouTube produced over 1 million hits.
110
When raids used 40 people during Vanilla World of Warcraft, VOIP was a requirement for any serious
raider. Later, Blizzard created an in-game voice chat system, but of such poor quality that most raiding
guilds still used third-party software. Initially, access to and ability to use a VOIP distinguished first- and
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fingers focused on character control rather than typing. As discussed previously, audio
interaction can give a lot of information about the player’s age or gender, but it also
offers an entrance into the player’s gaming space and home life. During a raid with
VOIP, players are on the computer equivalent of a conference call and you often hear
more than you intend. The microphones are normally on a “push to talk” setting, much
like a walkie-talkie or CB handset and different players set the “push” button to different
keyboard or mouse buttons, but you still get an audible picture of the space where the
player is gaming. For example, one raiding group I played with for a while offered a
wealth of audio information about their physical-world locations. Valerie, although she
lived alone, often had friends and family talking in the background. You could hear her
daughter playing Rockband
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(Electronic Arts, 2007). Roger’s mentally handicapped
brother often played near where he was on the computer and you could sometimes hear
him speaking to Roger and to himself. Owen’s mic made him sound like he was in an
echo chamber and we often tease him about being an astronaut, although he was usually
connecting from hotel rooms because his job kept him travelling. On my mic, other
players could frequently hear the sounds of police helicopters and emergency vehicles
outside my apartment; people asked about them and then said “ohhh” knowingly when I
said I lived in Los Angeles. These small clues add levels of intimacy to the social
interactions that are mediated by game characters, text and VOIP.

second-generation gamers, but VOIP became much more commonplace after the Wrath of the Lich King
expansion.
111
Rockband is a console-based game where the players simulate instruments and create music.
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It is easy to get a sense of the people you are playing with when you hear anger or
excitement or sympathy in their voices. It is easy to think differently about them if they
have an accent or sound very young, and easy to attribute negative qualities to players
who do not participate in voiced discussions. Players who consistently do not have a mic
or do not speak on VOIP have to work twice as hard to have their “voice” heard via text
in group situations where conversational norms have taken over. Players who do not
conform to the expected behaviors regarding VOIP may find their identity performance
questioned or ridiculed. Some PUGs (pick-up groups) led by first-generation gamers will
not invite anyone who does not have VOIP and will sometimes kick players out of the
group who do not have mics. By not having a mic, the players are viewed by other
players as not prepared to play the game seriously, or, even worse, that the mic-less
player might have something to hide. Not engaging fully in the audio social interactions
becomes a performance of an un-social identity, and therefore, unacceptable to first-
generation players.
Performing social identity through quantifiable participation.
First-generation players have clear, although implicit, guidelines for acceptable
behavior. They understand the value of teamwork and feel no hesitation to point out
when someone on the team is not pulling their weight (Brown & Thomas, 2008). Many
raiding guilds use a data-collection mod
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which tracks individual contributions to group

112
A “mod” is a program that modifies the player’s user interface (UI) to present game information in
personalizable ways. “Much like how previous games such as Asheron’s Call allowed users to modify the
UI, Blizzard has constructed its game system so that playerdevelopers can dramatically change not only the
way it looks but indeed how the game is experienced and played. This means that UI modifications (mods)
are not simply cosmetic but can provide core functionality to the game, even altering the nature of play
itself. Some of the mods currently available allow you to do things like add special timers to your game
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activities. “Damage meters are, as one might guess from their name, tools that calculate
the amount of damage individual players are doing to opponents (either other players or
nonplayer characters). They then typically visually represent this information in real time
within the [user interface] and can also be output as text, complete with statistics and
rankings. Damage meters can be a useful tool for players in showing them how they
compare to others in their group or raid, often acting as a notification system in case they
are doing too little or too much damage to an opponent. They can either be used
privately—as when someone has one running and simply watches the tally to see their
and others’ performance—or collectively, by publicizing the results in text to a chat
channel” (Taylor, 2006a, pp. 326-327).
In describing the first-generation-gamer attitude about individual assessment,
Brown and Thomas (2008) say, “Gamers like to be evaluated, even compared with one
another, through systems of points, rankings, titles, and external measures. Their goal is
not to be rewarded but to improve. Game worlds are meritocracies where assessment is
symmetrical (leaders are assessed just as players are), and after-action reviews are
meaningful only as ways of enhancing individual and group performance.” Lackluster
individual performance is visible to the group, providing both individual incentive and
social pressure to improve. Taylor (2006a) acknowledges that while “surveillance” mods
like damage meters are quantitative, the third-party software may not accurately reflect
every player’s contribution to a situation, e.g., the roles of some members of the team

window so you can see when spells are fading, easily swap out gear and equipment with one click, and
even instantly heal people if they get below a certain prespecified damage threshold” (Taylor, 2006a, p.
326).
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may not be to do damage. However, the extensive use of these kinds of mods offers
compelling data that supports Brown and Thomas’ argument that stereotypical players
thrive on transparency and internal competition in collaborative situations.
Performing social identity through good sportsmanship.
First-generation players associate personality types with character classes, races,
and factions, and are quick to label other players based on their behaviors. The initial
interactions of players within an MMO are often focused on achieving a group goal, so
the actions of a player can be telling about a person’s character. In the age of LiveJournal,
Wordpress
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, MySpace, and Facebook and Twitter, consumers are familiar with creating
an online presence and a representational “face” to show the world. In an online game
like World of Warcraft, that “face” is represented not so much in the physical
representations that people choose, but in other choices, such as character class, level,
and gear. Even more expressive than selecting from choices pre-defined by the game, are
the actions a player takes in different situations. At the heart of it, World of Warcraft is a
game full of collaborative and competitive elements, and players can choose whether or
not to “play nice.” First-generation gamers can tell a lot about the person behind the
character by how he/she responds at moments of choice – does she complain when
someone else wins a piece of choice loot
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in a random roll? Does he blame his mistake
on another player?

113
LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/) and WordPress (http://wordpress.com/).
114
“Loot” is a common term for any item dropped by a defeated enemy at the end of a fight. Usually these
items are divvied up between group members according to their value/usefulness and random chance.
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Taking measure of someone’s moral fiber by playing a game with them is not a
new idea. Stories about deals made on golf courses have abounded for years and the
technique has migrated into the virtual world. The idea that World of Warcraft was “the
new golf”
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hit mainstream news in February of 2006 (Pinckard, 2006; Terdiman, 2006).
Rodriguez (2006) expressed the correlation when he said, “WoW facilitates surprisingly
rich social interactions between players. In WoW I’ve set up meetings, arranged
introductions, even asked for a favor or two. All the things that used to happen at a
country club can now occur in this online space, only with an order of magnitude more
people and without the limitations of geography or tee times” (Rodriguez, 2006,
¶3).Playing a game with someone forces you to interact with that person in a consistent
and specific way. “The most important – and honestly, most surprising – thing I’ve
learned in WoW is how it forges genuine, we’ve-been-through-hell-together
friendships…. Through WoW, I’ve come to trust these guys in the same way I trust my
real-world collaborators.” (Rodriguez, 2006, ¶5). First-generation players understand the
social connectedness and trust that teamwork can develop during gameplay. Second-
generation players find it “most surprising” that interaction with other players can be
deeply personal.
Developing a Social Identity
“I believe World of Warcraft is an exemplar of a new means of forming and
sustaining human relationships and collaboration through digital technology” (Nardi,

115
The interviewee, Joi Ito, credited Cory Ondrejka with the first comparison between the
social/professional uses of World of Warcraft and the game of golf (Ito, 2006). In that same blog post, Cory
Ondrejka credits a discussion on the Terra Nova website started by Thomas Malaby (2006).
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2010, p. 5). Second-generation gamers wrestle with the “realness” of the social ties that
they develop online and with their willingness to immerse themselves in gamer culture.
They do not have the same depth of history with online interactions as first-generation
players. Second-generation players use email and social networking sites like MySpace
or Facebook, but these interactions are generally with personal friends or with friends of
friends, ties that still have some association to known relationships, unlike an MMO
community. How second-generation gamers perceive other players in the online space
has a significant impact on the player’s experience within the game.
Keeping a ‘safe’ distance.
In his often-quoted treatise on games and play, Huizinga (1950/2006) claims that
between the cheater and the spoilsport, the latter is the worst of all offenders because he
not only refuses to play by the rules, but he points out that the rules are arbitrary in the
first place. This also extends to players who refuse to participate in the norms of gamer
culture. For some second-generation players, MMOs are full of “gamers.” Although they
play games, they do not identify as “gamers,” and they do not identify with the gamer
community as a whole. These players downplay the significance of online interactions.
At best, they place people met online in a separate, lesser category of friends or
acquaintances. At worst, they pretend that other players are inconsequential and that
online anonymity protects them from responsibility for their actions. For players who
distance themselves from other people in the game, their sense of community
membership is tenuous.
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Unlike first-generation gamers who often play with their real life friends or with
guilds that move together from game to game, a lot of second-generation gamers engage
in the space as a separate world with a specific set of gaming friends. Some players keep
their game playing secret from their “real” friends or family.
Samuel, a white, mid-twenties male, held a steady job as a construction engineer.
He also played World of Warcraft for thirty to forty hours per week, which is not an
insignificant amount of time; however, Samuel made a point of always telling other
players he was unavailable for game-related activities on Friday nights because that was
his “going out” time and people should not be playing a video game on a Friday night. He
said that no one knew he played video games and he planned on keeping it that way.
Samuel’s derogatory opinion of other video game players, especially those who play to
the exclusion of any other form of socializing, is not uncommon among second-
generation players. Many second-generation players cannot identify with the stereotype
of the isolated, antisocial gamer. They are ashamed to tell friends, family, or coworkers
that they play World of Warcraft in large part because second-generation players reject
the assumptions that they and other people have about video game players.
Steven, a single man in his mid thirties, was a successful office manager within a
large company. When he was transferred to manage a branch in a rural area, he was
unhappy about the lack of entertainment for people his age, so he used World of Warcraft
to supplement his social life. Steve was heavily involved in World of Warcraft, had
multiple high-level characters, led raids, and spent a large amount of his free time in the
game. He was extraordinarily flirtatious with female players in the game and had several
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long-distance relationships that began online. Steven also played online console games,
sometimes while conversing in VoIP software with other World of Warcraft players. On
the surface, he had many characteristics of a first-generation gamer. On the other hand,
he rejected the label, “gamer,” he vocally ridiculed hardcore players, and he did not play
on nights he went “to the bar,” although he often logged in after a night out drinking.
More importantly, like Samuel, none of his friends, family, or co-workers knew he
played World of Warcraft. According to him, the relationships he had with people online,
including being heavily involved in his game guild and engaging in intimate
conversations with other players outside of the game, should be segregated from “real”
life. In his mind, his achievements in the game were a result of his general overall ability
to achieve, and his playing was only due to his circumstances, not his choice.
Ginny, a thirty-two-year-old female player who was married and expecting her
first child, played World of Warcraft with and without her husband and also worked full
time as a nurse. She also segregated her video game hobby from the rest of her life. This
segregation became visible when she posted a status on Facebook (copied and pasted
from another friend) requesting that her Facebook friends comment on how they had first
met her. When friends from World of Warcraft mentioned meeting in the videogame, she
posted that “oops,” some of her friends and family were going to find out that she played
video games. Ginny’s perception of Facebook was that it was full of her “real” friends
and family. She had forgotten that she had included World of Warcraft friends on her
“friends list” causing her membership in that online community to became transparent to
the rest of her life.
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Will was a Texan in his mid-thirties who used World of Warcraft as social time.
He had a full time job, went to the gym three to four times a week and had a fiancée that
he saw regularly, so he successfully maintained the social ties with which gamers
supposedly struggle. Although he was a social man, he did not play World of Warcraft
with his physical-world friends but treated it like another world with an entirely different
set of friends.
One of the key reasons that Will played World of Warcraft was to meet girls. In
his personal life, he had a tempestuous relationship with his fiancée and used any “off ”
time to date and sleep with other women. He justified that this was not cheating because
he and his fiancée were not officially together at the times he had slept with those other
women. Interactions in World of Warcraft, however, were an even better opportunity for
him to safely connect with females for sexual conversations and, at least once, to arrange
to meet for sex. It seems unusual to think of the male-oriented World of Warcraft as a
place to pick up women, but perhaps Will’s success is a good indication of the changing
demographics of video game players. When he talked about his interactions in World of
Warcraft, Will was at the same time dating and eventually engaged to his fiancée. In his
mind, cybersex, flirting, innuendo, phone sex or anything like that did not “count” as long
as it happened in World of Warcraft. He saw it as a safe outlet for his sexual frustrations
and urges, with no long-term repercussions. When I asked if he thought it was cheating,
he adamantly said “no”. When I asked if his fiancée would think it was cheating, he
hesitated and hedged before finally saying that she probably would, but she would never
know.
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Beyond the embarrassment of his physical-world friends discovering he was a
gamer, Will had a strong incentive to keep World of Warcraft separate from the rest of
his life. One way this manifested was through his scheduled activities in the game. As
much as Will enjoyed indulging in the World of Warcraft community, he was very strict
about the amount of time he spent playing World of Warcraft. As a raid leader, he would
schedule raids for two-hour blocks of time, rather than focusing on progression. No
matter how much, or how little, the raid had accomplished, after two hours, the raid was
ended. This was unusual because large-party raids in World of Warcraft require a
significant amount of time in order to achieve goals. First-generation gamers not only
dedicate these large amounts of time, but tend to think about raids in terms of
accomplishment as well as time block so that there are specific goals that are attained by
the party during the raid event. It is not that first-generation gamers ignore time, but that
raid events are generally organized in terms of tasks to be accomplished. For example, a
raid on a specific instance might be organized based on the number of bosses the raid
anticipates defeating. Will, on the other hand, demonstrated a second-generation
approach to raiding, where the raid was about engaging in the activity with other people
rather than accomplishing a specific task. In a first-generation raid, it would be very
unusual to be one trash pull
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away from a boss fight
117
and end the raid because of a

116
As mentioned previously, a “pull” is to initiate a fight with a group of opponents. The term “trash”
refers to the lower-level mobs who will join in on a boss fight if they have not been defeated before
initiating battle with the boss.
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A “boss fight” is a longer, more complicated battle with a much stronger opponent. Each boss fight has
unique elements and first-generation raiders thrill at finding the key strategy that will defeat the boss in the
fastest time.
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time deadline. For Will, game play is structured around the number of hours he has
allotted to himself for play. When asked about this near fetishism of scheduling his
gameplay time, Will replied that he did not want to spend too much time playing so that
he had time to do the other things that he needed to do: “Gotta keep [my fiancée] happy.”
For these second-generation players, it was important that their social identity in
World of Warcraft be distinct from their social identity in the physical world. By keeping
a distance between themselves and the World of Warcraft community they had freedom
to enter and enjoy the community without struggling to explain the discrepancies between
their personal identity and the first-generation gamer stereotypes. Gaming was a hobby,
rather than an identity, a guilty pleasure rather than a source of pride. From a first-
generation-player perspective, where the community of players is paramount, this
artificial distance from other players denies an essential part of the gameplay experience.
(Re)Creating an authentic self.
Unlike players who distance themselves from the community, some second-
generation players behave as though online social interactions are simply offline
interactions in a mediated form. These players endeavor to express their identity to other
players the same way they would if they were face to face. Their social identity
performance is contingent on the perceived authenticity of their membership within the
community, and how believable other players find their personal identity performance.
These second-generation players may not bring World of Warcraft to their everyday
lives, but they certainly bring their everyday lives to the game. For many of these players,
the specifics of the game is less important than the community of players. This is similar
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to Rheingold’s (1993/2000) description of the social interactions in an online community:
“Participating in a virtual community has not solved all of life’s problems for me, but it
has served as an aid, a comfort, and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like
an endless, ugly, long-simmering family brawl” (p. 9).
What differentiates these “authentic self” second-generation players from first-
generation players is not how the second-generation players interact with the community,
but how they interact with the game. First-generation players have a strong sense of
community, but they are also competitively playing the game. If a player is not
contributing to the group, for example, as documented by damage-meter mods, the other
players may work with this player to help him improve, or ask her to switch to a different
role, or perhaps cut him from the raid roster – much like a competitive sports team.
Second-generation players are more focused on the social interactions and just “having a
good time,” like an amateur sports league that accepts any players regardless of ability.
This second-generation disposition is expressed in many ways for “authentic self”
second-generation players. For example, Caroline is a guild leader of a 100+ member
casual raiding guild
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. She prides herself on being the motherhen for her guild, offering a
shoulder to lean on and advice on a variety of topics. In return, she often uses guild time
to complain about her frustrations with her career, men, and her son. She calls her guild a
family and treats it like such, being playful at times and temperamental at other times.
Anyone who does not want this intimate relationship with Caroline is welcome to switch

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A “casual raiding” guild is similar to an amateur-league sports team. Membership is generally based on
interest rather than competitive tryouts, and, while winning is nice, most members enjoy just playing the
game. Friction often develops when players expect a casual raiding guild to behavior (or succeed) like a
hardcore raiding guild.
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to another guild, although she will, of course, contact any player who “gquits”
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,
wanting to know how they could possibly leave her happy little family.
A player’s willingness to contribute their authentic selves to the community
creates a rich sense of depth in the online space. People are themselves, their characters,
and also the online personality that they create. “CMC [computer-mediated
communication] is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate
with them on a community level. It’s a way of both making contact with and maintaining
a distance from others” (Rheingold, 1993/2000, p. 11). Some players take their online
interactions into the physical world. Deeply emotional friendships and romantic
relationships have been a part of electronic mediated communication since the telegraph
(Standage, 1998/2007).
Ralph and Katie are an example the depth of romantic connections that can
develop in the game space when players try to create authentic social identities. Ralph
was a retired military man in his mid-thirties. He was estranged from his ex-wife who
lives in another state with his two children. He suffered from post-traumatic stress
disorder, which disturbed his sleep and kept him awake most nights. When the
nightmares woke him up in a cold sweat, World of Warcraft offered a pleasant distraction
full of people he could talk to at any hour. For Ralph, the World of Warcraft community
was like a family. He was fiercely loyal to in-game friends and to his guild although his
excessive bravado often rubbed other players the wrong way. In the public channels, he

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Typing “/gquit” in the game immediately cancels a player’s membership in a guild. In addition, “/gkick
[player name]” removes other members from the guild if you are an officer with permissions. These terms
quickly became action verbs.
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was loud
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, brash, and generally leapt before he looked, and he did not work well with
large groups; however, his one-on-one interpersonal interactions were much more
thoughtful and his loneliness was very apparent.
Katie was a mid-twenties girl with little formal education and few career
prospects. Her longest steady job had been a menial position in food service. She came
home from work every day and logged into World of Warcraft where she had developed
close ties to her guild and gaming friends. When Ralph joined her guild, there was at first
some friction with his outspokenness, but eventually Katie and Ralph developed a
friendship and began spending long hours talking and playing the game together. News
that they were dating was met with a wide range of responses within the guild. Some of
the members were happy for the couple. Some felt that online dating was not real dating,
and an online relationship would not be real until the people met in person. Still others,
who knew the personalities of Ralph and Katie, were surprised that the two were
compatible. A few were merely concerned with how their relationship might affect guild
dynamics.
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Eventually, Katie flew to visit Ralph and they met in person. Afterward, they
continued dating long-distance until Katie abruptly packed up her belongings and moved
in with Ralph. Initially, they both continued playing World of Warcraft, but eventually
they drifted away from the game. By the time they got married, they had moved on to

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Because this is a text-based channel, “loud” refers to both the frequency with which he participate in and
antagonizes conversations and also his penchant for typing in all caps, the textual equivalent of shouting.
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For example, couples generally want to play together, meaning that both members of a couple must be
included in group activities, regardless of their playing ability or character class.
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other hobbies; however, they kept in touch with their former guildmates via FaceBook
and are currently expecting their first child.
Ralph and Katie’s relationship and those of other couples who met through World
of Warcraft, are an example of the deep connections with another human being that can
develop through gameplay. These second-generation gamers invested themselves into
their interactions with other people in the game space. During the time when World of
Warcraft was a central part of their lives, both Ralph and Katie logged in every day. Katie
played around her work schedule and occasionally logged in during breaks at work in
order to chat with her friends. Ralph logged in constantly, day or night, while he was
looking for work and even after he had found a job with the city. World of Warcraft
offered many second-generation players a social support group, a community with similar
interests and, eventually, love and family.
The Compelling Intimacy of Social Identity Performance
While collecting data for this dissertation, I was purposefully truthful in my
personal and social identity. When asked, I never hid my gender, age, marital status or
my academic reasons for being a participant observer. Like many second-generation
players, I emphasized the authenticity of my identity in the game space, and, for the most
part, I was presented with authentic identities in return. Like Boelstorff’s (2008)
ethnography of Second Life, I was less interested in verifying offline identities and more
interested in the compelling performance of personal and social online identities.
During a visit to Tokyo, I spent about an hour each evening in my hotel room
playing and chatting with other players in World of Warcraft. The timing roughly
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translated to mid-morning in the U.S. The reactions I received to my comment that I was
currently in Japan were mixed. Most people thought it was so cool that I was talking to
them from Tokyo (including voice discussions with a headset and mic on VoIP). Others
said, “Why the hell are you on WoW when you’re in Tokyo?”
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I felt both perspectives
myself, but the truth was that, after a day of strangeness, culture shock, learning new
ways of doing things, a foreign language, and extreme sensory overload, it was
comforting to relax in the hotel room with a shower and to spend some time in a familiar,
albeit online, setting before going to bed.
The support of a social networking site.
Online video games, like other virtual communities, create the potential for
deeply meaningful social connections. Second-generation gamers often find this aspect of
game playing to be a startling revelation. One of the elements of “video game addiction”
(see Chapter 5) that existing research and news stories fail to take into account is the
social need that an online video game like World of Warcraft can fill for its players.
Many players use World of Warcraft for therapeutic purposes. I repeatedly heard
personal stories of the mental and physical challenges that the players faced in the
physical world. World of Warcraft, both because of its digital interface and its goal-
oriented structure made it easier for them to socialize and make friends.
Brian and Margaret are both more than twice the average age of a video game
player. They play World of Warcraft along with their middle-aged son and their
grandchildren. Brian does not raid, does not group and rarely talks to players outside of

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“WoW” or “wow” is an abbreviation for World of Warcraft.
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his guildmates. He likes to putter around in the game, completing a quest or two in
whatever location he finds himself. Brian’s son often logs into his account to level
Brian’s characters or gather items in the game for crafting, which moves Brian’s
character to new areas without the sense of “growing” a character that most players
experience. During the time I played with his guild, Brian was diagnosed with cancer.
The surgery and radiation treatments left him nauseous, exhausted and a restless sleeper.
World of Warcraft offered a pleasant distraction. Brian kept his laptop in bed with him or
by his favorite easy chair so he could login at any time of day or night, play for an hour
or so and then go back to sleep. During these brief bouts of activity, I would have long
conversations with him about a variety of subjects, including his disease. To his family he
was always resolute and optimistic that he would beat the cancer. However, in the safety
of cyberspace he spoke about the pain and his fears about the operation and radiation.
World of Warcraft was a comfortable space where he could vent with impunity or retreat
to for the small pleasure that completing simple quest goals could bring amide the
unknown outcome of his disease. It was both a place of consistency in his uncertain
world and a way to reach out to friends from his sickbed.
Brian’s wife, Margaret, also suffered poor health. When she was not spending
time entertaining the grandkids or looking after Brian, she would park herself in front of
her computer and play World of Warcraft. Margaret’s characters were also leveled and
stocked by her son, although infrequently. Margaret liked to wander around the map of
the world, exploring all the different locations within the game. She did not pay any
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attention to level progression
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so she spent a lot of time as a ghost
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running to find the
corpse of her character killed by monsters because she was in an area too high for her
character to handle. To Margaret, it was more fun to explore and chat with people from
her guild than to level, complete quests or attempt any of the game goals that are built
into the game structure.
For both Brian and Margaret, World of Warcraft was an easily accessible,
interactive social networking site. They could reach out to people when they were hurting
or lonely, at any time of the day or night, for as long as they wanted. Their guild was their
online and offline family – made up only of a group of trusted friends and family who
were all on a first-name basis, a rarity among even “authentic self” second-generation
players. World of Warcraft filled their need for both entertainment and socialization and
helped them through a difficult time in their lives.
The support of an anonymous confessional.
Poor health is not the only reason that players turn to the World of Warcraft
community for support. Many second-generation gamers admitted to mental health
issues. Of the 104 interviewees:
• 83 (80%) subjects struggled with frequent bouts of insomnia.

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As mentioned in the Introduction, World of Warcraft is laid out so that low-level “newbie” areas are
separate from higher-level areas. During the leveling process, roughly every 10 levels, the characters move
from the newbie areas up through high level areas.
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When a player dies in World of Warcraft, they can either be “rezzed” by another player or release their
spirit whereby they become a ghost at the nearest graveyard. In ghost form, the vibrant graphics of the
game change to a foggy black and white world through which the player must run their ghost back to be
reunited with their character’s body. If the character was killed by a game mob, the mob will most likely
still be in the vicinity of the corpse and “rezzing” near it may cause additional deaths.
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• 5 former or active military service men said they were suffering from PTSD
(post-traumatic stress disorder).
• 22 subjects brought up in conversation that they were seeing or had recently seen
a mental health professional.
• 7 subjects had been diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder and several
struggled with the costs and side-effects of their prescribed medication.
• 16 suffered from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and 5 discussed
different medications they had tried.
• 10 had physical limitations which kept them from more active entertainments,
including poor health, obesity, and pregnancy.
• 5 were prone to panic attacks in public settings.
Overwhelmingly, these players described World of Warcraft as safe, fun, and
understandable. They liked the clear goals and rewards of the quest system. They liked
the controlled interactions with other players – especially the ability to /ignore
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people
who disrupted their gameplay experience. World of Warcraft offered them an alternate
opportunity to fulfill their social needs in a low-risk setting.
During the time I was collecting data, several of the interviewees went through
the physical and emotional upheaval of relationship breakups and divorces. Through the
turmoil of change, World of Warcraft remained a constant for many of them – a few
people played World of Warcraft with their former partner and therefore quit the game

125
Many game commands in World of Warcraft can be accessed through the text interface by typing “/”
followed by the command. “/ignore [name]” adds the named character to an “ignore” list. You no longer
see comments from or actions performed by that particular player.
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while ending their relationship, although at least one member of the couple usually
remained. The majority increased the amount of time they spent playing World of
Warcraft. This may be to fill social time previously spent with their ex-partner, or to
promote more social interaction in general. These individuals generally found both a
willing ear to vent about their relationship problems and support while healing and
moving on.
The illusion of anonymity in World of Warcraft also makes it a space for
confessions. I say illusion because, unlike a chatroom which might be logged into with a
new account every night, World of Warcraft players have reputations, guilds, and friends
connected to each character. The player may feel protected by the mediated forms of
communication, but their social identity relies on the discretion of their conversation
participants when they begin a confession.
During interviews, six of the male subjects talked about having been the victims
of a past sexual assault from another man. This information was spontaneously offered,
rather than solicited by me in the course of my research. These conversations took place
in private “whispers”
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or on VoIP software where the informant and I were the only
participants. I believe that these confessions resulted in part because I am female. The
video game space can be hypermasculine and homophobic – a “boys club” where sexual
innuendos and crude humor are frequent (Burrill, 2008; Leonard, 2006). Meeting a
sympathetic female in the game space who was asking personal questions created an

126
The “whisper” command seems private because it is visible only on the sender and receiver’s screens;
however, this privacy is superficial since all text-based correspondence within the game goes through
unsecured Internet communication and is stored on the game server.
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opening for this type of interaction and allowed them to give voice to a shameful, taboo
subject.
These confessions are exemplars of the power of an online community allowing
players to make meaningful and compelling connections. More than just a place for
people who all have the same hobby, World of Warcraft, like the virtual communities
before it (Rheingold, 1993/2000) allows participants to connect with other people in
emotionally satisfying ways. A player’s social identity is situated within the strength of
connections she feels to the online community and to its other members. Performing an
authentic identity is not about imposing their physical-world identities on the game space,
but about sharing authentic pieces of themselves with people they had grown to trust
through the shared experience of gameplay. For these victims, baring a piece of their soul
was the ultimate commitment to their relationship with other players in the space.
Conclusion
Identity performance in an online space is about more than just the creation and
maintenance of an online identity, but about the social connections that players make
within an online community. With little online community experience outside of social-
networking sites, second-generation players struggle to stretch their understanding of
who they are and how to behave in an MMO community. They stumble over first-
generation norms and expectations about technology use and in-game behaviors. In
response, second-generation players lean toward either keeping other players at a
protective distance, or recreating an authentic self within the community. Those who
engage in the community often find the compelling social interactions described by first-
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generation players and online communities researchers. Despite feeling disconnected
from the gamer stereotype, and not engaging in end-game raiding or other aspects of
first-generation gameplay, second-generation players create a social identity that fits their
goals and needs. Whether they treat the World of Warcraft community like an
entertainment space, a dating service, a family, a social networking site, or a
confessional, second-generation players make the same kinds of strong social
connections enjoyed for years by first-generation players.

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Chapter 5: Negotiating with the “Addictive” Characteristics of Online Games
The earlier chapters of this dissertation identified the gaming disposition of
second-generation gamers, and explored how second-generation gamers perform
individual and social gamer identities. In this chapter, I will delve deeper into a label
often associated with gaming—addiction.
This chapter has the following sections:
• Digital games are increasingly accessible
• Research on digital game “addiction”
• Representations of the “Addicted Gamer” in popular culture
• Second-generation gamers and the third-person effect
• Second-generation player responses to “addiction”
• The hidden cost of “addiction” as a framework
The goal of this chapter is to explore how second-generation gamers talk about
and respond to the rhetoric of digital game “addiction,” and how they approach and
manage the reality of spending time playing digital games. Lastly, I explore how
“addiction” is not a useful framework for understanding second-generation gameplay
choices.
Digital Games are Increasingly Accessible
In the same manner as the gamer identity and the online community, the discourse
of digital game addiction developed within first-generation gamer culture. Second-
generation gamers are bombarded with media reports of the negative consequences of
playing digital games, including anti-social behavior and addiction. At the same time, the
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digital game industry is booming with more advertising, more entertainment-dedicated
hardware, and more players than ever before. Faced with negative images and terms like
“addiction,” second-generation gamers still choose to start playing an expensive and
time-consuming game like World of Warcraft. Technological, economic and social
changes along with changes to the game structure have facilitated this second-generation
of gamers (Kelly, 2011c).
Modern advancements in technology have made digital games more available to
people than ever before. Computers–the platform of massively multiplayer online games
(MMOs)–are becoming cheaper, faster, and more powerful. Internet access has spread
across America and faster broadband Internet connections are increasingly more common
than slower dial-up connections (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2010). There
are more computers in the home and these computers are entry-points for other forms of
technology (Williams, 2006). In addition, digital games and other software programs no
longer require specialized technical knowledge to install and run. They have become
easier to install and manage, making them accessible to more people.
Digital games also offer economical entertainment. A subscription-based game
like World of Warcraft offers as many hours of playtime per month as you choose for a
monthly fee ranging from $12.99-$14.99 per month (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010a).
Compare this with a single movie ticket which offers entertainment for only a few hours:
“The average ticket price at theaters in the U.S. last year rose to an all-time annual high
of $7.89, up 5% from $7.50 in 2009, according to the National Assn. of Theatre Owners.
In the fourth quarter, the average price was $8.01, up 5% from the year-ago period”
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(Verrier, 2011, para. 1). In the uncertain post-9/11 economy, the monthly cost of World
of Warcraft offers great value for the dollar.
Digital games are no longer the social pariah they used to be. While the
“stereotype” of the digital game player remains, digital game demographics have
expanded. The industry-owned website, The Entertainment Software Association (ESA),
annually publishes statistical data about digital game players and purchasers. While these
statistics need to be considered in context – members of the ESA have a commercial
interest in shaping these statistics – they suggest that players are more numerous and
more diverse in terms of gender and age than any time previously (ESA, 2010). “Sixty-
seven percent of homes in America own either a console and/or PC used to run
entertainment software.” (ESA, 2010, Industry facts: Game player data). Williams (2006)
suggests that increased income, especially from females participating in the workforce,
mixed with less time for entertainment have driven Americans to look for easy fun.
Digital games have become more socially acceptable as a form of entertainment.
Lastly, World of Warcraft itself has undergone numerous expansions and patches
from its initial release in November of 2004 that has made it easier for second-generation
gamers to play. Repeatedly the expansions and patches made major changes to the GUI
(graphical user interface), making it easier for players to locate and interact with objects,
quests, and NPCs (non-player characters) within the game. Other examples of “dumbing
down” the game include changing the leveling criteria for levels 20-60, “with less
experience needed per level in that range as well as higher quest experience rewards for
quests levels 30-60” (patch 3.2.0) and reducing the required level for beneficial talents
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and skills, like making a riding mount
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available at level 20 instead of level 40 (patch
3.2.0). The graphical and structural changes to the game have lowered the entry threshold
for new players making it easier to become proficient enough at the game to pass
previously difficult challenges.
From a purely commercial perspective, the technological, economic, social and
game structure changes have made World of Warcraft more accessible to play. Second-
generation gamers found more reasons to play than they did to be concerned about the
potential “addictive” characteristics of a massively multiplayer online digital game.
Research on Digital Game “Addiction”
With so many people entering into the digital game space, digital game
“addiction” is a buzz word among main stream media and academia alike. Many digital
games now take advantage of Internet connectivity to interact with other people on a
more massive scale than two-player games, and modern home computers and console
game systems or portable devices currently incorporate online playing features. It is
difficult to provide an exhaustive list of current studies on digital game addiction in part
because the terminology used to describe “when someone spends too much time playing
digital games” is inconsistent. Not only is there disagreement on whether the addiction is
to “video games,” “computer games,” “digital games,” “cyber-games,” or “online
gaming,” but as games shifted online, researchers and the media started to associate

127
A riding mount dramatically decreases travel time and increases the efficiency of questing.
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digital games as a form of “Internet addiction.” Internet addiction
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itself goes by a
variety of names such as pathological Internet use (Davis, 2001), problematic Internet use
(Caplan, 2003), Internet addiction (Young, 1998), technological addiction (Griffiths,
1995) and Internet abuse (Morahan-Martin, 2005).
Centralized research on digital game addiction is also hindered because, like the
Game Studies field itself, the research spans many disciplines – such as psychology,
addiction, game studies, human-computer interaction, media studies, etc. This impacts
second-generation gamers in two ways: News stories concerning digital game addiction
appear periodically as studies within different disciplines are released, and the media
stories are disjointed and lack consensus. The concept of having an “addiction” to online
communication technologies is still a controversial phenomenon (Caplan, Williams &
Yee, 2009; Charlton & Danforth, 2007; Chiu, Lee, & Huang, 2004; O’Brien, 2010). The
controversy centers around comparing a psychological compulsion – where you want to
do something – with a chemical dependence where your physiology needs a drug to
function. The American Psychological Association (APA) debated adding “non-
substance addictions, such as Pathological Gambling and Internet Addiction” to the
upcoming fifth edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(APA, 2010, frequently asked questions). Charles P. O’Brien, MD, PhD, and chair of the
Substance-Related Disorders Work Group of the APA commented that while there may
be some connection between activating the reward system in the brain and a conditioned

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For overviews of Internet addiction research, see Morahan-Martin (2007, 2008), Griffith and Davies
(2005), and Byun, Ruffini, Mills, Douglas, Niang, Stepchenkova, Lee, Loutfi, Lee, Atallah and Blanton
(2009).
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reflex, the APA is not prepared to add Internet Addiction as a new diagnosis at this time,
although they welcome further research on the topic (O’Brien, 2010).
Internet addiction, like digital game addiction, has been linked to increased
depression and lower social competence (Davis, 2001; Kubey, Lavin & Barrows, 2001;
Leung & Lee, 2005; Morahan-Martin & Schumacher, 2003; Ng & Weimer-Hastings,
2005) and is invoked when media users “become hooked” by the “habit-forming nature
of the Internet” (Young, 2004, pp. 402-403). One of the symptoms of Internet addiction is
overuse of the medium (Young, 1998, 2004). Young, one of the initial researchers on
Internet addiction and founder of the Center for Online and Internet Addiction, states
that, “although time is not a direct function in diagnosing Internet addiction, addicts
generally are excessive about their online usage, spending anywhere from 40 to 80 hours
per week, with sessions that could last up to 20 hours” (2004, p. 405).
The studies of the negative impacts of Internet addiction have been inconclusive
(Morahan-Martin, 2005; Southwell & Doyle, 2004). Caplan, Williams and Yee (2009)
found that digital game playing had a minimal impact on problematic Internet usage.
Southwell and Doyle (2004) in their review of computer/video game research, discuss
and refute many of the presumed negative effects of digital game playing, including time-
use arguments, stating that, “individual motivation for game playing or individual
capacity for immersion should both play an important role in moderating any main-effect
relationship” (p. 393).
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Representations of the “Addicted Gamer” in Popular Culture
When second-generation gamers enter World of Warcraft, they have already been
bombarded with news coverage of academic studies and congressional hearings on the
effects of digital games. Their attitudes about digital game playing have been shaped by
stories of spectacular cases of spousal neglect (e.g. Alter, 2007), failing school (e.g.
Jacobs, 2010) and unhealthy media use (e.g. Mollman, 2008). Even more telling, digital
game “addiction” has become the basis for characters in popular culture.
The stereotype of the game-addicted, adolescent, white male gamer discussed in
Chapter 3 is celebrated, caricaturized and incorporated into popular culture. An example
includes the newspaper comic strip, Foxtrot, which ran several series of strips where
Jason, the teenage male character, plays the fictitious game, “World of Warquest,”
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addressing concerns such as anonymity – a helpful player in the game was actually a girl
(his school nemesis, Eileen Jacobson ) – and addiction – Jason’s mother repeatedly asked
him to stop playing for meals, sleep, and school (Amend, 2006). Digital-game-obsessed
players are more negatively portrayed as offenders on episodes of Law and Order: SVU
(“Game,” originally aired February 8, 2005) where the gamers are “unable to distinguish
fantasy from reality” (IMDB
130
, episode description) or CSI: Miami (“Urban
Hellraisers,”
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originally aired November 21, 2005) where college students act out

129
This name is meant to evoke a relationship to both Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and
Sony’s earlier Everquest series, both members of the online games genre known as massively multiplayer
role-playing games.
130
Internet Movie Database description available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0629657/
131
The name “Urban Hellraisers” may be a reference to the popular Grand Theft Auto series published by
Rockstar Games which has become known for including violent and sexual assaults as part of the game.
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scenes from a violent digital game and another of the players is found dead from a heart
attack after playing the game non-stop for 60 hours while consuming caffeine drinks
(IMDB
132
). These examples are not an exhaustive list of representations of the “addicted
gamer” stereotype in popular culture, but they capture the essence of how the stereotype
plays out in both comedic and dramatic fictional frames.
Closely tied with the stereotype of the game-addicted, adolescent, white, male
gamer is the stereotype of the game-addicted, middle-aged gamer with no job and no
social skills. A series that never misses a chance to poke fun at stereotypes, the cartoon
television show South Park (Parker, 2006), released an episode which caricaturizes both
representations of gamers. Created in conjunction with Blizzard Entertainment
employees, South Park episode 1008, “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” which originally aired
on October 4, 2006, partially took place within the World of Warcraft game. In the
episode, “there’s trouble in the online gaming world when a mad gamer won't play by the
rules. The boys dedicate their lives to defeating the renegade and saving the World of
Warcraft” (Comedy Central, Season 10, Episode 8, episode description). While playing
World of Warcraft together, the main cast of characters is attacked by a single player
who, mysteriously, has broken the game mechanics that prevent players from randomly
killing each other in low-level areas. As the startled characters are killed one-by-one in
the game, Stan exclaims, “Whoever he is, he is one tough badass.”
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The cartoon then
cuts to a picture of an overweight, balding, long-haired man in front of his computer

132
Internet Movie Database description available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0534850/
133
All quotes are cited directly from the audio track of the episode, currently available at
http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s10e08-make-love-not-warcraft
129
screen. The front view (Figure 2) shows a middle-aged man, unshaven and with skin
blemishes, intently staring at the screen, playing on his matching keyboard and computer
which both glow ominously with red LED-lit designs. His room is messy, littered with
dirty laundry, plastic figurines, cans of Rockstar caffeine drinks and an empty pizza box.
In the cartoon, worried Blizzard employees meet to discuss this player who is
rampaging across their game. Humorously, but also in a way that completes the
stereotype of the older, anti-social gamer, the “Blizzard President” pronounces,
“Whoever this person is, he has played World of Warcraft nearly every hour of every day
for the past year and a half. Gentlemen, we are dealing with someone here who… has
absolutely no life.” Reinforcing that all gamers have “no life,” the character Cartman
calculates the time it will take the cast to level characters high enough to combat the
renegade player. “7 weeks, 5 days, 13 hours and 20 minutes, giving ourselves 3 hours a
night to sleep. What do you say guys? You can just… You can just hang outside in the
sun all day tossing a ball around, or you can sit at your computer and do something that
matters.” This motivational speech is followed by a musical montage of the cast
obsessively playing World of Warcraft at home and school, forgoing eating and sleeping.
In typical South Park scatological style, Cartman even goes to the bathroom in a bedpan
held by his mother, rather than leave his computer. Meanwhile, their “real” cartoon
characters morph into grossly overweight, pale, pimply versions (Figure 3), completing
the transformation into “gamers” proficient enough to defeat the renegade player.
This episode of South Park visually caricaturizes the discourse of digital-game
addiction. The antagonist’s sole interest is to be a griefer, defeating other players and
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ruining their playing experience. For the sake of comedy, the griefer breaks the technical
laws of the game, as well as breaking the social norms of gamer culture so that he
terrorizes player and developer alike. Meanwhile, the main characters of the show obsess
about their avatars and about saving the game while grossly neglecting their health and
other obligations. These representatives of “digital game addiction” are grotesque and
antisocial. Second-generation players find it difficult to identify with these extreme
stereotypes.
Second-Generation Gamers and the Third-Person Effect
One explanation for why second-generation gamers are willing to try digital
games, despite the stories and images of digital game “addiction,” is because they feel
forewarned, and therefore, “addiction” could never happen to them. This is a
phenomenon associated with media consumption called the third-person effect. The
theory of the third-person effect as first introduced by Davidson (1983) contends that
individuals perceive that other people are more likely to be influenced by negative media
effects than they are themselves. The third-person effect has been found in both
perceptions of negative media influence and in changes in users’ behavior in response to
those perceptions (Chia, Lu and McLeod, 2004; Hoffner et al., 2001; Huh, Delorme and
Reid, 2004; Peiser & Peter, 2000; Perloff, 2002). Duck, Hogg, and Terry (1998, 1999)
and Reid & Hogg (2005) suggested a self-categorization explanation for third-person
perceptions. Self-categorization is when individuals see a greater effect from media on
strangers than on “comparison others” with whom they self-identify (similar to Eveland,
Nathanson, Detenber, & McLeod’s, 1999, social distance). Reid and Hogg (2005)
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describe the self-categorization explanation as an effective means for explaining “when
particular identities become salient as the basis for social perception and behavior” (p.
131). The self-categorization explanation suggests that, in general, the strength of third-
person perceptions of negative media effects inversely correlates with how similar the
individuals consider themselves to the comparison other, in regards to a medium that is
either normative or non-normative for themselves or for the other. In other words, if I
think I am similar to someone else, then I think we both will respond similarly to a
magazine that we are likely to read, however, if I think we are more different from each
other, then I think the other person is more likely to be negatively influenced by that
magazine. To test the self-categorization theory, Reid and Hogg involved the use of
stereotypes. For example, they found that undergraduates believed “trailer trash” to be
much more influenced by The National Enquirer than they were, and that this third-
person effect was lowered the more similar the participants rated themselves to “trailer
trash.” Using Reid & Hogg’s framework, Kelly (2005) had subjects compare themselves
to a “typical computer game player” and found greater third-person perceptions toward
addiction to excessive game playing versus people who did not consider themselves to be
gamers. In other words, if a person did not identify with being a “typical computer game
player,” then he thought that a gamer was more likely to be addicted to games than they
were. On the other hand, if the person thought she was similar to a “typical computer
game player,” she thought they would respond about the same. Schmierbach, Boyle, Xu,
and McLeod (2011) published similar findings.
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Second-Generation Player Responses to “Addiction”
Many second-generation game players deny the label “gamer,” and therefore are
likely to consider themselves not at risk for “addiction.” At the same time, playing an
online digital game can be fun and socially and psychologically rewarding. As second-
generation players become more involved in the game, they face the same potential for
excessive play and digital game “addiction” as first-generation players. Like the first-
generation, some second-generation gamers are more successful at negotiating with the
addictive characteristics of online games than others.
Second-generation gamers may not think that “addiction” can happen to them, but
they still struggle with managing their desire to play and the other activities in their lives.
The players I interviewed talked about their playing habits in a variety of ways, ranging
from an “all or nothing” attitude to carefully structuring their play time.
George is in his early thirties, married with a baby on the way, and is struggling to
make ends meet. Both he and his wife are trapped in a cycle of temporary jobs that end
without turning into a stable career and they are constantly looking for work with
inconsistent results. For George, World of Warcraft is a cheap escape from his everyday
concerns. George is an avid gamer and could possibly be considered first-generation,
except that George, like many second-generation gamers, struggles with the time
demands required to be a hardcore gamer. He and his wife, who does not play digital
games, fight about joblessness, money and time spent in entertainment rather than more
serious pursuits. As a result, George tries to keep the peace by not logging in during
evening hours, which is when most first-generation gamers are playing end-game
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content. Instead, he spends the evening with his wife and does not begin playing until
after she has gone to sleep, so his playing schedule is irregular. He often does not start
playing until midnight or later and will play until he falls asleep at the computer or until
just before his wife wakes up, in which case he pretends that he was sleeping on the
couch. This nocturnal playing schedule makes it difficult for him to function during the
day and he cannot successfully maintain it for long periods of time. As a result, George
often indulges in “binge” playing where he plays nightly for weeks at a time and then
abruptly cuts off his playing for a week or two or more. He expressed how guilty he felt
for playing when he knew he should be sleeping or researching jobs, and that secretly
playing only added stress to his relationship with his wife.
This cycle of heavy playing followed by abstinence is a pattern that many second-
generation gamers fall into as they try to fit game playing into their lives. With few
exceptions, players who quit or take a break from the game eventually start playing again.
Gaming is their hobby and they crave the game play of World of Warcraft, but even
more, it is the social interaction of World of Warcraft that pulls them back. First, World
of Warcraft offers gameplay and online socializing at the same time, whereas, during the
early years of World of Warcraft, console games had limited online playing capabilities
and were more associated with multiplayer in-person play, than with networked playing.
Second, and most important, at the time when they decide to take a break, all of their
friends are still playing World of Warcraft. Not only are they still bombarded with
conversations about World of Warcraft, but if they want to interact with their friends, it is
easier to find them in the game than to try to pull their friends out of it.
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Second-generation players who imposed bouts of abstinence on themselves
occasionally fell into another category—the “born again” anti-World of Warcraft player.
Similar to the idea of a “born again” Christian, these players pushed back against the
social pressure to rejoin World of Warcraft by vigorously and loudly proclaiming to any
current players (1) how much better their life is without World of Warcraft, (2) how
much happier they are now that they stopped playing, and (3) how stupid everyone else is
for still playing. Occasionally, players attempt to make a big splash with their exit.
Within the game, they give away the rare items or in-game money they have collected.
They write letters or post messages on forums telling guildmates exactly what they find
offensive about the other players. If they are in a position of leadership over a guild or
over scheduling or running raids, an ex-player’s abdication from the game may cause
others to also quit, a restructuring of the guild, or the transfer of players to other guilds.
Some of these “born again” ex-players quit World of Warcraft and find other
sources of entertainment – many move to other digital games. One extremely vocal ex-
player swore off digital games and started taking business classes. However, the majority
eventually come back to playing digital games in one form or another. For example,
several avid “born again” ex-players became militant players of games on Facebook such
as Farmville (Zynga, 2009), getting up in the middle of the night to harvest crops on time
and requesting help from fellow players daily. These Facebook gamers also re-enabled
their World of Warcraft accounts
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when a new expansion was released.

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Since World of Warcraft is a subscription-based game, players who “quit” the game generally only let
the subscription run out. This freezes the account but keeps the characters and items on the account intact.
Reactivating the subscription lets players start where they left off rather than forcing them to create new
characters.
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The “all or nothing” approaches are not very sustainable, so some second-
generation gamers set criteria to manage their game time that they can articulate to other
people. For example, they play only after their children have gone to bed, or only after
work until they go to bed. Each player negotiates how playing digital games fits into his
or her life, but a good way of visualizing them on a continuum is to look at how they
incorporate social connections into their criteria.
On one end of the continuum, players are responsible only to themselves. These
players describe their play time as “until I need to go to sleep” or “while I’m eating
dinner” or “just for a little while.” The endpoint is nebulous and easily adjustable. Players
with these kinds of criteria for playing tended to express dissatisfaction with the amount
of time they spent playing and this sometimes led to “binge” gaming.
Further along the continuum are players who include an aspect outside of
themselves. These players say things like “only until this quest chain
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is completed” or
“only Tuesdays and Thursdays” or “only on the weekends” or “before/after
school/work.” Although more specific, these criteria are still fairly flexible and players
would often break the criteria when an interesting opportunity presented itself, such as
friends requesting help or other players offering access to a new challenge.
At the other end of the continuum are players that incorporate not only an aspect
outside of themselves, but an aspect that involves other people
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. These players say

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Many quests in World of Warcraft are arranged in a chain, meaning that you must complete a series of
quests in a particular order. You cannot access the later quests until you have completed all of the previous
quests to get to the next step.
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This end of the continuum also includes players whose gameplay habits are controlled by other people,
such as parents imposing play limits on their children, or partners who resent time allocated to the game
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things like, “only after my kids are asleep” or “when my wife/husband is at work” or
“only when my friends are also available” or “only on raid nights.” Involving other
people in their game play choices helps them stick to the criteria they have set. These
players sometimes wish to play more often than they do, but they also express more
overall satisfaction with their game playing and play more consistently.
Second-generation gamers are interested in learning how to incorporate games
into their lives for entertainment. When the game ceases to be fun or the cost of playing
becomes too steep, they look for ways of managing their playing habits. The
disassociation that second-generation gamers feel toward the gamer stereotype also
applies to digital game “addiction.”
The Hidden Cost of “Addiction” as a Framework
The concept of “addiction” and other negative effects have a history of being
applied to new media technologies (Marvin, 1988; Sturken, Thomas & Ball-Rokeach,
2004). Comic books prevented the youth from reading literary works. Television was
making couch potatoes of us all. Arcade and digital games have been viewed with
suspicion almost from their inception. Even the term “Digital games” has a negative
connotation, both because they are games—meaning they’re on the non-serious side of
the work/play divide—and because they are digital, meaning that they are not real, and
therefore, not to be taken seriously. Thus, it seems easy to apply the label “addict” to
people playing digital games. Liz Woolley, who founded On-line Gamers Anonymous

instead of them. However, players whose gameplay choices are entirely controlled by other people are
generally dissatisfied with their access to the game.
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(OLGA/OLG-Anon) after the suicide of her son while playing Everquest (Spain & Vega,
2005), used the structure and wording from the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program
and simply replaced “alcohol” with “gaming” (OLGA, 2009; Liberation Entertainment &
Pineiro Escoriaza, 2009). However, thinking about playing digital games in terms of
“addiction” is not a productive way to conceptualize how people interact through online
communication.
First, labeling “gaming” as addictive denies the diversity of games. Games can be
played through many devices – computers, consoles, portable game devices, digital
tablets, or even on a mobile phone. Just within the category of online games played on a
computer, there are MMOs, Facebook games, free online games, etc. Different kinds of
games require different skills – puzzle games, arcade games, role-playing games or first-
person-shooter games to name a few – and have different requirements for social
interaction and the amount and length of time to play the game. Alcohol, on the other
hand, may come in different forms, but it has a consistent physiological effect on an
individual. Drinks vary mostly in terms of the severity of the effects, so, while it is
possible to make claims about the effects of alcohol as a whole, it is unreasonable to
categorize all games as having the same effect on individuals.
Second, addiction assumes that all games have a gradation of “bad” – for
example, educational games are “better” and entertainment games are “worse.” This ties
in strongly with the technological determinism view of technology which suggests that
once a player begins playing a game, he/she becomes shaped by that game, that the game
itself imposes the same effect on each individual (Sturken & Thomas, 2004). Seen from
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this dystopic perspective, games are inherently addicting and individuals are given little
agency in their interactions with games. Technological determinism does not leave room
for social constructionism, which gives individuals agency in their interactions with
technology. The range of second-generation gamers’ decisions about managing their play
time shows that players can make very different choices about the same game.
Third, addiction conflates game content and game structure. It is not enough to
ask, “Is this a violent game?” Instead, what is the role that violence plays in this game?
For example, compared to the modern game, Sniper Elite (Rebellion Developments,
2005), the old arcade game Space Invaders (Taito Corporation, 1978) has a much higher
kill count. However, how should we compare the psychological impact of cute, bloodless
graphics of the alien ships being attacked in the arcade game with the close-up videos of
heads exploding and blood spraying in Snipe Elite? Unlike the movie rating system
which codifies movie scenes that show sex, violence, profanity, etc., the digital game
rating system does not account for digital games being interactive. Digital games put the
player within the action, asking players to engage in specific behaviors in order to
advance the storyline or gain rewards. It is more helpful to think about content and
structure in relationship with each other: How does the player observe or instigate or
perpetuate the violence and how does that relate to the game’s structure? For example,
Gee (2003) discusses how the beginning tutorial of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation
(Core Design, 1999) has an instructor who tells both the character and the player how to
get through the level. Players who follow all of the instructions exactly will pass the
level, but will miss hidden treasures and items useful later in the game. Gee brings this up
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as an example of immersive learning, but it also provides an excellent example of how
the structure of the game has a greater impact on player behavior than just the content.
Finally, labeling digital games as addictive creates a demand for oversight and
regulation.
Addiction has become a familiar meme—the sad, weak-willed and non-productive
members of society become alcoholics, drug addicts, or neurotics with weekly therapy
appointments. We are comfortable with these labels. We have government and social
agencies designed to regulate addicted individuals and control companies making
harmful products. When the media contacted Sony Online Entertainment for comment
about Elizabeth Woolley blaming her son’s suicide on an addiction to EverQuest, Scott
McDaniel, then VP of Marketing, said, “There’s a duty on the consumer to use it
responsibly” (quoted in Spain &Vega, 2005). This image of a grieving mother and her
dead son being taken advantage of by an evil corporation begs us to demand justice
without looking deeper to find out that the son had a history of mental and emotional
problems and suffered seizures. Using the label addiction glosses over potentially
important connections between the combination of particular warning signs, such as
depression, joblessness and chemical imbalances, which may lead to attempted suicides.
It does not take into account the links between managing depression and the social
benefits of online gaming communities (as described in Chapter 4), or personality traits
and online games (Mehroof & Griffiths, 2010). Oversight and regulation for an addictive
activity provide a limited framework for addressing the issue of some players choosing to
spend large amounts of time playing an online game.
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Conclusion
Digital game “addiction” is a pervasive representation of digital games and their
players. “Addiction” is discussed by television pundits, congressional hearings,
researchers and news media, and caricatures of game-obsessed players show up in
comedic and dramatic television shows. Despite the hype, the number of second-
generation gamers continues to grow larger as changes in technology, the economy, and
access make games more available and less of a specialized hobby. Most second-
generation gamers think that “addiction” would not happen to them, but at the same time,
most develop strategies for managing their play time. The experience of second-
generation gamers suggests that there are hidden costs to applying the framework of
addiction to digital game playing. The “addiction” framework denies the diversity of
games, assumes a negative gradation to all games, conflates game content with game
structure rather than considering the role of each, and creates a demand for oversight and
regulation without considering the broader context within which an individual chooses to
play games.

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Chapter 6: Significance and directions for future research
This final chapter examines the contributions of this dissertation to the discipline
of Communication and related interdisciplinary fields. The research documented herein
explores four key discourses on the playing of digital games: dispositions, performed
individual and social identities, and digital game “addiction.” Through the lens of
Communication, this dissertation research crosses disciplinary boundaries with the fields
of Game Studies, Performance Studies, online communities research, and Media Studies.
The key contributions of this research are:
• Differentiation between first- and second-generation gamers
• A longitudinal examination of identity performance in an MMO
• Hidden costs of the “addiction” framework
This chapter discusses the implications of these three contributions in relation to existing
bodies of research and suggests future studies to enhance our understanding of the role
Communication plays in the increasingly social and complex world of Internet
technologies.
Differentiation Between First- and Second-Generation Gamers
The study of communication and culture within the technology of digital games
connects the fields of Communication and Game Studies. Game Studies is an
interdisciplinary field of study that engages both the psychological and social impacts of
play and games (cf. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith & Tosca, 2008; Goldstein & Raessens,
2005; Mäyrä, 2008). Game Studies has attracted researchers from a variety of fields
encompassing a wide range of methodological approaches, areas of interest and avenues
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of entry into games and the people that play them. This dissertation seeks both to add
knowledge about and disambiguate key areas of research that connect Communication
and Game Studies. The differentiation between first- and second-generation gamers is a
significant contribution to research on digital games.
From the ethnographic perspective, the online communities that develop around
MMOs like World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), offer a microcosm culture
with fascinating conventions of behavior developed in synergy with the coded rules of
the virtual space through which people interact. Currently, there is a narrow
understanding of what it means to be a gamer. Games (and their players) are often
described by genre, e.g., first-person shooter (fps) players or puzzle game players, but
this categorization overly simplifies players’ behaviors. Bartle (1996) and Yee (2006)
organize players in terms of what motivates them to play a particular type of game;
however, games like World of Warcraft offer complex gameplay options that can appeal
to all the different types of player motivation. Juul (2010) focuses on innovations in
console gaming like the Nintendo Wii and X-Box RockBand-style games and discusses
hardcore gamers versus casual gamers in terms of the types of games they play—
hardcore gamers play intensive, time-consuming games while casual gamers play easily
learned games with intuitive controllers. Juul found that many casual gamers are actually
people who had previously played video games and were returning to gaming:
“Hence the bigger picture was not just that video games were finding a
new audience, but also that video games were reconnecting with an
audience that had been lost. Why? The answer: the first video games had
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been made for a general audience because there was no separate audience
of game experts at the time. Between the arcade games of the early 1980s
and today, video games have matured as a medium, developed a large set
of conventions, grown a specialized audience of fans” (p. 2, Juul, 2010).
Juul observed an important distinction between gamers, but his use of the term “casual”
is confusing because (1) if “casual gamer” is defined by the type of games played this
definition gets blurry because many hardcore gamers also play console games, including
Rockband, or mobile games, including Angry Birds (Rovio Mobile, 2009), and casual
players explore game titles designed for hardcore gamers; (2) if “casual gamer” describes
the amount of time spent playing, some casual gamers play video games in the morning
before going to work, during work, and after work in the evening, sometimes for hours at
a time, making it clear that this is not a “casual” hobby for them; and lastly, (3) if “casual
gamer” is defined by the skill level of the player, her skill changes based on the
experience of the player with other games, time spent playing this game, and the
particular skills required by the type of game. Rather than using casual or hardcore labels
for players, I unpacked the concept of “casual gamer” by looking at how players enact
different dispositions in their engagements with the game and other players and placing
gamers on a continuum.
First- and second-generation gamers are differentiated based on their gaming
disposition and their interest in and ability to immerse themselves in the dominant culture
of the hardcore gamers. Compared to Brown and Thomas’ (2008) attributes of the [first-
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generation] gamer disposition, second-generation gamers’ dispositions are more focused
on quick gratification with the least mental effort.
• Second-generation gamers have an ease-of-use orientation. They talk about
World of Warcraft as cost-effective entertainment, as accessible, and as a fun
social environment.
• Second-generation gamers embody diversity in two ways: They dabble in multiple
characters and aspects of the game and they also believe that they are diversified
from the “gamer” stereotype.
• Second-generation gamers thrive on consistency by appreciating entertainment
that does not require a high investment of mental energy. They have limited time
to play and want to enjoy the experience, rather than be overly challenged.
• Second-generation gamers learn only what is necessary. They are busy people
with full lives and, unless something catches their fancy, they would rather
passively consume entertainment than actively engage in entertainment.
• Second-generation gamers rely on proven solutions. Faced with a challenge,
second-generation gamers ask for advice from other players or, as a last resort,
look up the answer on an online knowledge database. They are rarely caught up in
the excitement of the exploration and problem solving that are key motivators for
first-generation gamers.
Viewing the game play disposition of second-generation gamers as distinct from
first-generation gamers can help researchers understand what players learn from digital
games. In addition, numerical order of the generations is meant to describe a player’s
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investment into the digital-game playing culture, not how long she has been playing
digital games. For the moment, the second-generation gamer disposition suggests a way
of understanding why different players approach the same game in different ways. At the
same time, the generational framework is also open for future changes to the game
culture, game structure and gaming technology.
Some second-generation players morph into first-generation players as their
investment into and understanding of video games increases; however, the “gamer
culture” discussed by the media and studied by games researchers also continues to
change and develop. As “gaming” increases in popularity, a third-generation wave of
players who have a different set of conceptions about what it means to be a gamer, may
approach a game like World of Warcraft from a different perspective leading to a third
flavor of “gamer disposition.”
In addition, the structure of how games are designed is also changing. The vanilla
release of World of Warcraft in 2004 offered players a different playing experience than
the expansions released in 2007, 2008, and 2010. The patches and expansions not only
fixed errors in the game, but made fundamental changes to the UI and to the amount and
types of mini-games available to players. The nature of the game changed and made itself
more accessible to second-generation players. At the same time, new technology
continues to be developed that shapes the gamer experience. Motion-controlled
interfaces, better graphics and processers, and mobile technologies and apps encourage
new ways of thinking about gaming. As gaming and gaming technologies continue to
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change in response to the players’ needs and expectations, the expectations of players
will also change, creating a space for third-generation players.
These observations open new directions for future research. More longitudinal
studies could trace the process by which second-generation gamers learn social norms
and game-specific skills. Some research has been done in this regard (e.g. Pearce, 2009),
but it needs to situate second-generation gamers as a distinct group of players with a
different disposition of play. Subsequently, another area of further research is the
examination of if and how second-generation gamers modify their media consumption
after exposure to the “gamer culture.” Williams, Yee, and Caplan (2008) have survey
data suggesting that gamers spend less time watching television, but this does not reveal
the dispositional elements of if and how players might think differently about interactions
with technology after playing games.
Lastly, many researchers have explored the psychological motivations for playing
and enjoying digital games and found a wide variety of answers for the appeal of games.
Utilizing the range between first- and second-generation gamer dispositions would allow
a new entry point for exploring player motivation. For example, it would shift the
research question from one of motivation/reward-seeking to one of “ways of thinking.”
A Longitudinal Examination of Identity Performance in an MMO
This dissertation uses Communication theoretical frameworks that are connected
to both Performance Studies and research on online communities to explore the social
interactions that happen through online communication. The research sought to both add
knowledge about and tease out unique examples of identity performance in online
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communities. A longitudinal examination of identity performance in an MMO is a
significant contribution to research on online communities and identity performance.
One important aspect of communication technologies is the capacity to connect
like-minded people over vast distances. Writing about one of the earliest text-based
online spaces, Rheingold (1993/2000) described the powerful social connections formed
through the Internet as a virtual community. “Virtual communities are social aggregations
that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long
enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in
cyberspace” (p. xx). Of his personal experience with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link
(WELL), Rheingold said:
“Finding the WELL was like discovering a cozy little world that had been
flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire
cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon
as I found the secret door. Like others who fell into the WELL, I soon
discovered that I was audience, performer, and scriptwriter, along with my
companions, in an ongoing improvisation. A full-scale subculture was
growing on the other side of my telephone jack, and they invited me to
help create something new.” (p. xv)
Since Rheingold’s initial research, the communication technologies that can
create a virtual community have expanded to include a variety of text-based and
graphical interfaces, everything from blogs to forums to online games to virtual worlds.
Following in Rheingold’s footsteps, data for this dissertation was collected utilizing
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online ethnographic methods. Ethnography is a traditional anthropological method which
requires the researcher to immerse herself in the culture she is examining, and it has been
successfully used to explore the culture of online communities (e.g., Boellstorff, 2008;
Nardi, 2010; Pearce, 2009; Taylor, 2006b). Traditional ethnography relies heavily on
observation – unobtrusively watching patterns of behavior emerge as you sit in a corner
(sometimes literally) while people go about their daily lives – which is difficult to do in a
virtual setting. Boellstorff (2008) conducted his research inside the digitally created
‘virtual world’ of Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003), a computer program that lets you
create an avatar (a virtual body) and move the avatar around a three-dimensional space
with objects and the avatars of other people. Boellstorff used participant observation to
gather ideas for later discussion in small groups that met in the virtual world. Once he
identified a behavior pattern, he and his discussants would talk about how that behavior
reflected the sociality of their group within Second Life.
Nardi (2010) set her ethnographic research in World of Warcraft (Blizzard
Entertainment, 2004), a digital game with much more structured interaction than a virtual
world and also the main site for research for this dissertation. While Boellstorff (2008)
interacted with people “hanging out,” Nardi’s subjects were more likely to be working on
a checklist of tasks (“quests”) provided by the game, so interactions with the researcher
were frequently goal-based. She also centered her research on two in-game guilds—
groups of players who played and socialized together online. Guilds are a foundational
social structure built into the game structure of many online games and guilds offer an
opportunity for an ethnographer to interact with a cohesive group of people.
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In the traditional model of ethnography, the researcher observes inhabitants of a
community during their daily activities. In addressing her experience in her ethnography
of Everquest (Sony Online Entertainment, 1999), another massively multiplayer online
(MMO) game like World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), Taylor (2006b),
quotes Christine Hine saying, “…The ethnographer inhabits a kind of in-between world,
simultaneously native and stranger” (Taylor, 2006b, p. 17). The ethnographic focus of
this dissertation studies the entry of other “strangers” into the “native” environment.
Although they play games, these “strangers” fall outside of the stereotype of the digital
game player community, both in their demographics and in their approach to playing.
Expanding on a traditional ethnography, this dissertation examined the entry of these
“newbie” players into a vibrant gamer culture, treating them as a new generation of
digital game players who brought with them assumptions about what it means to play
digital games. Thus, the second-generation subjects of this dissertation are, like Hine’s
ethnographer, “simultaneously native and stranger.”
The dissertation followed the entry of second-generation players into World of
Warcraft and examined their development of both their individual and social gamer
identities. In creating a gamer identity, most second-generation players sought ways to
make their social interactions easier by choosing to pass as the stereotypical player or by
creating small enclaves where their differences from first-generation players were less
remarkable. Physical characteristics such as gender, ethnicity or age were something they
could hide from random players, but could choose to divulge to guildmembers or players
with whom they wished to develop a deeper connection. For some second-generation
150
players, their gamer identity was a carefully crafted performance designed to meet the
expectations of first-generation players. For others, their gamer identity is a painstakingly
authentic portrait of their physical-world identity.
Kaye is an example of a second-generation player who struggled with creating an
online identity, in part because she struggled with her physical identity. Kaye was female,
not married, not working, and she lacked a sense of connection to family or community.
She saw a boyfriend on weekends, but spent the majority of every week isolated in her
apartment. She was diagnosed as bipolar and her mood swings made it difficult for her to
interact socially. Her therapist had assigned another patient to be her mentor and to check
up on her and, despite the fact that she was barely computer literate, her mentor had
convinced her to try World of Warcraft. Kaye started a character and wandered around,
occasionally completing quests, leveling and upgrading her gear, but, while she had
plenty of free time to spend in the game she certainly did not devote much thought to it
and did not progress quickly. At first, she only interacted with her therapist-assigned
mentor in the game. He quickly had her join his guild, which consisted only of close
friends he had met in person. She made loose acquaintance with them, but rarely
grouped, preferring to explore on her own.
The guild, becoming ambitious, began running quests together and invited Kaye
to join. Once in the group, her behaviors were erratic—sometimes she would be
responsive to typed communication and other times she simply ignored them. She did not
join the guild VoIP server. One night she began typing random comments in guild chat.
Words were misspelled, one letter was held down for several lines of text, and whole
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sentences were typed in all capital letters. Textually, this was the equivalent of Kaye
finding a crowd of people casually talking at a cocktail party, bursting in and jumping up
and down while waving her arms and yelling random words and nonsense sounds. Kaye
did not respond to queries about her odd behavior and eventually logged off. This
happened several times, with no clarity offered by Kaye at the time. After several weeks
of constant play and slowly getting to know the guildmembers Kaye again had a “bad”
night, only this time she removed herself from the guild before engaging in erratic
behavior. The next evening, she claimed it had been a mistake and asked to be re-invited
to the guild. A couple of nights later, she again removed herself from the guild. After a
few weeks, she abruptly quit playing World of Warcraft.
Several interviews with Kaye revealed an explanation for her behavior. Kaye was
an alcoholic, although she was careful to hide this fact from the few people in her life.
Neither her family, her boyfriend, nor her therapist knew how much alcohol she regularly
consumed. When Kaye began playing World of Warcraft, it was just another distraction
from her everyday life and something to keep her occupied while she was drinking. At
first, she felt no connection with the other players in the game, despite knowing her
mentor personally, and felt no qualms about behaving rudely or doing something strange
while drunk. All of the characters in World of Warcraft were merely bits on the screen
and did not need to be treated like real people. However, after Kaye began building a
connection with the other members of the guild, her perception of the other players had
shifted and she no longer felt comfortable being drunk in front of them. For Kaye, when
the graphics on the screen became associated with personalities, the social connections
152
became too much for her. She attempted to withdraw from the guild, but then found
herself speaking to other players with other guilds. Ultimately, she decided that the social
connections within World of Warcraft made her as uncomfortable as the social
connections offline.
For Kaye and many other second-generation players, entry into World of Warcraft
becomes an unexpected performance of identity. It forces players to confront their
personal sense of identity in choosing which aspects to highlight and which to hide in
their interactions with other players. In addition, while first-generation players are
familiar with the deeply personal social connections that can develop during gameplay,
second-generation players are often surprised by the strength of connection they feel with
an MMO and how their identity performance changes when they become members of a
community.
MMOs offer a rich site for future studies in identity performance and online
communities research. Although I located pockets of second-generation gamers, by their
very nature they do not congregate in large groups, unlike the raiding guilds of first-
generation gamers. Further studies of second-generation players should build on the
methods developed in this dissertation and include further documentation of players’
entry and assimilation into gamer culture and their development of a gamer identity.
The Hidden Costs of the “Addiction” Framework
Media Studies is a broad area of research within Communication which, among
other things, is concerned with the social impact of online communication. This
dissertation sought to push the boundaries of knowledge in Communication from the
153
perspective of media consumption and fan culture. Uncovering the hidden costs of using
an “addiction” framework to describe player behaviors is a significant contribution to
research on media consumption.
“We are not the first generation to wonder at the rapid and extraordinary shifts in
the dimension of the world and the human relationships it contains as a result of new
forms of communication, or to be surprised by the changes those shifts occasion in the
regular pattern of our lives” (Marvin, 1988, p. 3). The introduction of new technology
makes possible the rearrangement of social norms and power structures. The rapid
growth of computers, the Internet, and mobile devices over the past thirty years has
emphasized the ability of technologies to augment rapid social change. Public discussions
abound about the potential benefits and problems from these technologies
137
. These
public discussions foster a sense of urgency in understanding the role technology takes in
our lives; however, academic research into media effects and critical/cultural studies of
technology has had difficulty keeping pace with rapid change. Public opinion, therefore,
is riddled with misconceptions and misunderstandings about media consumption. Castells
(2001) describes how rapid technological change led to negative perceptions of the
Internet:
“The speed of transformation has made it difficult for scholarly research to
follow the pace of change with an adequate supply of empirical studies on
the whys and wherefores of the Internet-based economy and society.

137
For example, social networking sites such as twitter and facebook were used to rally, organize and keep
media attention on popular revolts in Egypt in 2010.
154
Taking advantage of this relative void of reliable investigation, ideology
and gossip have permeated the understanding of this fundamental
dimension of our lives, as is often the case in periods of rapid social
change. Sometimes this had been in the form of futurological prophecies
based on the simplistic extrapolation of social consequences from the
technological wonders emerging from science and engineering; at other
times, it appears as critical dystopias, denouncing the supposedly
alienating effects of the Internet before even practicing it. The media, keen
to inform an anxious public, but lacking the autonomous capacity to assess
social trends with rigor, oscillate between reporting the amazing future on
offer and following the basic principle of journalism: only bad news is
worthy news” (p. 3).
Fear that technologies will encourage isolation, deception, addiction, and loss of
community is not unique to the Internet. It is a socially driven fear of uncontrolled change
that has appeared with each introduction of new communication technologies. Standage
(1998/2007) argued that concerns originally raised about the telegraph are similar to
concerns now being raised about the impact of the Internet. “Public reaction to the new
technologies was, in both cases, a confused mixture of hype and skepticism” (p. 207).
Following a tradition of exploring social norms by examining the everyday
practices of popular culture, this dissertation focused on how individuals wrestle with
public concerns about video games by examining gameplay practices of second-
generation players. Miller (1998) emphasized the importance of applying social theory to
155
mundane activities in order to expose hidden assumptions. Radway (1984) questioned
general assumptions about why women consumed romance novels, finding that this form
of entertainment filled a complicated social need for women readers. In a similar effort to
look below surface-level assumptions, Kutner and Olsen (2008) questioned stereotypes
about children and video game play. They collected data on how children actually play
video games and asked the children what they thought about their own game use. Their
subjects provided surprisingly thoughtful answers indicating that even young “gamers”
are aware of concerns about the social impact of technology and reject many of the
behaviors that concern parents and politicians. Like Kutner and Olsen, this dissertation
combined observation and interviews in order to explore the motivations behind video-
game-consumption choices, and used this data to critically examine popular perceptions
about video game “addiction.”
Second-generation players are aware of the threat of video game “addiction” and
work to find a successful juggling of their game playing with the rest of the demands on
their time. Looking across their stories, the players who included a social component in
determining the limits of their gameplay were able to sustain their playing and expressed
that they were not playing World of Warcraft “too much.” This suggests that perhaps
“addiction,” which is a physiological state of dependency, is not a useful framework for
describing how players interact with an MMO.
Labeling gaming as “addictive” situates it within a larger discourse of addiction.
It denies the diversity of games, assumes that all games are a gradation of “bad,”
conflates game content and game structure and creates a demand for oversight and
156
regulation. Labeling games “addictive” does not encourage a deeper exploration of the
role that digital games play in players’ lives. It does not take into account the context
within which digital gamers choose to play video games over the many other forms of
entertainment available in the modern era. For example, Michael’s story offers an
alternative representation of the video game “addict.”
Michael was a twenty-five-year-old former Army serviceman who had spent most
of his civilian life living in Georgia near where he had been born. He had joined the
Army out of high school and completed one tour of duty in Iraq before returning home.
During the time this research was completed, the “War on Terror” had become a drawn-
out battle on multiple fronts. Servicemen and women were joining the military branches,
completing training and tours of duty and returning home, and some were playing video
games throughout the process. Both first- and second-generation players included active
and former military personnel. Of the second-generation gamers that I interviewed five
discussed suffering from PTSD, including Michael.
Michael was an avid World of Warcraft player and I found him online practically
any hour that I logged in. He was very social in the game and preferred group activities
over soloing. He had a vast network of other players whom he happily pulled together to
tackle large and small challenges. For Michael, PTSD was a quiet but constant force in
his life. Although he usually put on a happy face, he was often moody and
temperamental. One night he would be laughing and joking and the life of the party, the
next he would be silent, refusing to login to his VoIP server and ignoring whispers in the
game. On good nights, he ran raids and engaged in silly activities like running low-level
157
instances with upper-level characters for fun or nostalgia. On bad nights, he focused
exclusively on PvP (Player versus Player) activities, a group of mini-games within World
of Warcraft similar to Capture-the-Flag or deathmatch-style team competitions. Michael
would spend hour after hour playing PvP, not working with his social network to form
competitive groups that would excel at PvP, but playing with random groups resulting in
some victory but many defeats. These PvP activities gained him honor points, but not
efficiently, which suggests that his PvPing focused more on mental escape than active
participation in the game.
In his personal life, Michael struggled to hold down jobs which were mostly
arranged by friends or family—working with his father in construction or with a friend in
a yard-maintenance company. Most of his jobs ended for unclear reasons summed up by
“because my boss was a douche.” On good days, Michael’s social nature extended
beyond the game: he loved to host parties at his house to play console games like Smash
Bros or American Idol, and board games like Cranium. He arranged movie nights and
invited people to play World of Warcraft in LAN-style (local-area network), with
everyone bringing a laptop to his house and playing together in his living room. Often
when people were over he would move restlessly around the room regaling the party with
funny and self-deprecating stories from his time in the Army. When the party wound
down and the people left, he would pick up his aging laptop and go back to playing
World of Warcraft. As his job opportunities grew farther apart, so did his ability to host
parties.
158
His sleep was restless and he preferred to fall asleep on the couch playing World
of Warcraft than to sleep next to his girlfriend in their bed. Coffee, soda and chain-
smoking several packs a day helped him put off sleeping until exhaustion took over. Bills
often went unpaid, the rent was consistently late, his electricity and phone accounts were
shut off several times, and his car was repossessed. He attempted to re-enlist, but the
Army would not accept him until he reduced his debt. Eventually, his girlfriend kicked
him out and he moved back in with his parents.
Unlike many other players, Michael never expressed concern or regret about the
amount of time he spent playing World of Warcraft. He described it as “cheap
entertainment” and a “way to see all my friends” when he had no money for gas or to go
out with friends. When he held jobs, he did not use World of Warcraft as an excuse to be
late to work although he was sometimes tired from lack of sleep. He seemed to relish
physical work when it was available, but even manual labor did not help him sleep any
better.
On the surface, Michael’s story looks like another instance of digital game
“addiction;” however, calling Michael an addict denies the diversity of games. Michael
was not playing any game. He was not playing puzzle games or combat simulations;
although he liked those kinds of games. He was drawn to World of Warcraft because the
structure of the game offered him a particular social experience. Michael had a high-
school diploma, little work experience, and had retired from the Army with a set of skills
that he was unable to apply to another career. The economic downturn had added
Michael to a long list of the perpetually unemployed. At the same time, he had a strong
159
need for social interaction that he no longer had the money to fill by arranging parties and
group outings. The constant World of Warcraft playing seemed to be more of a symptom
of his depression, his PTSD, and his inability to re-assimilate with the civilian life than
with an addiction to play a particular game.
Describing Michael as an addict also implies that playing the game has only a
negative impact. For Michael, World of Warcraft offered social opportunities that were
unavailable to him in the physical world. Michael’s sense of identity was closely
connected to his ability to protect and provide for people. In World of Warcraft, he could
be magnanimous with his time and with the virtual gold and gear he collected. He had
multiple characters and could play whichever role (Tank/Healer/DPS) was needed within
a group to defeat a particular challenge. He readily offered rare items to people who were
having trouble attaining them. His persona in World of Warcraft fits more closely with
his image of himself than his reality. Michael also felt a need to spend time with people
and World of Warcraft offered him that option any time of the day or night.
The “addiction” framework also conflates game content and game structure. To
the uninformed observer, Michael spent hours clicking on his mouse buttons, violently
attacking fantasy creatures and other players. In contrast, an understanding of the
structure of World of Warcraft helps an observer recognize that what Michael craved was
the structure and goals of the game world. World of Warcraft was full of checklists and
tiered challenges. The requirements for making progress in the game were clearly stated.
The experience he needed for leveling was quantifiable. Achievements were unlocked
when he met certain criteria. Recipes listed the specific items he needed to combine in
160
order to form crafted items. The UI even showed him when he was making progress on
quests. For example, if he needed to collect 7 “[Mana Wraith Essence]” the UI showed
him how many he had collected as well as when he had completed the quest and needed
to turn the quest items into the quest giver. More importantly, vendors had a fixed sales
price for items and a fixed purchase price for items that he collected during gameplay. As
a player, Michael was never really broke because he always knew the vendor value of
items and had the option of grinding random monsters for money and items to sell.
The structure of World of Warcraft also offered Michael a series of victories. He
had the opportunity to constantly reward himself by collecting experience, gear, in-game
gold, “rep” with different factions, PvP honor points, Achievement points, Arena
rankings, badges, etc. The majority of the activities built into the game structure had clear
and quantifiable rewards, and many of these rewards were accessible through diligence
rather than skill
138
. Not only was Michael rewarded through the structure of the game, but
World of Warcraft also made it easy to accrue social rewards because many elements of
the game required multiple players to complete.
The addiction framework also creates a demand for oversight and regulation. The
amount of time Michael spent playing World of Warcraft seemed excessive. His personal
relationships and his career options suffered. “Addiction” implies that these negative
impacts should have been mitigated by imposing a time limit on his playing. However, it
does not take into account the positive impacts of playing games. World of Warcraft
offered Michael a sense of structure, purpose and community, and helped him combat his

138
See, for example, the discussion on “welfare epics” in Chapter 1.
161
frustrations and his feelings of inadequacy. Rizzo et al. (2011) found that combat
veterans with PTSD frequently played commercial first-person-shooter digital games,
pondered if that might be a form of self-treatment and created a successful combat-
simulation for PTSD treatment. Seen from this perspective, Michael’s excessive playing
of World of Warcraft is not about addiction, but is instead a form of self-medication for
other events going on in his life. “Self-medication” is only one possible framework that
may be more useful for Media Studies scholars than “addiction,” but understanding the
limitations of the “addiction” framework opens opportunities for a more useful
framework to be developed.
Conclusion
This dissertation explored the social impacts of online communication by
examining the interactions between gamers and the complex social world supported by
World of Warcraft. Only through immersing oneself in the details of this digital space
can a researcher develop an understanding of the roles that Internet technologies and the
underlying philosophy of the game have in shaping the gaming and social experience of
the gamer. By examining dispositions, identity performances and responses to the
discourse of addiction, I differentiated between first- and second-generation gamers,
recorded the development of individual and social identities, and identified the hidden
cost of the “addiction” framework, as well as other insights observed in the everyday
interactions between first- and second-generation gamers and the continuing evolution of
the digital space in which they interact.

162
Gameography
Angry Birds (Rovio Mobile, 2009)
Breakout (Atari, Inc., 1976)
Everquest (Sony Entertainment, 1999)
Farmville (Zynga, 2009)
Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine, Inc., 2007)
Rockband (Electronic Arts, 2007)
Second Life (Linden Lab, 2004)
Sniper Elite (Rebellion Developments, 2005)
Space Invaders (Taito Corporation, 1978)
Star Wars Galaxies (Sony Online Entertainment, 2003)
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation (Core Design, 1999)
World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment/Activision Blizzard, 2004)

163
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175
Appendix: Figures
Figure 1

Figure 1. Second-generation players can learn a first-generation gaming disposition.

176
Figure 2

Figure 2. A caricature of the older male gamer who is “addicted” to digital games.

177
Figure 3

Figure 3. The cast of South Park after their characters have morphed into “gamers.”

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kelly, Shawna Kathleen (author)

Core Title Running with newbies: understanding online communities through the eyes of second-generation gamers

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 04/27/2012

Defense Date 02/16/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag addiction,disposition,ethnography,identity performance,interactive entertainment,OAI-PMH Harvest,online communities,video games

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Thomas, Douglas (committee chair), Balsamo, Anne (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email shawnake@gmail.com,shawnake@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-16527

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Legacy Identifier etd-KellyShawn-659.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kelly, Shawna Kathleen

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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