Book Review: World of Warcraft and Philosophy. Wrath of the Philosopher King

World of Warcraft and Philosophy. Wrath of the Philosopher King

Edited by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger

Open Court Books / Carus Publishing, Chicago 2009

W.o.W. and The Fellowship of Smart Gamers

Reviewed by Marco Benoît Carbone [http://www.marcobenoit.net/]

If knowledge should go hand in hand with action in order to truly be worthy of being part of our lives, why can’t we kick the crap out of our rival guild in Warcraft while pondering on Heidegger and our being-towards-death? And by the way, which of those two objects of thought is more «action-like»?

WOW and Philosophy is yet one more successful instalment in the fast-growing Popular Culture and Philosophy series, which has already built up a snug reputation for filling in the anachronistic gaps in the cultural divide some residual highbrow critics have been digging in order to separate themselves from what they perceive as the despicable garbage of our contemporary digital media industries. This is especially true when it comes to certain countries in the world (as an Italian reader, I’d love to read more stuff like this, perhaps also properly translated) and also videogames in general: which are not only a unique, quite recent expression of our cultural complexity, but also have only just recently come out of their sandbox and begun to teach something new to its bigger brothers, sisters – and loathers – in the family of arts and humanities.

So why should World of Warcraft be able to tell us something about philosophy?

While it is not completely right to say that it does so directly, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot of things for a whole lot of people. Semioticians, linguists and other humanities scholars are continually searching for meaning in any possible kind of cultural object, and have pointed out that intellectual content is what naturally emerges from the very act of consumption of books, games, movies, music etc. Further, we could recall Umberto Eco’s lessons about literary narrative: it’s always the reader that completes the «writing» of a text; hence, anyone who can’t see anything meaningful in something they are reading, watching or playing, can’t really be chock full of meaning themselves either!

So – what might Warcraft speak to us of in terms of philosophical content?

Certainly far too much for a brief review like this to go into in detail, given the massive trans-cultural phenomenon it has become. Over the last few years, Warcraft has revolutionized the way millions of gamers all over the world interact, socialize, build, and run a collective universe together – as well as an own economy that somehow runs on its own, interfacing with the economies of the «real» world and creating its own sets of needs, desires and commodities, its own trends and shortcomings, and even its very own – and very dark – colonising, slave-labouring side. Power and boredom, ethics and utopian politics, social performance, the legacy of Machiavelli, the need to beat the hell out of other people’s characters and a compulsory tendency to stack up piles of gold and other goodies for us living beings in the age of avatars (collection habits being the object of just one interesting contribution – amongst a myriad of others – by Patrick Coppock and Dario Compagno): these are just a few of the concepts you’ll discover running through one simple game of Warcraft (if you can manage to glimpse them as you play, that is). These same concepts also keep running all the way through this entertaining selection of essays written by something like thirty gaming fanatics from different scholarly worlds of philosophy and game studies for this particular book (if you really want to keep moving along to the next level).

They’re not trying to fool you into taking part in something boring, however. Quite the opposite. Indeed, the best thing about WOW and Philosophy, apart from the sheer quality and variety of the contributions, is probably the playful, quest-like, game-level structure of the whole volume. This is a funny, totally laid back introduction to some very neat pieces of contemporary philosophical thinking about games and gaming, and while it’s bestowed with a quite clear form and mission, you can also choose just to dive into it at will, whenever you feel like just ‘powering up’ your brain. That is really some weaponry, especially if you consider the following: if your mind is humming along as lively and freely as a kid’s mind does during play (numerical age doesn’t count here) while at the same time someone else is preaching about how bad some things are for you (especially videogames) – it will probably turn out to mean in the end that they’re good!!