Bonnie Nardi response

Bonnie Nardi’s anthropological account of World of Warcraft was exactly what I was told it was going to be but not was I was expecting by any means. Nardi does a great job at introducing people to the game and give readers the background knowledge required to understand exactly what is going on. I guess since it had World of Warcraft in the name and I don’t play that game, nor will I probably ever, I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy the reading or understand what she was talking about. Luckily Nardi wrote broadly about each section, which makes sense since this is one of the first books of its kind and should have acted more as an introduction to the topic.

Regarding addiction I realize that I am not really addicted to any games but I am pretty close to being addicted to Melee. But playing melee counteracts one of the definitions supplied for game addiction on p. 125, where Nardi explains Seay and Kraut’s definition. Part of their definition includes gaming displacing other activities like maintaining friendships and I have made plenty of friends through Melee and I imagine other people have made friends through other games as well. The other parts of their definition basically make it so that anybody who is addicted to a game wouldn’t be able to keep up their addiction for very long so I also find that they are a little bit too strict in defining it.

I also realized something pertaining to my end of the semester essay, I was writing about how in fighting game communities people generally have toxic behavior when they are online and thanks to reading chat logs in the book I realized that a lot of people have toxic behavior in any online gaming experience which is why people generally can only play with friends. I might expand my research to include more online gaming for my essay but I still find it interesting that people have to be so terrible to each other online.

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