Neither the First Nor Last Book on WoW

The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World - William Sims Bainbridge

2009 - MIT Press

 This is a brilliant book. And a brilliantly ridiculous book.  Yet despite buying this $28 “sociological” examination of a computer game, I never felt duped or cheated or thought ill of MIT Press. 


The following 4 quotes sum up the work for me – I quietly leave them for you not in an effort to give away the entire story, but as a gentle argument why the author is brilliant (but the story is not):


“I studied the World of Warcraft through ethnographic  participant observation  for two years…”


“I tabulated the major professions for 1,096 characters in [a guild:]…”


“ With more than a little shyness, I do conclude it is worth explaining how I constructed the personalities of my twenty-two WoW characters, beginning with the ones I lavished the most time on.”


“At Bohannon’s encouragement I had organized this conference to explore the potential of virtual worlds as meeting places for scientists as well as laboratories for doing scientific research.”


Amazon description - An exploration of the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft as a virtual prototype of the real human future.