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JOURNAL TITLE: Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds

USER JOURNAL TITLE: Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds

ARTICLE TITLE: Fighting heroic hegemony with ennui: The remarkable everyday in World of Warcraft

ARTICLE AUTHOR: DIBYADYUTI ROY

VOLUME: 7

ISSUE: 2

MONTH: June

YEAR: 2015

PAGES: 169-182

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169

JGVW 7 (2) pp. 169–181 Intellect Limited 2015

Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds Volume 7 Number 2

© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jgvw.7.2.169_1

Keywords

quotidiantemporalityhegemonic masculinityWorld of WarcraftMMORPGheroic

dibyadyuti royWest Virginia University

Fighting heroic hegemony

with ennui: the remarkable

everyday in World of

Warcraft

abstract

This article explores the predominance of mundane everyday tasks within the World of Warcraft (WoW) gamespace to emphasize the importance of the quotidian within this purported heroic environment. The importance of what is understood to be ordinary-everyday-tasks in accomplishing heroic quests, I argue, challenges popular and scholarly perceptions of WoW, as a gendered gaming space based in heroic time and presumably inhabited by skilled male technocrats. I illustrate that the WoW game-environment, in offering players the option of in-game progression not only through slaying dragons but also by picking herbs and sewing clothes makes a defi-nite rupture in the idea of heroic temporality, which is traditionally understood as masculine while the everyday is essentialized as feminine. Without gendering any task as either feminine or masculine I assert that heroic identity in WoW is exten-sively influenced by everyday ennui, to the extent that maintenance of heroic status quo often means a regular engagement with the quotidian. By allowing for the possi-bility of gameplay in multiple temporal modes WoW challenges social constructions of heroic time as masculine and everyday time as feminine. In doing so these multi-ple temporalities open out possibilities for perceiving the WoW landscape as ideal for resisting hegemonies of masculinized heroism and the creation and sustenance of alternative modes of agency.

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introduction

In a 2008 cartoon parody (Lagspikefilms 2008) of World of Warcraft (WoW, Blizzard Entertainment 2004), some archetypal characters from the wondrous world of Azeroth decide to take a breather after a ‘normal’ day of slaying dragons by playing their favourite massively multiplayer online game, namely, the ‘World of Workcraft’. Within this game space, which closely resembles the reality television show The Apprentice (2004–), magic potions have been replaced by Red Bulls, the main threats are not dragons, but deadlines for memos while the martial obstacles are not lack of weapons, but rather ill-timed toilet runs.

Beyond the comedic value of such a role-playing production that satirizes both the ludic and the corporate realms, what stands out is the transposing of quests from the realm of the heroic to the sphere of the banal and the reciprocal relationship between both. Most importantly as the Azeroth char-acters in the video transition seamlessly from their fictional heroic dimen-sions into real-life corporate drudgery, the viewer is made to acknowledge how a player’s identity within and beyond Azeroth is regulated not only in the spectacular, but as Edensor (2002: 15) notes, grounded in ‘the mundane details of social interaction, habits, routines and practical knowledge’. In fact, by making mundane official chores a part of the heroic narrative, the video hints at a rather under-emphasized aspect of the player’s quests within the WoW – the emancipatory possibilities that lie invested within ennui and the everydayness of heroic quests.

Through focusing on ‘the essential, taken-for-granted continuum of mundane activities’ (my emphasis; Felski 1999: 15) in the World of Warcraft this article argues that what is being accomplished through everyday acts, constitutes a ‘temporal otherness, a radical break with existing notions’ of heroic time (Felski 1999: 22). Although WoW is constructed as a space based

Figure 1: A scene from the ‘World of Workcraft’ showing some characters from the World of Warcraft (WoW).

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in heroic time to be presumably inhabited by skilled male technocrats, I explore in this article how the predominance of mundane and banal everyday tasks in the gamespace emphasizes the importance of the quotidian within the heroic space. The importance of banal everyday tasks within the realm of heroic quests in WoW, I argue, allows for the possibility of gameplay in multi-ple temporal modes, thereby challenging social constructions of heroic time as masculine and everyday time as feminine.

the hero and his time(s)

For players and interested individuals who seek an introduction to the WoW, the beginner’s guide on the American website Battle.net (an online gaming portal developed by Blizzard Entertainment) declares that it ‘is an online game where players from around the world assume the roles of heroic fantasy characters and explore a virtual world full of mystery, magic, and endless adventure’.

The rhetoric of this carefully constructed introduction is worth exploring since even for an individual who is uninformed about Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), the term ‘heroic fantasy’ is presumed to immediately evoke the vision of archetypal adventures carried out by mascu-line figures. Considering that in both mythology and popular culture the trope of quests has been explored largely through the models of male heroism it is not surprising that heroic time is culturally coded as a masculine domain. As Rita Felski (2002: 22) notes in ‘Telling time in feminist theory’, traditionally heroic time has always been considered masculine while the trappings of the mundane everyday have been essentialized as feminine. However, Felski, in offering a counter reading of this essentialist tradition, argues that feminist time can be understood as emancipatory through four models of redemption, regression, repetition and rupture, which ‘reach beyond the empty mechani-cal measure of clock time’. In forefronting Felski’s idea, this article explores the diverse temporal modes available in the WoW and explores the role of

Figure 2: Introduction to WoW.

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1. The distinctions between qualitative time (kairos) vs quantitative time (chronos) have been summarized well by John E. Smith (1986: 4) in his essay ‘Time and qualitative time’. Smith points out that qualitative time is characterized by the experiential aspects of an event with the emphasis on how an individual perceives the passage of time in a ‘special temporal position’ (1986: 3), which cannot be productively measured through quantitative time – or merely the numerical duration of the event.

2. Of course it must be also noted that even the meta-heading of North American time is a misnomer since the United States of America is itself divided into multiple time zones.

repetitive everyday tasks as an integral part of the heroic quest. I posit such a view from the understanding that the idea of the ‘heroic’ – distinct from the ordinary – is deeply embedded in the processes of individual identity forma-tion, whereby certain attributes or actions in both the gameplaying world and in real life are supposed to provide access to an extraordinary realm. What I want to underline is that repetitive everyday tasks are among the fundamen-tal parameters in the project of self and identity formation in any sphere and most definitely MMORPG’s. Since ‘for most of human history, activities have gained value precisely because they repeat what has gone before them’ (Felski 1999: 21), repetition understood as a ritual provides the self with a sense of community and the ability to assimilate the various aspects associated with personal and social identity. While existentialism critiques identities produced through everyday repetition since the individual is subjugated to the demands of an imposed pattern, it is crucial to understand that ‘[r]epetition is one of the ways we organize the world, make sense of our environment and stave off the threat of chaos’ (Felski 1999: 19).

Pertinently, the idea of heroic quests performed within the temporality of WoW would imply that this ludic landscape functions under a single mono-lithic model of masculine time. However, in parsing out the importance of the everyday in both the game objectives and player interactions within the WoW domain, it is critical to underline that the ludic experience of this MMORPG situates itself within multiple temporal modes. As the player logs onto their Blizzard Entertainment account and into the specific realm/server that they have chosen, a clock is immediately made visible on the screen, informing the player of the amount of time they have been/will be playing the game. Simultaneous to this quantitative ‘real-world time’, which is constantly visible on the screen, the player’s experience (speed of movement, patches, quest, resets, etc.) is concurrent with the qualitative1 time that they have spent in Azeroth depending on the specific gamer’s playing skills and gaming dynamics.

Interestingly, this temporal dimension is further complicated by the physi-cal location of the player as Blizzard Entertainment sets the time in Azeroth based on its server location; for example for a player logging in from India into a server/realm such as Garona, which is based in North America, it would imply that their gameplaying experience would function within three tempo-ral spaces: Indian time, in which they are physically located, North American time,2 in which their quantitative gaming experience is being measured, and the qualitative gaming experience within the world of Azeroth. Therefore, from the very inception of the ludic experience in WoW, the emphasis is both on the quantitative and the qualitative time, neither of which can be divorced from each other if we are to decipher the machinations of this landscape. Vitally, the WoW gameplaying experience involves a combination of unidirectional and forward-moving linear time as well as the repetitive acts of accessing computer terminals and logging into your account, characterizing the natural circadian rhythms of cyclical time. Since the player is reliant on acts of repeti-tion associated with cyclical time – which have been historically essentialized as feminine (Felski 2002: 25) – and teleologically forward-moving linear time associated with the heroic masculinized narrative of WoW, it is evident that both modes of temporality are needed for an effective gameplaying experi-ence. Helga Nowotny’s assertion that ‘everyone is a practitioner and theore-tician of time’ (1994: 6) is particularly relevant for this MMORPG experience since, as highlighted above, the experiential aspects of time based in the

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everyday are constantly being remoulded and utilized by both by the gamer and the gaming world in WoW in order to augment the ludic experience.

Therefore even at the elemental level of gameplay such as the act of logging into the WoW universe, multiple temporalities based within the quotidian are being negotiated, which make the WoW temporal landscape function predominantly through Felski’s feminist conceptualizations of time and immediately challenge popular perceptions of WoW as a capitalist space of masculine domination. To make this connection further transparent it may be useful to reference Felski’s idea of ‘time as repetition’ since ‘repetition is linked to the everyday and the everyday to the woman’ (Felski 2002: 18). While such a negative connotation of repetition emerged from historical asso-ciations of women with the repetitive tasks of everyday life, it is rather inter-esting that advancement in WoW requires hours of repetitive work, which is never considered feminine due to the meta-temporal framework of heroism within which it is located.

the heroic quest For hypermasculinity

In Die Tryin’: Video Games Masculinity and Culture, Derek Burrill asserts that video games have been heavily influenced by narrative cinema and ‘have borrowed certain representative strategies as well, particularly in the catego-ries of gender and sexuality’ (2008: 73). These strategies have particular reso-nance in the construction of masculinities within the gameplaying world, an aspect that borrows from the ‘long and undignified history of presenting heteronormative, white masculinity as both natural and ideal’ (2008: 73). This construction of heteronormative white masculinity in the video gaming world, which Varda Burstyn (1999: 15) refers to as ‘hypermasculinization’, holds particular importance in reference to the WoW gameplaying experience. In fact this ‘hypermasculinization’ is apparent even as the player creates their

Figure 3: Choosing an Avatar in WoW.

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3. Melodie Calvert and Jennifer Terry argue that:

We could define gender itself as a technology according to the following propositions: Gender is an organized system of management and control which produces and reproduces classifications and hierarchical distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Gender is a system of representation, which assigns meaning and value to individuals in society, making them either men or women.

(1997: 5–6)

gameplaying avatar, much before they have actually started accumulating experience within the world of Azeroth.

As the player is provided with the option of selecting an avatar from the various options available either in the Horde or the Alliance, a preview of the character is displayed on-screen. The gender and physical appearance and preview figure can then be customized according to the preferences of the player. However, in the case of almost every character, the preview figure is exhibited with a specific weapon, which he or she then dramatically and violently brandishes against an invisible assailant as a mark of their antici-pated potency within the ludic sphere. Thus, this avatar, which should ideally serve as an entry point for the player and a possible ‘site of agency in which the player may enact any number of identities and subjectivities free from the constraints of the abject flesh’ (Burrill 2008: 74), has in fact already been effec-tively gendered – through the acts of dramatic violence, which it performs.

Without essentializing any act of violence as a symbol of hypermascu-line performativity it may be logically asserted that social constructions of masculinity in the realm of films and video games have continuously associ-ated acts of violence with the virile male subject. Suzanne Hatty points out in Masculinities, Violence and Culture (2000) that the disassociation between the feminine and the masculine is a dominant gesture in western cultural narra-tives, which she argues is generated by the mythos of violence. Burill (2008) asserts that this eulogization of violence is a critical part of hegemonic white masculinity, which is based within ‘narratives of good violence … stories [that] mythologize violence … romanticize the actors and their behaviors, engage in self-congratulations and reinforce reputations for bravery in dealing with the avowed enemy’ (2008: 67). Unsurprisingly therefore video games that focus largely on heroic quests locate themselves within this mythology of violence and bravery. As Burrill argues, video games in general encourage the devel-opment of a subject formation that ‘mirrors the ontology of heteronormative white male masculinity’ (2008: 67), thereby producing the normative struc-tures of dominant violent hypermasculinity. While gaming spaces and more specifically the ludic realms of ‘heroic fantasy’ games like WoW are geared towards producing hypermasculinity as the very technology3 that structures gameplay, such strategies are also inevitably fissured, leaving the possibility to be challenged by making ‘use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers’ (Certeau 1988: 37).

challenging the hypermasculine hero through everyday tactics

In July 2014 the popular gaming entertainment website IGN came out with an article headlined in bold letters ‘WARCRAFT PLAYER HITS LEVEL 90 WITHOUT LEAVING STARTER AREA’ (ign.com). Chronicling the exploits of a player named ‘Doubleagent’ the article goes on to enumerate how the player achieved Level 90 ‘on June 21, 2014 after a whopping 173.5 days of playing, which translates to 4,164 hours’ (Karmali 2014, par. 1). While the arti-cle itself is rather informative in detailing the methods required to circumvent what seem to be pre-ordained choices for any player in the WoW landscape, the most fascinating aspect is the description of how the player achieved this landmark – ‘by utilizing herbs and mining nodes in the zone for their meager XP offerings once quests dried up and mobs stopped providing experience due to their low level’ (2014, par. 3). When the player in question was asked

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about his gameplaying experience he answered that ‘apparently it offer[ed] a change from the normal. Plus it’s pretty easy to do when I have TV shows or movies that I need to catch up on, more so than trying to do that during a battleground or raid’ (2014, par. 3). Clearly the response underlines that, while the ‘normal’ mode of playing may involve apparently heroic tasks such as the merciless killing of mythical animals, creatures, monsters, etc., the change of playing style by concentrating on everyday tasks such as ‘picking up herbs’ could effectively produce the same result.

Pertinently, several scholars in recent times such as Tanya Krzywinska (2008: 126) have stressed the importance of studying games as stand-alone worlds, which should be seen independent of the logic of films, televisions and hypertexts (Rettberg 2008: 24). This article, however, keeping in mind the aforesaid viewpoints, preeminences Jesper Juul’s understanding that ‘games can be played with or without real-life consequences’ (quoted in Corneliussen and Walker-Rettberg 2008: 8), implying that the player’s intentionality often steers both the temporal and the spatial aspects of the gameplaying experi-ence. Before moving onto a discussion of the situational exigencies that shape the intentionality of a player, it is important to understand the characteristics of WoW, which allow it to move beyond the binaries of winning/losing and death/life – making it a perfect space for challenging the heroic and ‘definitive goals of role playing games … such as leveling up’ and allow banal everyday tasks to constitute a resistive tactical temporality (Rettberg 2011: 21).

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1988) asserts that everyday tactics that may subvert strategic powers are not intended to ‘destroy or take over the entirety of that which it is entering’ (Weideman 2000, par. 1). Rather the effectiveness of tactics lies in their ability to under-cut strategic surveillance through the utilization of time. De Certeau further mentions his example of the office space where the subordinate worker employs tactics during official ‘company time’ by engaging in ‘la perru-que’ or the worker’s own work – which is ‘free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit’ (1988: 25). As Jason Weideman notes in his analysis of De Certeauan tactics ‘nothing of value is stolen; what is taken advantage of is time’ (2000, par. 4). Nowhere is this more apparent than within the WoW gaming space as exhibited in my personal gaming experience, which I describe in this article.

Scott Rettberg notes in his essay ‘Corporate Ideology in the World of Warcraft’ that ‘in addition to the … duties of slaughtering enemies for the glory of the Horde or the Alliance, WoW avatars earn their keep picking herbs, skinning dead animals … sewing clothes and so on’ (2008: 27). Such acts illustrate that the banal everyday temporality makes a definite rupture in the heroic temporality and in Felski’s words constitutes ‘temporal otherness, a radical break with existing notions of time’ (2002: 21). Even without classify-ing any of the processes of ‘picking herbs or sewing clothes’ as either femi-nine or masculine it can be safely asserted that what is being accomplished through everyday tasks opens out possibilities of perceiving the landscape as ideal for the creation and sustenance of non-gendered agency.

Thus within the multiple temporalities in Azeroth, heroic identity is exten-sively influenced by the mundane, to the extent that maintenance of heroic status quo often connotes, as shown, a regular engagement with the quotid-ian. Therefore linear models of heroic masculine temporality that are ascribed to the WoW severely limit the understanding of the resistive potential of this space. Perceiving the game as merely the process of completing fantastical

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heroic journeys fails to take into cognizance the liberatory potential, which lies embedded within the repetitive and ruptured aspects of the ludic experi-ence. What needs to be emphasized here is that the liberatory combination of the heroic and the banal is made reactionary and regressive through the machinations of hypermasculinity – one of the notable strategies being the overt sexualization of female avatars – which compensates for the emancipa-tory possibilities and subdues them. This colonizing potential of hypermas-culinity, which manages to suppress the importance of everyday tasks within the WoW gameplaying environment, is intrinsically connected to essentialized conceptualizations of everyday life.

Everyday life has been historically characterized as a world ‘leached of tran-scendence … the miraculous, the magical and the sacred’ (Felski 1999: 16), characteristics that are understood as integral to the heroic and synony-mously hypermasculine domain of video games and MMORPG’s in particu-lar. However, a critical aspect of the WoW universe, which allows it to move beyond the reductive heroic temporality of other contemporary role-playing games and even its predecessors, is that success in the WoW is not marked by a ‘single number, but many different types of metrics’ (Rettberg 2008: 27). Such metrics are influenced primarily by the level that the player is on, which in turn is predicated on a large number of factors ranging from the ‘player’s weapons, armors’ to the ‘reputation with different factions and militaristic ranks of honor’ (2008: 27). As Rettberg notes, such quantifiable measures of achievement are further complicated for advanced players, who in addition ‘to the “hard” metrics calculated by the system’, are affected by ‘numerous “soft” outcomes, in terms of a player’s … relationship with other players’ (Rettberg 2008: 28). As can be understood while killing members of the Horde/Alliance in the heroic temporal space may be extremely beneficial for a Level 7 player in order to move up, a Level 50 player will find it increasingly difficult to progress unless they acknowledge the purportedly trivial aspects of building relationships with other players or promoting goodwill amongst the members of a guild.

In other words, much as in real life, where individuals derive their self-worth from both the serious and the banal, in the simulated world of Azeroth it is this ‘banality … [that] is most important’ (Blanchot and Hanson 1987: 13). Surprisingly, however, both academic scholarship and contemporary culture undervalue the impact of the banal everyday on the gameplaying world as it is often the most taken for granted aspect of the WoW gaming experience. Highmore (2002: 1) notes that the everyday has largely been ignored in popu-lar discourse since ‘to invoke everyday life can be to invoke precisely those practices and lives that have traditionally been left out of historical accounts, swept aside by the onslaught of events instigated by the elites’. While the quotidian has been grossly under-theorized in relation to any cultural studies project, it can be said with certainty that there exists almost no scholarship in the realm of gaming related to the idea of the everyday. Particularly in rela-tion to the WoW universe, the emphasis on the heroic self has meant that the ‘everyday’ is contrasted to heroic epic time, which works as a transcen-dental signifier subsuming (albeit unfairly) all of the gameplaying experience. Personally, as an individual who is not an avid gamer, my experiences have shown me that while the heroic is indeed the dominant strategic mode devel-oped and promoted by Blizzard, there do exist tactical avenues that subvert this strategic structure.

As I entered the WoW universe my intention was to choose a character who would require movements that could be easily grasped by an individual

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who was not an advanced gamer. Since my impression was that martial activ-ities require a higher gaming skill set, I accordingly opted for a Blood Elf char-acter of the Paladin class, who are primarily the healers in any community. Although I had hoped that choosing such a ‘tame’ class denomination would allow me to escape martial activities, the training quests of my education as a ‘Paladin’ required me to kill Mana Wyrms (a floating serpentine creature) for their crystals and regal Springpaw Lynxes and cubs for their collars. While understandably such an enterprise that embodied the heroic ethos was indeed the easiest way to gain entry into the next level, I soon realized that I was not obligated to kill the assigned number of mythical creatures; since in many cases the coveted objects were often found strewn on the landscape, left there presumably by other advanced players who had lost use for them. Such an experience not only vindicated for me the idea that the gameplaying experi-ence is indeed as Juul (2003: 34) argues predicated on the intentionality of the player but also that the mundane everyday act of collecting objects is in fact an equally effective way of gaining capital within the WoW universe.

The fundamental problem with a significant section of WoW scholarship (Mortensen 2006; Taylor 2006) is that it has implicitly assumed a monolithic player figure, one who approaches the game with a set of advanced gaming skills and readily adopts the heroic mythos, which is unarguably the most accessible aspect of this MMORPG. Even in the nuanced scholarship of Scott Rettberg (2011), there is an assumption that WoW promotes a ‘capitalist fairy tale’, where gamers are encouraged to work hard and build gaming skills in order to rise to great wealth. However, such a view ignores the fact that the purported capitalist model in WoW is a uniform one that requires the player to have only a specific skill set, namely gaming proficiency in order to gain success in Azeroth. This is in sharp contrast to real-world scenarios where multiple skill sets are exploited in capitalist economies. In Raymond Williams’

Figure 4: Blood Elf character of the Paladin class.

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(1985: 27) words the ‘residual, emergent aspects of a culture that are coex-isting and competing with the dominant mode’ – namely players with a considerably lower skill set or individuals who do not want to partake of the heroic ideal – are absolutely ignored in such scholarship. More importantly such a reductive view ignores a key tenet of understanding gaming culture and any culture for that matter, which, as Williams asserts, is that ‘culture is ordinary’ (1985: 27). Considering that WoW is not only based on complet-ing quests but also on a significant bit of strategization while choosing the tasks to be completed, it is important to underscore that the dominant gaming culture that prioritizes heroic time does not include the ‘low-key, humdrum passage … in which decisions are made, identities enacted and displayed’ (Edensor 2002: 20). Such scholarship that creates an elitist paradigm within the realm of so-called popular culture is clearly aligned with understanding the ‘heroic’ as a monolithic mode of gameplay comprised of constant new challenges, magical manoeuvres, battling supernatural beings and an inces-sant thirst for quests, far removed from the ‘low-key humdrum passage’ of everyday life . Contextually, such a view clearly genders both the gameplayer and the temporal mode in which he or she functions since historically both the everyday and the female figure have been defined through negation. As Felski notes, ‘[w]omen, like everyday life, have often been defined by nega-tion. Their realm has not been that of war, art, philosophy, scientific endeavor, high office. What else is left to woman but everyday life, the realm of the insignificant, invisible, yet indispensable?’ (1999: 17).

Felski’s argument points out that while historically the idea of repetition has been maligned as a mode of activity that results from certain forms of external pressure or domination, the contrary holds true for our contemporary existence. A continuous privileging of the ‘superior value of the new’ (Felski 1999: 21) fails to take into cognizance that ‘everyday rituals may help safeguard a sense of personal autonomy or dignity … repetition is not simply a sign of human subordination to external forces but also one of the ways in which individuals engage and respond to their environment’ (Felski 1999: 21). Seen in the light of general gaming scholarship and more specifically WoW-based gameplay theory, it would imply that the empowering aspects of the everyday and the quotidian have always been an integral part of gaming environments. The failure to consider repetitive tasks such as picking up herbs or dousing fires – which are not only accessible to gamers of all skill sets but also add value to the player’s in-game progress – develop from the same hegemonic masculine mindset that privileges an understanding of repetitive tasks as a form of enslavement or emerging from a lack of superior intellect. Such an understanding of repetition completely ignores the idea that repetitive tasks can be a crucial strategy ‘in the gradual formation of identity as a social and intersubjective process’ (Felski 1999: 21). Contextually the landscape of WoW is replete with situations and circumstances where repetitive tasks allow both new/inexperienced and experienced players to gain traction within the envi-ronment and plan ahead for future accomplishments.

This aspect of strategization, which involves making what may otherwise seem trivial decisions, often determines the holistic playing experience for the gamer. For example in the case of Blood Elves, once the training mode is completed, there are diverse quests on offers and it is often only after care-ful deliberation that certain quests are accepted at the cost of others, keeping in mind the intentionality of the player and the individual’s skill set. Such tactical moves are indirect opposition to the strategic structures that seem

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to have been apparently imposed by Blizzard Entertainment. However, the fact that any player can exercise these tactical options based on temporality to challenge the ‘heroic’ mode of strategic gameplay signifies that Blizzard Entertainment has wilfully allowed for multiple manoeuvring methods within the WoW environment. This is consistent with De Certeau’s formulation where strategies are actions/ideologies that give rise to totallizing spaces by reducing temporal operations to spatial ones while tactics are precisely those operations whose value is derived from their stress on time. Therefore it can be asserted with confidence that the potential and possibilities embedded in tactical moves such as everyday quests like dousing fires with water, which are rarely mentioned in academic and popular scholarship, challenge the mascu-line status quo that maintains both the ideology and the space of the heroic. In defining the heroic as most definitely based in the quotidian and manifested through mundane acts of the everyday, certain tactics emerge that allow us to develop a definition of the heroic that is independent of the gendered and violent cultural narrative of hypermasculinity. Interestingly the elision from both academic and popular scholarship (Corneliussen and Rettberg 2008; Collister 2014; Silva and Mousavidin 2015), of how everyday tactics can be an equally effective mode of play in WoW, is consistent with ideologies of national identity production in many cases. Often such structures imposed by the state through its various rules and regulations are considered the dominant method of identity production, at the risk of ignoring the localized quotidian that continues to have a persistent influence.

The utilization of tactical temporal situations is especially visible in the WoW space when a player encounters death, which occurs multiple times (for some inexperienced players like me this chance is higher than others). The concept of death is particularly fascinating in WoW as the player after death is not ejected out of the topos, but rather maintains presence as a spirit. This spirit figure in the lower levels of the game has the possibility of gain-ing redemption and life if they can go back to the place where they died and recover their corpse. This aspect of redemption, which is contingent on recov-ering your past body and bringing it into the present, maps onto Felski’s idea of feminist time as redemptive and empowering through ‘realizing that the way we live now is not inevitable, that other possibilities exist for you’ (1999: 26), disavowing the unidirectional linear progress of temporality. More importantly for lesser skilled players, death offers a welcome opportunity of being able to roam the entire landscape without any risk of bodily harm. Although this may sound a rather banal quotidian exercise akin to the idea of flâneuring (Soukup 2013), it cannot be stressed enough how helpful such a tactical move is because it allows the player to chart out the entire territory and locate all the potential threats, helping them plan and execute their next move when they come back to life.

While undoubtedly the modes of temporality discussed here are only a few of the many available in WoW, the implications of such tactical tempo-rality extend far beyond the realm of Azeroth, indicating that hero is never a merely disembodied, larger-than-life figure. Rather, as De Certeau asserts, the ‘hero is the murmur of societies … a multitude of quantified heroes who lose their names and faces’ (1980: 5), much like the quotidian that often gets effaced by the epical. In an age and time where we are constantly investigat-ing methods to counter visible meta-narratives of domination, it is perhaps important to pause and reconsider empowerment through what we under-stand as dull, boring and tedious: our everyday life and our everyday time. As

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Blanchot (Blanchot and Hanson 1987: 13) notes, even though ‘the everyday is platitude (… the residual life with which our trash cans and cemeteries are filled: scrap and refuse)’, this ‘banality is also what is most important, since it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity’.

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suggested citation

Roy, D. (2015), ‘Fighting heroic hegemony with ennui: The remarkable everyday in World of Warcraft’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 7: 2, pp. 169–181, doi: 10.1386/jgvw.7.2.169_1

contributor details

Dibyadyuti (Dibs) Roy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at West Virginia University. He came to West Virginia by way of the University of Glasgow, where he completed his M.Litt. in Modern Literature, Theory and Culture. His dissertation project explores performances of masculinity within nuclear discourses and has led to him discovering the far-reaching effects of the atomic age on cyberculture. Besides being a part-time gamer he enjoys immersing himself and his students in the wondrous world of speculative fiction and fantasy literature.

Contact: West Virginia University, Department of English, 100 Colson Hall, 1503 University Avenue, P.O. Box 6296, Morgantown, WV 26506-6296, USA.E-mail: dibyadyutir@gmail.com; droy2@mix.wvu.edu

Dibyadyuti Roy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

JGVW_7.2_Roy_169-181.indd 181 8/5/15 12:51:52 PM

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UbiquityISSN: 2045-6271 | Online ISSN: 2045-628X

2 issues per volume | Volume 2, 2012

Aims and Scope‘Ubiquity’, the ability to be everywhere at the same time, a potential historically attributed to the occult, is now a common feature of the average mobile phone. The journal anticipates the consequences for design and research in a culture where everyone and everything is connected, and will offer a context for visual artists, designers, scientists and writers to consider how ubiquity is transforming our relationship with the world.

Call for PapersThe journal invites contributions on subjects such as:• The evolution of media forms as they seep off the page and screen and into

the environment• The emergence of the ‘Internet of Things’ and the advent of spimes,

blogjects and ambient intelligence• The consumption of networked digital devices and the transgressions and

trauma implicit in the cultural shift that follows• The behaviours and technologies that cultivate a networked culture• New inter-disciplinary vocabularies for understanding a social, environmen-

tal and technical sense of ‘place’

EditorsMike PhillipsUniversity of PlymouthM.Phillips@plymouth.ac.uk

Chris SpeedEdinburgh College of Artc.speed@eca.ac.uk

Editorial AssistantJane MacdonaldEdinburgh College of Artjane.macdonald@eca.ac.uk

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