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 definite 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 extensively 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 possibility of gameplay in multiple temporal modes WoW challenges social constructions of heroic time as masculine and everyday time as feminine. In doing so these multiple 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.

Resistance and sexuality in virtual worlds: An LGBT perspective

“…For the vulnerable populations, being in a virtual world is a particular way of being in the world. Recent studies in WoW explains how people make sense of their lives using everyday digital practices such as gripe, bereavement, and ennui (e.g., Bainbridge, 2010;Corneliussen & Rettberg, 2008;Cuddy & Nordlinger, 2010;Klastrup, 2008;Roy, 2015;Silva & Mousavidin, 2015). Although the previous studies advanced the social study of WoW, recent literature has under-explored the significance of sexuality in the virtual protests.…”

Freed or Trapped: Gaming Pleasures and Expression of Gender Identities in World of Warcraft among Chinese Players

“…MMORPG playing is continuous, thus many players stay in a game for months and even years. The background story of WoW revolves around western wars and battles, full of fighting and killing, which is typically regarded as characteristic of a masculine genre (Roy, 2015). The images and narratives are mainly designed to meet male interests.…”