Bridging anthropological theory: Accumulating and containing wealth in World of Warcraft landscapes

Abstract

Human ingenuity responds to changing environments and resources with technological sophistication and variations in accumulative behaviors. While anthropologists look to the past and to processes of globalization to sketch these shifts in the natural world, there is a growing awareness that these transformations also occur in digital online worlds. I argue that archaeology’s attention to materiality provides useful analysis and directions for ethnographic video game analysis. I use research from the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, where players marshal social and economic resources in both the natural and digital worlds. In constructing reputations and accumulating prestige, players integrate online and offline resources, traversing the tangible/digital divide in their pursuit of achievement. Archaeological perspectives and theories of aggrandizement, containment, systems, landscapes, and ontological materiality provide opportunities to expand ethnographic video game research and debates into new directions.