Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life

Abstract

Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second LifeRobert M. Geraci New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014. Appendix, notes, references, index, and images. 348 pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780199344697Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraftand Second Life is in many ways a natural follow-up to Robert W. Geraci's 2011 book Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality. His latest work is erudite, lucid, and a poignant and significant contribution to the flourishing multidisciplinary study of games and virtual worlds. It also adds to the recent body of scholarship examining the nexus of virtual worlds, sacred traditions, meaning making, and myth, including sociologist William Sims Bainbridge's eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming and psychologist Nick Yee's Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-and How They Don't. Virtually Sacred stands firmly alongside such works, offering a theoretical premise derived from the social sciences in general and the sociology of religion in particular.Beyond Geraci's ambitious theoretical premises, he also spent extensive time in and out of virtual game worlds conducting ethnographic research replete with interviews and surveys within guilds of World of Warcraft(2004) and communities of Second Life (2003). Geraci balances quantitative and qualitative findings and observations with insightful anecdotes highlighting everyday occurrences of virtual-world residents. At times he openly acknowledges when the two approaches conflict or need not express religious impulses exclusively. All this teeming with an approachable style of writing and prose makes Geraci's case equitable. He has also supplied ample endnotes and an invaluable appendix on his own methodologies and sources. Any scholar pursuing similar work will want to consult this generous supplementary material.Chapters 1 through 3 lay out Geraci's experiences in World of Warcraftand his own efforts to acknowledge its strength as a prefabricated mythos and lore-driven domain. As such, the first few chapters reveal Geraci's suggestive insights into the discourse of myth and meaning as a cohesive story and game world. He further develops a brief account of key progenitors of World of Warcraftand games with similar thematic and aesthetic tendencies toward myth making. Naturally, the mythopoeia of Tolkien and the genre of high fantasy stand out as canonical, along with science fiction in general as a model for "modern mythology" (pp. 28-31). These, alongside the highly influential table-top role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, readily demonstrate content culturally transmitted with an appeal for myth and magic. However, the operative and more deeply entrenched mythos, as Geraci suggests, may very well be the players' intervention with a cosmic struggle between good and evil, enabling room for ethical concerns and reflections, while yielding transcendent-like experiences within the major tides of this underlying mythos.Geraci dedicates chapters 4 through 6 to analyzing Second Life's more opaque engagement with religious community building, social experiments with its openworld reliance on user-generated content, and fabrication and identity construction. Much like World of Warcraft, Second Life also draws on the canonical texts of science fiction and cyberpunk like William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992). As Geraci reveals, the porous world of Second Life is not so much lore driven (though loredriven lands exist), but rather cosmo- and mytho-plastic. …