Cu Unjieng Hall2.Odt

8/9/2019 Cu Unjieng Hall2.Odt

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The struggle to code

Stuart Hall played a central role in developing a Marxist program of research for the

investigation of mass media and communication. This involved, in Hall's estimation, four breaks

from what was then the general paradigm of the (largely American) field:

1. A break from a behaviourist (stimulator-response) model of media to a focus on its

'ideological' role. Hall and his peers at The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

(CCCS) in Burmingham posited that mass media played the dominant role in the production

and transformation of popular ideologies in the audiences addressed, helping viewers to

ideologically define social relations and political problems,

2. from the media texts as 'transparent'. This allowed them to shift the attention of traditional

forms of content analysis to the complexity of the linguistic structuration of the forms of

media texts,

3. from an understanding of media audiences as passive and undifferentiated, towards a theory

of the audience as active readers and interpreters of the media texts, focusing in particular on

the complexities and potential contradictions involved between the acts of coding by media

producers and decoding by media audiences, and

4. from mass-culture models which were largely silent on ideology, to a return to the view of

mass media as playing a role in circulating and securing dominant ideological definitions and

representations.1

A few limitations with this framework should be readily apparent. Although Hall no doubt

would have preferred to think of the fourth break in terms of an ideologically cohered 'historic bloc'

exercising influence or even control over media production, in effect this is not very different from

Marx and Engels' claim in The German Ideologythat

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the

same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the

ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

1Stuart Hall, Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre, in Culture, Media, Language : Working Papers in CulturalStudies, 197279,eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Routledge, 2005) p.104-105. Original emphasis.


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Although this formulation is often dismissed as crude, the truth of the claim explicitly rests on the

degree to which the ruling class are directly the producers of ideas, and regulate the production and

distribution of the ideas of their age.2Even ifthis claim was generally true in Marx's day, as Hall

well knew, modern mass media production tends, to some degree, to involve hiring out these tasks

to a stratified layer of professionals. The ruling class' relative success in managing (rather than

simply producing) the ideas of the epoch therefore depends in part on successfully hiring the right

thinkers for the job. Logically, this process can be complicated by a number of factors ranging from

the individual idiosyncrasies of media moguls to the fact that these 'ideas' are also often

commodities that need to be successfully sold. Arguably, in an age such as ours, where media

technology enables a much less monological field of media production in comparison both to

Marx's time and to Hall's, this process is even more fraught. What is key however, is that Marx

explains the necessary conditions for the truth of his claim. Hall does not. Put simply, Hall asserts

the consonance of media products to hegemonic/dominant ideology without much attention to the

possibility that the ruling class might occasionally fail to secure this cooperation. Mass media

becomes the ideological purveyor of hegemony by definition, when in fact the loyalty of the media

product to hegemony must be proven in each case.3

A second limitation is really a matter of word choice. Casting the developments within the

program of the CCCS as breaks is an exaggeration that partly obscures aspects of their continuity

with what they are said to be breaking from. Arguably, the focus on the ideological effect of media

is a clarification or transformation of the behaviourist model which allows us to better conceptualise

the nature of the 'stimulator' and the factors involved in a subject's 'response'. Similarly, the 'break'

with traditional content analysis did not signal a break with content analysis tout court,only

2Karl Marx and Frederick Engles, The German Ideology, Marxist Internet Archive (MIA)https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm (3 December, 2014)

3Hall's easy assumption here may have something to do with his insistence that one can think questions of class

relations only by using the displaced notions of ensembles and blocs, (Cultural Studies and Its TheoreticalLegacies in Stuart Hall Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies , Eds. by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen

(New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 266.) since it seems to have had the effect of taking the integration of these layersinto a cohesive bloc as read without a rigorous analysis of the class relations which form (the, sometime more,sometimes less, successful) integument of such historic blocswhich is further complicated by the relative divisionof classes into class fractions.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm


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expanded it by using semiotics as the framework of that analysis.

Hence, much of the novelty in the CCCS' critical practices had less to do with a radical

break than with productive expansions, redefinitions, and transformations. This is likely to be the

actual sense in which Hall uses the term 'break'as a way of flagging the decisive moment of these

transformations in the course of a process of critique. This is a strategy borrowed from Gramsci

whose critical method depended on speaking within the terms of 'common sense' in order to

dissolve and rearrange its elements into a new paradigm that was both intelligible to the people

whose ideas were being critiqued while repositioning what was best in them.4This is at least part of

what Stuart Hall did to the field of Media Studies as it existed in the early 70s, and the key texts in

this exercise were Encoding and decoding in the television discourse written in 1973 and a

slightly edited and condensed version of the same text, Encoding/Decoding, written a year later.

These texts took seriously the emphasis of the likes of Raymond Williams and, most

especially, of Gramsci that culture needed to be understood broadly as both a way of life and a

mode of securing the dominance of a hegemonic bloc over the rest of society while attempting to

think through these priorities largely in terms of the concepts and methodologies taken from two

kinds of structuralism: structural linguistics and Althusserian Marxism.5

Hall begins by transforming the linear sender/message/receiver model of communication

into a reproducing circuit sustained through the articulation of linked but distinct moments

production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction. Each of these moments have their

own modality [and] forms and conditions of existence and the reproduction of the circuit

depends on the successful passage from one moment to the next. The modalities of each moment

therefore determine the conditions for the success or failure of each step in this passage.

For Hall, the

'object' [that is to say, the product] of these practices is meanings and messages in the

form of sign- vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of communication or

4See for example a text for which Hall wrote the Forward, Roger Simon's, Gramsci's Political Thought: An Introduction(London: ElecBook, 1999), p. 72-73.

5For a detailed assessment of the role played by these figures as Hall understood them, see Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies:Two Paradigms," Media, Culture & Society 2.1 (1980): 57-72.


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language, through the operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain of a discourse.

Thus, signs (aural-visual, in the case of television discourse) are the form of appearance of the

product (meanings, for example, an 'event' in the case of news broadcasting) in the moment of

circulation. In the form of signs, these meanings are therefore subject to all the formal 'rules' by

which language signifies.

Production therefore constructs the message by 'encoding' it in discourse. At the moment of

reception (consumption) this discourse is 'decoded'translated into social practices. This

renders the circuit complete and effective because if no 'meaning' is taken, there can be no

'consumption'. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. For Hall, therefore,

media is always importantly phatic: it always speaks in the imperative mode. Put another way, in as

much as the output of media is always a 'message,' this message is also always a piece of rhetoric.

And because the social world constitutes the material which is worked up and re-encoded by media,

these effects of these rhetorical acts are reincorporated, via a number of skewed and structured

'feedbacks', into the production process in the process of reproduction.6Thus the semiotic

paradigm is the appropriate tool for analysing either end of the communicative chain.7

Hall's argument hinges on his insistence that nothing guarantees the equivalence of the codes

deployed at production to encode the product and the codes available at reception to decode it. To

open up this argument he redefines Barthes' denotative and connotative levels of the sign. For Hall,

these terms refer to an analytical distinction between those aspects of a sign which appear to be

taken, in any language community at any point in time, as its 'literal' meaning (denotation) from the

more associative meanings for the sign which it is possible to generate (connotation). It is at the

level of connotative possibility that sign interfaces with ideologywhere situational ideologies

alter and transform signification. Relying on the ideas of the Marxist linguist, Valentin Voloinov,

Hall argues that this is where the active intervention of ideologies upon discourse is most visible,

6Hall, Encoding/decoding, in Culture, Media, Language : Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 197279,eds. StuartHall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Routledge, 2005) p. 117-118 and 119.

7Hall, Encoding/decoding,p. 120.


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where the sign is open to new accentuations and enters fully into the struggle over meaning.8

To be clear, it is not that a sign 'really means' what it denotes, rather denotation refers to the aspects

of a sign whose meanings are most secure at any given time, most clearly agreed upon. Although

hegemony relies upon and must contain these associations, the connotative level is the point at

which the smooth communication of meanings is most vulnerable to the 'misreadings' of the

audience, the point at which the hold over its potential meanings by the hegemonic ideology is most

open to breach.

What is clear from this is that the associative possibilities available to a sign are not all

equal, any more than all ideological formations pack equal social force. The struggle over meaning

is precisely a struggle, rather than a pluralist melange of pure whimsy, because something is at stake

in these meaning. The hegemonic bloc secures hegemony by securing signs to its preferred codes

and the struggle of various other ideological blocs involves organising and imagining themselves

along different axes of meaning. The hegemonic bloc therefore is, by definition, hegemonic because

it sets the preferred meanings of the signs deployed in a culture; it defines the dominant code.

Hall provisionally suggest 4 possible codes by which viewers can relate to this hegemonic

semantic order.

1. The dominant/hegemonic code itself.

2. The professional code. This is the code employed to professional broadcasters when they are

retransmitting a message already signified within the hegemonic code. It operates codings

which relate to such questions as visual quality, news and presentational values, televisual

quality, professionalism, etc. Hall assumes that broadcasters are faithfully forwarding the

interpretations of events provided to them by political elites, but notes that the particular

choice of presentational occasions and formats, the selection of personnel, the choice of

images, the staging of debates, etc. are selected by the operation of the professional code.9

8Hall, Encoding/decoding, p. 123.9A theoretical ambiguity should be flagged here. Hall's claims regarding this code is based on a conjectural assessment

of the ties that he believed actually existed between mass media broadcasters and the elites, but gives no indicationthat this conjuncture could shift. The other three coding positions therefore operate at a higher level of generality


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3. The negotiated code. According to Hall,

decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional

elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the

grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own

ground-rules, it operates with exceptions to the rule.

4. The oppositional code. A viewer operating in this code understands the intended meaning but

determines to recaststhem within a alternative framework of reference. For example,

someone may listen to a debate on the need to limit wages, but [read] every mention of the

national interest as class interest.10

This whole framework rests on two key planks: Hall's concept of mass media

communication as a circuit of production with distinct but mediated moments whose (more or less

sequential) passage into each each other is vulnerable at both poles of circulation (but essentially

the reception end), and his insertion of this process within a field of force constituted by people and

groups of people in struggle. It is easy enough to see how this constitutes a specifically Marxist

program of research. But it is important to understand, as he candidly admits, that Hall's 'Marxism'

was wrestling with the problematic of Marxism contraMarx. Gramsci is the prize fighter that

Hall enlists for this corner because his

strategies of evasion forced [his] work to respond to the things which marxist

theory couldn't answer while Gramsci belonged and belongs to the problematic of

marxism, his importance for this moment of British cultural studies is precisely the

degree to which he radically displaced some of the inheritances of marxism in cultural

studies11

Hall's project as a cultural critic, as in the rest of his political and theoretical work, is significantly a

Gramscian project. The purpose of the likes of Barthes, Saussere, and, most importanty, Althusser is

to provide the tools necessary for this project. Unfortunately, certain incompatibilities exist between

Gramsci and Althusser. Theories of the sign, in particular Voloinov's, are used to shore up

Gramsci's insistence that 'common sense' (i.e.: popular consciousness) is a battleground, and that the

than this one (that is, they would retain their validity even in the face of such a shift). Note, however, that inEncoding/Decoding the 'professional code' is fully absorbed as a sub-code of the 'hegemonic code' (p. 126)

10Stuart Hall, Encoding and decoding in the television discourse, in CCCS Selected Working Papers Volume 2, eds.Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson and Helen Wood (London and New York: Routledge,2007), p. 396-397.

11Hall, Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies, p. 265 -266.


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very meanings of its categories were determined by blocs of political subjects. As Colin Sparks

observes, Voloinov plugged the gaps that existed between Gramsci and structuralism in Hall's

model.

However, it is also true that it is usually Gramsci that gets 'articulated' in structuralist jargon

and not the other way around (the only major exception to this may be his use of the term

'hegemony' which was already in very common usage). I suspect this is another example of

Gramsci's strategy of speaking the language of the paradigm being critiqued; arguably Hall was

attempting to speak Althusserian the better to re-position a Marxism already significantly versed in

the language. This is a strategy that carries some risk. Not only do the gaps between Gramsci and

Althusser require the theoretical eclecticism that Sparks identifies, the language Hall chooses to use

tends to obscure the fact that the various theorists he employs are often naming subtly but

substantially different objects for theorisation even when the terms seem quite similar.

Voloinov's theories, for example, are intended in part as an uncompromising critique of

the likes of Sausssure (the founding figure of structural approaches to the sign) whom he accuses of

abstract objectivism. Perhaps a theoretical synthesis of the two approaches is possible, but it is

not giveninstead an ad hoccombination is cobbled together as needed. In point of fact, by

deploying Voloinov through semiotics, Hall obscures a key aspect of Voloinov's theory. This

theory, to be clear, is emphatically not a general theory of semiotics but a theory of linguistics. The

distinction between the two tends to be muddled in Saussure and even in Peirce. Voloinov's writing

contains a theory of the sign (which is not identical to Saussure's or Peirce's), but, as a theory of

linguistics, this theory is also integrated into a theory of 'the word.' The word is the form of

appearance of the sign in languageits embodied, practical form.12This difference is significant

because Voloinov's theory of the sign as a terrain of class struggle includes an attention tothe role

signs play as a mediator between people, but specifically as they materially exist as words. As word,

the sign has particular properties (for example: a dialogical character, etymology, and intonation)

12Jean-Jacques Lecercle,A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. Gregory Elliot (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006) p.

111-112 and 107


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which become determinants in structuring its relationship to people and people's relationship to

others through words.

If for Hall aural-visual signs are the 'form of appearance' of messages or meanings as the

'product' of the media in a circuit of reproduction, then, in the spirit of Voloinov, I disagree. I

would suggest that if we are dealing with signs, we are dealing with signs made material, practical,

embodied in the form of media objects. This is not a petty quibbleHall's exaggerated emphasis on

media objects as signs in the abstract (sometimes qualified as aural-visual) causes him to underplay

a key aspect of his theory: that media production exists as a branch of general social production.

Even though Hall's subjects are explicitly producers and consumers, the usual implications of this

are dropped. They relate to each other on the terrain of signsi.e.: ideologyas encoders and

decoders, and not (for example) as commodity producers and purchasers. The fact that mass media

senders can only get at receivers through forms of technology which are embedded in social

political economicrelations is concealed by the manner in which Hall emphasises ideological

relations. Among other things, this means that the moments reconnecting reception to reproduction

are extremely under-theorised and what began as a general theory of media circulation reduced

itself very quickly to a program for researching audiences.13These are all significant, if

understandable, omissions.

The general academic enthusiasm for treating everything exclusively as texts seems to be on

the wane, meaning that we are a bit better suited than Hall was to deal with the material

implications of media signs. But first, a detour.

World of Warcraft as ideology and as object

Blizzard's World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massive multiplayer online role playing game

(MMORPG). A player begins by creating their character. To do this, they must select a faction

(Horde or Alliance), from which they can choose from the variety of 'races' within that faction (the

number of available races expands with every release), pick a gender out of two available options

13Hall, Encoding/decoding, p. 120 onwards, basically.


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(male and female), select a class (e.g.: hunter, paladin, etc.), and finally distribute numerically

measurable ability points among a range of qualities (e.g.: strength, speed, stamina). These

selections are permanent.14

There is no 'game over' (death is temporary), nor any win-state; rather, one's character is the

purpose of the game. Playing involves improving one's game-self by advancing up 'levels,' gaining

skills, improving one's reputation, and acquiring wealththe last of which is used to augment

attributes such as strength or intelligence. Mastery is simply a matter of developing the knack for

surviving and thriving in the game world.

As in almost all role playing video games (RPGs), all of these appear to the player as

gaming abstractions which are finally numerical and so have a perfect equivalence to each other.

There is no difference between the 5 points added to intelligence by a cloak and 5 points added by

advancing up levels except that the former can be written off by a change in equipment. Items, gold,

and experience are also all acquired in the same way: by killing enemies who give experience and

drop wealth at death, by raiding dungeons in which there are enemies and treasure chests, and by

completing quests for which there are rewards from the quest-giver.

Quests are particularly important as they often provide the overarching frameworks in which

one kills enemies, travels the world, and enters dungeons. Quests are short tasks given by a quest

giver (usually an non playable character (NPC), but also signs, wanted posters, or scrolls with

instructions). The task is presented in narrative which is part of the way in which Blizzard fleshes

out the history and current state of affairs of the world of the game (Azeroth). They often involve

repetitive taskskill x number of a particular creaturealthough they occasionally involve more

'heroic' actionskill such and such villain.15

Players have no ability to permanently alter the game world, although certain states do alter

14Nicolas Ducheneaut, et al. "Building an MMO with Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft."

Games and Culture 1.4 (2006): p. 281-317.

15Jill Walker Rettberg, Quests in World of Warcraft: Deferal and Repetition, inDigital Culture, Play, and Identity: Aworld of Warcraft Reader, eds. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (London: The MIT Press, 2008),p.


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their individual access to it. Certain select elements are manipulable (enemies can be killed, chests

can be opened, quest relevant items can be moved around) but these elements quickly reset. Even

quests, which seem to usher the player into the 'plot' of the game do not permanently affect the

game-world. Most quests can be repeated by the player, and even those that are 'locked' after they

are accomplished can be performed by any other player on the server who hasn't successfully done

so yet. This means I can watch (or be watched by) other players performing tasks which appear as

significant historical eventsan NPC, for example, can be killed over and over again, by me or by

others. The same is true for more mundane quest: the same items may be gathered over and over

again, I can slay sets of monsters for a quest giver more or less as often as I please.16

Furthermore, all of these quests follow the same structure: get instructions with promise of

reward; perform repetitive task x number of times, or explore an area to seek out the thing, or battle

through the dungeon to kill someone; then receive the aforementioned reward. As one's character

improves, the details of the quest may change to increase the challenge. I may have to perform a

repetitive task 2x times, or, if the task involves (as it usually does) killing monsters, I may have to

kill x number of harder monsters. Character advancement just means doing the same thing, but at a

higher level.

Many quests, especially the most difficult ones cannot be accomplished by a single

character. Cooperation between characters can be achieved by on the fly grouping, or on a semi-

permanent basis in guilds.17The most difficult quests are also the ones that tend to be invested with

the greatest historical weight, meaning that struggles of the greatest historical significance for

Azeroth are waged sociallyalthough, ad nauseam.

How would a critic approach this using Hall's framework? To begin with, she would

probably arrange the various elements of the game-as-text into its syntagmatic elements; this was

16Espen Aarseth, A Hollow World: World of Warcraftas Spatial Practice, inDigital Culture, Play, and Identity: A

world of Warcraft Reader, eds. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (London: The MIT Press, 2008),

p. 111-122.17Dmitri Williams, et al. "From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft." Games and

Culture 1.4 (2006), p. 338-361, and T.L. Taylor, "Does WoW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server,Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause." Games and Culture 1.4 (2006): 318-37.


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already provisionally done by the loose 'narrative' of my summary. These elements could then be

compared paradigmatically to elements performing homologous functions in similar texts (e.g.:

other MMO games, other works of high fantasy, other RPGs, etc.). The 'meaning' of these elements

would be determined by their relationship to each other along both these axesfor example,

paradigmatically speaking, while most video games present the game to the player using numerical

abstractions, other games situate the player as a collective entity (a species, a military, a city),

within a different kind of world (sci-fi, city streets, Hell), offer up different kinds of interactions

(build a fort, a second life, explore), and relation to time (may be more bounded, less repeating,

etc.). This is about the time she might be inclined to draw a diagram. Finally, particular

understandings of the world outside of the game could then be identified as the likely codes by

which the message was articulated in the form of the game text. This moves with another narrative

act by which these meanings are evaluated using a particular framework: the set of understandings

about the world which the critic brings to the text and which allows her to guess at the intended

'meanings' and necessary codes used by the game producers.

WoW might then be viewed as built around certain fantasies of capitalism: the market as a

playground of equivalence, the world as being infinitely available to anyone that works hard

enough, pluralism in the form of everyone's initial equality but also their fundamental and

unalterable differencesand all of these are organised around the overarching framework of the

self-creation of the abstract individual. But, because any critic capable of such a reading is almost

certainly operating within an oppositional code, she would also observe that these same game

mechanics reveal certain repressions of capitalism.

She might expand on Espen Aarseth's observations that in Azeroth the player is a ghost-like

guest on an uncaring, slick surface,18by noting that there are other ways in which players are

ghosts in the world besides their inability to meaningfully interact with it. Perhaps thinking with

Freud, she might suggest that, in their incessant and unalterably repetitive activities, players have a

18Espen Aarseth, A Hollow World: World of Warcraftas Spatial Practice,p. 114


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hauntological existence in the worldas though they were stuck trying to work through the same

trauma over and over again in the same way. In fact the world itself, whose history can never not

keep happening in exactly the same way, is also pretty ghost-like.

The cypher for this repression might be found in the now trite observation that patterns of

play seem to be more and more modelled along patterns of labour. Perhaps the trauma is capitalist

alienation itself. Furthermore, given:

1. that our only ability to manipulate the game world in ways that are actually given meaning

(and therefore libidinal weight) are in quests which, however they are performed at the micro

level, are always exactly the same because we are unable to manipulate their terms and goals,

2. that, no matter how often our characters solve in-game problems, we will be presented with

them again either in exactly the same form or with only inessential differences, and

3. that the world seems doomed to present each successive 'generation' of individual players with

exactly the same events and burdens no matter how often previous players had seen them

through,

the image we are really seeing is not that of the ruggedly self-made individual as an agent equal to

whatever challenges may be thrown at him or her. Rather, this individual is radically helpless and

inadequate. She is capable of thriving, but only in terms set independent of herself, terms which she

can never break no matter how far she advances. She only fools herself if she thinks she can shape

the world which is even more unalterable than the fact that she is a female Blood Elf paladin of the

Hordesince, she can at least 'remake' her character, but never the world. She inhabits a 'history'

that is not only destined to repeat, but is, in fact, always already in the process of repeating. She is

an individual who can never make history, only inherit it. Thus a game which presents itself as a

power fantasy actually encodes an experience of powerlessness in the face of the conditions of our

real lives as the designers imagine them. Blizzard might be presenting players with a sinister and

demoralising argument about the nature of individuals in society. And the developers have either

read too much Schopenhauer or are presenting this miserable individualism cynically.


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That, at any rate, would be my reading if I were using Hall's framework, and I like to think it

is an interesting one with some truth. But it relies on the assumption that the mechanics of the game

are the result of the ideologies through which the designer's experience of the world are translated

into the game-as-text. Broad historic changes in the patterns of game mechanics would therefore

tend to be mapped to epochal changes in culture, perhaps even ultimately to changes in the

composition of the hegemonic bloc. Whatever the case, we would find ourselves back to a

'reflection' theory of cultural texts whereby they are, at bottom, the result of the worldview of the

authors. While I do not actually think that this theory can be rejected entirely, I want to also call

attention to the way in which forms (very broadly understood) play a role in determining the shape

of our thoughts, even what is materiallythinkable through them as social things.

So what determinations helped shape the particular individualism found in WoWthat is to

say, why these game mechanics?

As Scott Rettberg has usefully pointed out, the

form and structure of player's engagement with video games have always been to a large

part determined by the economic goals of game developers, and for completely logical

reasons.He links gameplay to the particular way in which developers try to get at our money. Arcade games

needed to extract as many quarters as possible as quickly as possible; console game developers

needed to sell cartridges that contained games that were considerably more compelling than arcade

games, but not so compelling that the player would not want to buy another game from them.19

But the business model of MMO games is different again:

The real money is made in the monthly churn The logical goal of MMORPG

producers, then, is to immerse players in one single game for as long as possible,

without diversion to other virtual world environments, and without end20

The development team did not set out to 'write' a 'message;' they set out to design a

profitable commodity. This commodity was a game that was (1) played online, (2) massively

multiplayer, and (3) subscribed to through the payment of regular fees. At the very basic level, the

19Scott Rettberg, Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft, inDigital Culture, Play, and Identity: A world of Warcraft Reader, eds. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (London: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 21

20Rettberg, Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft, p. 21.


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hardware and the requirements of playability have a key role in determining things like the size of

the world21and how many game processes can be run at any given time. Even as apparently

arbitrary a choice such as the decision to have players enter into the world as an individual character

rather than, say, as armies (the original RTS form of Warcraft), cities (Sim City), or nations

(Civilization) was at least in part circumscribed by these technical-economic considerations.

The fact that Azeroth is a shared world which players enter generationally according to

whenever it is that one logs on for the first time, means that it has to be both persistent and

relatively staticsuch changes as occur are introduced by Blizzard and are experienced equally by

all. Put another way, all players have to be able to 'buy into' the same commodity. This is why plot

cannot play the role that it does in more traditional, linear, RPGs which unfold like a novel for a

single player. It is also why gameplay does not permanently act on the world as it does in sandbox

games like Fallout. Rather, the 'narrative' (such as it is) is not actualized or unfolded by the player,

but is instead available for experience. Player activity does not constitute a living history. This

occurs at the level of mythos and lorea fictive world substantially outside of the game world

which is only a (virtual) theme park version of it. This theme park world has been constructed to

withstand the pressure and tampering of millions of visiting players, who are allowed to see, but not

touchlet alone build or destroy.22

Even the numerical nature of the gaming abstractions can be explained in this way, since the

epistemology available to coders is entirely quantitative. The absurd metrics attached to things like

skill or honour are really a matter of showing the gamer the only form in which skill and honour can

be made visible to code and therefore act as an element in the game bound by game mechanics.

These may be homologous to capitalist reification or the actions of bureaucracy, but homology does

not imply causation or identity.

In a substantially different way, similar considerations may enter into how player behaviour

should be 'read'. For example, it has been observed that large guilds are often 'managed' in much the

21Aarseth, World of Warcraftas Spatial Practice, p. 117.

22Aarseth, World of Warcraftas Spatial Practice, p. 119 and 121.


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considerations cited above.24Nevertheless, it is surprising how much the ideological aspects of the

game can be thought of in just these terms. Consciousness plays a role here, but not onlyin terms of

an 'author's' world view. It alsoincludes the efforts of designers to understand the strategies (for

developing a profitable game) made available by its technological basis. This basis determines

things like what the hardware can accomplish, or the form of distribution of the product. This is

somewhat different from 'ideology' in the sense that Hall uses it as relating to world views that

contest or support hegemony. The goal to which these technological affordances are put are not set

simply by ideology, but also by social relations (such as the market) that impose them upon the

designers without much regard for how they think or feel about it. Put crudely, the game as product

'thinks' the designers as much as the other way around.

One could claim, and I would tend to agree, that the sheer number of homologies between

capitalism and the game details of WoW suggests that they are not coincidental. The creation of the

game was an imaginative act which produced (perhaps by a failure of imagination) these

homologies. However the actual product that Blizzard developed was not meanings and

messages, it was a particular commodity. To the determination by ideology which Hall

emphasises, we have to add the determinations introduced by the realities of this commodity as both

a material use value and exchange value which must be realised through a particular marketing

strategy. WoW contains signs and meaningswithout which it would not be a very compelling

game at allbut if we get at those signs we only do so in the form of an embodied social object: the

game itself.

This helps us understand a little bit better the sense in which WoW is a rhetorical object. The

rhetorical effect of the game upon the players does not need to have been 'encoded' through

ideology by the developers. This is an important implication for Hall's insistence that the 'passage of

forms' from one moment of the media process to another have their own modalities and therefore

must also introduce their own determinations. We are obliged to relate to the game and to make

24Jessica Langer, The Familiar an the Foreign: Playing (Post)Colonialism in World of Warcraft, inDigital Culture,Play, and Identity: A world of Warcraft Reader, eds. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (London:The MIT Press, 2008), p. 87-108.


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meaning out of it, as we find it. This is substantially unrelated to why and how the game got to be

the particular game that it is. It can make its rhetorical demands in ways that are surprisingly

independent of the ideologies of its producers, and even at times, independent of our own ideologies

as consumers. However Hall is clearly right when he observes that what we take from media is not

absolutely determinedthat we can relate oppositionally to it, or we can simply not integrate its

rhetorical demands into the rest of our lives.

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