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You’re thinking of craft as other. But lawyers are craftsmen. They’re actors and seducers. Good teachers are craftsman. Craft should not be presented as some sort of helpful element to life. It’s how we communicate. Politicians are craftsmen. Con-men are craftsmen. The manipulation of subtexts and implications.
“Its a vindication of craft over art, of workmannship over ‘inspiration’”
You’ve just made me not want to get this book.

Try writing a dialogue where the implications of each speaker’s words undermine the stated intent. That is: try writing a dialogue that’s also a quartet. If you can pull it off it’s because you’re a craftsman. Describe geekdom compellingly to a non-geek and you’ll be a craftsman. More so than any geek could ever be.

Divided government and legal adversarialism are both based on the inevitability of craft and the need for mastery.
“Ladies… and gentleman, of the jury. Ladies and gentleman… of the jury. [stare directly at them but don't intimidate them] Cast your eyes on my poo-oor client [hey kid...stop smiling] Is this the face of a lad who could commit… such a heinous act as throwing a baseball through a plate… glass… window?”

Academics forgot the craft of language. All they have left is ideas, and most of them are lies. Can you imaging that there are subtexts in the language of this blog? That you’re “crafting” a little linguistic home for yourselves to reinforce your own prejudices?
That is simply a fact. So how do you respond to that understanding?

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But frankly I think all classes can solo quickly and efficiently as long as you don’t gimp their spec (trying to level a warrior as prot instead of fury, e.g.), not just pet classes. And of course puging 5 mans doesn’t require tons of scheduling but… I imagine we both have better things to do than have me convince you to play more WoW!

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In Rex’s ethnography (?) or theorization of WoW, I really, really hope that you address the issues of, say, locks and hunters, who are chosen by people because they can solo. When I tried dependent classes, I could not commit the hours needed, and the need to schedule my real life around the game. That meant after I leveled, I spent a while helping out newbies, lowbies, guildies, etc. then logged off.

I also hope you will address issues of gender and sexuality in WoW, as well as Blizzard’s conflicts with its sexual minoritarian players. There were interesting gay bashings as well (PvP hunting for members of gay guilds, disrupting parades and weddings, etc.)

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I think its a fascinating question and I hope he (or someone else) would answer it! I’d give it a crack myself but… I’ve got to farm some tin to level my alts blacksmithing…

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95% of what I think I know about the British craft movement comes from Lears’s No Place of Grace:

bq.In part a reaction against therapeutic self-absorption, the revival of handicraft ultimately became another form of therapy for an overcivilized bourgeoisie . . . ‘Do-it-yourself’ projects have provided innumerable Americans with a sense of autonomy and a chance to confront the substantial reality of material things. For people whose working lives seem beyond their control and permeated by the barrenness of a bureaucratic civilization, this is no small achievement. Yet it perpetuates the fragmentation decried by Ruskin and Morris: the split between work and pay and work for joy.

Never having a single minute at Second Life or WoW, I’ve got nothing to say about how that analysis might map onto the MMPORG world.

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Points for Tom:

2. Do SLers “treat the world as full of inert objects that are infinitely plastic and submit to human manipulation”? They may or may not, but given the number of quotes I have read and seen which focus on SLers being “limited only by their imagination” “creating a world from scratch” “the entire world is created by users” “having control over things in a way they never could in real life” I’m voting for ‘may’. Of course we’d need more research so… keep going!

3. Regarding ‘craft and the Xian tradition’ — I think you might enjoy reading the first half of Sennett’s book, which traces the shifting relationships between craftsmen and machinery in Western Europe. And thanks for the cite to the McCullough — I will look it up.

4. By ‘designers’ I simply mean ‘people who work with prims a lot’ and probably have a lot of the experiences that Sennett describes of people working with wood. Regardless, I don’t think you could call Cory’s work very focused on ‘craft’ in Sennett’s sense. When he says things like “content creation has traditionally been the domain of elite artists” ‘art’ is refigured as ‘content’ and the player as a romantic genius. This is not what Sennett is after.

4. Re: fieldsites, treating SL as a closed world and not venturing out of it for research doesn’t seem to rethink the fieldwork imaginary very much. As for whether you take your own work seriously or consider it ‘a conceit’ — I’ll wait for you to come down one way or the other before I do so as well ;)

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“It’s another example of Coming of Age in Second Life running afoul of the sort of theorization of ‘the field’ that Gupta, Ferguson, Marcus etc. have been trying to rethink.”

How could I resist? Since Akhil Gupta was one of my dissertation advisors, and Jim Ferguson and George Marcus are former and current colleagues at Irvine, respectively, the obvious point to make here with regard to how I rethink “the field” is:

You do realize that the book is a conceit, right? Or is it? Ha ha!

If you’re interested in how I theorize the field, one piece you might find interesting is “Ethnolocality” (The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 3(1):24–48, see my website). I sum up this argument in my first book (The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia), but the article goes into more depth. It’s about Indonesia, not Second Life of course, but I find fascinating theoretical linkages.

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When you carve something, and get better, the final product also gets better. But when you grind in WOW, level, put a boss on farm status etc, it doesn’t get better – it stays the same. You just get better at making the same product, where the craftsman ends up making a better product.

Craftsmanship vs Practice… something like that…

Also the grinding = not fun, progress = fun, statement is a bit too simple. I had fun running around doing world pvp – which at the time didn’t lead to “progress” in the game. Now with the pvp system running around killing has its perks/progress too…

Just to say not everyone sees progress the same way on there. Many roll alts constantly and never progress past level 20 [yet they play just as much as raid freaks]… I was a bit progress intensive, and got stuck raiding so much I got in trouble if I went pee too often.

In the end I was part of a guild that slaughtered the end game [pre expansion] – I feel I practiced a lot, honed my skills, and it took a lot of teamwork, but somehow it lacked the ingenuity that I’d hope for if I was “crafting”.

Confessions of an ex wow addict volume III.

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When you speak about something that “most designers in Second Life probably realize implicitly,” what you assume is an emic category of “designer” that’s associated with craft and that misses broader cultural logics of craft in Second Life and beyond. Those who engage in craft need not see themselves as designers nor be seen as such by others. This is something that Cory Ondrejka and others note. In my book, where of course I do identify craft as something important, I find Cory quite useful in this regard (he was one of the first folks to really identify this notion of craft as important, and of course his role as a designer adds another level of significance). So I would see my own work as building upon and extending Cory’s important work.

In my book, I suggest there are two directions in which discussions of craft might go in order to better understand the cultures of virtual worlds. One is production: that is, to think about the relationship between craft and labor (since in some economic writings they are separated through a limitation of craft to something like “handicraft,” that is, something outside circuits of production). The section is religion and the relation between craft and creation. I’m particularly interested in the book in linking this up to the Christian tradition, given the dominance of the West in the history of virtual worlds. Craft is crucial to this tradition in a range of ways (after all, Jesus was a carpenter!) that are fascinating to explore.

It makes sense to me from what I’ve seen of other virtual worlds and online games that craft is broadly relevant in these online contexts. I would thus very much agree with your saying that “playing WoW, even the most repetitive grinding aspect of it, features a strong element of craft work.” After all, as you note in the title of the post (but not in the post itself), it is called World of War “craft!”

If you find Sennett useful, you may also want to take a look at Malcolm McCullough’s fascinating book Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (MIT, 1996).

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Kerim — I wish that Tom had more directly engaged Cory’s work, since Cory is himself a theorist of SL, but since Tom was doing ‘Island ethnography’ I guess it wasn’t in his purview to take a look at who made the island, beyond the citations to Cory’s work that Tom does (in all fairness) make. Its another example of CASL running afould of the sort of theorization of ‘the field’ that Gupta, Ferguson, Marcus etc. have been tring to rethink.

I think that the term ‘creationist capitalism’ does capture much of the ‘creation ideology’ of SL, although I must say that of all of the parts of CASL this section was the most tantalizing and, in many ways, the least worked out in its reference to “Christian metaphysics” and Marxism. I think overall I’d say that I would be much more willing to take issue with Second Lifers’ self-understanding, whereas Tom does not want to make ethical or ontological judgments about his informants beliefs and actions (except *ahem* some of the time…)

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Sennett sounds well worth reading. As you’ve described it, it explicates my experiences of gardening and cooking very well. I have a vision, but the physical materials have their own rules. I think of gardening, especially, as art with/vs. science.

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