A guild culture of "casual raiding' enhances its members' online gaming experiences: A cognitive anthropological and ethnographic approach to World of Warcraft

We document the norms and practices of a casual raiding guild pursuing a balanced approach to World of Warcraft gaming under the banner offline life matters. Confirming insights in the problematic online gaming literature, our ethnography reveals that some guild members experience gaming distress. However, this guild's normative culture helps its members better self-regulate and thus protect themselves from, among other things, their own impulses to over-play and thus compromise their offline lives. We suggest that cognitive anthropological culture as socially transmitted knowledge theoriescombined with ethnographic methodsilluminate how socially learned gaming patterns shape online experiences. Our approach helps us refine theories judging socially motivated Internet activity as harmful. We affirm the potential for distress in these social gaming contexts, but we also show how a specific guild culture can minimize or even reverse such distress, in this case promoting experiences that strike a nice balance between thrill and comradery.