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

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.2 Even if this 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

Karl 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)
3
Hall'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 Theoretical
Legacies 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 layers
into 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 blocs which is further complicated by the relative division
of classes into class fractions.

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.4 This 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
4

See 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.
5
For 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.

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.6 Thus 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 ideology where 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,

Hall, Encoding/decoding, in Culture, Media, Language : Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 197279, eds. Stuart
Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Routledge, 2005) p. 117-118 and 119.
7
Hall, Encoding/decoding, p. 120.
6

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

Hall, Encoding/decoding, p. 123.

A 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 indication
that this conjuncture could shift. The other three coding positions therefore operate at a higher level of generality

8
9

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 recasts them 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 contra Marx. 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 in
Encoding/Decoding the 'professional code' is fully absorbed as a sub-code of the 'hegemonic code' (p. 126)
10
Stuart 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.
11
Hall, Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies, p. 265 -266.

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 given instead an ad hoc combination 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 language its embodied, practical form.12 This difference is significant
because Voloinov's theory of the sign as a terrain of class struggle includes an attention to the 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)
12

Jean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. Gregory Elliot (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006) p.
111-112 and 107

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 quibble Hall'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 signs i.e.: ideology as 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 economic relations 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.13 These 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

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

13

(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 wealth the 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 tasks kill x number of a particular creature although they occasionally involve more
'heroic' actions kill such and such villain.15
Players have no ability to permanently alter the game world, although certain states do alter

14

Nicolas 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.

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

15

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 events an 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 semipermanent basis in guilds.17 The 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 socially although, 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

Espen Aarseth, A Hollow World: World of Warcraft as Spatial Practice, in Digital 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.
17
Dmitri 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.
16

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 axes for 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 differences and 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,18 by 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

Espen Aarseth, A Hollow World: World of Warcraft as Spatial Practice, p. 114

18

hauntological existence in the world as 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
Horde since, 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.

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 materially thinkable through them as social things.
So what determinations helped shape the particular individualism found in WoW that 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

Scott Rettberg, Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft, in Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A world of Warcraft
Reader, eds. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (London: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 21
20
Rettberg, Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft, p. 21.
19

hardware and the requirements of playability have a key role in determining things like the size of
the world21 and 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 static such 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 lore a 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
touch let 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
Aarseth, World of Warcraft as Spatial Practice, p. 117.
Aarseth, World of Warcraft as Spatial Practice, p. 119 and 121.

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same way that a workplace is managed.23 These involve hierarchical systems of 'management,'
quotas, performance incentivisation, surveillance, even applications for entry that look surprisingly
like job interviews. This could be a reflection of the success of the current hegemony in limiting
what forms of social organisation are imaginable to most of people. Or, it could be a practical
response to the demands of the game. The guild is an instrument in this project, not a project in its
own right. It is an effect of the foundational individualism of WoW that players join guilds in order
to pursue their own self-interest without joining guilds, they would not have access to the most
difficult dungeons and to the sweet, sweet loot that they contain. In that respect seeking entry into a
guild is rather like seeking employment in a corporation. You may not have any loyalty to the
collective for its own sake, but without the job you would have no access to things like clothing,
medicine, swords, or shields. In such a situation, cooperation and the subordination of individuals'
activities to corporate interests has to be enforced. This is a good deal of what managerial tools
were designed to do. This homology shouldn't be pushed too far however: WoW does not reward
guild leaders the way capitalism rewards CEOs, and members can 'fire' their leader while most
workers cannot. Using in-game player behaviour to guess at their motives and values is at best
speculative which ought to rather complicate the task of market research for Blizzard.
More importantly, it seems that a set of very complex of behaviours arouse that deal with
WoW's game mechanics mechanics whose nature are to a great extent explicable in terms of the
design strategies employed to deal with the demands imposed by the nature of the commodity that
Blizzard set out to produce.
Ideology and forms of appearance
None of this is to say that ideology is somehow absent in WoW; the features of female
avatars (generally sexualised, ridiculous, or both) or the fact that the skin tones available to human
characters ranges from white to tan cannot possibly be explained in terms of the technical

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Dmitri Williams et al. "From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft." Games and
Culture 1.4 (2006), p. 347, 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.

considerations cited above.24 Nevertheless, 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 only in terms of
an 'author's' world view. It also includes 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 meanings without which it would not be a very compelling
game at all but 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
Jessica Langer, The Familiar an the Foreign: Playing (Post)Colonialism in World of Warcraft, in Digital 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 determined that we can relate oppositionally to it, or we can simply not integrate its
rhetorical demands into the rest of our lives.