Abstract

The work of Jean Baudrillard propounds a dilemma for social theory and research concerning digital games. On the one hand, the influence of what Baudrillard terms the Virtual threatens traditional social forms and modes of understanding. It insinuates its systematic logic into everyday life through the ubiquity of digital technology. On the other hand, playfulness and game-playing are held forth as a critical alternative comportment against this totalizing system of the Virtual . Research into digital games must address the paradox of virtual play in order to answer Baudrillard's challenge. Seeking an alternative reading of the situation surrounding digital games, this investigation employs the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer on hermeneutics, play and understanding. Against the horizon of massive online digital games as a novel social circumstance in which character-play is expressly possible, players of the World of Warcraft were enjoined in conversation. Through the situated hermeneutic interpretation of these conversations, play emerges as a dynamic negotiation of circumstance, society, mechanical resolution and tradition. The situation of playing a character in a digital game is revealed as containing the possibility of a critical alternative consciousness.