Idealized landscapes and communities
Knowledge Production I:
One of the dominant themes or tropes in WOW is community-building. The WOW website talks about how this happens:
There are several questions that come to my mind from this proclamation and my experiences thus far in cyberspace:
Folks will think of many others, of course. But these are my first attempts at articulating what I'm seeing out there in the WOW.
The immersive nature of this environment has to affect the emotional content of forming friendships. I notice in my guild that I'm lagging behind as far as levelling my character up, for several reasons, first and foremost among which is the fact that I don't spend nearly as much time on-line as do other members of my guild. Because of this, I'm not able to go on quests with them, because they're working in areas that would get me killed very quickly. (Esp. since one of the key strategies in any battle is to kill the priest or priestess, since then no one else will be able to be healed while fighting.) And so in many ways the experience of WOW for me has been a lonely one, made even more lonely as I hang around the edges of 'enemy' camps, waiting for lone scouts to come out that I can pick off.
Even so, I've been able to team up with folks outside my guild. I've worked with several strangers who have helped me complete a particular quest, and whom I've never met again. The experiences have all been sort of strange for me, because I turned down the first few groups I was asked to participate in, not knowing how the process worked.
My first team-up was the most interesting in many ways. I teamed up with a guy who was a rogue, and we needed to kill a bunch of a band of 'traitors.' I'm not sure exactly who they were traitors against, but I'm guessing the alliance. This person asked me to join him (priests are popular, because we heal!), and then went aggressively in and started killing these folks. I had no choice but to follow.
I was most worried about playing poorly. But he didn't seem to care that I didn't heal him the first time, and he got killed. He just went right back (in WOW, if you're killed, you can recover your body almost immediately and go right back in). He got killed twice, as did I, and that didn't matter. We completed the quest.
It was a fun experience, one that I enjoyed until the end. At the end, he rolled for a cool weapon off one of the dead bodies (more on looting later). And I felt sorta betrayed that he didn't offer it to me, because it was a mace for a priest.
One of the dominant themes or tropes in WOW is community-building. The WOW website talks about how this happens:
Being "Massively Multiplayer," World of Warcraft allows thousands of players to interact within the same world. Whether adventuring together or fighting against each other in epic battles, players will form friendships, forge alliances, and compete with enemies for power and glory.The link is here.
There are several questions that come to my mind from this proclamation and my experiences thus far in cyberspace:
- what is the emotional content of these friendships?
- what's the difference between an alliance and a friendship?
- how do competing notions of enemy and friend compete in this format?
Folks will think of many others, of course. But these are my first attempts at articulating what I'm seeing out there in the WOW.
The immersive nature of this environment has to affect the emotional content of forming friendships. I notice in my guild that I'm lagging behind as far as levelling my character up, for several reasons, first and foremost among which is the fact that I don't spend nearly as much time on-line as do other members of my guild. Because of this, I'm not able to go on quests with them, because they're working in areas that would get me killed very quickly. (Esp. since one of the key strategies in any battle is to kill the priest or priestess, since then no one else will be able to be healed while fighting.) And so in many ways the experience of WOW for me has been a lonely one, made even more lonely as I hang around the edges of 'enemy' camps, waiting for lone scouts to come out that I can pick off.
Even so, I've been able to team up with folks outside my guild. I've worked with several strangers who have helped me complete a particular quest, and whom I've never met again. The experiences have all been sort of strange for me, because I turned down the first few groups I was asked to participate in, not knowing how the process worked.
My first team-up was the most interesting in many ways. I teamed up with a guy who was a rogue, and we needed to kill a bunch of a band of 'traitors.' I'm not sure exactly who they were traitors against, but I'm guessing the alliance. This person asked me to join him (priests are popular, because we heal!), and then went aggressively in and started killing these folks. I had no choice but to follow.
I was most worried about playing poorly. But he didn't seem to care that I didn't heal him the first time, and he got killed. He just went right back (in WOW, if you're killed, you can recover your body almost immediately and go right back in). He got killed twice, as did I, and that didn't matter. We completed the quest.
It was a fun experience, one that I enjoyed until the end. At the end, he rolled for a cool weapon off one of the dead bodies (more on looting later). And I felt sorta betrayed that he didn't offer it to me, because it was a mace for a priest.
posted by ron at 7:15 AM
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