The obligatory long-time-away post...

As the title says...

I've levelled my main character to 68, have several other characters on both sides, and have enjoyed playing WOW for two years now. I'm still married, still have a special needs child, and have not so far completely abandoned my duties at work or at home.

This makes me unlike many of my comrades.

I also am a member of a pre-eminent raiding guild on the Arthas server. Before Burning Crusade, we had worked our way to the Twin Emperors in AQ 40, and had started on Nax. We had just started to have some of the usual drama, and had kept a fairly hard-core group for over a year (I'm not one, as I raid once a week for four hours, and don't play every night for at least three...).

The move to this expansion has been a bit troublesome for the guild, as our leaders want us to keep raiding in order to stay sharp, but most of the rest of us want to explore BC and level up our characters (and get all that tasty new gear). We have decided to raid once a week and just play the rest, which seems to be a case of the leadership bowing to the consensus of the group. I'm not sure if our Guild Leader, who has spent a lot of time reviewing videos and talking with other guilds about how to accomplish certain of the end-game puzzles, will still want to lead after this.

Levelling Up

I've been levelling up gradually with my character, climbing through the teens. Two problems: 1) even as you level up, the game doesn't get easier. In fact, it gets harder, because the monsters you face (called 'mobs', short for mobile monsters) get harder, as do the quests. 2) I'm running into limitations because I haven't been addressing my two professions, herbalism and alchemy.

As I level up, I also notice things I should have addressed differently at a lower level, such as the distribution of my talent points. I guess I'll just have to start new characters in order to address these issues...

Idealized landscapes and communities, Part II

As I'm walking through Westfall under a full moon, I enter Sentinel Hill, eager to redeem a quest that I've completed. By the gryphon aviary, several other characters have gathered, picturesque in their weaponry and armor. As a member of the Alliance, I'm surrounded by dwarves, gnomes, and night elves, each of whom is just different enough from the human norm: night elves with their glowing eyes and long pointed ears, gnomes looking like small, perfect, deadly children, and dwarves with their enormous noses and forearms. The moon bathes us all in its glow, and the light cloud cover and lack of snow or heavy clothing reminds me that this landscape is perfect, even down to the monsters and bad guys (easily identified by the red tags on their names that appear when I drag my cursor over them) waiting beyond the next hill.

As I climb the next ridge, I see a camp of gnolls. They wear armor and carry heavy weaponry: swords, bows, and long knives. Some are obviously spell-casters, identified by their wands or maces and the ritualistic totems on their shoulders. Each will defend the cyber-territory around their camp.

I notice another character, a human mage, looking at the same scene. Before I can even consider how to make contact with him, a window appears above my cyber-head, asking me if I want to join a group. In the chat window, I notice that he has asked me if I want to "group them," with each of us pooling our talents in order to meet the requirements of our quest, eight gnoll paws. I agree, having learned from my previous experience that this is a fast and efficient way to fulfill a quest.

We proceed to kill off a number of the gnolls, with each of us getting a paw from the resulting corpse. We get killed a couple of times each, mainly by pressing the gnolls' camp too closely and thus provoking an attack from multiple gnolls. But the overall effect is fun, and addictive: I play for another three hours based on the adrenaline I feel.

The horror and the beauty

The WOW landscape evokes these sorts of reactions, both in myself and in others who play. When I asked one of my fellow guild members about his lack of sleep, for instance, he responded by saying that there's no need for sleep when he could be playing WOW, and that response is typical. Part of its immersive power comes from this beauty, the fun of playing, the challenges inherent in the game, and so on, and it's an immersion that provokes passion among its players.

However, the immersion also comes from a careful merging of Blizzard games. In some environments - corporate, academic - this would be called 'training' or 'education,' and when I'm feeling cynical I'd agree. one that I call training. WOW is obviously based on the three-sequence Warcraft game that millions have played, including on-line, but it also incorporates many of the elements found in Diablos I & II. Both of these games have large on-line communities - I'd be interested to know how much these communities have changed since the implementation of WOW in late November - and thus they've enabled Blizzard to develop several aspects of its new game: in addition to terminology, characters, classes, ways of equipping characters, and the concept of levelling up (stolen from D & D), players are also familiar with the Blizzard method of connecting to various servers, the format of that connection, the game forums that Blizzard and several other companies use to accept feedback from their players, and the extent to which Blizzard employees will respond to customer feedback. I'll need to work this list into one that separates broad concepts from components of those pieces, but there are so many out there that the training aspect just begs to be explored.

This redudancy serves many purposes. My guess is that chief among these is training, because training is both a huge expense for companies (game manuals, user feedback forums, and on-line game managers are just pieces), and they also serve to keep customers coming back, forking over 15 bucks a month for the privilege of playing the game.

I've never played Everquest.

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:

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:

1. what is the emotional content of these friendships?
   
2. what's the difference between an alliance and a friendship?
   
3. 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.

Immersing myself in the world of warcraft

This blog will focus on my experience with playing in the World of Warcraft (proper adoption of corporate symbols inserted here). As a member of the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), I'm looking for uses of these sorts of games in traditional learning environments, and this immersion is my first attempt at blogging my thoughts. This site will be connected to the LGI website (located here. If you're interested in studying computer games from an academic perspective, please consider joining our group.

This blog will serve as a narrative of my personal experience, but I'll not try not to make it too self-indulgent. My more academic responses to this immersive process (yes, that is the word of the day) will be located in a semi-weekly column on the LGI website.