Welcome to Being Social: WoW
Posted by: turdpolish on: May 20, 2009
Welcome! This is a study of the World of Warcraft, hopefully at a angle that will make it interesting for non-game players. I hope to open up the notion of WoW being an intensely social activity, and not just another hack and slash fantasy game, and that people can come into these pages, and come away with a deeper understandings of the complex social mechanisms that players use and that motivate them to play this game.
If you’ve never heard of World of Warcraft, hopefully this site can help you.
If you can’t understand for the life of you, why grown people might choose to spend 6 hours a day playing this game, maybe this site can shed some light on that.
If you want to be entertained by some of the wackier hijinks of players in this game, rest assured you will have them. (To the best of my ability to find them).
Theory Warning: Last and not least, I will be using some academic theory to explore this social nature of WoW. Do not be alarmed, it’s just words, you can skip the offensive parts if you wish without losing the thread of what this site is about.
Thank you very much (or my condolences for your misfortune for having misclicked to this site), and I hope you find something interesting here, comment are welcome and much appreciated.
Norris loves his theory
Introduction: Why WoW might matter
Posted by: turdpolish on: May 20, 2009
WoW is a phenomenon that literally has touched millions of people. As of 2007, the player population was equal to the population of Sweden.
But if you’re not a game player, or do not spend much time online, what is so interesting about WoW?
After all on the surface it seems like any other fantasy role-playing game, in which you dress up shiny armour, choose a race from the overblown Lord of the Rings franchise with pointy ears, and you walk around virtual landscapes hacking at monsters and vile evil-doers.
A layperson might appreciate the fantasy and escapism factor that might incite one to play such a game, much like we immerse ourselves in front of large screens in dark rooms, watching narratives of phantom characters flickering on the screen. Essentially, immersion is the name of the game.
But if you don’t play games, and see no point in such interactional activities with polygonal figures, when you could hang out with your friends instead, that’s when you could be surprised.
You see, at the core of World of Warcraft, is a system that does not merely allow you to interact with other people, it also forces you to learn how to cooperate with massively large groups of people (If you want to get far in the game). While you can always play solo, if that’s your fancy, the reality in WoW, is that numbers matter.
To achieve your goals in World of Warcraft, you have to develop an extensive social network. This may consist of competent players that you can group play with, collective knowledge of players, using players for mundane activities such as food and water or transportation, and most importantly, a way to quell the yawns when raiding a dragon’s cave for the umpteenth time.
The average stereotype of a gamer is a teenager locked in a basement, but studies done by scholars such as Nick Yee (2006) show that only 25 percent of MMORPG players are teenagers. About 50 percent of MMORPG players work full time. 36 percent are married, 22 percent have children, and the average age of a player is 26 (Yee 2006). In other words, these are mostly working professionals in their late twenties, a significant portion of them being married with kids, choosing to log onto a virtual world, and spending hours and hours slaying monsters with their best friends (80% of players play with real life friends), using the game as a core social activity with their friends and family, developing additional social skills, extending their social network in the game as they progress to higher levels. (Yee 2006).
Not to mention at high level play, the logistical nightmare that is organising 40 online people to log on at the same time and to cooperate at an incredible level of efficiency during an elite guild raid, one might boggle at why people want to do this, how they do it, and you might wonder if you too could have fun doing something like that…
Imagine the organizational skills of a guild leader, he has to placate egos, allocate loot and equipment fairly, coordinate the raid like a football coach, getting the right people to do the right things at the right time. No wonder a WoW guild leader I interviewed said that “you have to be a sucker for punishment” to be a guild leader, as there are no immediate rewards for doing the job competently. No wonder that the same guild collapsed when the leader left, in such intricate and dependent social hierachical structures in WoW, when a pillar of of this structure collapses, the whole temple comes down, and people start to leave the game in droves, as the efficiency (namely fun) of group play has been compromised.
World of Warcraft is an essential social game, or as a player famously said in Dmitri William’s study (2006); “This game is…World of Chatcraft”.
Essential links:
References
Williams, Dmitri., Ducheaneat, Nicolas., Xiong, Li., Zhang, Yuanyuan., Yee, Nick., and Nickell, Eric. 2006. From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, Oct 2006; vol. 1: pp. 338 – 361.
Yee, Nick. 2006. The Daedalus Project. “The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments.” Viewed on February 25th, 2009 at http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_demographics.html
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