Journal 7: culture of gaming

I would like to discuss about the game that I am currently playing “World of Warcraft”. It’s very interesting to look at social aspect of the game because I think it’s the big reason for drawing many people into this game. It’s not just fun to play the game with great content and graphic, but it’s also enjoyable to play with some other people and helping each other out. It’s something that the game itself does not provide the players. The players have to go out and find the right people that they can associate with. Then, they will be able to have fun playing the game together with whoever has the same intention or goal for helping to complete the game.
I pick the game “World of Warcraft” as the example because this game involves greatly on social aspect of the game. In order to complete the end game, the players need to help each other out to defeat the enemies. By lacking of any important roll in the group, it could result in incomplete the game. For example, it’s impossible to defeat the elite bosses in the instance if the players don’t have enough people in a group or missing some key players in a group. In regular dungeon instance, a group needs to have five people which consist of one tank, one healer, and three DPS (damage per second). It’s nice for DPS people to be able to use CC or crowd control ability such as Frost Trap by a hunter or Polymorph by a mage, so the group can concentrate on defeating one enemy at a time. Missing one of those people could jeopardize the capability to finish the instance. The group instance run is the main reason why we need to build a social group which we call a guild, so the players can finish the game content as a team. And upon building the guild, there’re many commotion, drama and social attachment between the guild members.
Mark Stephen Meadows talks a little bit about a secondary avatar called alt. He mentions that the players can have many avatars, so I remember before I made a first alt. There was a little incident happen during an instance run. I believe it was in Shadow Labyrinth. I was a warrior tank level 70 and some other 4 people in the group. Two of them were from the guild that I was in. At some point in the middle of the instance, we got wiped by the 2nd boss, so one of the guys in my guild was kind of blaming me for the reason that we got wiped. I knew that I wasn’t the best tank, so I felt down a bit. Also the bad thing about it was that he was the one in the guild that I was in. For some reason, I didn’t feel like playing my warrior, so I decided to start playing new character and joining the same guild, but I was trying to act like no one knows me before, act like I was a different person. The reason for that was that I can spy and see if anyone talks bad about me in the guild which is the best way. I have fun playing different character, so people can look at me different as long as I don’t reveal my true identity. I can be another person and there’s no way they can find out who I actually am.
The book “I, Avatar” talks about if the sin can be committed by an avatar. I remember there was the time I did bad thing, not seriously bad. I was doing a quest in Tarren Mills where I have to Hillsbrad Foothills where I have to kill one NPC. There was another guy from the same fraction as I am, trying to kill this same NPC guy I do. He was waiting to kill this NPC before I got there, so I did bad thing by killing his pray before that guy did. Later, he was cussing me like crazy. The thing about in game is that there’re no social rule, so if you do some wrong thing but still within the game rules, there’s no police going to come and arrest you. The worse case scenario would be only got banned from the server if it’s been reported.
The last thing I want to talk about was the social connection between the guild members, I am fortunate enough to stay with the good guild. There was one guy who happens to be our guild master. He claimed that he was addicted to WOW. He told guild members that he was having a conflict between his dad and his girlfriend because the time he spends with WOW was too much, so he decided to retire for WOW. The rest of the guild members hate to see him go because he is the nice guy. Somehow, he came out of the retirement a week later. He says he missed the guild because it took a long time to build a guild and find a nice people to play with. In the same token, he told our guild members and his in-real-life girlfriend that he will play less than it used to be. Now, he decides to leave again because he has less time sleeping due to his night-shift work, so he decided to call it quit for the second time. I doubt if he will come back from his retirement again.