My presentation

These are the notes I based a presentation of my project on. My prof told me that while my idea and my method were interesting that I have to present more than some episodes I need a story line and I agree with him. My project is still a little bit unfinished but this should help illustrate what I wanted to get from it.

I started this project with the intention of studying player versus player (PvP) gaming in the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) World of Warcraft (WoW) but the honest truth is that I don’t know more about that now than I did when I started. While I was thinking about how best to approach my subject I got distracted by my life in the virtual world. I realized that I did not understand the technical aspects of game play well enough to relate to my chosen subject and more importantly that the auto ethnographic method that I chose was not suited for the task at hand. That’s when I began to look for another subject. I debated studies of gaming practices, tanking on my paladin, spec and the effort that players put into perfecting their characters. I even contemplated talking about guilds as social units in WoW but I realize that while all of those subjects were interesting they were not what my project was about. And then it hit me: scholarship has a very poor idea of what people do in online games. This project is an attempt to provide some raw ethnographic data that could help fill in blank spaces.
My interest is not to represent what all WoW players do at all moments in the game, not is it even to represent the totality of my gaming experiences; instead my goal is to evoke the realities of the Azeroth, the virtual world that is the setting of WoW. Unlike much of the other work I have read on virtual worlds, I am not looking to define or explain, my goal is more modest than that; it is very simply to describe, to relate, to evoke another reality. While the work that I have read on virtual worlds is interesting and valuable it has been highly theoretical with ethnographic data there mostly to illustrate theoretical points. My project is an impressionist tale, stories that stand alone without needing elaborate theoretical framework. In order to facilitate comprehension I will focus more on the social aspects of gaming and less on the technical ones, that is to say my stories will be about the social networks and relationships that form in the game adding in more context specific elements as needed. My method is thus simply to tell stories as I remember them, World of Warcraft does not allow me to make chat logs so I do not have records to fall back on even if I wanted them; these stories are my memories retold so that they will make sense to somebody other than me.
This is a story that I have yet to put in my blog, it is a story that I have not really told to another person, a story about an encounter that I had with a fellow guild member. In World of Warcraft, guilds are stable organizations of players, in other words informal associations made up of and run by players. As a member of a guild you can turn to fellow members when in need of assistance or advice and are expected in turn to help others in need. While it is not expected that all guild members will become friends, they are generally expected to get along with each other and friendships between guildies is pretty standard, more so in a smaller guild than a larger guild. Because World of Warcraft is such a big game often joining a guild can be the easiest way to meet people; there is a chat channel for guild members to chat with each other in appropriately called guild chat and as a fellow member players will be more inclined to want to socialize with you, at least that’s how it’s been in my experience. In many ways Guilds are the basic social unit of WoW.
I was chatting with a guildie named Pegolas in guild chat about Death Knights, I had just had a negative encounter with a player whose character was one, and he said “Noob DKs are fags.” The term noob or newbie is a derogatory term, it refers to players who are not interested in making the effort to learn how to play the game and demand that other players assist them instead. The simple truth is that because there are more people playing Death Knights than any other class, there are more noobs playing them, so he was basically saying “noobs are fags.” Unhappy with what he said but at that point unwilling to get into an argument I pointed out that his choice of words was questionable. He justified his choice of words by claiming that they were accurate and that’s when I lost my temper and told him that as a gay man I found his choice of words offensive. He then got defensive and told me that if I was so easily offended then maybe I should rethink my choice of guild. At this point I was really insulted and seriously contemplating leaving the guild, but fortunately some of my friends in the guild spoke out in my defense. It’s then that Pegolas asserted that he was not using ‘the homo term’ and that where he came from calling a person a fag was like calling them stupid and then complained that I was making a fuss about nothing.
People use the term gay to mean stupid or unfair all the time without ever thinking about the other connotations of the word and Pegolas could not understand why I got so offended. A few other guild members agreed with him and I was encouraged to ‘move on and forget about it.’ In my time in World of Warcraft I have seen complete strangers randomly insult other for no real reason other than that they can and fag is the insult of choice. Playing the game I learned pretty quickly to tune out certain chat channels and to dismiss and ignore rude people out of hand, but when a fellow guild member used the term in guild chat I was unprepared to let it pass. When Pegolas claimed I was making a lot of fuss about something that was ‘just a word’, one of my friends, a guy named Jerac, pointed out that if he had not used the term there would not have been a problem in the first place. It is then that the guild leader stepped in; first she found out what happened and then she told the guild in no uncertain terms that using racist or homophobic remarks was unacceptable. She also asked that we not fight in guild chat but that if we had to argue that we should do so in whispers, that is private chat.
My guild leader’s intervention ended the discussion in guild chat but I whispered some of my friends to thank them for their support. I was having trouble with some of my quests so Jerac offered to come and help me. As we teamed we talked about what happened, I explained to my friend that if Pegolas had recognized what he did and apologized for it I would not have reacted the way I did. Jerac understood where I was coming from and he explained to me that he had a gay brother whom he was very protective of IRL and then we quested together. Later that day Pegolas messaged me to apologize and I accepted his apology. He told me that he was sorry that he had offended me; he made sure that I knew he had not meant to and I assured him that I did. It turns out that Jerac and Pegolas had a talk about our fight in guild chat and Jerac explained to Pegolas why I had gotten upset.
This is a story about misunderstandings and assumptions; both Pegolas and I imagined that our fellow guild members thought the same way we did. When I tried to justify my reaction to Jerac I told him that I should not have to tolerate insults or homophobic comments from fellow guild members and I’m willing to bet that Pegolas got defensive because he felt I should have understood what he meant. In both cases we imagined the guild to be made up of likeminded individuals and were shocked to find out that another person saw things differently. Pegolas is not the only person who ever used terms like fag or gay without thinking of what they are saying, but I bet if I spoke to other gay WoW players they would tell me that it’s remarkable that he apologized. My story, however, is just the account of a little argument I had with a guild member on an RP server of a game called World of Warcraft. I guess that’s my story, I have not spoken much with Pegolas since the incident though I see him in guild chat.