Saturday, April 11, 2009
My final topic
I think I will focus on guilds as social units with a particular emphasis on some of the stories of my time in Sadie's guild. What kind of community is a guild? Is it a community that forms solely around shared (virtual) material practices or are there also other factors at work in the way a guild functions as a social unit? What, if anything, makes these communities different from real world communities and are these differences significant? Looking at my own experiences with a guild I will attempt to begin to answer these questions looking at my lived experiences. I will discuss imagined communities, the formation of identity in online games, norms and online society, as well as social capital and the contradiction between autonomy and interdependence. My central question will be What is a guild in World of Warcraft? and I will try to bring a partial answer to the subject by talking about a particular guild at a particular moment on a particular WoW server.
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I was really looking forward to the initial topic of PvP Dynamics. At one point in my academic career when I was done CEGEP and waiting to start university, I jumped into to PVP really hardcore for 4 months and I always wished I could write something about it.
ReplyDeleteCan you share the difficulties you had when you were trying to look into this topic?
Well fist I was planning to PvP on my warlock but I had gotten him to level 30 recently (for the Felhound) which made him less than optimal for PvP. Then I realized that it would be very difficult for me to run BGs during the day. Not to mention I can't do more than two BGs in a row because after that I sort of lose interest. Also I don't understand the vagaries of spec very well so while I can figure out what can work and what is less good I'm not always going to be able to explain why. My biggest obstacle though was that I'm not that interested in PvP.
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