Seasons of WoW
A growing body of work seems to suggest that Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) function as social worlds. How these virtual worlds function is less understood and while scholarly literature is beginning to grasp the subtle dynamics of these new environments there is still a lot that needs to be accounted for. For one thing every game is different and yet there is very little work on how that could impact one’s findings and there is a lexicon of generic MMORPG terms like gold and guild that are used to talk about all game worlds. I find this problematic because it elides the ways in which every game world is different from every other especially when it comes to terms like guild which describe social practices. If we agree with the generic definition of a guild as the basic social unit of MMORPGs how does that translate into specific practices in particular games? What does it mean to be in a guild in World of Warcraft (WoW) or in any game for that matter? If we can think of MMORPGs as social worlds it seems counter intuitive to assume that this means that these worlds are somehow uniform. How can we study virtual worlds as cultures if we ignore the contextual specificities that make each game unique?
My project is about guilds in the game World of Warcraft, more specifically it is an auto ethnographic meditation on the role guilds play in the game. What is a guild in WoW? This is not simply a technical question as my interest lies more in studying the social basis for guilds than in their specific designed functions. What does it mean to be in a WoW guild? What makes guilds central to social life in WoW? What kind of social group is a guild? If we assume that a guild is a community, what kind of community would we be dealing with? A caveat, this is a project based mostly in my lived experience this means that it is not representative of the experiences of every WoW player on ever server at every time. My data cannot even represent the totality of my game play experiences; instead what I can do is evoke the reality of WoW, present a snapshot of what (virtual) life in WoW can be like. As humble as it may seem this work and others like it are crucial to establishing an understanding of what people do when they play online games. I will preface my work with a brief discussion of MMORPGs as a genre of game in order to make my work accessible to non gamers. I will then present my findings as an impressionist tale discussing in some detail experiences I had in the game. After I present my data and my findings I will conclude with a meditation on game studies and socialization in online environments.
The term Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game refers to a specific genre of online game. MMORPGs are massively multiplayer because many players can play the game simultaneously. Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of WoW, brags that their game has over nine million subscribers. Most MMORPGs use servers, instances of the game world that thousands of players can be logged into simultaneously. MMORGPs are graphically rich virtual worlds featuring a variety of different environments designed to keep the players interested in them. What’s more these are persistent worlds, the game world exists independently of individual players and is therefore present for the players to access at any time they want to. MMORPGs are also avatar based, this means that players create avatars described by various statistics that interact with the world (Filiciak, 2003) through a combination of keys and mouse clicks. One of the goals of any MMORPG is to advance one’s avatar, to improve it by improving its statistics or giving it new abilities. Interestingly though MMORPGs are very open ended allowing the player to set his or her own goals, there are limits to this freedom, however, and players found violating the terms of service can expect to face the consequences.
One thing all MMORPGs interfaces come with is a chat box, and through this chat box players can communicate with each other using a variety of chat channels. Perhaps the easiest image for a person who has never gamed before would be a graphically complex chat room with a bunch of interactive tasks (Yee, 2005). While players will use programs like Ventrilo or Teamspeak to speak to each other voice to voice and some games even have voice chat software built in much of the social interaction in MMORPGs happens in text chat. I don’t know how widespread voice chat is, I’ve used in the past and several of the guilds I was in had Ventrilo servers but my project will focus on chat. Text can be a very imprecise means of communication because it lacks the affective cues present even in voice chat but it is the default medium in most MMORPGs. WoW has voice chat software build into it but this software is not particularly effective and I have not had any good experiences with it. I have gotten better results with the Ventrilo servers my guilds set up but since I don’t use vent much it won’t play a major role in my discussion.
Before I get into the specifics of WoW, it is worth repeating that MMORPG worlds are highly interactive. With thousands if not millions of players online at the same time the draw of such worlds is being able to play or interact with others. Game companies fill their worlds with a lot of content that allows players to interact with each other and the world in many different ways. Like any good game interacting with the world and completing game objectives is rewarded and players amass (virtual) material goods as they play. Every game has their own particular way of organizing their reward systems and their own kinds of (virtual) goods which are valuable only in the context of the particular game in question. These are also fictional worlds, that is worlds with a history and cultures that are nominally unique to the world in question. Immersing one’s self in the world means a minimum of role playing simply by having one’s avatar interact with the world. In real life I am not an elfin paladin or a gnome wizard but in World of Warcraft I am both of those things even if I do not actively pretend to be either of those things.
World of Warcraft is an MMOROPG with many servers and each server can host up to about 20 000 players simultaneously, there are over a hundred servers available in the United States alone. Like most MMORPGs it features a fantasy themed world called Azeroth, a world of dragons, elves, magic and war. WoW is an avatar based game and players create characters selecting a race, a gender, and a class that they use to interact with the world. If gender ,race, and class are presented as cosmetic choices at avatar creation, then the ways they are built into the game and constructed by players tell a very different story. There are two major player factions the Horde and the Alliance. Each faction is made up of five playable races with their own racial skills and a particular fictional history and ten classes. After choosing faction players choose race and then class, each choice restricting their subsequent choices. First a player chooses faction and this restricts their choice of race Orcs, Trolls, Zombies, Tauren (a race of bovine humanoids) and Blood Elves are the Horde races while Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves and Draenei (a race of blue aliens). While there are no classes unique to either faction choice of race restricts class choice. For example my highest level character is a Blood Elf Paladin; Blood Elves are the only race among the Horde that can be Paladins. Almost every race has a race specific language but each faction has a language that every race can understand, Alliance has common and Horde orcish but neither faction can understand the other because the factions are at war. According to game lore this was because of cultural differences between the Alliance and Horde races but this did not seem to matter to most players. Real factional differences were ascribed to demographics but I'm not sure what if anything those differences really were.
WoW servers or realms are divided into categories along three lines: player location, realm type and game play mode. The first category is in many ways the easiest to understand, Blizzard organizes its servers based on geographic location mostly for logistical purposes, with over nine million players worldwide and servers in multiple languages it is important for the game company to make sure the customers are accommodated in the most efficient way possible. Because I live in North America I play on a North American server, this means that many of the people I meet on the server are American but there are Canadians who play to. Blizzard then divides its realms into two types of realms, RP or role playing realms where players are formally encouraged to role play and normal servers where players are not. I play on a role playing server both because I like role playing and because when I started playing I had friends on the server. Blizzard further categorizes servers in relation to game play, some realms are formatted for PvP (player versus player) gaming and others are not. On PvP servers the war between the Horde and the Alliance is active and players are allowed to attack members of the opposite faction with impunity. On PvE (player versus environment) servers, or non PvP servers, players can choose not to be flagged for PvP and that means that players from the opposite faction can’t attack them. The servers I tend to play on are PvE, though I have never really played on a PvP server I feel more secure knowing that I won’t be randomly attacked as I adventure in the world.
I first started playing WoW because some of my friends were interested in playing the game. One of those friends, Jacobe, was already playing the game and invited us to join him on his server. With a bunch of my friends playing the game and my appreciation for the fantasy genre I was really excited to begin playing. The first MMORPG I ever played was Lineage 2, a fantasy themed game and I have loved the fantasy genre since before I played computer games. My first moments in the game were spent creating characters and figuring out how to use the basic game interface to play with my avatar while teaming with my friends. This did not last long and because of unfortunate real world circumstances I ended up playing alone because my friends were unable to find the time to join me. If I had been on a trial account I think I would have stopped playing when I realized my friends were not going to be able to play with me but because I had payed for two months I kept playing. One day I was playing with my paladin and I was invited to join a guild and everything changed.
I met Sadie in one of the first guilds I joined. While being part of a guild did not mean that I teamed up with other players more it did mean that I had people to chat with as I quested. One of those people was Sadie. She had a very lively sense of humor and she was always willing to talk about anything. One of the things I have always liked about MMORPGs is how the game can serve as an object of conversation providing me with a topic that I know the person I am talking with is interested in. While we only chatted at first we did team up and it is then that Sadie and I really got to know each other; I learned about her life and she learned about mine, it was an intimate moment between friends. I made many friends in that guild just by chatting with people in the guild channel. One of the guild members I befriended helped my druid get his aquatic form and on two separate occasions generously gave me in game currency when I needed it. What I appreciated about that guild was that even though most of us were playing alone in the game world we were also together in the guild channel. I was devastated the day I realized that most of my friends had left that guild. It had been an important hub for my virtual social life for so long that I was unsure of what to do with myself now that it was gone.
When after much soul searching I met up with Sadie again and she told me about her guild I was overjoyed because most of the people that I had befriended in my old guild were there. Sadie’s guild seemed to me to be everything I wanted in a guild, an association full of people I liked that I would be able to chat with freely. Sadie wanted a raiding guild but I was not really aware of what being in a raiding guild would really mean. Raiding in WoW is teaming up in large teams called raid groups and entering instances maps generated specifically for the raid group in order to access game content that no single player could master whether it be player versus player (PvP) content or player versus environment (PvE) content. Sadie was interested in PvE raiding, PvE instances are dungeons filled with very strong monsters that raid groups defeat both for the challenge and the (virtual) material rewards. Raiding is the means to accessing the most valuable gear in the game and the difficulty of the game content makes it important for raiders to work together well. Raiding is serious business and it requires commitment, dedication, and focus on the part of the raiders and a raiding guild is one that devotes its resources to making sure that the guild has the resources it needs to raid as efficiently as possible.
It is not uncommon for a guild to focus on one specific element of game play; in fact I believe it is current practice among guilds to specialize in this manner. This specialization means that like minded individuals can form guilds together and to a certain extent guilds are like imagined communities in that members take for granted that other members will see things the way they do. I have been horrified to hear guild members say racist or homophobic remarks because they are things I don’t think. What I mean by imagined communities is this Sadie's guild was comprised of hundreds of members and yet I probably really only interacted with a fraction of them, there was always this faceless body of players I never came into direct contact with that I assumed were like me. I always appreciated the efforts Sadie made to make her guild a place safe from the startlingly discriminatory language that is bandied about on a daily basis in most online environments. Chat is an imperfect medium for communication because it lacks many of the affective signals that voice to voice chat can transmit and as a result it’s a much more interpretable medium. When a guild member named Pegolas called a group of people fags, however, there was no misinterpreting what he meant or so I thought. When I confronted Pegolas he argued that he used the term fag to mean idiot and not homosexual and was initially quite defensive. Clearly he felt that as fellow guild members we would understand what he meant, that we were like him in a sense. That Sadie once compared the guild to a family at a guild meeting illustrates how the importance that guild life can take in WoW. The truth is I understood immediately what he had meant when he used the term "fag" and it took me a few moments to get incensed about his choice of words. Calling people "gay" or "fag" in online environments usually has little to do with sexual orientation and everything to do with deviant behavior. The choice of using a word created to insult homosexuals as a label for deviant , while not unproblematic, is ubiquitous in online environments.
Guilds form and disband all the time in WoW; they form quickly and never manage to become a cohesive social network for any number of reasons. It makes it important to look at a guild that can make it a month past the signing of its charter to figure out what makes guilds stay together (Duchenaut, Yee, Nickell, Moore; 2006). To misquote Tolstoy all successful guilds are alike, each unsuccessful guild is unsuccessful in its own way. Guilds are successful when players feel like they are appreciated by the guild, when they feel that they can contribute to guild life, and when their goals align with those of the guild. The most successful guilds are ones in which members come together to face common challenges and learn bow to face them together making them remarkably similar to Wenger’s (in Pirius, 2007) communities of practice. Wenger defines communities of practice as communities that share common interest in a topic and who deepen their knowledge in the area through repeated interaction. The key focus of communities of practice is managing knowledge and by creating, expanding and exchanging knowledge allowing individuals to develop abilities. Sadie’s guild was a place where members could, by working together, share and even at times create knowledge about WoW. The higher level members would raid regularly working on becoming better players. Without being particularly knowledgeable about WoW when fellow guild members asked questions that I could answer, I did.
Wenger argues that communities of practice develop their particular ways of talking and thinking about the subject at hand. Because the characters I had in the guild were not high enough level to participate in the raids I never got a firsthand experience of what raiding in Sadie’s guild might have been like. The guild was organized around managing knowledge and (virtual) material resources however and the sharing of these things was an important part of participating in guild life. With over nine million players there is a vast body of information about WoW readily available to anybody who cares to search for it. Online one can find directions, strategy guides and even programs that let players customize their interface in order to facilitate game play. While the knowledge that Sadie and the guild amassed and organized cannot be called original they undoubtedly appropriated it adapting it to suit their circumstances.
Communities of practice are based on sharing and acceptance and Wenger emphasizes that respect and trust are fundamental to the everyday workings of the community, in other words no respect or trust means no sharing. Sadie put a lot of effort into creating an atmosphere where discrimination was not tolerated but there were enough guild members who seemed to be incapable of respecting others to make the guild somewhat inefficient. I joined the guild upon the assumption that the other members were interested in the same things I was and it took me a while to realize that my goals were not in alignment with those of the guild community. As a community of practice the body of knowledge that they were amassing was never one that was particularly relevant to my gaming experience, so in short I stayed with the guild even though I had no formal reason to. I won’t deny that I benefited from the (virtual) material resources amassed by the guild but I also went out of my way to help guild members and I contributed to the prosperity of the guild in numerous ways.
Reciprocity is a major theme in the daily workings of a guild, if one is to benefit from the collective resources of the guild one must also be prepared to donate one’s resources to the guild. I got into trouble with some of my fellow guild members or guildies for theoretically refusing to help a guild member. What this story should underline is the way guild members enforce unenforceable behaviours such as generosity by criticizing perceived selfishness. I was online one day when this guild member whom I will call Cheval started complaining about immature players. This is a fair complaint as many players sometimes act in offensive or immature ways, this is the internet and people misbehave all the time because they feel that this bad behaviour cannot be linked to them. In any event she then bragged about being able to make people and most notably another guild member cry. This irritated me because I have a low tolerance for bullies having been bullied in the past so when she started asking for help I told her I could not help her and what’s more that even if I could I would seriously consider not helping her. This refusal drew angry reactions from other guild members who accused me of not being helpful enough. By intimating that I was not at this guild member’s beck and call I was asserting my right not to be helpful which flies in the face of the reciprocity at the heart of guild relations.
Cheval was not the only guild member I disliked and over time several members bothered me for a variety of reasons. One day I went out of my way to help a fellow guild member, she claimed to be having trouble completing a quest so I joined her. Because I was much higher level than her and the quest I could have easily just completed her quest objectives and gone on my way but I thought I would do her a favour and try to give her some advice and tips while I was at it. She balked at my attempts to give her advice; she complained that I was taking too long to help her and refused to listen to me. I found her attitude off putting and in the end I just quickly breezed through her quest and brushed off her attempt to thank me with badly concealed ill will. I felt that she had not properly appreciated my help and that experience meant that I was not prepared to help her a second time. In the same vein I also disliked a guild member who had the unfortunate habit of not paying attention to what he was doing and expected others to help him out when he got into trouble. If guild members can expect assistance from the guild it is only normal that they try not to impose on those who would help them. Because neither of the above guild members seemed willing to help themselves I dismissed them as idiots and after avoided them. Neither of them affected me like Bunny.
Bunny was a guildie (fellow guild member) who had the unfortunate bad habit of keeping his caps lock button pressed, this means that HE SPOKE IN CAPS ALL THE TIME no matter what he said. For those of you who don't know using all capital letters in chat is the equivalent of screaming in a face to face interaction. Not only did he keep the caps button on but he always felt the need to type out the lyrics to songs that he was listening to in guild chat. I can understand that sometimes people use caps to indicate frustration, but he was not doing that, it was like he was screaming everything he said for no reason. I found this very obnoxious and so the first few times I saw him do this I asked him to stop, and I asked politely, the conversations went something like this:
Bunny: I'M A LITTLE TEAPOT SHORT AND STOUT
me: Um, hey there Bunny would you mind taking off caps?
Bunny: WHY?
me: Well I find it sort of obnoxious and I would appreciate it if you did not do that
Bunny: HERE IS MY HANDLE AND HERE IS MY SPOUT
Basically he refused to listen to me so I went to see the guild leader and I complained to her telling her that I understood that sometimes using caps could be important but that Bunny was being really obnoxious. She told me that she would speak to him and eventually did. When she did Bunny through a fit and insisted that he was not changing to make anybody happy and that if somebody had a problem with him that they should put him on ignore. I was really pissed off at this and I promptly put him on ignore. I thanked my guild leader for her help and that I chose to put him on ignore but that I was not happy about it. My guild leader reminded me that I could not like everybody and that especially in a big guild that lack of manners was to be expected sometimes. I told her my problem with Bunny was that he was rude and unreasonable but that she could count on me to not cause drama and that is what happened. I put him on ignore and then I tried not to think about him.
With the exception of a guild member who made blatantly racist comments in guild chat before being kicked out of the guild by Sadie, Bunny was the only guild member I ever officially put on ignore. While I would simply not talk with most guild members I disliked, Bunny was a special case. Cheval was a mean person but unless one provoked her she could be counted on to behave. Bunny was an obnoxious and he would go out of his way to annoy others. In other words Cheval could behave, Bunny could not. I think that Bunny amused Sadie and she found it funny to watch him fluster other guild members without ever fully realizing that it was his fault when others got angry at him. I will never really understand what Sadie saw in Bunny, however, mostly because after I joined her guild I never spoke with her. Though I still think of her as a friend and I know she thinks about me the same we don’t speak to each other regularly and this means we are not as close as we once were. I think that her first guild ultimately fell apart because she was unwilling or unable to convince members to really be respectful of one another.
Social relationships in WoW like in many other places online are contingent on regular contact and Joelle Kivits’s writing about e-mail interviews captures the importance of contact in online relationships. Looking at my own social life I can see how it is the people that I would communicate with on a regular basis with that I would think of as friends. Only approaching Sadie when I had something significant to report to her changed our relationship and it made intimacy more difficult to achieve. My time in Sadie’s guild was one of great confusion because while I had friends in my guild I was also realizing that the guild as a community was not particularly relevant for me. The main goal of Sadie’s guild was to raid and while my goal of socializing with members was not in direct opposition to the guild’s objectives we did not share the same priorities . I was committed to the friendships that I had made in the guild but ultimately felt alienated by my inability to relate to the guild’s larger goals. This is why I felt nothing about leaving her guild; I had stayed in that guild a lot longer than I should have. Sadie abandoned her guild and started a new one which I also joined but when this new guild proved to be the same as her old one I quit the guild. I left in good standing making sure that Sadie knew why I quit the guild but I left because the knowledge her community was gathering was meaningless for me.
In WoW, guilds can serve as important loci for socialization when the serve as social networks players can turn to in times of need. Centered on managing knowledge about the game, guilds create bodies of knowledge that can be accessed by individual members in order to help them become better players. WoW can be a very isolating game at times. From my own experiences players rarely team up together outside of specific contexts in which having a team is necessary. In many ways WoW is a game where people play next to each other, in parallel without ever really interacting. With a server population of around 20 000 one can wander the world and never encounter the same player twice. Even as part of a guild I spent most of my time in WoW playing alone, the guild gave me a people to chat with but as the cases of Cheval and Bunny illustrate that was no guarantee of companionship. What a guild does is put people in relationships with each other. Guilds are social in that they give you a body of players with which you can interact with and consult in times of need. When I needed help getting my paladin his mount guildies helped me gather the needed materials and when my mage needed gold to buy spells or my druid needed help getting a spell guildies helped me do those things.
I set out to talk about my experiences as a WoW player and the way that guilds shaped my game experience and in a sense I did that. Thinking about the roles guilds play in WoW I realized that there was a lot I did not understand. How do the objectives of a guild affect the functioning of a guild? While I have been a member of more than one guild there are many kinds of guilds I have never been a member of. I have never been part of a role playing guild, for example, so I don’t really know what that is like. If the focus of a guild affects the way a guild functions how does server type affect the population that plays on it? Are there differences between the populations of PvP and PvE realms and if so how do we understand them? And ultimately if player experiences in the same game can be radically different what does this say about our ability to talk about socialization on MMORPGs?
Reference List
1. Anderson, B. (1983). “The Origins of National Cnsciousness.” In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London & New York: Verso. Pp. 41-49.
2. Filiciak, M. (2003). Hyperidentities: Postmodern identity patterns in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In The video game theory reader. M.J.P Wolf& B. Perron eds. New York: Routledge. Pp 87-102.
3. Yee, N. (2005). The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, Jun2006, Vol. 15 Issue 3, p309-329.
4. Pirius, L. K. (2007) Massively Multiplayer Online Game Virtual Environments: A Potential Locale for Intercultural Training. Available from ProQuest database (UMI Microform 3263133)
5.Ducheneaut, N. ; Yee, N. ; Nickell, E. ; Moore, R. J. (2006) 'Alone together?' exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2006); 2006 April 22-27; Montreal; Canada. NY: ACM; 2006; 407-416.
Showing posts with label World of Warcraft. gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World of Warcraft. gaming. Show all posts
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
My final paper
This is my final paper I make no guarantees of quality but it is what I ended up with.
A growing body of work seems to suggest that Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) function as social worlds. How these virtual worlds function is less understood and while scholarly literature is beginning to grasp the subtle dynamics of these new environments there is still a lot that needs to be accounted for. For one thing every game is different and yet there is very little work on how that could impact one’s findings and there is a lexicon of generic MMORPG terms like gold and guild that are used to talk about all game worlds. I find this problematic because it elides the ways in which every game world is different from every other especially when it comes to terms like guild which describe social practices. If we agree with the generic definition of a guild as the basic social unit of MMORPGs how does that translate into specific practices in particular games? What does it mean to be in a guild in World of Warcraft (WoW) or in any game for that matter? If we can think of MMORPGs as social worlds it seems counterintuitive to assume that this means that these worlds are somehow uniform. How can we study virtual worlds as cultures if we ignore the contextual specificities that make each game unique?
My project is about guilds in the game World of Warcraft, more specifically it is an auto ethnographic meditation on the role guilds play in the game. What is a guild in WoW? This is not simply a technical question as my interest lies more in studying the social basis for guilds than in their specific designed functions. What does it mean to be in a WoW guild? What makes guilds central to social life in WoW? What kind of social group is a guild? If we assume that a guild is a community, what kind of community would we be dealing with? A caveat, this is a project based mostly in my lived experience this means that it is not representative of the experiences of every WoW player on ever server at every time. My data cannot even represent the totality of my game play experiences; instead what I can do is evoke the reality of WoW, present a snapshot of what (virtual) life in WoW can be like. As humble as it may seem this work and others like it are crucial to establishing an understanding of what people do when they play online games. I will preface my work with a brief discussion of MMORPGs as a genre of game in order to make my work accessible to non gamers. I will then present my findings as an impressionist tale discussing in some detail experiences I had in the game. After I present my data and my findings I will conclude with a meditation on game studies and socialization in online environments.
The term Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game refers to a specific genre of online game. MMORPGs are massively multiplayer because many players can play the game simultaneously. Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of WoW, brags that their game has over nine million subscribers. Most MMORPGs use servers, instances of the game world that thousands of players can be logged into simultaneously. MMORGPs are graphically rich virtual worlds featuring a variety of different environments designed to keep the players interested in them. What’s more these are persistent worlds, the game world exists independently of individual players and is therefore present for the players to access at any time they want to. MMORPGs are also avatar based, this means that players create avatars described by various statistics that interact with the world (Filiciak, 2003) through a combination of keys and mouse clicks. One of the goals of any MMORPG is to advance one’s avatar, to improve it by improving its statistics or giving it new abilities. Interestingly though MMORPGs are very open ended allowing the player to set his or her own goals, there are limits to this freedom, however, and players found violating the terms of service can expect to face the consequences.
One thing all MMORPGs interfaces come with is a chat box, and through this chat box players can communicate with each other using a variety of chat channels. Perhaps the easiest image for a person who has never gamed before would be a graphically complex chat room with a bunch of interactive tasks (Yee, 2005). While players will use programs like Ventrilo or Teamspeak to speak to each other voice to voice and some games even have voice chat software built in much of the social interaction in MMORPGs happens in text chat. I don’t know how widespread voice chat is, I’ve used in the past and several of the guilds I was in had Ventrilo servers but my project will focus on chat. Text can be a very imprecise means of communication because it lacks the affective cues present even in voice chat but it is the default medium in most MMORPGs. WoW has voice chat software build into it but this software is not particularly effective and I have not had any good experiences with it. I have gotten better results with the Ventrilo servers my guilds set up but since I don’t use vent much it won’t play a major role in my discussion.
Before I get into the specifics of WoW, it is worth repeating that MMORPG worlds are highly interactive. Game companies fill their worlds with a lot of content that allows players to interact with each other and the world in many different ways. Like any good game interacting with the world and completing game objectives is rewarded and players amass (virtual) material goods as they play. Every game has their own particular way of organizing their reward systems and their own kinds of (virtual) goods which are valuable only in the context of the particular game in question. These are also fictional worlds, that is worlds with a history and cultures that are nominally unique to the world in question. Immersing one’s self in the world means a minimum of role playing simply by having one’s avatar interact with the world. In real life I am not an elfin paladin or a gnome wizard but in World of Warcraft I am both of those things even if I do not actively pretend to be either of those things.
World of Warcraft is an MMOROPG with many servers and each server can host up to about 20 000 players simultaneously, there are over a hundred servers available in the United States alone. Like most MMORPGs it features a fantasy themed world called Azeroth, a world of dragons, elves, magic and war. WoW is an avatar based game and players create characters selecting a race and a class that they then move around the world training. There are two major player factions the Horde and the Alliance. Each faction is made up of five playable races with their own racial skills and a particular fictional history and ten classes. After choosing faction players choose race and then class, each choice restricting their subsequent choices. First a player chooses faction and this restricts their choice of race Orcs, Trolls, Zombies, Tauren (a race of bovine humanoids) and Blood Elves are the Horde races while Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves and Draenei (a race of blue aliens). While there are no classes unique to either faction choice of race restricts class choice. For example my highest level character is a Blood Elf Paladin; Blood Elves are the only race among the Horde that can be Paladins. Almost every race has a race specific language but each faction has a language that every race can understand, Alliance has common and Horde orcish but neither faction can understand the other because the factions are at war.
WoW servers or realms are divided into categories along three lines: player location, realm type and game play mode. The first category is in many ways the easiest to understand, Blizzard organizes its servers based on geographic location mostly for logistical purposes, with over nine million players worldwide and servers in multiple languages it is important for the game company to make sure the customers are accommodated in the most efficient way possible. Because I live in North America I play on a North American server, this means that many of the people I meet on the server are American but there are Canadians who play to. Blizzard then divides its realms into two types of realms, RP or role playing realms where players are formally encouraged to role play and normal servers where players are not. I play on a role playing server both because I like role playing and because when I started playing I had friends on the server. Blizzard further categorizes servers in relation to game play, some realms are formatted for PvP (player versus player) gaming and others are not. On PvP servers the war between the Horde and the Alliance is active and players are allowed to attack members of the opposite faction with impunity. On PvE (player versus environment) servers, or non PvP servers, players can choose not to be flagged for PvP and that means that players from the opposite faction can’t attack them. The servers I tend to play on are PvE, though I have never really played on a PvP server I feel more secure knowing that I won’t be randomly attacked as I adventure in the world.
I first started playing WoW because some of my friends were interested in playing the game. One of those friends, Jacobe, was already playing the game and invited us to join him on his server. With a bunch of my friends playing the game and my appreciation for the fantasy genre I was really excited to begin playing. The first MMORPG I ever played was Lineage 2, a fantasy themed game and I have loved the fantasy genre since before I played computer games. My first moments in the game were spent creating characters and figuring out how to use the basic game interface to play with my avatar while teaming with my friends. This did not last long and because of unfortunate real world circumstances I ended up playing alone because my friends were unable to find the time to join me. If I had been on a trial account I think I would have stopped playing when I realized my friends were not going to be able to play with me but because I had payed for two months I kept playing. One day I was playing with my paladin and I was invited to join a guild and everything changed.
I met Sadie in one of the first guilds I joined. While being part of a guild did not mean that I teamed up with other players more it did mean that I had people to chat with as I quested. One of those people was Sadie. She had a very lively sense of humor and she was always willing to talk about anything. One of the things I have always liked about MMORPGs is how the game can serve as an object of conversation providing me with a topic that I know the person I am talking with is interested in. While we only chatted at first we did team up and it is then that Sadie and I really got to know each other; I learned about her life and she learned about mine, it was an intimate moment between friends. I made many friends in that guild just by chatting with people in the guild channel. One of the guild members I befriended helped my druid get his aquatic form and on two separate occasions generously gave me in game currency when I needed it. What I appreciated about that guild was that even though most of us were playing alone in the game world we were also together in the guild channel. I was devastated the day I realized that most of my friends had left that guild. It had been an important hub for my virtual social life for so long that I was unsure of what to do with myself now that it was gone.
When after much soul searching I met up with Sadie again and she told me about her guild I was overjoyed because most of the people that I had befriended in my old guild were there. Sadie’s guild seemed to me to be everything I wanted in a guild, an association full of people I liked that I would be able to chat with freely. Sadie wanted a raiding guild but I was not really aware of what being in a raiding guild would really mean. Raiding in WoW is teaming up in large teams called raid groups and entering instances maps generated specifically for the raid group in order to access game content that no single player could master whether it be player versus player (PvP) content or player versus environment (PvE) content. Sadie was interested in PvE raiding, PvE instances are dungeons filled with very strong monsters that raid groups defeat both for the challenge and the (virtual) material rewards. Raiding is the means to accessing the most valuable gear in the game and the difficulty of the game content makes it important for raiders to work together well. Raiding is serious business and it requires commitment, dedication, and focus on the part of the raiders and a raiding guild is one that devotes its resources to making sure that the guild has the resources it needs to raid as efficiently as possible.
It is not uncommon for a guild to focus on one specific element of game play; in fact I believe it is current practice among guilds to specialize in this manner. This specialization means that likeminded individuals can form guilds together and to a certain extent guilds are like imagined communities in that members take for granted that other members will see things the way they do. I have been horrified to hear guild members say racist or homophobic remarks because they are things I don’t think. I always appreciated the efforts Sadie made to make her guild a place safe from the startlingly discriminatory language that is bandied about on a daily basis in most online environments. Chat is an imperfect medium for communication because it lacks many of the affective signals that voice to voice chat can transmit and as a result it’s a much more interpretable medium. When a guild member named Pegolas called a group of people fags, however, there was no misinterpreting what he meant or so I thought. When I confronted Pegolas he argued that he used the term fag to mean idiot and not homosexual and was initially quite defensive. Clearly he felt that as fellow guild members we would understand what he meant, that we were like him in a sense. That Sadie once compared the guild to a family at a guild meeting illustrates how the importance that guild life can take in WoW.
Guilds form and disband all the time in WoW; they form quickly and never manage to become a cohesive social network for any number of reasons. It makes it important to look at a guild that can make it a month past the signing of its charter to figure out what makes guilds stay together. The most successful guilds are ones in which members come together to face common challenges and learn bow to face them together making them remarkably similar to Wenger’s (in Pirius, 2007) communities of practice. Wegner defines communities of practice as communities that share common interest in a topic and who deepen their knowledge in the area through repeated interaction. The key focus of communities of practice is managing knowledge and by creating, expanding and exchanging knowledge allowing individuals to develop abilities. Sadie’s guild was a place where members could, by working together, share and even at times create knowledge about WoW. The higher level members would raid regularly working on becoming better players. Without being particularly knowledgeable about WoW when fellow guild members asked questions that I could answer I did.
Wegner argues that communities of practice develop their particular ways of talking and thinking about the subject at hand. Because the characters I had in the guild were not high enough level to participate in the raids I never got a firsthand experience of what raiding in Sadie’s guild might have been like. The guild was organized around managing knowledge and (virtual) material resources however and the sharing of these things was an important part of participating in guild life. With over nine million players there is a vast body of information about WoW readily available to anybody who cares to search for it. Online one can find directions, strategy guides and even programs that let players customize their interface in order to facilitate game play. While the knowledge that Sadie and the guild amassed and organized cannot be called original they undoubtedly appropriated it adapting it to suit their circumstances.
Communities of practice are based on sharing and acceptance and Wenger emphasizes that respect and trust are fundamental to the everyday workings of the community, in other words no respect or trust means no sharing. Sadie put a lot of effort into creating an atmosphere where discrimination was not tolerated but there were enough guild members who seemed to be incapable of respecting others to make the guild somewhat inefficient. I joined the guild upon the assumption that the other members were interested in the same things I was and it took me a while to realize that my goals were not in alignment with those of the guild community. As a community of practice the body of knowledge that they were amassing was never one that was particularly relevant to my gaming experience, so in short I stayed with the guild even though I had no formal reason to. I won’t deny that I benefitted from the (virtual) material resources amassed by the guild but I also went out of my way to help guild members and I contributed to the prosperity of the guild in numerous ways.
Reciprocity is a major theme in the daily workings of a guild, if one is to benefit from the collective resources of the guild one must also be prepared to donate one’s resources to the guild. I got into trouble with some of my fellow guild members or guildies for theoretically refusing to help a guild member. What this story should underline is the way guild members enforce unenforceable behaviors such as generosity by criticizing perceived selfishness. I was online one day when this guild member whom I will call Cheval started complaining about immature players. This is a fair complaint as many players sometimes act in offensive or immature ways, this is the internet and people misbehave all the time because they feel that this bad behavior cannot be linked to them. In any event she then bragged about being able to make people and most notably another guild member cry. This irritated me because I have a low tolerance for bullies having been bullied in the past so when she started asking for help I told her I could not help her and what’s more that even if I could I would seriously consider not helping her. This refusal drew angry reactions from other guild members who accused me of not being helpful enough. By intimating that I was not at this guild member’s beck and call I was asserting my right not to be helpful which flies in the face of the reciprocity at the heart of guild relations.
Cheval was not the only guild member I disliked and over time several members bothered me for a variety of reasons. One day I went out of my way to help a fellow guild member, she claimed to be having trouble completing a quest so I joined her. Because I was much higher level than her and the quest I could have easily just completed her quest objectives and gone on my way but I thought I would do her a favor and try to give her some advice and tips while I was at it. She balked at my attempts to give her advice; she complained that I was taking too long to help her and refused to listen to me. I found her attitude off putting and in the end I just quickly breezed through her quest and brushed off her attempt to thank me with badly concealed ill will. I felt that she had not properly appreciated my help and that experience meant that I was not prepared to help her a second time. In the same vein I also disliked a guild member who had the unfortunate habit of not paying attention to what he was doing and expected others to help him out when he got into trouble. If guild members can expect assistance from the guild it is only normal that they try not to impose on those who would help them. Because neither of the above guild members seemed willing to help themselves I dismissed them as idiots and after avoided them. Neither of them affected me like Bunny.
Bunny was a guildie (fellow guild member) who had the unfortunate bad habit of keeping his caps lock button pressed, this means that HE SPOKE IN CAPS ALL THE TIME no matter what he said. For those of you who don't know using all capital letters in chat is the equivalent of screaming in a face to face interaction. Not only did he keep the caps button on but he always felt the need to type out the lyrics to songs that he was listening to in guild chat. I can understand that sometimes people use caps to indicate frustration, but he was not doing that, it was like he was screaming everything he said for no reason. I found this very obnoxious and so the first few times I saw him do this I asked him to stop, and I asked politely, the conversations went something like this:
Bunny: I'M A LITTLE TEAPOT SHORT AND STOUT
me: Um, hey there Bunny would you mind taking off caps?
Bunny: WHY?
me: Well I find it sort of obnoxious and I would appreciate it if you did not do that
Bunny: HERE IS MY HANDLE AND HERE IS MY SPOUT
Basically he refused to listen to me so I went to see the guild leader and I complained to her telling her that I understood that sometimes using caps could be important but that Bunny was being really obnoxious. She told me that she would speak to him and eventually did. When she did Bunny through a fit and insisted that he was not changing to make anybody happy and that if somebody had a problem with him that they should put him on ignore. I was really pissed off at this and I promptly put him on ignore. I thanked my guild leader for her help and that I chose to put him on ignore but that I was not happy about it. My guild leader reminded me that I could not like everybody and that especially in a big guild that lack of manners was to be expected sometimes. I told her my problem with Bunny was that he was rude and unreasonable but that she could count on me to not cause drama and that is what happened. I put him on ignore and then I tried not to think about him.
With the exception of a guild member who made blatantly racist comments in guild chat before being kicked out of the guild by Sadie Bunny was the only guild member I ever officially put on ignore. While I would simply not talk with most guild members I disliked Bunny was a special case. Cheval was a mean person but unless one provoked her she could be counted on to behave, Bunny was an obnoxious and he would go out of his way to annoy others. In other words Cheval could behave, Bunny could not. I think that Bunny amused Sadie and she found it funny to watch him fluster other guild members without ever fully realizing that it was his fault when others got angry at him. I will never really understand what Sadie saw in Bunny, however, mostly because after I joined her guild I never spoke with her. Though I still think of her as a friend and I know she thinks about me the same we don’t speak to each other regularly and this means we are not as close as we once were. I think that her first guild ultimately fell apart because she was unwilling or unable to convince members to really be respectful of one another.
Social relationships in WoW like in many other places online are contingent on regular contact and Joelle Kivits’s writing about e-mail interviews captures the importance of contact in online relationships. Looking at my own social life I can see how it is the people that I would communicate with on a regular basis with that I would think of as friends. Only approaching Sadie when I had something significant to report to her changed our relationship and it made intimacy more difficult to achieve. My time in Sadie’s guild was one of great confusion because while I had friends in my guild I was also realizing that the guild as a community was not particularly relevant for me. The main goal of Sadie’s guild was to raid and while my goal of socializing with members was not in direct opposition to the guild’s objectives. I was committed to the friendships that I had made in the guild but ultimately felt alienated by my inability to relate to the guild’s larger goals. This is why I felt nothing about leaving her guild; I had stayed in that guild a lot longer than I should have. Sadie abandoned her guild and started a new one which I also joined but when this new guild proved to be the same as her old one I quit the guild. I left in good standing making sure that Sadie knew why I quit the guild.
In WoW, guilds can serve as important loci for socialization when the serve as social networks players can turn to in times of need. Centered on managing knowledge about the game, guilds create bodies of knowledge that can be accessed by individual members in order to help them become better players. WoW can be a very isolating game at times from my own experiences players rarely team up together outside of specific contexts in which having a team is necessary. In many ways WoW is a game where people play next to each other, in parallel without ever really interacting. With a server population of around 20 000 one can wander the world and never encounter the same player twice. What a guild does is put people in relationships with each other so that they can have social networks to fall back on in times of need. I set out to talk about my experiences as a WoW player and the way that guilds shaped my game experience and in a sense I did that. Thinking about the roles guilds play in WoW I realized that there was a lot I did not understand. How do the objectives of a guild affect the functioning of a guild? While I have been a member of more than one guild there are many kinds of guilds I have never been a member of. I have never been part of a role playing guild, for example, so I don’t really know what that is like. If the focus of a guild affects the way a guild functions how does server type affect the population that plays on it? Are there differences between the populations of PvP and PvE realms and if so how do we understand them? And ultimately if player experiences in the same game can be radically different what does this say about our ability to talk about socialization on MMORPGs?
Reference List
1. Anderson, B. (1983). “The Origins of National Cnsciousness.” In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London & New York: Verso. Pp. 41-49.
2. Filiciak, M. (2003). Hyperidentities: Postmodern identity patterns in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In The video game theory reader. M.J.P Wolf& B. Perron eds. New York: Routledge. Pp 87-102.
3. Yee, N. (2005). The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, Jun2006, Vol. 15 Issue 3, p309-329.
4. Anderson, B. (1983). “The Origins of National Cnsciousness.” In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London & New York: Verso. Pp. 41-49.
5. Pirius, L. K. (2007) Massively Multiplayer Online Game Virtual Environments: A Potential Locale for Intercultural Training. Available from ProQuest database (UMI Microform 3263133)
A growing body of work seems to suggest that Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) function as social worlds. How these virtual worlds function is less understood and while scholarly literature is beginning to grasp the subtle dynamics of these new environments there is still a lot that needs to be accounted for. For one thing every game is different and yet there is very little work on how that could impact one’s findings and there is a lexicon of generic MMORPG terms like gold and guild that are used to talk about all game worlds. I find this problematic because it elides the ways in which every game world is different from every other especially when it comes to terms like guild which describe social practices. If we agree with the generic definition of a guild as the basic social unit of MMORPGs how does that translate into specific practices in particular games? What does it mean to be in a guild in World of Warcraft (WoW) or in any game for that matter? If we can think of MMORPGs as social worlds it seems counterintuitive to assume that this means that these worlds are somehow uniform. How can we study virtual worlds as cultures if we ignore the contextual specificities that make each game unique?
My project is about guilds in the game World of Warcraft, more specifically it is an auto ethnographic meditation on the role guilds play in the game. What is a guild in WoW? This is not simply a technical question as my interest lies more in studying the social basis for guilds than in their specific designed functions. What does it mean to be in a WoW guild? What makes guilds central to social life in WoW? What kind of social group is a guild? If we assume that a guild is a community, what kind of community would we be dealing with? A caveat, this is a project based mostly in my lived experience this means that it is not representative of the experiences of every WoW player on ever server at every time. My data cannot even represent the totality of my game play experiences; instead what I can do is evoke the reality of WoW, present a snapshot of what (virtual) life in WoW can be like. As humble as it may seem this work and others like it are crucial to establishing an understanding of what people do when they play online games. I will preface my work with a brief discussion of MMORPGs as a genre of game in order to make my work accessible to non gamers. I will then present my findings as an impressionist tale discussing in some detail experiences I had in the game. After I present my data and my findings I will conclude with a meditation on game studies and socialization in online environments.
The term Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game refers to a specific genre of online game. MMORPGs are massively multiplayer because many players can play the game simultaneously. Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of WoW, brags that their game has over nine million subscribers. Most MMORPGs use servers, instances of the game world that thousands of players can be logged into simultaneously. MMORGPs are graphically rich virtual worlds featuring a variety of different environments designed to keep the players interested in them. What’s more these are persistent worlds, the game world exists independently of individual players and is therefore present for the players to access at any time they want to. MMORPGs are also avatar based, this means that players create avatars described by various statistics that interact with the world (Filiciak, 2003) through a combination of keys and mouse clicks. One of the goals of any MMORPG is to advance one’s avatar, to improve it by improving its statistics or giving it new abilities. Interestingly though MMORPGs are very open ended allowing the player to set his or her own goals, there are limits to this freedom, however, and players found violating the terms of service can expect to face the consequences.
One thing all MMORPGs interfaces come with is a chat box, and through this chat box players can communicate with each other using a variety of chat channels. Perhaps the easiest image for a person who has never gamed before would be a graphically complex chat room with a bunch of interactive tasks (Yee, 2005). While players will use programs like Ventrilo or Teamspeak to speak to each other voice to voice and some games even have voice chat software built in much of the social interaction in MMORPGs happens in text chat. I don’t know how widespread voice chat is, I’ve used in the past and several of the guilds I was in had Ventrilo servers but my project will focus on chat. Text can be a very imprecise means of communication because it lacks the affective cues present even in voice chat but it is the default medium in most MMORPGs. WoW has voice chat software build into it but this software is not particularly effective and I have not had any good experiences with it. I have gotten better results with the Ventrilo servers my guilds set up but since I don’t use vent much it won’t play a major role in my discussion.
Before I get into the specifics of WoW, it is worth repeating that MMORPG worlds are highly interactive. Game companies fill their worlds with a lot of content that allows players to interact with each other and the world in many different ways. Like any good game interacting with the world and completing game objectives is rewarded and players amass (virtual) material goods as they play. Every game has their own particular way of organizing their reward systems and their own kinds of (virtual) goods which are valuable only in the context of the particular game in question. These are also fictional worlds, that is worlds with a history and cultures that are nominally unique to the world in question. Immersing one’s self in the world means a minimum of role playing simply by having one’s avatar interact with the world. In real life I am not an elfin paladin or a gnome wizard but in World of Warcraft I am both of those things even if I do not actively pretend to be either of those things.
World of Warcraft is an MMOROPG with many servers and each server can host up to about 20 000 players simultaneously, there are over a hundred servers available in the United States alone. Like most MMORPGs it features a fantasy themed world called Azeroth, a world of dragons, elves, magic and war. WoW is an avatar based game and players create characters selecting a race and a class that they then move around the world training. There are two major player factions the Horde and the Alliance. Each faction is made up of five playable races with their own racial skills and a particular fictional history and ten classes. After choosing faction players choose race and then class, each choice restricting their subsequent choices. First a player chooses faction and this restricts their choice of race Orcs, Trolls, Zombies, Tauren (a race of bovine humanoids) and Blood Elves are the Horde races while Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves and Draenei (a race of blue aliens). While there are no classes unique to either faction choice of race restricts class choice. For example my highest level character is a Blood Elf Paladin; Blood Elves are the only race among the Horde that can be Paladins. Almost every race has a race specific language but each faction has a language that every race can understand, Alliance has common and Horde orcish but neither faction can understand the other because the factions are at war.
WoW servers or realms are divided into categories along three lines: player location, realm type and game play mode. The first category is in many ways the easiest to understand, Blizzard organizes its servers based on geographic location mostly for logistical purposes, with over nine million players worldwide and servers in multiple languages it is important for the game company to make sure the customers are accommodated in the most efficient way possible. Because I live in North America I play on a North American server, this means that many of the people I meet on the server are American but there are Canadians who play to. Blizzard then divides its realms into two types of realms, RP or role playing realms where players are formally encouraged to role play and normal servers where players are not. I play on a role playing server both because I like role playing and because when I started playing I had friends on the server. Blizzard further categorizes servers in relation to game play, some realms are formatted for PvP (player versus player) gaming and others are not. On PvP servers the war between the Horde and the Alliance is active and players are allowed to attack members of the opposite faction with impunity. On PvE (player versus environment) servers, or non PvP servers, players can choose not to be flagged for PvP and that means that players from the opposite faction can’t attack them. The servers I tend to play on are PvE, though I have never really played on a PvP server I feel more secure knowing that I won’t be randomly attacked as I adventure in the world.
I first started playing WoW because some of my friends were interested in playing the game. One of those friends, Jacobe, was already playing the game and invited us to join him on his server. With a bunch of my friends playing the game and my appreciation for the fantasy genre I was really excited to begin playing. The first MMORPG I ever played was Lineage 2, a fantasy themed game and I have loved the fantasy genre since before I played computer games. My first moments in the game were spent creating characters and figuring out how to use the basic game interface to play with my avatar while teaming with my friends. This did not last long and because of unfortunate real world circumstances I ended up playing alone because my friends were unable to find the time to join me. If I had been on a trial account I think I would have stopped playing when I realized my friends were not going to be able to play with me but because I had payed for two months I kept playing. One day I was playing with my paladin and I was invited to join a guild and everything changed.
I met Sadie in one of the first guilds I joined. While being part of a guild did not mean that I teamed up with other players more it did mean that I had people to chat with as I quested. One of those people was Sadie. She had a very lively sense of humor and she was always willing to talk about anything. One of the things I have always liked about MMORPGs is how the game can serve as an object of conversation providing me with a topic that I know the person I am talking with is interested in. While we only chatted at first we did team up and it is then that Sadie and I really got to know each other; I learned about her life and she learned about mine, it was an intimate moment between friends. I made many friends in that guild just by chatting with people in the guild channel. One of the guild members I befriended helped my druid get his aquatic form and on two separate occasions generously gave me in game currency when I needed it. What I appreciated about that guild was that even though most of us were playing alone in the game world we were also together in the guild channel. I was devastated the day I realized that most of my friends had left that guild. It had been an important hub for my virtual social life for so long that I was unsure of what to do with myself now that it was gone.
When after much soul searching I met up with Sadie again and she told me about her guild I was overjoyed because most of the people that I had befriended in my old guild were there. Sadie’s guild seemed to me to be everything I wanted in a guild, an association full of people I liked that I would be able to chat with freely. Sadie wanted a raiding guild but I was not really aware of what being in a raiding guild would really mean. Raiding in WoW is teaming up in large teams called raid groups and entering instances maps generated specifically for the raid group in order to access game content that no single player could master whether it be player versus player (PvP) content or player versus environment (PvE) content. Sadie was interested in PvE raiding, PvE instances are dungeons filled with very strong monsters that raid groups defeat both for the challenge and the (virtual) material rewards. Raiding is the means to accessing the most valuable gear in the game and the difficulty of the game content makes it important for raiders to work together well. Raiding is serious business and it requires commitment, dedication, and focus on the part of the raiders and a raiding guild is one that devotes its resources to making sure that the guild has the resources it needs to raid as efficiently as possible.
It is not uncommon for a guild to focus on one specific element of game play; in fact I believe it is current practice among guilds to specialize in this manner. This specialization means that likeminded individuals can form guilds together and to a certain extent guilds are like imagined communities in that members take for granted that other members will see things the way they do. I have been horrified to hear guild members say racist or homophobic remarks because they are things I don’t think. I always appreciated the efforts Sadie made to make her guild a place safe from the startlingly discriminatory language that is bandied about on a daily basis in most online environments. Chat is an imperfect medium for communication because it lacks many of the affective signals that voice to voice chat can transmit and as a result it’s a much more interpretable medium. When a guild member named Pegolas called a group of people fags, however, there was no misinterpreting what he meant or so I thought. When I confronted Pegolas he argued that he used the term fag to mean idiot and not homosexual and was initially quite defensive. Clearly he felt that as fellow guild members we would understand what he meant, that we were like him in a sense. That Sadie once compared the guild to a family at a guild meeting illustrates how the importance that guild life can take in WoW.
Guilds form and disband all the time in WoW; they form quickly and never manage to become a cohesive social network for any number of reasons. It makes it important to look at a guild that can make it a month past the signing of its charter to figure out what makes guilds stay together. The most successful guilds are ones in which members come together to face common challenges and learn bow to face them together making them remarkably similar to Wenger’s (in Pirius, 2007) communities of practice. Wegner defines communities of practice as communities that share common interest in a topic and who deepen their knowledge in the area through repeated interaction. The key focus of communities of practice is managing knowledge and by creating, expanding and exchanging knowledge allowing individuals to develop abilities. Sadie’s guild was a place where members could, by working together, share and even at times create knowledge about WoW. The higher level members would raid regularly working on becoming better players. Without being particularly knowledgeable about WoW when fellow guild members asked questions that I could answer I did.
Wegner argues that communities of practice develop their particular ways of talking and thinking about the subject at hand. Because the characters I had in the guild were not high enough level to participate in the raids I never got a firsthand experience of what raiding in Sadie’s guild might have been like. The guild was organized around managing knowledge and (virtual) material resources however and the sharing of these things was an important part of participating in guild life. With over nine million players there is a vast body of information about WoW readily available to anybody who cares to search for it. Online one can find directions, strategy guides and even programs that let players customize their interface in order to facilitate game play. While the knowledge that Sadie and the guild amassed and organized cannot be called original they undoubtedly appropriated it adapting it to suit their circumstances.
Communities of practice are based on sharing and acceptance and Wenger emphasizes that respect and trust are fundamental to the everyday workings of the community, in other words no respect or trust means no sharing. Sadie put a lot of effort into creating an atmosphere where discrimination was not tolerated but there were enough guild members who seemed to be incapable of respecting others to make the guild somewhat inefficient. I joined the guild upon the assumption that the other members were interested in the same things I was and it took me a while to realize that my goals were not in alignment with those of the guild community. As a community of practice the body of knowledge that they were amassing was never one that was particularly relevant to my gaming experience, so in short I stayed with the guild even though I had no formal reason to. I won’t deny that I benefitted from the (virtual) material resources amassed by the guild but I also went out of my way to help guild members and I contributed to the prosperity of the guild in numerous ways.
Reciprocity is a major theme in the daily workings of a guild, if one is to benefit from the collective resources of the guild one must also be prepared to donate one’s resources to the guild. I got into trouble with some of my fellow guild members or guildies for theoretically refusing to help a guild member. What this story should underline is the way guild members enforce unenforceable behaviors such as generosity by criticizing perceived selfishness. I was online one day when this guild member whom I will call Cheval started complaining about immature players. This is a fair complaint as many players sometimes act in offensive or immature ways, this is the internet and people misbehave all the time because they feel that this bad behavior cannot be linked to them. In any event she then bragged about being able to make people and most notably another guild member cry. This irritated me because I have a low tolerance for bullies having been bullied in the past so when she started asking for help I told her I could not help her and what’s more that even if I could I would seriously consider not helping her. This refusal drew angry reactions from other guild members who accused me of not being helpful enough. By intimating that I was not at this guild member’s beck and call I was asserting my right not to be helpful which flies in the face of the reciprocity at the heart of guild relations.
Cheval was not the only guild member I disliked and over time several members bothered me for a variety of reasons. One day I went out of my way to help a fellow guild member, she claimed to be having trouble completing a quest so I joined her. Because I was much higher level than her and the quest I could have easily just completed her quest objectives and gone on my way but I thought I would do her a favor and try to give her some advice and tips while I was at it. She balked at my attempts to give her advice; she complained that I was taking too long to help her and refused to listen to me. I found her attitude off putting and in the end I just quickly breezed through her quest and brushed off her attempt to thank me with badly concealed ill will. I felt that she had not properly appreciated my help and that experience meant that I was not prepared to help her a second time. In the same vein I also disliked a guild member who had the unfortunate habit of not paying attention to what he was doing and expected others to help him out when he got into trouble. If guild members can expect assistance from the guild it is only normal that they try not to impose on those who would help them. Because neither of the above guild members seemed willing to help themselves I dismissed them as idiots and after avoided them. Neither of them affected me like Bunny.
Bunny was a guildie (fellow guild member) who had the unfortunate bad habit of keeping his caps lock button pressed, this means that HE SPOKE IN CAPS ALL THE TIME no matter what he said. For those of you who don't know using all capital letters in chat is the equivalent of screaming in a face to face interaction. Not only did he keep the caps button on but he always felt the need to type out the lyrics to songs that he was listening to in guild chat. I can understand that sometimes people use caps to indicate frustration, but he was not doing that, it was like he was screaming everything he said for no reason. I found this very obnoxious and so the first few times I saw him do this I asked him to stop, and I asked politely, the conversations went something like this:
Bunny: I'M A LITTLE TEAPOT SHORT AND STOUT
me: Um, hey there Bunny would you mind taking off caps?
Bunny: WHY?
me: Well I find it sort of obnoxious and I would appreciate it if you did not do that
Bunny: HERE IS MY HANDLE AND HERE IS MY SPOUT
Basically he refused to listen to me so I went to see the guild leader and I complained to her telling her that I understood that sometimes using caps could be important but that Bunny was being really obnoxious. She told me that she would speak to him and eventually did. When she did Bunny through a fit and insisted that he was not changing to make anybody happy and that if somebody had a problem with him that they should put him on ignore. I was really pissed off at this and I promptly put him on ignore. I thanked my guild leader for her help and that I chose to put him on ignore but that I was not happy about it. My guild leader reminded me that I could not like everybody and that especially in a big guild that lack of manners was to be expected sometimes. I told her my problem with Bunny was that he was rude and unreasonable but that she could count on me to not cause drama and that is what happened. I put him on ignore and then I tried not to think about him.
With the exception of a guild member who made blatantly racist comments in guild chat before being kicked out of the guild by Sadie Bunny was the only guild member I ever officially put on ignore. While I would simply not talk with most guild members I disliked Bunny was a special case. Cheval was a mean person but unless one provoked her she could be counted on to behave, Bunny was an obnoxious and he would go out of his way to annoy others. In other words Cheval could behave, Bunny could not. I think that Bunny amused Sadie and she found it funny to watch him fluster other guild members without ever fully realizing that it was his fault when others got angry at him. I will never really understand what Sadie saw in Bunny, however, mostly because after I joined her guild I never spoke with her. Though I still think of her as a friend and I know she thinks about me the same we don’t speak to each other regularly and this means we are not as close as we once were. I think that her first guild ultimately fell apart because she was unwilling or unable to convince members to really be respectful of one another.
Social relationships in WoW like in many other places online are contingent on regular contact and Joelle Kivits’s writing about e-mail interviews captures the importance of contact in online relationships. Looking at my own social life I can see how it is the people that I would communicate with on a regular basis with that I would think of as friends. Only approaching Sadie when I had something significant to report to her changed our relationship and it made intimacy more difficult to achieve. My time in Sadie’s guild was one of great confusion because while I had friends in my guild I was also realizing that the guild as a community was not particularly relevant for me. The main goal of Sadie’s guild was to raid and while my goal of socializing with members was not in direct opposition to the guild’s objectives. I was committed to the friendships that I had made in the guild but ultimately felt alienated by my inability to relate to the guild’s larger goals. This is why I felt nothing about leaving her guild; I had stayed in that guild a lot longer than I should have. Sadie abandoned her guild and started a new one which I also joined but when this new guild proved to be the same as her old one I quit the guild. I left in good standing making sure that Sadie knew why I quit the guild.
In WoW, guilds can serve as important loci for socialization when the serve as social networks players can turn to in times of need. Centered on managing knowledge about the game, guilds create bodies of knowledge that can be accessed by individual members in order to help them become better players. WoW can be a very isolating game at times from my own experiences players rarely team up together outside of specific contexts in which having a team is necessary. In many ways WoW is a game where people play next to each other, in parallel without ever really interacting. With a server population of around 20 000 one can wander the world and never encounter the same player twice. What a guild does is put people in relationships with each other so that they can have social networks to fall back on in times of need. I set out to talk about my experiences as a WoW player and the way that guilds shaped my game experience and in a sense I did that. Thinking about the roles guilds play in WoW I realized that there was a lot I did not understand. How do the objectives of a guild affect the functioning of a guild? While I have been a member of more than one guild there are many kinds of guilds I have never been a member of. I have never been part of a role playing guild, for example, so I don’t really know what that is like. If the focus of a guild affects the way a guild functions how does server type affect the population that plays on it? Are there differences between the populations of PvP and PvE realms and if so how do we understand them? And ultimately if player experiences in the same game can be radically different what does this say about our ability to talk about socialization on MMORPGs?
Reference List
1. Anderson, B. (1983). “The Origins of National Cnsciousness.” In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London & New York: Verso. Pp. 41-49.
2. Filiciak, M. (2003). Hyperidentities: Postmodern identity patterns in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In The video game theory reader. M.J.P Wolf& B. Perron eds. New York: Routledge. Pp 87-102.
3. Yee, N. (2005). The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, Jun2006, Vol. 15 Issue 3, p309-329.
4. Anderson, B. (1983). “The Origins of National Cnsciousness.” In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London & New York: Verso. Pp. 41-49.
5. Pirius, L. K. (2007) Massively Multiplayer Online Game Virtual Environments: A Potential Locale for Intercultural Training. Available from ProQuest database (UMI Microform 3263133)
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.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Goodbye my spec
I am retribution... I will not respec... maybe if I can I will dual spec prot but my guild will never ever see me as a tank again. When I was leveling my paladin I told Jaer that when I was a tank on raids I would make sure that there was always a place for him on the raids and now that will not happen. His girlfriend is the guild's main tank and the truth is not just that she is better than me but that I know that I could never be a consistently perfect tank, I am a good tank and I could be a periodically sublime one but never a perfect one. It costs me a lot to admit this, it also costs me a lot to let go of my dream of tanking for Jaer but it happened. I do like ret but it's not like... my first real tanking experience was a PuG group, a pick up group made up of random players, and we ran a dungeon called the Nexus and it was sublime, everything was perfect and all the pieces fell into place. I have yet to have a sublime moment with my new spec and I worry that I will not. Secretly I feel I have to make mt spec work because there is no way I can change back and I worry that I will never have a sublime moment with my paladin anymore.
Recently a druid tank joined the guild and another guild leader tried tanking for the first time and they talked about tanking, every word of those discussions was a pain in my heart because they made me feel like a failure as a player. Jaer has told me that it was not because I was a bad tank that he recommended a respec but I can't help but feel like I did fail as a tank every time they talk about it. This is me though. I know that Jaer is my friend and that he only wants what is best for me, I do the same for him but I am having trouble saying goodbye to my spec. I wish I was not having problems but I am, I was so proud as a tank and now I sort of feel somehow less as DPS. I try telling myself I will rock as DPS but it's not the same as knowing that I have rocked as a tank, maybe I need to test out my spec in a team environment, maybe I am just a stupid glory hog and I liked being a tank because good tanks get glory, whatever it is talk of tanking makes me feel bad inside and I have no idea how to express it.
Kind of silly to get worked up about a video game though. I would argues though that it's not the game but a perceived loss of social status that is bothering me but I don't know if that is just a justification. Yesterday I joined my guildies on a low level dungeon run to help the new tank and as much as I wanted to be part of the fun I felt sort of... seeing my friend really enjoying tanking reminded me of the good times I had, times that I would never have again. Moreover I don't think that my new spec will really get me more invites to guild events, DPS is dime a dozen and I am sure they know more than enough people that inviting me will not be a priority. I really have no clue why I respecced and the only think I know is that I do not want to respec back, no matter how sad not being prot makes me sometimes.
Recently a druid tank joined the guild and another guild leader tried tanking for the first time and they talked about tanking, every word of those discussions was a pain in my heart because they made me feel like a failure as a player. Jaer has told me that it was not because I was a bad tank that he recommended a respec but I can't help but feel like I did fail as a tank every time they talk about it. This is me though. I know that Jaer is my friend and that he only wants what is best for me, I do the same for him but I am having trouble saying goodbye to my spec. I wish I was not having problems but I am, I was so proud as a tank and now I sort of feel somehow less as DPS. I try telling myself I will rock as DPS but it's not the same as knowing that I have rocked as a tank, maybe I need to test out my spec in a team environment, maybe I am just a stupid glory hog and I liked being a tank because good tanks get glory, whatever it is talk of tanking makes me feel bad inside and I have no idea how to express it.
Kind of silly to get worked up about a video game though. I would argues though that it's not the game but a perceived loss of social status that is bothering me but I don't know if that is just a justification. Yesterday I joined my guildies on a low level dungeon run to help the new tank and as much as I wanted to be part of the fun I felt sort of... seeing my friend really enjoying tanking reminded me of the good times I had, times that I would never have again. Moreover I don't think that my new spec will really get me more invites to guild events, DPS is dime a dozen and I am sure they know more than enough people that inviting me will not be a priority. I really have no clue why I respecced and the only think I know is that I do not want to respec back, no matter how sad not being prot makes me sometimes.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Why I respecced
I have changed from Prot to Ret, I am a tank no longer. Mostly I changed because of the recommendations of a friend of mine who told me that she liked Ret so much that leveling 2 rep pallies was a pleasure.
I made up with my guild leader and we talked about what happened and I have made my peace with it. It turns out he did not want to tell me his opinion because he knew how much I liked being a protection paladin and did not want to tell me how to spec.
One other element was that he eventually admitted that as DPS there would be more room for me at guild events.
I still miss my old spec,. I mean I was protection from level 10 to level 76 but I want to give ret a fair shot. I think I will have to see my spec in a dungeon to really figure that out though so i am giving myself the space to do it.
I made up with my guild leader and we talked about what happened and I have made my peace with it. It turns out he did not want to tell me his opinion because he knew how much I liked being a protection paladin and did not want to tell me how to spec.
One other element was that he eventually admitted that as DPS there would be more room for me at guild events.
I still miss my old spec,. I mean I was protection from level 10 to level 76 but I want to give ret a fair shot. I think I will have to see my spec in a dungeon to really figure that out though so i am giving myself the space to do it.
Monday, March 9, 2009
The (un)kindest cut
My guild leader Jaer and I got into a fight yesterday. I participated in a raid, that's when I realized that raiding was maybe not for me, it's hard work and if everybody is not where they are supposed to be then the whole group can wipe. It can be very stressful and I am not sure I want to deal with that kind of stress on a regular basis. I had been feeling like some of my guild members have been talking behind my back but trying to tell myself that this was not the case. The first time a random guild member told me I would enjoy a different spec I did not think much about it but then everybody talking about death knight tanks, being told three times in a day that "tanking is a big responsability" with that unspoken "I don't think that you can handle it", Jaer's hesitation to let me in the raid in the first place... I'm angry because they talked behind my back and not just in passing, they expressly went off to the side to talk about me and it hurts... Jaer told me that they did not mean to hurt me, and that they did not say anything bad about me and no matter how bruised my pride is I can't help but try to understand where everybody is coming from... I understand that Jaer was hesitant to tell me how he felt because he did not want to insult me, I understand that I could probably do ok as DPS on a raid because I can follow orders well enough and not quibble about it too much, I understand that my guild leader needs me to not be a dork about this, still... I wish he could have told me... the truth is I am not even that attached to my spec and even now as I am still a little defensive I am contemplating a respec. The thing is if it's "he respecced cause he can't cut it as a tank" I am not sure I even want to play the game anymore. Maybe I would enjoy playing ret more but right now I am still upset and respeccing while I feel like shit is a bad idea.
Bottom line: I can change my spec, it's not the end of the world if I do, I may try it out... I can't say I am not curious... to try ret
Bottom line: I can change my spec, it's not the end of the world if I do, I may try it out... I can't say I am not curious... to try ret
Thursday, February 26, 2009
What is a paladin?
Guardians of the Holy Light, paladins bolster their allies with holy auras and blessing to protect their friends from harm and enhance their powers. Wearing heavy armor, they can withstand terrible blows in the thickest battles while healing their wounded allies and resurrecting the slain. In combat, they can wield massive two-handed weapons, stun their foes, destroy undead and demons, and judge their enemies with holy vengeance. Paladins are a defensive class designed to outlast their opponents.
I play a tankerdin, that is a paladin tank, I may not be the most amazing pally tank the world has ever seen but I am still learning and I am an ok tank if I do say so myself. I think a chunck of my problem is that I need the practice and another bit of it is that I need the experience.
Paladind have three talent trees http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/paladin/talents.html
the holy tree which centers on healing, the retribution tree focused on dealing damage and the protection tree focused on taking damage. The protection tree is the tanking tree, as a tank the goal is to keep the monsters attacking you and nobody else so that they can heal or deal damage unmolested.
The Paladin is a mix of a melee fighter and a secondary spell caster. The Paladin is ideal for groups due to the Paladin's healing, Blessings, and other abilities. Paladins can have one active aura per Paladin on each party member and use specific Blessings for specific players. Paladins are pretty hard to kill, thanks to their assortment of defensive abilities. The Paladin can also heal with Holy Light, unlike other combat classes. The Paladin is an Undead specific fighter as well, with several abilities designed to be used against the Undead.
I play a tankerdin, that is a paladin tank, I may not be the most amazing pally tank the world has ever seen but I am still learning and I am an ok tank if I do say so myself. I think a chunck of my problem is that I need the practice and another bit of it is that I need the experience.
Paladind have three talent trees http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/paladin/talents.html
the holy tree which centers on healing, the retribution tree focused on dealing damage and the protection tree focused on taking damage. The protection tree is the tanking tree, as a tank the goal is to keep the monsters attacking you and nobody else so that they can heal or deal damage unmolested.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Spiders, webs... and terrible poison, oh my!
Today I tanked Azjol Nerub for the first time, my guild leader Jaer was there and he encouraged me, he also told me about some add ons, programs that modify the interface of WoW, how I interact with the game that should make my life easier. Having him on the runs is both really cool and sometimes a little disconcerting, he knows pallies so well cause he raided on one that he can give me advice and having him means I pay extra special attention so I can do it right to impress him, but it also makes me a little nervous because he's a better paladin than I am. Today even though we died a few times and I was reminded to keep consacrate up he told me I did good, I think it's not fair of me to rely on him for my self confidence and when I got into the swing of things and believed in myself I ok, I am still adjusting my bars and getting used to tanking. It's not the most difficult thing in the world but it still takes getting used to sometimes. One of the things that was bad this time was that one boss had poison that leeched my life and healed hers, maybe my new addons will help with that. I feel bad that we wiped at all actually. I think it's not that wipes don't matter but that if you wipe and learn from it and then manage to clear the dungeon you did a good job.
The folley of detachment
People are social animals, culture itself is an expression of that sociability and anthropologists who go into the field have to remember that. What brings this up, a guild member whom I also consider a friend is going to Iraq soon, he is happy to be back in the military about sad to go. I know that all I can do is wish him luck and hope for the best. As a pacifist and a left leaning individual I think that the war in Iraq was never legitimate to begin with, but as a friend I know that saying this will not help anything. There are probably a number of reasons that my friend is back in the army and that he is being shipped off to Iraq again but that does not mean I have to like them.
My friend is going to Iraq, not for the first time either and it saddens and troubles me. It troubles me because when my friend mentioned it, my perception of him changed a little bit, like suddenly there was this secret and scary part of him, this mysterious 'soldier' aspect that kind of scared me. More than that it's that I am facing the possibility of never seeing a person again, and I am confronted by the possibility of war.
When I visited New York recently with my family we came to a church and there were white ribbons attached to the outside fence, the woman who gave the tour told us that each ribbon represented a soldier who dies in Iraq and pointed to some ribbons that represented the Iraqi people who also died. Those ribbons made me want to cry and they made my mother angry for the same reason: I am not so different from many of the young men whose names were floating in the wind on that day in New York. Looking at that fence, just like hearing my friend talk was confronting my own mortality, even if it was not very likely. My mother got angry because she was confronted with the possibility of losing a child, because the ribbons evoked the possibility of never seeing me or my little brother again.
"It's a horrific thing that happens to a parent when his or her child is killed or dies from any cause before the parents" Writes activist Cindy Sheehan. "... when you arrive at the moment that you learn that your child is dead, that's the point when you pray for death yourself. But I didn't die."
this is part of an interview with her http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ta_FKd1JKM
It's funny that the game world of WoW is one at war, and I have seen signs of it. There are places in the game world that have struck me as sad and beautiful at the same time for a number of reasons. There is a quest in Azuremyst island where you have to rescue furbolg cubs as you intervene in a war between furbolg tribes (http://www.wowwiki.com/Furbolg), there is an NPC in the badlands, a robot who dreams of being a real boy, the fictional world of Azeroth is full of war stories of all sorts, some beutiful and others horrific, yet none moved me as much as the prospect of my friend going to Iraq. Maybe it is that even as the relationshipsbetween players are real, the game world itself is not and so our relationship to the world is different from our relationship to this reality.
The sight of the city guards spitting on death knights made me think of these lines from the Hugh Lloyd Jones translation of the Agamemnon "For those they sent away/they know, but instead of men/ to each one's home/there came back urns and ashes." And yet the thought of my friend going to Iraq bothers me more...
My friend is going to Iraq, not for the first time either and it saddens and troubles me. It troubles me because when my friend mentioned it, my perception of him changed a little bit, like suddenly there was this secret and scary part of him, this mysterious 'soldier' aspect that kind of scared me. More than that it's that I am facing the possibility of never seeing a person again, and I am confronted by the possibility of war.
When I visited New York recently with my family we came to a church and there were white ribbons attached to the outside fence, the woman who gave the tour told us that each ribbon represented a soldier who dies in Iraq and pointed to some ribbons that represented the Iraqi people who also died. Those ribbons made me want to cry and they made my mother angry for the same reason: I am not so different from many of the young men whose names were floating in the wind on that day in New York. Looking at that fence, just like hearing my friend talk was confronting my own mortality, even if it was not very likely. My mother got angry because she was confronted with the possibility of losing a child, because the ribbons evoked the possibility of never seeing me or my little brother again.
"It's a horrific thing that happens to a parent when his or her child is killed or dies from any cause before the parents" Writes activist Cindy Sheehan. "... when you arrive at the moment that you learn that your child is dead, that's the point when you pray for death yourself. But I didn't die."
this is part of an interview with her http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ta_FKd1JKM
It's funny that the game world of WoW is one at war, and I have seen signs of it. There are places in the game world that have struck me as sad and beautiful at the same time for a number of reasons. There is a quest in Azuremyst island where you have to rescue furbolg cubs as you intervene in a war between furbolg tribes (http://www.wowwiki.com/Furbolg), there is an NPC in the badlands, a robot who dreams of being a real boy, the fictional world of Azeroth is full of war stories of all sorts, some beutiful and others horrific, yet none moved me as much as the prospect of my friend going to Iraq. Maybe it is that even as the relationshipsbetween players are real, the game world itself is not and so our relationship to the world is different from our relationship to this reality.
The sight of the city guards spitting on death knights made me think of these lines from the Hugh Lloyd Jones translation of the Agamemnon "For those they sent away/they know, but instead of men/ to each one's home/there came back urns and ashes." And yet the thought of my friend going to Iraq bothers me more...
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Race and race in WoW
I was hanging out on one of my toons the other day and a fellow guild member suddenly went off on Asian people. It was really horrible, I am not Asian but I found the epithets he used offensive. It's not simply that he was using racist epithets, or even using them to denigrate actual people, what was most offensive was that this idiot was arguing that it made him more enlightened. He claimed it was ok for him to use racist terms because he was racist against everybody, as if misanthropy makes anything better, and that he also used racial terms for his own race. I will let you all figure out that out on your own. I was so shocked by the stupidity of what he said that I got upset and called him an idiot and then a fellow guild member whispered me and told me to calm down because he would mention it to the guild leader, and that action would be taken. Simply telling me that he would make sure that this was taken care of, that he was outraged by it, and that I could ignore the person made me feel better. I ignored the offending party but he had soured my mood. Then my guild leader took action and kicked the offending party and renewed my faith in the guild, by trying to make up for the actions of one idiot.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Let's try this again, only this time more feeling'
On Friday I tanked Nexus twice and I think I did a pretty good job. My first party wiped twice against the final boss and my other party wiped about twice or three times against some bosses. I died once on the second team because I ran ahead when our healer was afk. My only problem with that was that our healer spontaneously went AFK (away from keys) with no warning. I will admit that there was a moment when I charged not realizing that we needed to wait for her to get her mana back up. I thought I did pretty well, since both times I went through the Dungeon pretty efficiently. On Sunday my guild leader and I had a talk, he's the one with a high level , used to raid paladin, and he had an alt in the second dungeon team and he asked me why I had not been using my Avenger's Shield to pull mobs. I am really embarrassed about admitting this but I was running up to mobs and hitting them to draw aggro when I should have known better. My guild leader was not mean or harsh but very gentle about it, I was so ashamed by what I had done, I don't think I will ever not pull mobs again, it really is not a reliable way to draw and maintain aggro. Thinking about it I realized that I had been taking unnecessary risks and why? Because I was afraid my party wouyld charge in and steal my aggro. My guild leader told me this maxim "If the tank dies it's usially the healer's fault, if the healer dies it's usually the tank's fault and if the DPS dies it's usually their own fault." I need to pull and have faith in my DPS. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody is sloppy sometimes and if I don't take this opportunity to learn then maybe I should not tank.
In other tanking news I got a tanking weapon and I am really happy about it.
In other tanking news I got a tanking weapon and I am really happy about it.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Why I made my paladin
I met Jacobe online and we would hang out all the time, I still consider him a friend and we see each other regularly. He is the one who encouraged me to join him in WoW. In fact the circle of friends I hung out with that included him all decided to play WoW. We joined him on his server and made toons. First I made a tauren shaman, then when it became apparent that everybody else wanted to make Blood Elves, I made a Blood Elf warlock to play with them. I could have moved from Mulgore (the Tauren starting Zone) to Eversong Woods (the Blood Elf starting zone) but I was not familiar enough with the world to do that. After a few levels or warlock I tried a priest and then my friend T talked me into trying a paladin. We got our paladins to level7 or 8 together and after that I did not look back.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Last night a trinket saved my life!
This week I ran a bunch of dungeons as tank, I ran 5 or 6 dungeons: Shattered Halls, Nexus, Auchenai Crypts(not sure about spelling), Sethekk Halls and most of Utguarde Keep. I say most of Utguarde keep because I wiped at least once on each boss in the dungeon once. My guild leader who is both an amazing player and a really great guy told me that I did a really good job even though we did wipe a few times and even though in the end two party members had to get level 80's to finish the Keep I would like to think I did well. I'm still reeling at this, I am amazed to find I am a good tank. One thing that helped me was the fact that I have ne of the most popular tanking trinkets that drops in the outlands!
When I first made my toon I never imagined I would be tanking dungeons with him, and when I failed my first attempt at tanking evar I never thought I would ever do as well as I did this week. My guild leader used to raid for one of the major raiding guilds on ym server and he told me I was doing a good job. One of the reasons that we had trouble was that our super competant healer was a few levels lower than the rest of the group, it's not to say that she was bad just that even a higher level healer would have trouble doing what we attempted.
In the middle of Utguarde Keep I suddenly realized that I had a project even better than PvP practices in WoW sitting in my lap. A project that is much better suited to the auto-ethnographic method, the story of me and my blood elf paladin. The story of how I decided to make him, how I leveled him, what happened to him and what I am doing with him now. This is part of the story of how I started to play WoW and comes from my encounters with the game and the other players.
I'm sure that it has less of the anthropological cachet of "I went to observe the wild PvPer in his native environment." that anthropology sometiems seems to sometimes revel in but I think this will make my project ulitmately more managable.
When I first made my toon I never imagined I would be tanking dungeons with him, and when I failed my first attempt at tanking evar I never thought I would ever do as well as I did this week. My guild leader used to raid for one of the major raiding guilds on ym server and he told me I was doing a good job. One of the reasons that we had trouble was that our super competant healer was a few levels lower than the rest of the group, it's not to say that she was bad just that even a higher level healer would have trouble doing what we attempted.
In the middle of Utguarde Keep I suddenly realized that I had a project even better than PvP practices in WoW sitting in my lap. A project that is much better suited to the auto-ethnographic method, the story of me and my blood elf paladin. The story of how I decided to make him, how I leveled him, what happened to him and what I am doing with him now. This is part of the story of how I started to play WoW and comes from my encounters with the game and the other players.
I'm sure that it has less of the anthropological cachet of "I went to observe the wild PvPer in his native environment." that anthropology sometiems seems to sometimes revel in but I think this will make my project ulitmately more managable.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
An attempted glossary
This is my attempt to explain certain WoW terms.
guild: a guild is a social organization of players, guilds can have tabards, a bank vault where they can store and share objects, a toon can only be the member of one guild at a time and is normally a more stable group than a party.
party: players band together to form parties to work on specific goals, in WoW players tend to team up mostly for dungeons and raids, that is instances.
instance:instances are spaces where each party or raid group that enters has their own copy of the place. Each instance is an identical copy of the world
guildie: a fellow guild member
profession: In WoW every toon or character can have two professions as well as the option to take up take up the three secondary professions (cooking, mining, and fishing). Professions fall under two broad categories gathering ( mining, herbalism, skinning) or crafting (blacksmithing, leather working, tailoeing, alchemy, etc...)
link http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/professions/index.html
spec: the term spec refers to the way that one has invested one's talent points, this link is a good explanation of the talent system
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/talents.html
This is some of what it says:
Talent points are one of the main ways to customize your character in World of Warcraft. They can make your character a specialist in one of their available class roles, change their entire playstyle, and offer countless combinations for you to experiment with. Characters begin gaining talent points at tenth level, with one additional point per level gained thereafter. Each class has three unique talent trees, each focusing on a different area. The possible talent points in the three trees are far greater than the maximum number of talent points that you can earn at maximum level. Thus, how you choose to spend your precious talent points is an important decision that should be planned and executed with careful deliberation.
attributes: this is a basic discussion of character attributes I got from the official WoW site
url: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/characters.html
Also this is the blossary that the official WoW site provides
Here are some of the terms which may cause some confusion. This is not a complete list of words that you may hear. There are many other common terms used on the internet which do not directly relate to the game.
AC - Armor Class or Defense.
Add - An extra monster has joined an existing battle.
Alt - A character on your account other than your main character.
AoE - Area of Effect Damage. This is a spell that hurts a group of monsters in an area like Blizzard in Warcraft III.
AE - Area Effect
AFK - Away from Keyboard. This means the player is away from his computer.
Aggro - This means the monsters are mad at you and you've "activated" them to attack you. They are now in the motion of trying to reach and attack you. "The Murloc aggroed on me!" or "The Murlocs will aggro if you get too close!"
Aggro Radius - The radius around the monsters where they will "wake up" and attack you.
AGI - Agility
AH - Auction House
AQ - Ahn'Qiraj
AV - Alterac Valley Battleground
Avatar - Your character
BG - Battleground
BRD - Blackrock Depths
BWL - Blackwing's Lair
Buff - A beneficial spell cast on a monster or player. An example of a "buff" is the Priest's Inner Fire or Shaman's Bloodlust.
Carebear - Player that prefers to help other players attack monsters rather than attack other players in player vs. player combat.
Caster - A character that stays on the back row to heal or cast spells on the enemy, such as a Mage.
Cheese - To exploit an imbalance in the game.
Combat Pets - A NPC controlled by a player, aiding that player and his teammates in fights.
CR - Corpse Retrevial
Creep - Monster
Creep Jacking - A term from Warcraft 3 where players attack other players while they are already engaged in combat with neutral monsters.
Critters - Monsters that don't attack back, like a bunny or deer.
CTF - Warsong Gulch Battleground
DD - Direct Damage. This is a spell that does all of its damage in one hit rather than spreading its damage over time.
DM - Dire Maul or Deadmines (if in Westfall)
DMG - Damage
DOT - Damage over time
DPS - Damage per second
De-Buff - A negative spell cast on a unit that makes it less powerful. An example of a "de-buff" is Slow.
FH - Full Health
FM - Full Mana
FTL - For The Loss, a sports or game term.
FTW - For The Win, a sports or game term.
Gank - Player vs. Player: To attack another player while they're trying to fight a monster.
GM - Game Master. Someone employed by Blizzard Entertainment to assist and help players.
Griefer - A person who purposely tries to annoy or anger other players.
Grinding - Staying in the same area fighting the same types of monsters for a very long time.
GS - Goldshire
Hate - Similar to threat
HP - Hit points or Health
IF - Ironforge
Incoming (INC) - This means an attack is coming.
Instancing - This is a dungeon where you will load into your OWN copy of the dungeon with your group. Only you and your group will be in your copy of the dungeon. Another group that enters the same area will enter their own copy of the dungeon.
INT - Intelligence
Kiting - A style of combat in which a player continually stays out of combat range of an enemy usually by running from it, while simultaneously causing damage to it.
KOS - Killed on Sight. If an Orc approaches a Human Guard, the Guard would try to kill on sight (aggro).
KS - Kill Steal. Try to steal another person's kill.
LFG - Looking for a group.
LFM - Looking for more.
Log - When you log off; disconnect from the game.
LOL - Lots of Laugh or Laughing Out Loud. This abbreviation indicates something is really funny. It's pretty cliche nowadays though.
LOM - Low on Mana.
LOS - Line of Sight
LOOT - To take the treasure from a monster that has been killed or from a chest.
LVL - Level
Mez - Short for Mesmerize. Refers to spells, such as Polymorph that temporarily incapacitate a target.
MMO - Massively Multiplayer Online.
MMOG - Massively Multiplayer Online Game
MMORPG - Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
MOB - MOB" is an old programming acronym of Mobile Object Block. Mobs are all computer controlled characters in the game. You should likely use some other term such as monster, creep, or bad guy.
MT - Main Tank
Named - A special monster that is usually stronger than surrounding monsters with possible special abilities and item drops.
NBG - - Need Before Greed, only people that need an item will roll dice (in case there are more than one player in the team that needs the item).
Nerf - To downgrade, to be made softer, or make less effective. "X has been nerfed."
Newbie - A term that sometimes means new player. Newbie is also used to suggest that a player is not very good.
Newb - Short for Newbie. See above.
Ninja - To try to loot an item without other players knowing or paying attention. Basically, to take an item without permission.
N00b - An incredibly uncool way to say newb. Don't use it.
NPC - This is a non player-controlled character. The characters are controlled by the server or realm. A "computer" character.
OOM - Out of Mana. People say this to let their party know they are out of mana and can't cast any spells, especially healing.
Pat - Patrolling monster
PC - Player controlled character
Pet - A NPC controlled by a player such as a Wolf, Infernal, and so on.
PK - Player Kill or Player Killer.
POP - Contraction of "Repopulation", often used as a shortened term for the re-spawn of monsters.
Proc - Activate. Example: A weapon with a special effect will "proc" every so often.
PST - Please Send Tell. Indicates that the person speaking wants to receive communication via a /t(ell) or /w(hisper) command.
Puller - Person who pulls monsters for the party.
Pulling - One of the players in a party heads out and leads one or more of the monsters back to the party so that the party can attack the monsters. The idea is to prevent too many monsters from attacking at once.
PvE - Player vs. Environment. Combat between players and computer controlled opponents.
PvP - Player vs. Player. This means for one player to attack another player.
Raid - A raid is a large-scale attack on an area by a group of players.
Res - Short for resurrect
Re-Spawn - A monster that has been killed has spawned (been created) again.
Rest (state) - An indicator of how tired a character is, which affects how much experience is gained from killing monsters.
Rez - Resurrect
RFD - Razorfen Downs
Roll - This means that you should roll a random number to determine who has the right to get an item. For example: /random 1-100
Root - To trap a target in place/stuck using a "root" type spell such as Entangling Roots.
RR - Redridge Mountains
Shard - Soul Shard. An item gained by the Warlock through Soul Draining, used to cast several spells such as Ritual of Summoning and to conjure Soulstones.
Small Pets - An animal following the player around. While this does not directly influence the player or monsters, it is cool to have around, especially the rare ones.
Spawns - The location or process of monsters appearing when they are created in the world.
SPI - Spirit
SS - Southshore
STA - Stamina
Stack - A number of identical items placed in a single inventory slot, to conserve space. Only certain items can be stacked.
STR - Strength
STV - Stranglethorn Vale
SW - Stormwind
Tank - A melee character that can take a lot of damage like a Warrior.
Tap - To do damage to a monster, making it "your" kill. Once you have damaged the monster, you are the only one able to get experience and loot from it. A monster with a greyed-out name bar has been tapped by another player and will not earn you experience or loot.
Taunt - Related to Aggro. An ability that allows a player to pull the attention of a monster off of another player and onto him- or herself.
Threat - Related to Aggro. This is what a character "gives off" to generate or draw monster aggro.
Train - To lead monsters into another player. This is not a desired behavior.
Twink - A low level character who has been made more powerful by higher level characters, usually by getting stronger armor and weapons than the character would normally have at such a low level.
Uber - German slang for 'super', originally meaning 'over'; exceptionally powerful
UC - Undercity
WC - Wailing Caverns instance
WF - Westfall
Vendor Trash - An item that only a vendor/merchant would buy
WoW - World of Warcraft
WTB - Wanting to buy
WTS - Wanting to sell
XP or Exp - Experience Points
Zerg - From StarCraft, to attack something with a lot of players/units.
ZF - Zul'Farrak
ZG - Zul'Gurub
guild: a guild is a social organization of players, guilds can have tabards, a bank vault where they can store and share objects, a toon can only be the member of one guild at a time and is normally a more stable group than a party.
party: players band together to form parties to work on specific goals, in WoW players tend to team up mostly for dungeons and raids, that is instances.
instance:instances are spaces where each party or raid group that enters has their own copy of the place. Each instance is an identical copy of the world
guildie: a fellow guild member
profession: In WoW every toon or character can have two professions as well as the option to take up take up the three secondary professions (cooking, mining, and fishing). Professions fall under two broad categories gathering ( mining, herbalism, skinning) or crafting (blacksmithing, leather working, tailoeing, alchemy, etc...)
link http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/professions/index.html
spec: the term spec refers to the way that one has invested one's talent points, this link is a good explanation of the talent system
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/talents.html
This is some of what it says:
Talent points are one of the main ways to customize your character in World of Warcraft. They can make your character a specialist in one of their available class roles, change their entire playstyle, and offer countless combinations for you to experiment with. Characters begin gaining talent points at tenth level, with one additional point per level gained thereafter. Each class has three unique talent trees, each focusing on a different area. The possible talent points in the three trees are far greater than the maximum number of talent points that you can earn at maximum level. Thus, how you choose to spend your precious talent points is an important decision that should be planned and executed with careful deliberation.
attributes: this is a basic discussion of character attributes I got from the official WoW site
url: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/characters.html
| Strength (STR) | |
| | |
| Agility (AGI) | |
|
| |
| Stamina (STA) | |
| | |
| Intellect (INT) | |
|
| |
| | |
| Spirit (SPR) | |
| | |
Also this is the blossary that the official WoW site provides
Here are some of the terms which may cause some confusion. This is not a complete list of words that you may hear. There are many other common terms used on the internet which do not directly relate to the game.
AC - Armor Class or Defense.
Add - An extra monster has joined an existing battle.
Alt - A character on your account other than your main character.
AoE - Area of Effect Damage. This is a spell that hurts a group of monsters in an area like Blizzard in Warcraft III.
AE - Area Effect
AFK - Away from Keyboard. This means the player is away from his computer.
Aggro - This means the monsters are mad at you and you've "activated" them to attack you. They are now in the motion of trying to reach and attack you. "The Murloc aggroed on me!" or "The Murlocs will aggro if you get too close!"
Aggro Radius - The radius around the monsters where they will "wake up" and attack you.
AGI - Agility
AH - Auction House
AQ - Ahn'Qiraj
AV - Alterac Valley Battleground
Avatar - Your character
BG - Battleground
BRD - Blackrock Depths
BWL - Blackwing's Lair
Buff - A beneficial spell cast on a monster or player. An example of a "buff" is the Priest's Inner Fire or Shaman's Bloodlust.
Carebear - Player that prefers to help other players attack monsters rather than attack other players in player vs. player combat.
Caster - A character that stays on the back row to heal or cast spells on the enemy, such as a Mage.
Cheese - To exploit an imbalance in the game.
Combat Pets - A NPC controlled by a player, aiding that player and his teammates in fights.
CR - Corpse Retrevial
Creep - Monster
Creep Jacking - A term from Warcraft 3 where players attack other players while they are already engaged in combat with neutral monsters.
Critters - Monsters that don't attack back, like a bunny or deer.
CTF - Warsong Gulch Battleground
DD - Direct Damage. This is a spell that does all of its damage in one hit rather than spreading its damage over time.
DM - Dire Maul or Deadmines (if in Westfall)
DMG - Damage
DOT - Damage over time
DPS - Damage per second
De-Buff - A negative spell cast on a unit that makes it less powerful. An example of a "de-buff" is Slow.
FH - Full Health
FM - Full Mana
FTL - For The Loss, a sports or game term.
FTW - For The Win, a sports or game term.
Gank - Player vs. Player: To attack another player while they're trying to fight a monster.
GM - Game Master. Someone employed by Blizzard Entertainment to assist and help players.
Griefer - A person who purposely tries to annoy or anger other players.
Grinding - Staying in the same area fighting the same types of monsters for a very long time.
GS - Goldshire
Hate - Similar to threat
HP - Hit points or Health
IF - Ironforge
Incoming (INC) - This means an attack is coming.
Instancing - This is a dungeon where you will load into your OWN copy of the dungeon with your group. Only you and your group will be in your copy of the dungeon. Another group that enters the same area will enter their own copy of the dungeon.
INT - Intelligence
Kiting - A style of combat in which a player continually stays out of combat range of an enemy usually by running from it, while simultaneously causing damage to it.
KOS - Killed on Sight. If an Orc approaches a Human Guard, the Guard would try to kill on sight (aggro).
KS - Kill Steal. Try to steal another person's kill.
LFG - Looking for a group.
LFM - Looking for more.
Log - When you log off; disconnect from the game.
LOL - Lots of Laugh or Laughing Out Loud. This abbreviation indicates something is really funny. It's pretty cliche nowadays though.
LOM - Low on Mana.
LOS - Line of Sight
LOOT - To take the treasure from a monster that has been killed or from a chest.
LVL - Level
Mez - Short for Mesmerize. Refers to spells, such as Polymorph that temporarily incapacitate a target.
MMO - Massively Multiplayer Online.
MMOG - Massively Multiplayer Online Game
MMORPG - Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
MOB - MOB" is an old programming acronym of Mobile Object Block. Mobs are all computer controlled characters in the game. You should likely use some other term such as monster, creep, or bad guy.
MT - Main Tank
Named - A special monster that is usually stronger than surrounding monsters with possible special abilities and item drops.
NBG - - Need Before Greed, only people that need an item will roll dice (in case there are more than one player in the team that needs the item).
Nerf - To downgrade, to be made softer, or make less effective. "X has been nerfed."
Newbie - A term that sometimes means new player. Newbie is also used to suggest that a player is not very good.
Newb - Short for Newbie. See above.
Ninja - To try to loot an item without other players knowing or paying attention. Basically, to take an item without permission.
N00b - An incredibly uncool way to say newb. Don't use it.
NPC - This is a non player-controlled character. The characters are controlled by the server or realm. A "computer" character.
OOM - Out of Mana. People say this to let their party know they are out of mana and can't cast any spells, especially healing.
Pat - Patrolling monster
PC - Player controlled character
Pet - A NPC controlled by a player such as a Wolf, Infernal, and so on.
PK - Player Kill or Player Killer.
POP - Contraction of "Repopulation", often used as a shortened term for the re-spawn of monsters.
Proc - Activate. Example: A weapon with a special effect will "proc" every so often.
PST - Please Send Tell. Indicates that the person speaking wants to receive communication via a /t(ell) or /w(hisper) command.
Puller - Person who pulls monsters for the party.
Pulling - One of the players in a party heads out and leads one or more of the monsters back to the party so that the party can attack the monsters. The idea is to prevent too many monsters from attacking at once.
PvE - Player vs. Environment. Combat between players and computer controlled opponents.
PvP - Player vs. Player. This means for one player to attack another player.
Raid - A raid is a large-scale attack on an area by a group of players.
Res - Short for resurrect
Re-Spawn - A monster that has been killed has spawned (been created) again.
Rest (state) - An indicator of how tired a character is, which affects how much experience is gained from killing monsters.
Rez - Resurrect
RFD - Razorfen Downs
Roll - This means that you should roll a random number to determine who has the right to get an item. For example: /random 1-100
Root - To trap a target in place/stuck using a "root" type spell such as Entangling Roots.
RR - Redridge Mountains
Shard - Soul Shard. An item gained by the Warlock through Soul Draining, used to cast several spells such as Ritual of Summoning and to conjure Soulstones.
Small Pets - An animal following the player around. While this does not directly influence the player or monsters, it is cool to have around, especially the rare ones.
Spawns - The location or process of monsters appearing when they are created in the world.
SPI - Spirit
SS - Southshore
STA - Stamina
Stack - A number of identical items placed in a single inventory slot, to conserve space. Only certain items can be stacked.
STR - Strength
STV - Stranglethorn Vale
SW - Stormwind
Tank - A melee character that can take a lot of damage like a Warrior.
Tap - To do damage to a monster, making it "your" kill. Once you have damaged the monster, you are the only one able to get experience and loot from it. A monster with a greyed-out name bar has been tapped by another player and will not earn you experience or loot.
Taunt - Related to Aggro. An ability that allows a player to pull the attention of a monster off of another player and onto him- or herself.
Threat - Related to Aggro. This is what a character "gives off" to generate or draw monster aggro.
Train - To lead monsters into another player. This is not a desired behavior.
Twink - A low level character who has been made more powerful by higher level characters, usually by getting stronger armor and weapons than the character would normally have at such a low level.
Uber - German slang for 'super', originally meaning 'over'; exceptionally powerful
UC - Undercity
WC - Wailing Caverns instance
WF - Westfall
Vendor Trash - An item that only a vendor/merchant would buy
WoW - World of Warcraft
WTB - Wanting to buy
WTS - Wanting to sell
XP or Exp - Experience Points
Zerg - From StarCraft, to attack something with a lot of players/units.
ZF - Zul'Farrak
ZG - Zul'Gurub
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Fishing for thoughts
Today I decided to level up my fishing, so I spent time in Zangarmarsh, Winterspring and Azshara fishing. I used baubles even though after a while I was able to fish wothout needing them. I preferred to uset he baubles since the drastically raised my chances of catching fish and let's face it at 6-10 fish per skill point level I was not about to miss 2 out of every 3 casts. I like fishing when I can catch things that are interesting or when I can level quickly. Yet I also got a bettter idea of what the profession was designed to do. At high levels , especially when it;s abotu 10 fish per level with cooking and fishing a character never needs to buy food from merchants.
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