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.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Thursday, April 30, 2009
A break from WoW
I've decided to take a break from WoW I guess because I began to find it too depressing to play the game at some point all of my guilds became raiding guilds and it was like my social world imploded. If you look at my previous post about guild life in WoW I said that a guild is only around as long as it is pertinent for its members and my guilds became irrelevant to me even though my friends were in them.
Raiding
Here is my final word on the subject (for now) You can't raid casually either you raid seriously. do your homework and prepare right or you don't and anybody who tries to tell you that you can raid casually is lying to you and/or themselves. Raiding is serious business and I don't want to play a game that's like a job, if I want a job i will go out and get one, I go to school I don't need to do extra homework. Ok maybe raiding can be fun for some people but it seems like a lot of work to me, a lot of work where I will get screamed at a lot. I don't need that.
Another thing about WoW is that it was full of many millions of little goals I needed to do such as get exhalted with every faction (except the bloodsail buccaneers, I hate those pirates), get all the mounts, get all the JC/cooking recipes, get as many achievements as possible and in the end I found that sort of not fun buyt stressful. I mean what is the point it was like work and it was becomeing less fun as time passed.
Raiding
Here is my final word on the subject (for now) You can't raid casually either you raid seriously. do your homework and prepare right or you don't and anybody who tries to tell you that you can raid casually is lying to you and/or themselves. Raiding is serious business and I don't want to play a game that's like a job, if I want a job i will go out and get one, I go to school I don't need to do extra homework. Ok maybe raiding can be fun for some people but it seems like a lot of work to me, a lot of work where I will get screamed at a lot. I don't need that.
Another thing about WoW is that it was full of many millions of little goals I needed to do such as get exhalted with every faction (except the bloodsail buccaneers, I hate those pirates), get all the mounts, get all the JC/cooking recipes, get as many achievements as possible and in the end I found that sort of not fun buyt stressful. I mean what is the point it was like work and it was becomeing less fun as time passed.
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
An ending of sorts
The other day Sadie asked me to leave her guild, well not exactly. She left her guild to start a new one because she was tired of all the guild drama, drama I assume between the higher level players, drama that I did not notice much of. This is pretty typical for me I did not notice Drama in the guild Sadie and I were in before she started her guild and I did not notice the higher level drama in her guild. In any event I had my mage leave her old guild and join her new one. Before this changing guilds was always a big deal for me and I did not do it lightly but the truth is I knew I was not going to be staying in that guild for much longer so I did not think twice about leaving. Also a lot of the friends I had in Sadie's guild, friends I had made in the guild before that one, joined this new guild. I still have an alt in Sadie's old guild like I have an alt in the first guild I joined Alliance side but I will see what happens with that. I think that being in a guild can be a very important choice since in all likelihood it is guild members that I will interact with most, so I think I want to be in a guild where players want the same or similar things from the game that I do. For instance: I am not a hardcore raider so I would not ever want to be part of a big raiding guild. While social interaction is never limited to one's guild, a guild can be the backbone of one's social life and that makes the choice so signficant. My friend Jacobe who is a really good raider and a raid healer changed guilds because he felt that his guild was not doing enough raiding as a guild. In any event I left a guild I always had mixed feelings about, it was a guild with people I liked and people I disliked intensely I was never sure whether I loved or hated it and that ambiguity frustrated me but ultimately I realized that the guild had done nothing to earn my loyalty so I left.
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.
A small conclict that got resolved
Nacirema joined Jaer's guild in December when computer problems made it impossible for me to play. Until that moment the guild had been mostly me and him chatting in guild chat and I like that alot, but Jaer being the amazing and popular guy he is had friends want to join his guild and Nacirema was one. We became friends and would chat a lot about many different things, she would complain about her real life and I would listen and try to give advice when I could and she would do the same for me. She knew another of the new guild members and she had a complicated past with this person, this past eventually became the source of a lot of drama that really upset Jaer. In the end he had to kick Nacirema from the guild because she caused too many problems, the drama culminated in a fight in Ventrilo that I expressly logged out to avoid.
I will say this I in no way condone what Nacirema did, I think that drama is bad and I don't think there is any excuse for the way she behaved with Jaer and some of the other guild members. That said she was always nice to me and I still think of her as a friend. I understand that the other guild members don't like her and I don't expect them to, their grievances are legitimate.
One day after Nacirema was kicked from the guild some guild members made disparaging remarks about her. Because I still consider her to be a friend I found those remarks kind of hurtful or more I did not like them so I asked my fellow guildies to please stop. They responded that she brought their scorn on herself and that they were not going to show her respect when she deserved none. I think they felt that I was either trying to apologize for her or asking them to stop out of respect for her or something but that was not it at all. I felt that by making those comments they were putting me in a really uncomfortable position, either defend her and get into a fight or don't and feel like I was betraying her. When I asked them to stop it had nothing to do with her it was because thier mean jokes were making me feel bad, but they did not listen to me.
If they want to they can make a "We hate Nacirema channel and say mean things about her all they want there, or whisper about her to their heart's content, my objection was having to hear them.
In any event I spoke to my guild leader and Jaer pointed out that she was on their shit list and that it was only natural after what she had done. I told him my point and he told me he would speak to the other guild members which I don't doubt he did and I know that he explained things well because I have not heard about Nacirema in guild since. I know he understood my point and explained it to the other guild members and I know my guild members had not meant to make me feel bad. In this case because of the goodwill that my guild members have shown me in the past I don't even need an apology from them to move on. I felt like I was being left out of guild business and they apologized for forgetting about me. They try to include me in guild things when the can and I do get along with them most of the time. When I felt that Jaer was being unnecessarily sarcastic with me and I spoke to him he apologized to me and made an effort to be more pleasant. Even though sometimes he worried that he is too laid back as a guild leader I think he is a good one. It is not fair for guild members to expect their leader to act like a babysitter, they need to at least try to resolve conflicts on their own, the way I did. I ended up turning to him for help but only after my own efforts failed. I am a good guild member because I try to solve my own problems in a polite manner but do not hesitate to ask for help when I need it and in all cases aim for an amicable resolution of the problem. Jaer is a good leader because he supported me in this even though he is really upset at Nacirema, he is a good friend because he cared and a good leader because he made sure I understood that I was right to come to him and he assured me he would do what he could to make the situation better.
I will say this I in no way condone what Nacirema did, I think that drama is bad and I don't think there is any excuse for the way she behaved with Jaer and some of the other guild members. That said she was always nice to me and I still think of her as a friend. I understand that the other guild members don't like her and I don't expect them to, their grievances are legitimate.
One day after Nacirema was kicked from the guild some guild members made disparaging remarks about her. Because I still consider her to be a friend I found those remarks kind of hurtful or more I did not like them so I asked my fellow guildies to please stop. They responded that she brought their scorn on herself and that they were not going to show her respect when she deserved none. I think they felt that I was either trying to apologize for her or asking them to stop out of respect for her or something but that was not it at all. I felt that by making those comments they were putting me in a really uncomfortable position, either defend her and get into a fight or don't and feel like I was betraying her. When I asked them to stop it had nothing to do with her it was because thier mean jokes were making me feel bad, but they did not listen to me.
If they want to they can make a "We hate Nacirema channel and say mean things about her all they want there, or whisper about her to their heart's content, my objection was having to hear them.
In any event I spoke to my guild leader and Jaer pointed out that she was on their shit list and that it was only natural after what she had done. I told him my point and he told me he would speak to the other guild members which I don't doubt he did and I know that he explained things well because I have not heard about Nacirema in guild since. I know he understood my point and explained it to the other guild members and I know my guild members had not meant to make me feel bad. In this case because of the goodwill that my guild members have shown me in the past I don't even need an apology from them to move on. I felt like I was being left out of guild business and they apologized for forgetting about me. They try to include me in guild things when the can and I do get along with them most of the time. When I felt that Jaer was being unnecessarily sarcastic with me and I spoke to him he apologized to me and made an effort to be more pleasant. Even though sometimes he worried that he is too laid back as a guild leader I think he is a good one. It is not fair for guild members to expect their leader to act like a babysitter, they need to at least try to resolve conflicts on their own, the way I did. I ended up turning to him for help but only after my own efforts failed. I am a good guild member because I try to solve my own problems in a polite manner but do not hesitate to ask for help when I need it and in all cases aim for an amicable resolution of the problem. Jaer is a good leader because he supported me in this even though he is really upset at Nacirema, he is a good friend because he cared and a good leader because he made sure I understood that I was right to come to him and he assured me he would do what he could to make the situation better.
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