Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Right from the get go I had this social interaction problem in World of Warcraft. It gave me a strong Playground vibe: everyone is ignoring me and that’s cool, but at any minute someone bigger and meaner than me might wander by and pants me. A lot of this came out of not taking the time to learn how to properly socially navigate the world. I didn’t know any action commands not related to combat or quest negotiation, or even how to start a conversation with another player. WoW was the first multiplayer online game I’d played. The exemplar of this weird hangup was a moment when I saw some dude tussling with a bear and noticed I had a bead on the beast with my rifle-type weapon, so assisted him with a shot. He noticed where the help had come from and executed a neat little bow and made some innocuous comment like “nice, thanks.” I had no idea what to do with this so I ran off.
So I’m running around basically grinding (which was 90% of what I did in my brief sojourn through Azeroth) and suddenly a name I do not recognize is “whispering” to me and my immediate reaction is oh what now?! Am I about to be subjected to teasing? Invited to participate in some collective action in which I’ll embarrass myself through ineptitude? Subjected to the pitch for some scam? It wasn’t until the person whispering was inviting me to connect on Skype and I recognized their handle there that I realized I was in fact talking to the same friend who had introduced me to the game in the first place - they were just inhabiting an avatar I hadn’t encountered yet - and deduced that the “whispering” thing just meant they were communicating privately.
So we got connected on Skype and my friend invited me to run around with him a while and see the sights. I’m still ridiculously susceptible to these technological “holy Brave New World, Batman!” moments and interacting with someone across town in a virtual world while simultaneously talking to them via a phoneless, internet mediated, free communication protocol was reasonably mind-blowing.
At this point I was more or less the character I’d started as, this drab dwarf in dull leather clothes: I’d acquired a few indifferent pieces of marginally better gear. So my friend shows up as some sort of wizard, resplendent in all this sparkling attire and dire-looking magical stave, attended by arcane familiars, occasionally shooting off sparks or bursts of flame... it was all very Country Mouse, City Mouse. Immediately he is showing me all this amazing stuff I was not ready to get to yet at my lowly level, transgressing at least some of those invisible walls I’d noticed at the outset.
And so I finally figured out the real hook of this kind of game: ironically (and already clichéd) it was all about the social. At its heart World of Warcraft’s actual game is not all that damn much more sophisticated than Paper Mario; certainly it doesn’t bring a lot more innovation to gameplay. The radical expansion occurs with the introduction of other people in real time. This is one of the 21st century truths of technology, I think: friends are the killer app. My nine nights in Azeroth certainly gave me a lot to think about in terms of the philosophy of gaming, as evidenced by the fact that I’m wrapping up a series of essays about it after almost 3 years, but my favorite memory of it is that night, being a rube, getting shown the bright lights by my friend from the city.
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