Trifecta Post

Rerolling (post 1)



After a long day of hard work, many people like to kick off their shoes, maybe take a shower and just plop themselves down on a couch. While this may be fun for most people, I like to relax by hurling bolts of frostfire at the faces of my enemies. Sometimes I join up with other people to take down towering dragons.



...



At this point, some of you may think I'm trying to make some elaborate joke, but I assure you that I am quite serious. :D I actually participate in these activities on a regular basis. Well, when I have free time anyway. However, I am not the only one. In fact, over 12 million other people have fun in this way. I am talking about the World of Warcraft. For those who don't know, WoW is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game developed by Blizzard Entertainment.



The game allows many players to log onto a virtual realm and don the personae of various fantasy archetypes. These characters can be made from a variety of races like humans, elves, orcs, trolls and many others. I have several characters in WoW, though I typically play my human mage Fenice, ambassador to the forces of the Alliance. (For those of you who play, I'm on the server Zuluhed)



Each player can then quest on their own or with other players, all the while slaying mystical creatures and obtaining rare and powerful weaponry for their characters. The game is ridiculously complex, but has a simple grace to it. It has been meticulously tested and revised since its initial launch in 2004 and is governed by ironclad rules. However, despite WoW's complexity, it has a striking amount of freedom.



I realize that there are many blogs about World of Warcraft out there. However, I hope to take a different approach to my blog. I am not only a player, but I am also a scholar. When I take off my robe of +58 stamina and +60 intellect I once again become an aspiring game designer and ludologist.



While games in general have been around for millennia, video games have developed much more recently. Computer games have developed alongside the computer and are therefore a product of the postmodern era. (Pretty much the latter half of the 20th century) Of course, games like World of Warcraft are even younger still and perhaps it is because the study of games is fairly young that many scholars look at them with disdain. Many see them as frivolous forms of entertainment that stupefy the masses. (Hmm. If I remember that's what they used to say about the study of film. I smell hypocrisy! )



I, however, believe that games offer a vast amount of material to study. Whether people realize it or not, their lives are filled with games, some that they themselves create. For instance, have you ever suddenly bet your friend that you can race across a field faster than he can? Or maybe that you can hold your breath longer? Even something as simple as betting on a flipped coin is a game. These little spontaneous games fall under the category of paedia put forth by noted French ludologist Roger Caillois.



Now. I realize that talking about games is a very broad subject that encompasses activities such as the aforementioned race, to games as complex as football, Monopoly, Dungeons & Dragons or Ocarina of Time. Therefore I will be focusing specifically on World of Warcraft and even more particularly on the social structures that develop within a digital environment. To be blunt, WoW is really a very elaborate chat room. (I'm sorry fellow gamers, but you know it's true) It has many things that you can do, but the whole game is really based around online relationships. Every day, strangers log on and group together to complete difficult quests. Serious gamers use voice chatting programs like Ventrilo to increase efficiency and teamwork. Some of these encounters require up to 25 people to work together for several hours at a time. At the heart of World of Warcraft there is a strong sense of community.



Yet even this is only a small aspect of the WoW universe. There are relationships within the game's virtual economy. While not immediately apparent, there is a faint class structure between players of different levels. I'd like to explore these forms of relationships as well as discover others and observe how relationships develop within a digital setting.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


A fellow WoW couple (post 2)

WoW. It seems to be really hard to actually find a blog that specifically addresses some of the topics that I would like to explore in mine, namely the various relationships forged between players in a online environment. However, I am not discouraged! This gives me an opportunity to act like a real scholar and observe behavior indirectly. (Let's read between the lines!) With that in mind, I tried looking for a more homely blog. Something more personal, you know? So after a little scouring of the blogosphere, I came across The Bronze Kettle: Good Eats & [Epic] Feats.

While I'm not terribly familiar with blogs myself, this one already seems unique because it has two primary authors, a husband and wife. (Let me just get it out there that first off, I think this is really cute.) This seems like a prime place to examine relationships and how they can relate to WoW. If you look into their bios, neither of them have a job working in the video game industry and therefore it should be noted that the blog is from a player's perspective. They don't appear to be "casual" players and adhere to a three day a week raid schedule. Even the blog is updated fairly frequently.

To be honesty, I'm not really sure how popular the blog is overall. There do appear to be readers as most of the posts have several responses. Granted, the wife Shelbi appears to be quite the accomplished chef and she occasionally posts delicious looking recipes. Perhaps some readers just come for the food. Haha. (They really look tasty. Check them out)

Recently the pair posted some photos from their recent trip to BlizzCon, which is Blizzard Entertainment's annual game exposition. Players from all over the country come to see their new games and meet fellow gamers. I realize that to a non WoW player, some of these photos might be uninteresting, they do demonstrate the strength of a relationship that many people have with games. People from all around the country show up, some even costumed as game characters. The 20,000 or so tickets that were sold, sold out in less than a minute according to Blizzard reps. (This was later confirmed in a article in the L.A. times. I also didn't manage to get one for myself. T.T ) That's over 300 tickets per second. Scholars shouldn't underestimate how important games can be in a person's life.

I believe I mentioned somewhere that it has been difficult to find an academically oriented blog about WoW that is related to my topic. (It still is) I have read a lot of academic literature on the game, but I don't know of any WoW scholars that post their findings in a blog. If anyone knows of any, feel free to suggest. For now I will continue to examine this one.

While I am studying the relationships of players within game, it is good to see players aware that they still have real world commitments.

"Life has been hectic at home and at the office, plus I've been spending a lot of time in game playing with my wife and the rest of the Awesomites."

Every WoW player faces a sort of dual lifestyle. You have relationships that you maintain in real life, and then those that you maintain in game. If you clicked the link, you will see the stats of the Awesomite's guild. In WoW, a guild is a group of up to 200 players that form a collective, often helping each other out on difficult tasks. These micro communities are quite fascinating as they are self regulated and often have lengthy screening processes for membership. Many of them even use a form of custom currency called the Dragon Kill Point and regulate their own personal economies. (More on that later.)

While the Bronze Kettle is a good blog to observe for research, my own blog will be quite different. While I am a WoW player myself and will be using my knowledge of the game to support my research, I plan on trying to take a slightly more academic approach. (Though I admit parentheticals and smileys aren't exactly "academic". Hey. It's the age we live in) I intend to look at questions surrounding WoW's popularity and how a micro societies within digital environments are similar and different from their real life counterparts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Voice (post 3)



Voice. It's interesting to examine voice while writing online. These are just words being read online, but when you read them, you may notice that you can almost hear me saying them. You may imagine my voice as being rough and deep, or perhaps light and melodic. Who knows, perhaps you are imagining my saying these words in your own voice. However there is more to voice than just how they sound. Every writer applies different weights to words and by examining these words, we can get a sense of a writer's style, or voice.



Voice can give a personality to an otherwise lifeless page of words. For instance, Hardcore Casual uses a fairly colloquial form of writing that feels like the author is addressing his audience directly. In his Letter to Blizzard, he types out his opinion regarding the various changes that have occurred in WoW over the five years since its launch:

Okay, okay. I'm no game developer. I have no idea how hard it is to balance a game of this scale. Fair enough. However, FOUR years after release, you're telling me you STILL don't have a handle on Paladin tanking?

Shall we examine? (Sorry. You can't actually respond to that. Words on a page.) First off, the use of short sentences like, "okay, okay" and "fair enough" give the post a more casual tone. Even admitting that he isn't a game designer demonstrates that he is aware that he is not a true authority in the matter. However, this does not mean he isn't entitled to sharing his opinion. This gesture is both inviting and reassuring that the writer does acknowledge the limits of his knowledge.

He also tends to use capitals on specific words to create emphasis in his writing. In the previous quote, "four" and "still". In the next quote he capitalizes "you" and "forums". While it is a minor grammatical change, when read, these particular words carry more force and have a different intonation than the rest.

However, somewhere along the way, you stopped developing the game YOU wanted, and started developing the game the FORUMS wanted. I do not like this change in direction.

Highlighting these two words also creates a direct contrast between the opinion of the developers, (YOU) versus the opinions of the players, (FORUMS). He's quite direct about it actually.

He also tends to use one line paragraphs. (Hah. If I ever tried that in another writing course...) While in academic writing, this usage is questionable at best, online it adds a pause to create tension. It can also be used to add emphasis to a particular point. "Then, it happened," or "I could take over Bound by Honor!" These paragraphs are deliberately places between longer paragraphs creating a methodic rhythm to his posts. This technique is used in several places throughout his blog.

The thing I find interesting about these techniques is that they are written conventions that aim at making writing seem more like everyday speech. When we write, we have time to collect our thoughts and fine tune our words, (like I'm doing now) but when we speak we have to revise on the fly. Often stopping mid sentence or pausing to look for better words. Human speech is full of errors and we therefore edit in realtime by filling our sentences with disclaimers and explanations.

How does this style affect the blog itself? (One sentence!)

Good question. Well. Seeing as the blog is about playing WoW, it should have a more personal tone of voice. The style of Hardcore Casual is very much like listening to a player talk about WoW. The game is quite exciting and constantly changing and evolving. The game quickly changes between story and action, emphasizing key points. Therefore, I find that this writing style mimics some of the flow of the game itself.