So, World of Warcraft players have formed a sub-culture within the gaming culture.  What is cool is that a lot of members of this affinity group were not traditionally gamers.

Anyway, I was thinking about all the crazy internet memes that have propogated via WoW such as Leeroy Jenkins, the O Rly owl, the Chuck Norris vs. Vin Diesel debate, and the 50 DKP minus dude.  But this stuff is part of a larger trend of new talk.  People make shit up all the time in WoW it seems.  Why do they do this and how does this new shit propogate?

One answer might be all the tedious grinding that has to be done in WoW.  What else do you have to do while killing 200 plainstalkers to get 12 feathers or whatnot?  Shoot the shit on the general channel.  What else do you have to do while grinding for rep in Winterspring?  Make funnies in the guild channel. Right?

Or maybe it’s just a simple matter of having enough people participating in some sort of meaningful event that a critical mass has been reached and language/culture can emerge…

If ways of talking/ways of being are dynamic toolkits, how the hell does participating in WoW culture help someone? Is it only useful for in-game stuff?

WoW = no real game-world choices, only game-mechanics ones and the emergent social structure

NWN2 = linear progression of storyline, multiplayer afterthought

Oblivion = expansive with interesting choices! but not multiplayer

So, I’ve been sitting on this post for a long time because I’ve wanted to write something substantial but never got around to more than the three lines above… But I finally published it a couple of weeks ago (writing this late Sep 2007) with a backdate and lo and behold, it’s getting hits.  So here’s a little more info:

Basically, I am off-and-on dissatisfied with World of Warcraft because of the lack of real player choices in the game. I mean ethical and character building choices like those found in good single player games. Part of the problem is that no one has sat down to figure out a way of getting a mmog to feel like it reacts to individual player choices…

So, the nice thing about The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is that it is chock full of those choices. If Oblivion were multiplayer, omg.  But it isn’t.  And surprisingly, after I played it once, I didn’t play it again to make different choices…

But then Neverwinter Nights 2 came out proving that even if Oblivion were multiplayer, it’d have to do it right since doing it right is not a given. NWN2’s multiplayer sucks ass.  I think I let my experiences with Knights of the Old Republic predispose me to NWN2.  Unfortunately, NWN2’s choices weren’t as interesting so even if the multiplayer were working…  meh.

Claude Steele came to UW a month or two ago and gave a presentation on stereotype threat and identity threat. Basically, people and society give off cues all the time about their attitudes and prejudices regarding people of certain groups. The people of the affected groups unconsciously internalize the stereotypes being applied to them and, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, tend toward the patterns expected of them. For example (to use one of Claude Steele’s examples), if you give a test to a white kid and tell him while giving it to him that Asians tend to do better on this test, but he should try hard, anyway, the white kid will score less well than if you didn’t give him that social cue. You can imagine the kinds of social cues we give to African-Americans, women, etc. and realize that from the get-go some social groups are at a total disadvantage due to our unconscious stereotypes. Identity threat is sort of like the same thing. Steele’s argument is that people identify with whatever identity is most threatened. So, a black woman might identify more as black or more as a woman depending on her situation (and I think implicit in this is that people’s self-identifications change with different settings).

Continue reading Are virtual worlds doomed to replicate social problems of real life? →

Byron Reeves from Stanford’s Media X gave at talk at the LIFE center last week. Basically, he’s been doing research on people’s emotional responses to computer games, as measured in instants with electrodes or other biometric methods. His talk included a little bit of background on that research, but it also included general visions of how MMORPGs and games in general could change the way we work and learn.

Continue reading Byron Reeves at UW →