6-7pm Uncommon Feb. 18

Girl Here.

I verified my account a couple of days before so when I actually wanted to play I had no idea where I was supposed to find the domain. I clicked around and found a new players guide. It explained that I had to create a player with a race and class. My initial thought was to question if the race or class would affect the character’s performance. I also wondered if it would affect other online players saw me. For example, when I was younger I liked to play Call of Duty Black ops II with my brothers. They bother were younger but dedicated a lot of playing time to the game. I was older and did not dedicate much but my gamertag indicated that I was a girl. While we played online other players would send my friend requests but not my brothers. Even though they were better players than I was. I thought about the article we read by Richard Bartle titled, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades: Players who suit MUDS” and how it talked about the different typed of players. There were clearly people in the platform trying to kill be because I was not very good. However there were people who just wanted to be friends and I’m assuming it was because I was a girl. None the less I decided I would be a girl in World of Warcraft because we are already under represented. (Williams, et all). During my first session I spent a good thirty minutes going through the new player user guide and the next thirty customizing my player. My friend was sitting with me and she had played before with her older brother. We looked at all the different combinations read what the races and classes did. I ended up choosing the blood elf with rogue class. The outfit and characteristics were fine the only thing that bothered me was that it only had very light skin colors. The darkest one was a slight tan. I started the game and realized my first hour was up.

 

7-8pm Uncommon Feb.18

 

I see I see..

My initial immersion in the game was interesting. I was having a hard time using the designated letters to move around which were WASD. Subconsciously I switched to the keyboard errors and that worked just fine. I received my first assignment and ran around looking the animal it said to kill. I attacked the wrong animal and ended up dying within the first two minutes of playing. I had to revive my body, which was eerie in a sense. Yet I was super excited about the fact that I did not have to reload the game. When I respawned I checked my map to see where the animals I was supposed to kill were. The map was extremely helpful I quickly found the worms I was supposed to kill and completed the quest. When combatting I tend to just click random buttons and hope that my player will stab or kill my target before it kills me. It’s worked in World of Warcraft as of now but I wonder if it’ll fail when the targets get more intense and powerful. I ran around a lot and the terrain after running around became easier to recognize. It may be because I am a visual learner so maps and landscapes facilitate gameplay. This made World of Warcraft more enjoyable for me (this may also be what made Zork super hard for me). In reality I ended up grinding, completing two quests of hunting and killing animals, before my time was up. While I was playing the game I noticed I was curious to explore the terrain and check out things I could and could not do. Yet I knew that I had to complete the quests at some point so I could not get too derailed. This made me think a lot more about the “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades: Players who suit MUDS” article because if I were going to classify myself I would classify myself in the middle of explorer and achiever. I hardly tried socializing, and killing scared me (because half of me thought I would die first).

 

4-5pm Home Feb. 22

 

Blink and it’s All OVER

During my third session of gameplay I was at home. Sometimes when I am sitting in my room the Internet connection is slow. Innocently or stupidly I thought an online server as advanced as World of Warcraft could run on slow Internet. A few minutes into my playing time I was not able to kill characters I was assigned to kill. The game appeared to be running but the damage was not being recorded so I stopped attacking and began fiddling with my weapons. Then I ran around the terrain and all of a sudden I died. There was a flashback to the start of the battle where I was attacking then it showed the monster attacking back and killing me. Initially I thought the game had timed out for that second so I revived myself and continued playing. My new mission was to deliver a package and as I ran through the terrain it was eerily empty. There were no other players or creatures even when I arrived at the destination. I realized that the game was not intended to be this way when I could not find the delivery person. All of a sudden the screen changed to trying to reconnect me. I waited for a few minutes moving to my living room and the game loaded with all the characters. I was able to complete that quest and return to my ‘home’ for another one. This play session was a broken simulation. It ties back to the article written by Gonzalo Frasca titled, “Simulation versus Narrative” which talks about the distinction between the two. Since World of Warcraft assigns you quests but lets you figure out how to get there it has less of a narrative and more of a simulation experience. As Frasca says, “One of the most interesting cognitive consequences of simulation is its encouragement for decentralized thinking which may in the long term contest Mark Turners’s claim of a ‘literary mind’ by introducing the possibility of an alternative ‘simulational’ way of thinking” (pg 224) which is arguing we can switch mindsets to immerse ourselves in a world that is purely made up. I understood this a lot better after I played glitchy World of Warcraft versus normal World of Warcraft. In the glitchy session I was forced to break my simulation several times. I was very aware I was playing a video game and that technology was subjected to internet connections or system programming. My mindset was wandering from playing the game to looking up and around my surrounding while I waited for it to load.

 

10:45-12:05 am Home Feb. 23

The Fourths a charm!

In my fourth session of Warcraft I was assigned a quest that required me to cast a spell on a worm. I did not know how to cast a spell and I could not figure out where to look for the command buttons. I was killing all the worms rather than casting a spell on them, so I looked up how to cast a spell. The online review suggested I wait until it was at 25% health before casting the spell but they did not include which buttons cast the spell. So there I was trying not to kill the worm and typing into the chat box Arcane Turrant or something like that and nothing was happening. Another player walked up behind me and watched me struggle. A level 1 worm was killing me so it was pretty obvious I had no idea what I was doing. They asked me if I needed help. I said yes and posed my question. The person was really nice they taught me how to cast a spell and waited until I succeeded then they asked if I wanted help with anything else or if I wanted to be their friend. I said I’d like to be their friend (they taught me how to add a friend) then we turned in my quest. The person asked if I needed to sell anything, which I said yes to and they showed me where to do that. At this point it was almost midnight and I wanted to go to sleep. My friend was busy chatting so I asked where they were from. They said Australia, which made sense. I told them I needed to go to bed because I was playing in a different time zone. They said it was only 7pm there and asked if I wanted to play the next day. I said yes and we said our goodbyes. To be honest I felt kind of pressured when I was playing with someone else. Even though this person was a stranger they were of a higher level and I felt awkward and weird. I realized I did not want to play with them again. The pressure of learning things or not seeming stupid was too much. Which makes me think multiuser domains may not be for everyone. Although I do like the game World of Warcraft it was obvious I was uncomfortable interacting with another player. I thought about the article written by Johan Huizinga titled, “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon” where it says, “To our way of thinking, play is the direct opposite of seriousness” (pg 50). Where we think play can’t be serious but often times when we apply it to games where our wits are tied in this is erased. He uses examples like, chess or football, for me it was the mere possibility of seeming stupid to a stranger. Play can be as serious as you make it.

 

11:30-12:30 Café Roma Feb 24

To Be or Not to Be

After our class discussion I was really curious as to what culture the races and classes were trying to mimic. I decided to make a new character I chose a male undead hunter and played for a little bit. This was a different experience from playing as a Blood Elf Rogue. The Blood elf had a few deliveries less fighting. The Undead was killing after killing. I do not know if they game developers thought Undead would be more prone to wanting to kill or if they simply were trying to make each race and class different from each other. After playing for a while nothing was really giving away what culture they were trying to mimic. So I looked it up. There is quite a bit of speculation on what the races are personifying yet World of Warcraft has never released a statement confirming these speculations. A World of Warcraft fanatic and gamer posted his classifications on the general discussion pages https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/12505811697 Along this thread there were many other users who refuted his claims or supported them. Just to test a few theories out I created a new character and played as a Female Troll. This was very interesting because people argued that the trolls were Native or Aztec while others argued they were Caribbean. Based off appearances they could be one or the other but the accent sounded Jamaican. I was surprised at the fact that we trained with wood Tikis rather than animals at the start. The island was actually very calming to me. This was a huge contrast to the gray dark stormy undead world that I wanted to actually play in. I ran around completed missions and noticed there were dinosaurs on this planet. It was a very interesting mix of all of these things. There was also language usage in the introduction of this race the word savage was used. It got me thinking about the article written by Dmitri Williams, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James D. Ivory titled, “The virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games” and how it talks about disparities in race representation. Although there is a huge disparity I do not think these races should be included if it is not by a racially competent designer. How you portray someone or something is vastly more important than how much.

 

7:38-8:40 Uncommon February 24

Watch me play.

In my last play session I decided to try a new race I chose the male Worgen Druid. This was a surprising character because it game me the option to customize both the human looking version and the wolf looking version. The Worgen are shape shifters so it did make sense that there would be two versions of the same character. A reason I chose this character was because I wanted to hear the British accent. The accents were a bit exaggerated but nothing too problematic. I liked how the world was under attack the moment I stepped in. There was a lot of good versus evil and there narrative was quite interesting. I was able to kill things and finally play a character that killed things using spells. In the game there would be pauses of storylines but what stuck me the most was the inclusion of horses. The horses were used for quests but you could not direct them. When you mount a horse it controls where you go. It makes completing quests a lot easier but it would be cool to be able to ride the horse on your own. This reminded me of how Richard Bartle in his article titled, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades: Players who suit MUDS” talked about controlling the actions of players. If you take to much control away from the player the player becomes a spectator. When the player is watching their character play rather than making it’s character play it becomes boring. The balance between interacting and acting must be leveled. I realized that a lot of this game is actually controlled but I remember how we talked about special commands in class so I decided to type in random actions to see if I could discover any new ones. Most of them were rejected and I ran around looking for places to enter without being on a quest. The game did not allow much exploration either. However the majority of the time I played I was willing to blindly complete the quests for two reasons. One they were not hard. Two I was wanting to level up to see if later in the game I would have more freedom after ‘leveling up’. World of Warcraft was not hard to play and I can see how wanting to reach higher levels or social interaction is incentive to return and play. However I probably will delete this game soon because it takes up too much space in my drive!