This Sunday, I did something that I swore two years ago to never do ever again. For one hour, I stepped into the World of Warcraft (WoW) for the assignment. If this does not demonstrate my willingness to sacrifice for Comm 245, I do not know what will.
My last interaction with this six-million-player phenomenon ended in April, 2005, my senior year in high school. After wasting about five months of my life, I swore off the game altogether upon the realization that I was paying money to accomplish…nothing. So for me to re-enter this domain was quite the experience.
This Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) takes place in a multi-continent world with 8 races and an equal variety of specialty “classes” that one can customize to create a character more inclined to physical combat or to magic use. A player creates a unique character and explores the massive world, meeting people, completing “quests”, collecting items, and learning their character and its abilities. All this is done in the name of getting your character to the highest level possible and completing more difficult quests, perhaps for no other reason than because everyone else seems to be doing it.
My experience with the one hour I limited myself to for self-respect’s sake was pretty much the same as I remembered from my game time back in 2005. My time was spent running around the virtual world completing trivial tasks and occasionally interacting with fellow newly-created characters. After reading over the Yee & Bailensen (2007) article, I found that my avatar, a small male gnome, did not have any effects on my personality relative to FtF interactions. I believe this lack of difference in my general affect can be attributed to my previous experience with online virtual environments, and specifically with WoW. I furthermore think that my apprehension about engaging in an activity that had previously wasted a chunk of my life resulted in my detaching myself from the experience more than others might have, whether conscious or not. It could just be that I don’t buy into the whole behavioral confirmation phenomenon. In the end, I survived my brief jaunt into a world I’d hoped to have left far behind, and while I don’t plan to go back any time soon, I now have a new way to view any interactions I might have within that space.
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/11/10-adjust-shirt-wrinkles.html
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/11/10-if-second-life-were-real-life-id-end.html
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1 comment:
I really enjoyed this post. Although I did not "waste a chunk of my life" playing a virtual game, I felt that going into one of these virtual worlds and playing, even though in the back of my head I knew I was going to comment on my behavior later, forced me to act as expected. As you entered this world wanting nothing to do with it, so did I. I agree that playing these virtual games gets absolutely nothing accomplished and if you have that opinion, I don't think your behavior in these games will ever change from how you act in FtF.
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