Well it
has been awhile since my last post and that is probably because I haven’t
been actually required to do one in a while.
At the end of my last quarter of college was also the end of blogger
lifestyle. Why am I back you ask? Good question
and you can probably already guessed the answer, it is because I have to write
again. After my quarter of blogging
class I took another writing class that involved researching the online MMORPG
World of Warcraft. I had never played
WoW but I was intrigued by the community that did play. My friends and I were required to research
and write about an aspect of the game that we found interesting. We ended up
focusing on the social features and aspects of the game. What follows is some
of our findings about the game and what we thought about our experience
playing.
We
started by coming up with a set of interview questions for players that have
been both been plying the game for a while and those who had just recently
started to play. By doing that, we found
a division in the social uses of the game between the lower level, new players,
and the higher level, more experienced players. We then differentiated between team play
with socializing and solo play with a lack of socializing. Two of the members of the group including
myself were new to the game and were what you might call “noobs” (New Players). This was one of the main reasons that we
decided to do our research about the social aspects of both newer and older
gamers. Our third partner was very
experienced in the ways of WoW and he was all for the socializing and guilds
while the two of us just ran around and did our own thing without a care in the world for what other players were
doing in the game.
At
the end of our research, we found that other players were not so different from
those in our group in regards to what the two lower level players in our group
wanted to do versus what our higher level friend did. This did not come as much of a surprise
because through interviews that we conducted, the players reaffirmed our belief
that the higher level characters were more involved in the social aspect of the
game. Now this does not mean that we
didn’t have a few answers from lower levels that said they started playing the
game because of friends but the majority of players fell within our hunch. We also found out that a lot of people like
to socialize with friends in real life while playing in a virtual world and
that it is not that uncommon for groups of players to be all together in one
area in the RLS (Real Life Server) while playing together on a virtual server
created by Blizzard in the game.
Some
of the players that we interviewed gave us some pretty good quotes about the
social aspect of the game. On player
said, it “adds a lot of fun to it because everyone has a job to do. Dps
(damage dealers) have to do their jobs, while watching out for the mechanics of
the boss at the same time. Tanks (high health players) have to keep their agro
by taunting and making sure the boss isn’t attacking anyone but them. Healers
have to keep everyone alive.” He concluded his point by saying that “The boss
cannot be killed with the teamwork of every role.” We can see here that the
player is saying that teamwork and socializing are vital aspects to complete
higher level challenges in the game. Another player mentioned how when he was a
lower level “I was just dipping my toes into the social aspect.” He was
basically saying that he didn’t really socialize when he was low level and now
that he is a higher level, (90 I believe) he is much more into it.
So, if there are any WoW players that happen
to follow this extremely unpopular, un-followed blog then please feel free to
leave a comment or two about your feeling on the social aspect of World of
Warcraft. Our full research paper can be
found at, https://docs.google.com/file/
