Steven Levy has a longish and not terribly-illuminating article about World of Warcraft. The problem is that Levy (like a lot of others) want to make WoW out as the nexus of some new virtual social revolution. Levy actually claims that,
What distinguishes Warcraft from previous blockbuster games is its immersive nature and compelling social dynamics.
Riiigght. I guess Levy’s never spent a couple hours monitoring the various public chat channels in WoW. I guess if the constant chatter of 12 year olds deciding whether this or that is “gay” qualifies as “complex social interactions” then wait till someone turns him on to IRC!
Nor, as fun as the game is, is it particularly immersive. It is basically an incredibly well-done 3D Diablo that thousands of other people are playing along with you. Actual in-game interactions are frankly very limited compared to a genuinely interactive game like say, Second Life. Of course Second Life is fun to read about but not so fun to play.
But this paragraph did grab my attention,
Though WOW is a fantasy world, the interaction between guilds and individuals relies on human choices and morals. The first thing one does when joining the game is to choose an avatar from one of eight “races,” split between two factions: the human-looking Alliance and the more bestial Horde. Edward Castronova (Level 42, Priest), an Indiana U professor and author of “Synthetic Worlds,” once roiled the WOW community by a blog posting entitled “The Horde Is Evil,” in which he charged that only the antisocial at heart would pick that darker side. Castronova believes that if someone behaves badly in the game—an example would be the WOW equivalent of spree killing, where someone ganks a character of a much lower level, just for the hell of it—that person should be judged harshly in the real world as well.
First, I’d wager that all but a very small percentage of WoW players have never even heard of Castronova.
Second, Castronova’s argument (assuming Levy has accurately conveyed it here) is absurd. Of course, my defense of “the Wow equivalent of a spree killing” is a bit self-serving since that’s pretty much all I do in WoW these days.
Originally I rolled a warlock and spent the first 8 months playing the game taking my warlock to level 60. For the most part, I only played with my wife and occasionally a small group of friends at work. I got to 60 essentially playing WoW solo with some small-group co-op (which you could do with many non-MMO games, but damn WoW is a sweet game).
Pretty much the only thing left to do when you reach 60 is spend time doing large instanced dungeon raids, which doesn’t appeal to me at all. So I quit playing for several months — and then created a gnome rogue.
I’ve managed to get my rogue up to level 43, but for the most part what I do with my rogue is gank other players. In between every level, I’ll spend 20-30 hours in Stranglethorn Vale or South Shore killing every Horde player I can, and attempting to hide/run away from higher level players against whom I don’t have much of a chance.
After 12 days, 10 hours of in-game time, I’ve amassed almost 1,000 honor kills (players score an honor kill when they kill a player of relatively the same level — a level 42 won’t get an honor kill for ganking a level 24). Getting 1,000 honor kills would be pretty easy to do much more quickly in any of the Battlegrounds, but players have a tendency to leave areas once they know a rogue’s in the area ganking — either that or they log off and log back on with their level 60 characters and play “lets kill the rogue” (ah, but finding the rogue can be next to impossible).
Honor kills are nice, but I’ll kill pretty much anything. If I’m riding through South Shore and I see a level 20 with only half his hit points, I’ll dismount and kill him. And then camp him.
Unlike Castranova I consider this sort of behavior a feature, not a bug. I am on a PVP server and as Blizzard notes in its description of PVP servers, being on a PVP server means that in most areas of the world you are a legitimate target to be killed by the other faction. In fact, the company’s FAQ on in-game harassment notes that some things that would be considered harassment on Player-Vs-Environment servers (where you have to essentially have the consent of opposing players to engage them in combat) are okay on a PVP server,
Actions that would typically be considered “dishonorable actions” such as, but not limited to; corpse camping, graveyard camping, or instance zone camping are considered acceptable PVP tactics and are not considered harassment.
Care Bears should find another server.
Castranova seems to think that, despite this, someone who would spend their time ganking and camping other players might still be worthy of moral approbation. But since this occurs with the pre-defined constraints of the software, I would argue instead that my gnomish rogue says as much about me as Al Pacino’s version of Tony Montana says about him. After all, this is still at heart a role-playing game — I just happen to be role-playing a character with abilities such as Cheap Shot, Murder, Gouge, Backstab, and the always-popular Eviscerate.
Hate the game, not the player.
Source:
Living a Virtual Life. Steven Levy, Newsweek, September 18, 2006.