5 Days To Go!

Browsing the BBC, I came across an article on World of Warcraft and its first expansion, The Burning Crusade. Due in stores in the first minutes of January 16, 2007, this expansion to the world's most popular online role-playing game ever has been garnering pretty much universally good reviews from the closed beta.

Some of the additions offered include a new race for both sides of the fight, the Blood Elves for the Horde and the Draenei for the Alliance, each with a whole new set of storylines, capital cities, and a brand spanking new continent. Additionally, these new races bring complexity to the war, as they are both traitors to the other side. The expansion also offers more enemies and allies for each side. Finally, Horde can now play as paladins and Alliance as shamans.

Furthermore- my favorite trait- players are now able to Look for Groups doing the same quests. Other expansion characteristics include expanded talent trees and new professions such as jewel-crafting, and the removal of the fairly useless (to me) honour system.

Why am I, whose main is only level 16, so excited about an expansion that is mainly geared toward lvl 60 players, with new quests, zones, mounts, and instances reserved for these high-enders? I guess part of it the knowledge that at some point I will indeed be one of those crazy nerds. The other part is that I love the idea of being able to do quests in groups easily. But finally, I so badly want to play as a Draenei, who crashed their spaceship and who you begin play as surrounded by the wreckage of your ship and the corpses of your comrades. Awesome.

Lonely Horde, Affable Alliance

The last issue of Games and Culture was dedicated to World of Warcraft, and there was some discussion of what kind of players chose to play as the Horde and which select the much prettier Alliance characters. The general consensus was the noobs and girls play as the Tolkienesque avatars of the Alliance, allured by the familiar good-guy rhetoric of elves and such, while hard-core gamers with experience are attracted to the monsterous orcs and trolls of the Horde. I was pleased by this originally because the first time around I played on the Horde. However, when I signed up after xmas on my own account, I was encouraged by friends to join them on their servers as Alliance members.

The difference in my experiences was striking. I figured my loneliness grinding away at the lower levels as a troll was symptomatic of being below level 10. As a night elf, I was quickly surprised by how much nicer and more social Alliance players are. I have grouped multiple times, spontaneously united with players to defeat a non-quest monster, and just generally chatted pleasantly. Businesslike calls for groups, trades, and tips were equally balanced by joking around and playful emotes. I am guessing that part of being a hard-core gamer is that all that sociality gets in the way of leveling efficiently and is only really desired when necessary for play.

Someone should do a study. Anyhoo, I know many of my untalkative readers are WoW players. Any comments on Alliance-Horde differences?

All You Can Say is... WoW

So the most recent edition of the academic journal Games and Culture was dedicated to articles on World of Warcraft, aptly abbreviated WoW, a phenomenally popular release in the genre of massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Previous to writing my thesis, I had always found the idea of these games compelling- they truly do seem to represent digital 'third spaces' (see Steinkuehler and Williams' "Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as 'third places.'") , or at the very least microcosms of social life accessible to those interested in a variety of questions ranging from the economic to the cultural to the legal. But it was only when I was engaging in case studies on seven varying genres for my thesis that I actually created an avatar and joined the huge numbers within the WoW universe.

Even though I found it to be a game that managed to strike a balance between an immersive persistent world with lush settings and well-plotted landscapes and a game with a series of at times repetitive quests required to allow the player to level sufficiently high enough to progress through said landscape, I became one of the statistics in Ducheneault et. al.'s abandonment rate after getting to level 9, largely because I was killed on a distant island and felt too aggravated to find my corpse again (in proof of their statistics on class and abandonment, I was a shaman).

But upon reading this journal, I felt compelled to again take up Mashyla, my dwarf shaman, and see if I couldn't get past those nasty voodoo trolls and further into the game.

My persistence (truly, I was killed another 18 times on that quest, so persistence may be another word for obsession) paid off. I made it to the Crossroads, where a quest led me to my first flight on a winged beast, over the landscape I had spent hours running across, to the huge commercial centre of Orgrimmar. Huzzah!

All this to say, stay tuned for lots and lots of WoW posts in the future. Every quest you complete and level you reach opens up new terrains, trickier quests, and meaner enemies, as well as greater oppportunities to meet other players. Reaching Orgrimmar opened up whole new channels of communication, and in the time it took me to disembark, I saw more real other players run by than my entire time playing. It seems to me like it may just be time to put my own post onto channel 4, LFG.

Believe it or not, I never used to be a video game geek before this game.