The Dramatic Learning Curve

1. Since installing the game on Wednesday, creating a character, and figuring out how to move around, I have played for about 15 - 18 hours (collectively). This is way more than the "one hour per week" that my course requires. However, I'm not sure that I would be able to understand "involvement" (Calleja, 2007) without spending some time, at least initially, and really, this game is pretty complicated. I've really spent this amount of time, though, because I've wanted to. Kind of.

2. I have made another character, Simona (named after Simone De Beauvoir and Nina Simone--I know, I'm an Uberdork), a warlock, because I wanted to experiment with her hybrid characteristics.

3. I have gone on 6 or 7 quests, including chopping the head off of someone (!), killing wolves (this really disturbed me, mostly because I like dogs, and see no real problem with wolves), and winning one quest only after another player killed some "deviants" next to my corpse as I lurked (as a spirit) fraudulently and snuck in to steal the loot once the coast was clear. I have received training in a number of spells that I have passing knowledge of (going onto the player forums and information sites is on my task list) and I have not joined up with anyone except in extremely informal ways. (I am still incredibly awkward at communicating through the game's chatting and social mechanisms, so when I helped another player slay someone--an artificial bad guy, not a real player--I could only silently stare back when the player gracefully bowed in appreciation.) My next big "to do" on my game task list is to be social; coincidentally, a task that is always on my "to do" list in the real world.

4. I clearly have learned things. However, I think the biggest learning gain so far is how to play the game. And once I started learning this, the curve was rapid and rewarding. My successes built on each other and were certainly motivating and engaging. Again, though, really the additional engagement has just brought me more into the game. And several times I have come to understand why several writers in the video game literature have compared this type of extended play to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow," but I am still not convinced. Something about playing WoW feels a little... for lack of a better word, dirty. I don't mean obscene, but just impure. It should seem obvious enough, but the virtual world is not the same as the real world. The type of flow experience in the real world has certain elements that are not reproduced in even the most vivid virtual world. David Rakoff writes of the possibilities of experiencing flow when doing something as comparably trivial as video games, making crafts, in his essay "Martha My Dear" (in his book of essays Don't Get Too Comfortable, which also includes an essay about another game-- a real world scavenger hunt. One may also hear the flow/crafts essay on the "Meet the Pros" episode, Act 3, of This American Life). And it is not the triviality or pointlessness of (many) video games (I'm not speaking here of video games that have nontrivial, valuable outcomes) that I object to in not meeting Csikszentmihalyi's definition, but that it lacks something of the real. I am willing to keep an open mind though. When I woke up this morning to take a picture of my new acquisition, an imp, for Simona, named Lazyap, I was definitely amused by the chicken running around randomly in the village, a dwarf character at level 70 awaiting a turn at a duel (maybe?), and a number of other elements all taking place in virtual rain, which was a nice surprise.

5. There are certain structures in the game that remind me to monitor the amount of time I spend in the world. As it becomes night (although curiously, three hours later than Eastern Standard Time), the virtual environment darkens, and there are rewards for eating, drinking (although virtually), and resting at "inns" and rest stops. At 1:30 a.m. last night these features acted not only as reminders but as cautions that I need to stop and reflect on what exactly I had been doing for so many hours.