Shared Involvement: I Become a Holy Dragon

On Friday night (yes, this is what I was doing), once I got to about level 7, I wasn't able to kill bad guys in the same way I had done in earlier levels. I had also left my starting point, Northshire, and traveled south to Goldshire and other places around the map. Also, the bad guys, or "mobs," as I learned they are called, could now attack me unprovoked, which frustrated me. A visitor to this site via a comment (another opportunity for communal game playing, I think) has directed me to thottbot.com, where I found some information on some of the beasts giving me a hard time (although not really specifics on why these beasts were suddenly so much more menacing than in the previous town); for example, the Rabid Dire Wolf. And building on my spacial skill discussion from a previous post, I also found an interesting mapping tool that uses the GoogleMaps API, called MapWoW.

But as when I first started, I found myself in a new area and getting killed and lost a lot. The Federation of American Scientists (2006) discuss the need for games to push players to the edge of their abilities, but they also discuss the variety of research on how challenges may relate to motivation.
(an image of my character lost and dead. again.)

So presented with frustration, and not quite ready to ask for help in fighting what I was fairly sure were one-on-one challenges (I planned on getting help by learning more on how to attack from posting boards and wikis), I started to explore the territory by running as fast as my character could on the marked paths. The landscape was interesting and vivid and created a narrative just in the changing surroundings. As the landscape became increasingly deserted and menacing (with names like Moonbrook, Duskwood, and the Dead Acre; one area reminded me of a scene in Julie Taymor's film rendition of Titus Andronicus), my feelings of alienation from this bizarre game community increased.

I eventually wound up in Stormwind City, a place where clearly high level players met to duel, trade, and participate in other activities that I have not yet uncovered. Because there were no bad guys, I was able to complete a minimal quest, but mostly I just wandered around in the place, which resembled Las Vegas or Orlando versions of Venice or Florence.

I was approached by a male character (maybe a warlock like Simona?) named "Mooners", who said "Hello" to me. Our conversation then proceeded in a very strange way. I asked if Mooners wanted something, and he said, "Okay." I asked if he was doing something in particular, and that elicited another cryptic response, like, "Yes." Eventually, after a botched attempt to trade, Mooners "mooned" me and I used the "emote" function in the chat to applaud. When doing this, Simona got a voice--I could hear her clapping hands and a certain kind of sarcastic laughing.

Another character approached, named Leetwarhead. He was a dwarf or a gnome, of a higher level than Mooners, and he was a hunter because he had a pet with him, a large tiger. He asked if we would like to join his guild; I explained that I was new, so I would have to learn some things, and he said that of course, the guild would be there to help.

He took over the conversation, saying, "Lets get to business." He directed Mooners and me to sit (this took me a while to do) and he gave us some advice. Mostly he gave Mooners advice about not going to websites to buy gold because Mooners seemed interested in how to get money (for his character, I imagine). In the middle of the conversation, another character, from a different guild, also with a companion creature, approached, and taunted Leetwarhead and Mooners. Mooners called this other person gay and made kissing noises at him. They continued taunting each other for a while, so I figured out how to make Simona feign sleep. Leetwarhead understood my attempt at a subtle social joke, did not get involved in Mooners' activity with this other character, and tried to bring the conversation back to order.

He indicated how to chat publicly (this is good etiquette to do, apparently), how to chat over the guild's channel (after we joined), and how to call for the guild's help in a quest. He contacted the guild leader and got a "tabard" for me to show proof of guild membership. He had a nice conversational style, addressing many of his points by beginning with my name (this also just made clear to whom he spoke as many people were "talking" in the chat).

When we were finished, after about 8 minutes, he said, "This concludes this guild recruitment and indoctrination session." It was very evangelical, or like what 1930s socialists might say after finding a new comrade. And somehow, after the chat, I had a new little buddy flying on my shoulder.

So I am now part of a guild! The guild is called The Holy Dragons (I think this is a fantastic name because of its paradoxical nature and because I have an interest in hagiography, and it reminds me of St. George lore). This is the guild's website: The Holy Dragons on Guild Portal.

During the "business meeting" with Leetwarhead (which my brother informs me should be spelled 1337; it refers to "leet speak") and Mooners (I imagine this refers to his interest in mooning?), I couldn't help but think of a passage from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics:

. . . the face you see in your mind is not the same as others see. When two people interact, they usually look directly at one another, seeing their partner's features in vivid detail. Each one also sustains a constant awareness of his or her own face, but this mind-picture is not nearly so vivid; just a sketchy arrangement . . . a sense of shape . . . a sense of general placement. Something as simple and basic -- as a cartoon. This, when you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face -- you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon -- you see yourself. (35-36)

(It's much better in the book because of course it is told with pictures and text-- but I feel funny about pirating from such a fine book. Check it out in the library or bookstore though.)

In the conversation in Stormwind City, however, I viewed the two "men" that I was talking to as cartoons, but fully elaborated cartoons in the virtual space of the game (not simplified, abstracted cartoons in my mind as McCloud suggests I view my own self in normal interactions). And I definitely was conscious of my own "real" identity at my desk at home; instead of sensing my own self as "a sketchy arrangement," my real identity was highly vivid in my mind. It was almost the reverse of what McCloud describes as happening in a real world interaction-- the people I talked to were representations and the most real figure was myself. I think this is a highly significant difference in the social interaction, but I'm not yet sure of the impact.

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.

Space and Wayfinding: Or, I walk into fences, curtains, and bushes a lot

Besides spending most of my early game play not knowing exactly how to operate the controls in the game (I am still resisting using W & S and instead have been using the Up and Down arrows, which I'm sure is not the "right" thing to be doing in the long run, and just yesterday, after about 10 - 12 collective hours of game play I took some time to figure out how to jump), a kinesthetic factor, my "spacial" sense, or "spacial phase of micro involvement" (Calleja, 2007) has dominated much of my attention.

Upon entering the game with Luxindra, I spent about 5 minutes (a long time) in the clump shown in the image above moving my cursor around the screen and reading the manual on how to move my character in the most basic ways. I then proceeded to spend about 20 - 30 minutes (an eternity) lost in a castle while other players in the game ran around with seeming purpose. Much of this, because of my unfamiliarity with the 3-D simulated environment and the way to navigate through it, involved viewing my lost situation through shrouds of curtains (the second image) or through the bodies of other players or characters. I didn't know how to get a "quest" or find whom the other players were talking to, but I kept hearing on my headphones "Reporting for duty" or "Go with honor" as (I later realized) other players received their instructions from an AI character, known as an FPC, a shorthand so "obvious" that WoWWiki does not have an entry on it.

A side note on game supports and brief forays into social interaction: If you look at the two images I have sampled here, both have yellow exclamation points at the bottom, which, if rolled over, give information, often related to the frustration at hand. Other features, such as information boxes that come up on objects, also still help me.


There does seem to be some slight responsiveness of the help structures in the game to increases in ineptitude, but I could just be reading too much into their random reinforcement. At one point I learned how to enter text into the chat box scrolling at the bottom left of the screen. Three out of the four times that I asked a question on how to do something or where to go for something, it was not answered (and I still have not figured out where the people are that are chatting in this box), but there are probably better strategies. A couple of players "winked" at me, one challenged me to a duel (I declined), and two asked me to join a group. I awkwardly figured out how to type in that I was a "newbi" and therefore wanted to practice more. The group work thing is going to be a hurdle in this virtual world just as it is for me in the real one.


The long periods of disorientation and wandering in circles really got me into some reflection on how much I was having to relearn a new type of wayfinding in this virtual world. Having not played many video games in recent years, and certainly not with 3D visualization, the environment was difficult to navigate both cognitively and with my limited mouse and keyboard skills. In life, my wayfinding has been significant affected by a poor sense of direction, but I actually think I have developed a learned better sense of space and direction from traveling, a love of maps, driving, and the conscious investigation of various strategies. I was interested in how these same strategies might play out in learning a new spacial sense and sense of direction in what was clearly a new environment. So far these tactics have been most effective:

• Increased strategic use of the game's mapping supports: symbols for "you are here" and for key locations


• Deliberate tracking of landmarks, distinct geographical and physical features (*a strategy impaired in the smooth, repetitious virtual world)


• Marking of approximate time to cover distances, move between spots


• Experimentation with direction; exploring new areas before venturing on a "task" or specific activity

I'm also interested in the literature and talk out there on 3D virtual environments and how we learn about them and with them:

• Here is a good background piece on wayfinding and spacial representation in general: Spacial Orientation, Wayfinding, and Representation (Darken & Peterson)


• Aram Bartholl, a German artist, explores making the digital game world physical in his art. The photo to the left is from his piece WOW! and he has done other similar pieces, such as this, of what it would be like to get coffee in the "real" WoW "world."
  
  




• An interesting article on strategies for "Wayfinding Design: Hidden Barriers to Universal Access"


• Of course I'm interested not only in mapping the virtual environment in World of Warcraft, but how applications like GoogleMaps and others are changing our representations of space. Earthmine, Inc is exploring how these representations may link to our sources of information.


• Fred Cavazza, on his blog, has created an interesting visual chart, or a Virtual Worlds Comparison Chart, a typology of the fields employing mapping technology.


• Georgia Leigh McGregor, at the University of New South Wales, has some scholarship on the specific spacial environments of MMORPGs:


• Architecture, Space and Gameplay in World of Warcraft and Battle for Middle Earth 2


• Situations of Play: Patterns of Spatial Use in Videogames
  

Getting Started: A lot of nerdy research and I still have no idea what I'm doing

I started playing World of Warcraft with basically only text knowledge-- the things that I had read in preparation from academic literature, from fan sites, and what I had heard from friends. I also started getting some information when I actually purchased the game and started reading the manual (*Anne has some interesting examples of how she has been using the manual in her game play), but none of this compares to the type of knowledge I gained from actually experiencing the game. Observations from these initial steps:

1. The installation of the game was an epic journey in itself. It took about 2 hours. Also included in the installation were a series of updates from Blizzard, reflecting not only the debugging process typical in software programs, but also the iterative design process clearly built into the program based on user feedback. The updates ranged from fixing bugs to "Mage's ---- spell will now last an hour rather than a half hour" or "---- Monster can now be defeated --- way..." and so on.

2. My first thoughts on getting into the game were how to select a character and how to enter into the game. These were the factors I considered:

• aesthetic concerns


• my character's abilities in the game, and in a larger sense, as Gee (2003) speaks of, my virtual identity, and probably more important, my projected identity


• which server I would pick ("role-playing centered game," "PvP" (Player vs. Player), or "Normal")


• where on the map I would start out


• right before I installed the game, Anne told me she was a Mage on the Nazjatar server, starting in the Elwynn forest


• I also had nebulous concerns about how I would operate the controls in the game, "talk" to other players, and how "good" I would be at playing.
  

A good resource was WoWWiki's Newbie Guide and a chart within it that had a matrix of the WoW "classes" and a breakdown of their talents. I found myself looking into which classes would be okay to "solo" (work alone in the game) as because I wanted to learn how to use the game before I started cooperating with others. My initial idea (just from reading the manual) that being a Warrior might be cool changed to picking a hybrid class, a rogue.

I had fun designing her, and at first using the Stratics Random Name Generator to find a name, I got these options: Cielind, Ocilibeth, Ibarenia, Cyven,Weni, but I noticed a mystical/pagan-ish trend to the names suggested by Stratics and by the game's own generator (and I know there are vague roots in WoW to Tolkien and Norse myths) so I picked Luxindra. There are actually a lot of rules about naming characters, but while playing I've noticed these violated often. I've also noticed a lot of characters and guilds named after Family Guy and South Park characters and places.

And then... I started the game. The graphics are pretty cool. And after playing it a while, I wonder if the simulated 3-D interface actually does start to change mental visualizations.

I have a Newbie Buddy!

Anne, in my games class, is also going to play World of Warcraft! This is her blog: T545 Pensieve.
It will be interesting to see how having someone I know to talk to about WoW will change the whole social dynamics.

I actually have other big news... I have been playing. A lot. Like until 1:30 a.m. last night. And this morning. I have a lot to report and I have been collecting screenshots of my journey. But for now I'm going to keep you in suspense.

Anonymous Posts Now Allowed: Blog Visitors May Now "Choose Their Identities"

Thanks to a visitor (who will remain anonymous) for pointing this out: I have changed the settings on this blog and you may now post comments anonymously. This has real significance because it means visitors to this blog may "choose their own identities."
See Gee (Chapter 3, 2003) for information on virtual, real, and projected identities. And leave comments! As yourself, your avatar (or most certainly not, as Raph Koster insists he will never do), or your projected self!

Yours,

Lisa, as "Lisa" [real self]

I'm a little scared to play World of Warcraft

But I'm just going to acknowledge it and move on. This is what Gee (2003) writes in What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy on confronting teaching and learning in the face of an identity, such as mine, that says "I'm not good at hand-eye coordination" or "I don't think elves are cool" or "I'm going to get very upset if the geeks attack me and call me a 'noob'.":

1. The learner must be enticed to try, even if he or she already has good grounds to be afraid to try.

2. The learner must be enticed to put in lots of effort even if he or she begins with little motivation to do so.

3. The learner must achieve some meaningful success when he or she has expended this effort.

(pp. 61 - 62)

Thus, I am facing my fears, and this weekend I shall go to Target to get my copy of WoW. And I'll sign up for the monthly subscription fee. And I will hope that I won't become addicted.

I am going to play World of Warcraft

I started by asking my friends for game recommendations...
So many came in: get a Wii. Brain Age. Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. The Sims games, Guitar Hero. Grand Theft Auto. But the most convincing response came from my friend A.M.:

"This was the company I worked at for the last 2 years. I believe the entire entertainment space will be dominated by the idea of community building. Musicians without blogs, weekly podcasts etc, will be left in the dust. This game will give you a chance to see how a bizarre community functions. World of Warcraft is a fantasy role playing game. Sort of Dungeons and Dragons but without rolling dice. The computer does the percentages in real time so it plays like an action/adventure game. although I wouldn't say its fast moving but you can play with people from all over the country/world."

Added to this were things I had heard about the game: it was being used as a model for business, for team building, for leadership, for simulating economics, social networks, etc. As I investigated further, I became interested because World of Warcraft seemed to have its own subculture, and I am always interested in participating in and deconstructing the issues around culture. Not related to gaming, but central to this passion and to youth cultures in general: Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

As I read Calleja (2007), I became interested in how World of Warcraft (WoW) may intersect with the phases of involvement. I am also interested in the broader question Calleja raises, applicable to WoW, of how the game goals may intersect with broader cognitive and social goals. And how much of this, as Blumenfeld, et. al. (2006) and others bring up, is transferred from the digital environment to "real world" learning tasks?