ethnography

For my ethnography, I'll be (once again!) focusing on Warcraft.  Since I spoke a little bit about this last week, I might re-cover some ground already trodden upon before.  If that happens...my bad?  I'll do my best to keep my exposition "new".

I played for four years.  First I was a horde shaman and an alliance hunter.  When raid-time came (read: when my characters got high-level) I trounced the then-broken shaman class in favour of a more entertaining dps class: the hunter.  When BC came along, I dumped the hunter in favour of a healing class...the now-fixed restoration-specced shaman.  I played that all the way through BC and into Wrath, becoming a pretty premiere healer on a very full server.

So let's start by picking apart what I just said. I'd be willing to bet most of what I said makes little sense to anyone not playing WoW on a regular basis.

Horde --- a lose confederacy of "monster" races on the fictional world of Azeroth.  Headed by orcs, the confederacy also boasts trolls, tauren (giant cow-men) and undead.

Alliance --- a somewhat tighter confederacy of less "monstrous" races on the same world.  Headed by the humans, it has night-elves, dwarves, and gnomes.

BC --- short for "Burning Crusade".  the first REAL expansion of the game.  It expanded the level cap from 60-70, introduced new character professions, and added the world of Draenor, the home-world of the orcs before they moved to Azeroth.  It also added the race of Draenei to the alliance, and blood-elf to the horde.

Wrath --- short for "Wrath of the Lich King", the latest expansion.  it brought the game's action back to azeroth, opening the northern continent for play as well as opening the character class of death knight.  There is also a new expansion, titled "Cataclysm" due to be released at the end of this month.

Shaman --- a multi-ability class in the game.  they rely on totems to support magic abilities.
Hunter --- a damage-dealing class in the game.  they rely on ranged weaponry (bows or guns) and a pet for support damage.

dps --- Damage Per Second --- the damage-dealing character in any group.  Other class options are tank (the character taking damage to protect other party members) and healer.

spec --- specialization.  a character has three trees to put talent points into (available at every level) and the place more points are placed into is the "spec" of the character.

Server --- self-explanatory --- some servers have a higher population than others.  the higher your population, the bigger your economy and the easier it is to get a group.

It's "server" that provides the biggest crux to understanding warcraft: the sense of isolated community and fracturings within.  your server is your world.  your character is an extension of you.  your ABILITIES in the game determine your stature in your server-world, and you are referred to as your character and defined by your talent spec.

The game as a whole, regardless of server, has a basic vocabulary based upon the lore of the game and the mechanics of playing.  Entire websites (elitistjerks.com being the most significant) are built upon understanding the actual mechanics of how a character class works and how to play to the limits of its ability.  Other websites (such as wowwiki.com) are constructed around understanding the lore.  We're not talking about isolated areas.   We're talking an entire list of jargon that can approach its own language, based entire on lore understanding, character mechanics, and more generalized uses of net-based abbreviations.  For example:

"WTB 200 Sar Ore, PST" --- translation --- "Want to buy 200 saronite ore, please send tell"
    --- even TRANSLATING this opens up another questioning --- what the hell is saronite ore?  it's a mineral, mined by characters with the mining profession throughout the world, and used for a variety of other professions.  Each profession has its own created jargon to simplify communication.

ON TOP of this is the game-specific memes which open up.  My favourite of which is, "you are made of win because you are made of nature".  Shamans use "nature spells", and since I successfully ran raids, I was therefore made of win.  This is just one example, it can go forever.

Anyway, I played from release until last year.  When I quit, I did so out of pure boredom.  A new Wrath dungeon was released the week before (called Ulduar), and when I started playing it, I realized I couldn't get into it...I was done.  Between that and a higher demand on my time due to tutoring, teaching college classes, and taking licensure courses, I couldn't do it.

For the purposes of this assignment, though, I bit the bullet.  I re-activated my dormant account and installed the game again.

I was still in my guild, a high-end raiding guild called "Spite and Malice".  There are hundreds of guilds on any given server, all devoted to different tasks.  Some are together for group pvp (player-vs-player gaming), some exist purely for levelling, some are just groups of rl (real-life) friends who screw around.  The biggest set, though, are the raiding guilds devoted to pve (player vs. environment) in terms of 25-man dungeon raids.  I'd been moved from my guild officer position to a new rank called "Retired Heroes", but when I logged on, it was as if i'd never left.  The entire guild immediately started harassing me to go on dungeon runs with them.  Never mind that I am now WOEFULLY undergeared compared to them: they still remember my status as a healer, they still wanted to bring me in.

In addition to this, I'd logged out in a major city: Dalaran, the capital of "Northrend", which was the northern continent opened up by the release of Wrath.  Now, the cities are all connected via chat channels: trade chats, general chats, looking-for-group chats, etc.  So I was immediately inundated by trade chats of people looking to buy, looking to sell, looking for runs, or just screwing around.  Chuck Norris is still a meme in the game, unfortunately.

And then there were the tells.  As part of gaming in WoW, you're rarely just going places with your guild.  people log off, people can't go, and you need to find some random stranger.  Hence friending...and if you do a good job, they stick you on their friend's list and get a notification when you log on.

I had fifty fuckers I'd never heard of telling me to they needed ME AND ME ALONE to come with them and heal some dungeon i'd never heard of.  A year.  And they still want me with 'em...

There's one major point to be made within this, and it's one I alluded to above: community.  You create your own community based upon your character.  It's within a guild, within a server, within individuals.  It's not solely performance-based, despite my above claim: it's also attitude-based.

Just like reality: if you act like a dick, you don't have friends.  you can be the best healer on the server, but if you kill-steal and steal loot from your groups, you won't go to any raids.

This is something ingrained to the gamer mentality: we're not NICE to each other when we know each other, not by a long shot.  But we'll treat each other fairly and help out where we can.  We've been playing these games since we were kids, our sense of net-etiquette is no different from our etiquette IRL.

This is NOT something ingrained to the casual or new-comer gamer.  In the last decade, gaming has risen in terms of sheer numbers.  the best way i can put it is this: when we were kids, we were ostracized or beaten up because we played these games.  now the kids who used to beat us up are playing games.  They treat the world differently, they take the sense of anonymity as an excuse to behave like an asshole without consequence.  They also look at gaming differently, which has led a lot of game publishers to alter what they release: 15 years ago, a game like "Halo" would have been unheard of.  No real gamer wants a blind first-person-shooter with no story.  we want character customization, we want lore, we want elaborate game-play.  but we're now the minority.

I tested this, upon logging back into my account.  I ran two dungeons.  The first was with four other people in my guild, and the second was a pure pug (pick-up group).  the former run went just fine, and the only real hiccups came in me refusing loot they kept trying to make me take...see, i'm not logging back in.  i can't take that stuff.  it needs to go to someone who will use it.

the second group was with people who play very few other games and haven't played many video games at all in their lifetime.  their life is not tied to gaming.  let's start at the problems:

1.  group fell apart at the start because the tank decided he was going to go with a different pug
2.  on getting a new tank, the mage (dps class) informed everyone that the only reason he was there was for a piece of loot off of the first boss, and he'd be leaving right after.
3.  on prodding, the mage revealed that he, as the leader of the group, planned to master-loot the item to himself without letting anyone else roll on it.
4.  on reforming the group, sans mage, we went in.  things went chaotically, but progressed, until the end of the first boss.  the tank had been keeping track of dps throughout the fight and decided the warlock hadn't done enough damage.  he decided to yell at the warlock, calling him, to quote, "fucking newb-ass cunt".
5.  warlock left.  i found a member of the guild to come in.  we went on ventrilo (a voice chat program) and proceeded to make fun of the tank.
6. final boss.  a mount drops...now, a mount is an animal that the character rides.  it increases movement speed and overall just looks hella-cool.  turns out, the leader (now the tank) knew it'd be dropping.  he set the loot to master loot (meaning he decides who gets what).  he immediately takes the mount and leaves the group.
7.  everyone else is pissed.

I managed to talk to each of the group members for a few minutes, letting them know i'd be writing about their reactions.  the tank stated, "it's just a game, i can do what i want."  on further interview, i learned that this was his first game.  he was 23 years old, he had only played a series of very short first-person shooters in his past, and considered gaming to be something given to him, not an extension of community where policies of common sense, values, or politeness come into play.

This is the changing face of gaming.  Entire populations of people with no comprehension of how to behave in game and how it'll effect others.