How much does WoW reflect real life society?

| Tuesday, July 21, 2009







Dw-redux said...

Think there are some comparison possibilities between real life and wow. Guilds beeing co-workers/family for example. However a lot of it is skewed. Conversation for example. When I studied communication, we where told over and over again how 70-80% of a conversation was anything that wasn't the words beeing said. I.e. non-verbal, tonation, gestures ect ect. That part goes lost in places like wow, so a lot of the alianation between players come from that imo. I also think that has a lot to do with why people in bg/pugs ect are so often described as idiots. You don't know them, or their motivations.
So it is a lot easier to write them of as beeing stupid or just be rude to them

(warning rant in progress) furthermore there are the different ways people react or choose to interact with the game. Mrs dw-redux chars look a lot like her, and the one time she managed to get /ignored by another player, sho took it very personal.
Whereas i've met some teenage boys who thought the whole purpose of the game was to try and be nothing like themselves: women or complete anonymous arsehats.
What im getting at, is that a lot of the problems with a comparison between wow and RL is that if people don't all react to and percieve the game the same way, comparisons gets difficult.
know what I mean?

Klepsacovic said...

You're right about the lack of cues leading to more negative communication. One of my papers last semester looked exactly at that: as a general trend with text people see neutral words negatively and positive words neutrally.

And then you went and hit exactly the problem: people can play games differently and that leads to even less objective measurement than IRL.

Kristine Ask said...

Your post about people not beeing as ignorant as we think was spot on, and I see this as a continuation.
It is about perceptions of what the WoW population is about.

We have been RL-citizens longer then we have been Azerothians, and we are ofcourse bringing in values, systems, traditions, cultural understandings etc. into the game. Alot of what we do in game is an attempt to emulate things we know from RL. DKP for instance. Its a way to balance reward with effort, quite like we are used to from work IRL.
We run guilds like organizations or companies with leaders, councils/officers/boards, trusted member, initates etc.
In short: the knowledge we have from RL is crucial at all times and of great importance.

However, because it happens online, cause it happens in a game - it will never be the same. Reflection is perhaps a good word to use, as it is not identical - its a slightly distorted mirror image. Like looking into a pond on a windy day; you can see your face but its not the same.

G-Rebel said...

Kristine Ask, you took the words right out of my mouth; reflections display something less than the real thing. Even in the clearest mirror there are things that are not reflected well or sometimes not at all (personality, knowledge, value system, past RL experiences). In short, it's very difficult to reflect the intangible parts of who we are, but it's also impossible to completely hide them either. If you are prone to say bad things about people in RL, sooner or later you'll YELL at someone and call them an idiot in-game.

Oh, and about the lazy, one-dagger Rogue who got fired from McDonalds, I think I know him. Just the other day he was calling me an idiot, then he swore and said I made him late to McDonalds (maybe that's why he was fired).

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