Are we “Alone Together” in WoW? – Solo Play pt. 10

Last part (part 9) was about secret alts and the need for time outs. This post may take some of that conversation and turn it upside down.

Hunter’s Pets and Companion Pets

When I spoke to my teacher about this project, he reminded me that perhaps players could also get a social effect from NPC’s. We are generally very capable of projecting an identity, a sentience, onto things we are perfectly aware are not alive and thinking, but we like the idea, it speaks to us, it’s appealing.

None of the players I interviewed mentioned this, but I remember back when I was leveling my priest, I would sometimes bring out my white kitten when I was out questing. It gave a sense of company. So I thought that perhaps hunters could the best example of this in WoW, maybe some hunters feel very attached to their pets and don’t feel like they are playing by themselves even though they actually are.

A quick search on Petopia led me to a discussion a group of hunters had had about this:

They may be just pixels, yes, but if you have even the slightest mentality of roleplaying or immersion in your character you can find how every pet has their own personality and identity. This creature will fight by your side and stay with you as you venture through the game world. Naming it and seeing the subtle hints of character within that pet is something that really broadens the enjoyment of the hunter class and brings a little more life to it. (from a Petopia thread)

I think the above quote says a lot, this hunter has taken notice of his/her pet’s “dedication”, it stays and fights for you! As a hunter, you tamed your pet yourself, you gave it a name and you feed it regularly. Back in the day, if you took good care of your pet, the pet tab would let you know that its loyalty was high and that it considered you its best friend. As Sherry Turkle puts it, the author of Alone Together (2011) a book about virtual intimacy and sociable robots:

As human beings, the way we’re wired is that we nurture what we love, but we also love what we nurture.

Risk Free Companionship

Outside of WoW we may find even better examples – remember the (in-?)famous Tamagotchis? I didn’t own one myself, but some of my class mates did and they took their little digital imprisoned pets very seriously, after all, these were capable of dying.

This area of technological advancement is progressing fast, synthetic companion pets are common toys amongst children and robots that mimic human interaction and pose as our friends are under constant development, sometimes with creepy result.

But why are these synthetic pets, or as Turkle call them “Relational Artifacts”, even an interest to us when you can have real pets and real interactions with living feeling people?

One of the answers is that synthetic companions are less risky – they might die like the Tamagotchi or a WoW pet, but we can start over, resurrect. They will never reject us and they are always available. If the social robot isn’t gamified, they might be entirely risk free, we are in control and the interaction happens on our premises, it’s all about us! Sherry Turkle puts it this way:

"I'm a lover not a fighter!"

We bend to the inanimate with new solitude. We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other.

When we feel a connection with our hunter’s pet, it’s mediated through our character, and it has to be said that not everyone feels this way. Some see the pet as an extension of the hunter-character or as a flashy accessory.

With the promised Pet Battle System in Mists of Pandaria, maybe companion pets will become even more meaningful to us.

What about online Friendships?

When Turkle in her book Alone Together makes a point about sociable robots as substitutes for the vulnerable relations to others, she turns it around and claims that we are largely doing the same thing when we engage in mediated relations:

We discovered the network – the world of connectivity – to be uniquely suited to the overworked and overscheduled life it makes possible. And now we look at the network to defend us against the loneliness even as we use it to control the intensity of our connections. Technology makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will.

A PostSecret submission

Her point is that when we engage in mediated communication, we’re also given more control of how we present ourselves, we’re less caught in the moment and can spend more time preparing the right response, the funny response, the authentic response (I know I do). We’re also able to cut the connection and leave immediately if we don’t like it anymore (have you ever faked a dc?). It’s harder to leave f. ex in the middle of a dinner out, but with computers it’s pressing one button. Overall, it makes us less vulnerable, we keep others close, but not too close – we’re in control.

The control and comfort plays out in several ways, f. ex when people maintain multiple identities online with both benign and malign intentions, others feel they are able to express their “true self” best online.

If you’ve read part 9 where I discussed RealID’s lack of a “show-as-offline” function, it was mostly a criticism of the lack of acknowledgement that sometimes WoW players want to play the game uninterrupted. Looking at RealID through the lens of this post, it’s another measure of control we can exert on our contact to the online network, especially as our presence online envelops more and more of every day life.

But Turkle says that perhaps this type of companionship that doesn’t demand our intimacy – that is without emotional risk, is teaching us this new kind of intimacy, one where we can be, as the book title states, “Alone Together”:

After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. [...] In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

Turkle says some provoking stuff, but for the sake of it, I’ll play on her team for a while. I can to some extent relate to what she’s saying.

I remember in my TBC days I was a member of a small raiding guild. I liked these people, I cared about them, chatted to them and was in the company of them almost every day for more or less hours.

At the same time, it was hard to merge the offline life with the online. My online friendships were also incredibly tied to WoW and the activities within the game. It was impossible to explain guild drama or a raid night of progression to anyone not playing WoW, I could never bridge the two. Sometimes it did feel as if I had a lot of friends in WoW, while sometimes it felt empty.

It also felt as if my guildies were only a subset of online friends, they were more specifically WoW-friends. The likelihood of the friendship being maintained beyond WoW was very low and today I don’t talk to any of them. In a way it’s sad, and in a way it’s probably the natural course of things. Despite my efforts and engagement, that’s all it was – temporary WoW-friends. I have made other friends in WoW that also became my friends outside of WoW, but those are only a fraction of the pool I was in contact with.

I can also relate to the attraction of chatting over any other form of communication. The conversation could be controlled so easily, it was as if language when tailored could be so powerful. I remember wishing more of my offline friends would spend more time on Messenger so we could chat. I saw them regularly, but I would have loved chatting with them too – that would leave me to be able to go about my stuff while still being able to plug in and out and socialize whenever I wanted. I guess this is what Twitter does these days.

There was without a doubt comfort in the distance and control the computer gave me.

Also a PostSecret submission. In all fairness, I think the creator of this card was going for another message than me, but the picture reminded me of myself, although I don't have my laptop set up in the kitchen.

Is WoW catering to Solo Players or creating Solo Players?

As I’ve described throughout the series, solo play has different functions and can meet the current need the player has: better immersion, smoother leveling, stress release. A lot of solo play in WoW, I’d claim, also offers a social component: social presence, an audience, a spectacle. Solo play might not be as rigidly lonely as it looks.

However, WoW has changed and is now offering quicker and more convenient access to parts that were previously reserved for “dedicated” players. Content originally aimed for raiding is now also offered through the “Looking for”-system – LFR.

The question is, was LFD/LFR products that were in demand by the (majority of?) players? Are these new convenience systems with low to no dependence on sustained relationships with others a symptom of the digital age we’re in? Or are we being taught by the game itself to consider other players only as a resource for our own advancement? Egg or chicken?

Now that we already filter companionship through machines, the next stage, Turkle says, is to also allow machines to be our companions.

Would players decry or praise a new patch to WoW that allowed us to group up with four intelligent NPC’s for a heroic? People can be so fallible and unreliable with their dc’s, standing in fire and ninja’ing, they are after all only human.

Finally, I want to present the picture below with a quote from the WoW forums.

Even though I have not been fond of the direction WoW has taken, I believe that the RL-meetings players arrange, pose a fact that counters the image of us as vehemently solo players.

If we prefer to only engage our WoW friends online, why ever go offline to meet them face to face?

Quotes on the pictures are from the Petopia and WoW forums.

Secret Alts, RealID and Obligations – Solo Play pt. 9

As is evident, WoW has great potential to turn even solo play into a social experience as we saw in the previous parts, depending on what level of sociability we tap into. However, solo play was also utilized as an escape from the social venue of the game, described by the players I interviewed in terms of taking a break or hiding:

Ironyca: You characterized playing alone as a break, what would it be a break from? (Just to make sure I understand you correctly)

Jefflindsay: People talking! haha. That constant scroll of bright green is a strain on the eyes :P

Here we are looking at the extreme end of solo play where the player purposefully wants to avoid contact. One of the more efficient ways to do this is to create a secret alt.

This particular topic is something I feel strongly about, I used to have a secret alt myself, my shadowpriest who later became my main through several expansions. While she was secret, it was a huge relief to play her, I could level and PvP in peace. I wasn’t trying to escape huge guild drama, I just needed a quick play session, some quiet time and no questions asked and my shadowpriest offered all of this.

Obligation and the difficulty of opting out

In T.L. Taylor’s book Play Between Worlds – Exploring Online Game Culture (2006), she documents how experienced players found themselves spending increasing amounts of time helping out friends or dealing with guild matters than actually playing themselves.

Saying “no” can sometimes be interpreted very negatively as rejection. Think about how a friend might react if you say “No, I’m sorry, I can’t attend your party tonight, I’m not in the mood”. I’ve tried it and usually people will think something’s wrong and won’t let you off the hook that easily. Why do you think everyone’s always busy? (whether it be offline or online) – Because it’s the bulletproof answer to every request, every question, every invitation! We aren’t always that busy, but saying so, stops the questioning and lets us move on.

The decision to keep a certain character secret illuminates that perhaps the social obligations that are connected to f. ex being part of a guild or more broadly online friendships, can be either too demanding, or just too difficult for the players to opt out of.

I used to frequent the Guild Management section on the old forums, and one of the recurring themes was guild master burn out.

Every thread about it was written by someone in a position of responsibility, it could be both casual but also more progression oriented guilds, and now this person was sitting in front of the computer, dreading to log in. The same topics came up: guild drama escalating, increasing workloads with recruiting and guild members generally expecting your attention and assistance at random.

Play had become work.

I have never been in a position, where if I took that break I actually really needed, my guild would collapse, no one willing to step up, no one there to continue raid leading, people would scatter – but I know people who have. In such situations they would push themselves, try and stick to it until they could possibly find help to sort things out instead of just vanishing.

The social obligations had them staying in the office working over time.

And so, avoiding the confrontation of having to reject your contacts within the game can be done by simply creating a new character and omitting this fact to others, without having to log off… or can it?

RealID as Secret Alts Prevention

The biggest outcry from the community regarding RealID came from concerns over privacy – that merging real life names with WoW characters was a lot to ask for a feature that simply allowed you to chat to someone regardless of what character/blizzard game you were playing. RealID could be so simple and convenient, but instead it forces you to share, not only real names, but also every character you will ever be online on. If you have anyone on your RealID list as it is right now, you cannot also have secret alts. Putting friends on RealID is for a lot of people, including myself, not a light decision.

But why is Blizzard so vehemently against adding a show-as-offline feature that practically every other social media has had from the onset?

“The second you can turn off your presence is the second everyone does it, and then it’s a weird situation where you appear offline but you’re secretly looking at everyone else who has themselves as online, but then they find out and start offline snooping.

We encourage that Real ID only be used with people you know in real life, friends, family, co-workers, school mates, etc. and for that reason it shouldn’t need to be a secret if you’re on your computer or not.

Also, when one of my Real ID friends asks me to run a raid or fill in a spot and I don’t feel like it, I say no. I realize that may not be a situation that’s reasonable for everyone at all times. I also don’t agree to be Real ID friends with everyone I know in real life in just the same way I don’t agree to allow my Grandma to be friends with me on Facebook (for fear of her seeing pictures of me at parties, etc.). [...]“ (community manager Bashiok – source)

I like how Bashiok in the quote contradicts himself by saying RealID is for RL family and friends, and then goes on to say that he wouldn’t want his “Grandma” on there. Apparently RealID was designed with such a narrow intent in mind that you should only add people who you know offline, who also knows that having a mana potion drop is not big news and who doesn’t run and create an alt when they see you logging on your new low level stealthed rogue.

What I get from the lack of acknowledgement about players asking for an offline function, is a strange fixation on making and keeping WoW social – “goddamnit people, CHAT, chat and play together ALL the time!!!!”.

I think this is social engineering gone wrong, the leash is too tight.

We hear about employees on the work market feeling pressured to keep their mobile phone on, even when they are on vacation, and that’s basically what RealID does. It puts a phone in your pocket and tells you it can’t be switched off, omitting to answer a text message triggers perhaps another message, and another. Everyone knows that when it has been switched on – it’s on, and there’s no switching back. Let me remind you that sometimes people play this game to get away from the drama real life throws at us, yet to find themselves unable to escape overly friendly friends, insisting siblings and demanding guild members.

When I did the interviews, I was actually fortunate enough to actually run into someone’s secret alt:

Fidell: No one knows I have this character or that it’s me! My hide away for the moment lol.

Fidell did specify that she did not intend her character to remain secret forever. It was a momentary choice for her, as she said she might reveal herself on this character in the future.

This series is unfortunately unable to say how permanent players consider their secret alts to be or how often they play them. A deeper investigation into the phenomenon of secret alts and how players utilize them could pose much richer information about the backsides of social gaming and the commitments to others, players can find themselves persistently abiding to and in the end wishing to escape.

This is something I don’t see RealID or the upcoming Battle Tags change, in fact, I believe they are worsening the problem.

There’s a limit to social play and it’s not necessarily something players want to engage in at every opportunity, regardless of the fact they are playing an MMO.

Black box quotes are from www.wowconfessions.org (although I think it’s now defunct). Yellow quotes are from my interviews, the remaining from the WoW forums.

The Community and the MMO Atmosphere – Solo Play pt. 8

This post has been really hard for me to finish. A lot has happened on the community side since I handed in the paper, which was the basis for this series.

A lot of the same topics seems to have surfaced once again with the Raid Finder (LFR), and even though it’s a new thing that the systematizing of the group making process moved from dungeons to raiding, I get flashbacks to when LFD was introduced.

I see the community (both blogs and the WoW fora) having the same discussions as back then, perhaps we thought we moved forward, perhaps history did repeat itself.

So while trying to encompass Solo Play in relation to MMO’s as a genre with their particular multiplayer atmosphere and their strong communities, it felt as if these recent LFR discussions were relevant. It also felt as if this couldn’t be done in a single blog post like this, MMO communities are so large and complex that I can’t do it justice, but I want to finish the series off too.

Before I go on a rant, I want to recommend an article written by Vidyala at Manalicious called Looking For: Community. She brings up a lot of valuable observations about LFR that are coinciding with my own thoughts and I think her article is relevant to solo play and server communities especially but also where WoW is heading in general.

But let’s get to the point.

The Community and the MMOG Atmosphere

Part 7 was about the closer network of players, but we can also think of wider relations than guilds and friends – that is the server and the WoW community as a whole, basically players you don’t have a direct contact to, but share the game with.

The Server

The MMO atmosphere here is closely interlinked with the experience of social presence, that even though you are alone, you still feel a sense of company. For example during my interview with Skyfire about enjoyable experiences when playing alone, he pointed to the time frame right after the release of a new expansion:

Skyfire:  yeah, then it can be fun to explore the new areas, quest, while seeing so many other players focusing on the same things, that can be fun even though I’m not playing with someone at that time

While Skyfire’s account of the allure of a shared world includes a visibility of other characters, his example is still centered on playing alone and just observing and enjoying a bustling world around him. We saw the more subtle sides to this in pt. 6 with the examples of city flâneurie and character performances through clothing and accessories, which are also facets that emerge between individual and social activities.

So even though someone might be playing alone, their experience isn’t necessarily lonely. While I see a lot of animosity towards solo players, about them playing the wrong game, about them being directly antisocial and disruptive, about them adding nothing to a game that is founded on community, my point is that this depiction of solo players is harmful and vastly over exaggerated. In terms of social presence, they too help populate the world – the server.

Gordon Calleja (2007) found in Digital Games as Designed Experience: Reframing the Concept of Immersion that one of the main attractions of MMOG’s was the experience of a shared but also “living, breathing world”, because they offer more than an automated game world to interact with. This counts for all of us, and this sensation can also be obtained even when alone, although the ability to actually meet other random characters, as in Skyfire’s story, greatly enhances and supports this.

Even though no interviewed players alleged to be playing WoW in solitude to get a sense of being “connected” or “in touch with the world”, it’s an experience I get when logging in and playing. The whole idea, that right now or at any given time my server is active and awake, is very fascinating to me. It’s like having Narnia inside my computer.

The difference between the server community and the WoW community as a whole is perhaps the fact that social presence is very much central to the server, as the wider community which flourish outside of the game space itself, on forums, blogs and the like, for some have less strength as a community factor:

Ironyca: Would you say you feel part of the WoW community?

Fidell: I guess I wouldn’t no! I just keep in my circle mainly and then that spreads out as I know more people.

Ironyca: How about the server community?

Fidell: Yes on my main char, I would say yes

Fidell emphasized that she felt part of her server community on her main, so it’s not only about being around people but also about not being completely unknown. Also, it turned out later that the character Fidell was secret at the time, so Fidells network didn’t know this character (except RealID contacts presumably). The phenomenon of secret alts is perhaps one of the more emphatic expressions of solo play, and one I will deal with in part 9.

Chat channels, which are local to the server, also play a big part in social presence, as Julian Holland Oliver (2002) puts it in The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space in the MMORPG:

With in-game chat and the practice of telling stories, we hear of the existence of other places with other people. That someone might be somewhere else doing something else, gives the world an extensiveness that can be felt from any occupied position. In this way the world develops its prominence, it persists regardless of the player, even regardless of that player’s active participation.

Jüsta, like Fidell, was also one of the players who could relate better to the question of whether they felt part of the server community than to the WoW community as a whole.

Jüsta: on ally everyone stays within their guild, on horde there is a community… And I like it. If you’re talking about the community on internet.. then I am no part of it. It’s enough playing this game. Reading about it is going over the line.

It should be noted that Jüsta played on a PvP server and his faction, the Horde, was the smallest of the two. He made me wonder if PvP servers, based on world PvP occurring more regularly there, have a stronger server community. The fights between the two factions can bring allied players closer and players out and about can be either enemy or a friend that can/need help.

On the roleplay server I play on, as mentioned in part 3, other players are probably seen differently. For example, they carry the treat of breaking the immersion when questing. Conversely, roleplay servers encourage players to stay in character as much as possible, and this can create interesting situations when you get enveloped in someone else’s storyline.

I had a short experience of this with my character Elford and that event definitely made me feel more integrated and tied to my server.

While trying to find a good angle for a screenshot of Elford sleeping, I ended up partaking in some random roleplay. It was very entertaining and certainly ignited the experience of the "living and breathing world".

Since the first step with cross realm battlegrounds, more and more parts of the play activities in WoW are becoming less and less tied to the individual server. Even raiding, albeit on a very simple in/out-level, has moved from being based on the individual server to being a WoW community wide thing (contained within the language based groupings – en/fr/de etc).

Does it matter that we play less and less with the people on our own servers? How important are server communities? – to us? – to the retention of the game as a whole?

Some obviously couldn’t care less, but I do fear that the effect of social presence can be weakened by this as we only briefly share a slice of the world with the people in these cross-realm situations. To bring back Oliver’s quote: How extensive is the world when we meet other players only momentarily? To me personally, WoW does feel less social and I believe it has something to do with this.

In closing, I would like to bring out a snippet of the conversation I had with the player Jefflindsay:

Ironyca: Do you often use the LFD tool?

Jefflindsay: When I’m in a rush, yeah i would. If i was playing with my guild we wouldn’t. We would walk to the dungeon etc

Ironyca: How do you relate to the players you meet in a randomized group in LFD?

Jefflindsay: I don’t think there is much interaction between players in LFD. Its more of get in, do it, get out kind of thing. On the other hand sometimes you do meet some nice people who are there for the experience :)

Ironyca: Would you call it socializing?

Jefflindsay: to an extent. Playing with others is essentially socializing. Right?

Ironyca: Perhaps, it’s a good question

Jefflindsay and I had somewhat the same experience of LFD (and now perhaps also LFR), it gave us one thing, convenience, fast and easy access and progress, but it took away something too, it took away the ability to choose who you wanted to play with, for some it made it feel less authentic, more hollow and robotic (this topic is where Vidyala’s post has a lot to say).

But he posed the question whether play in itself was social. Are we playing together in LFD/LFR or in parallel to each other?

I don’t have the answer to this question myself.