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.

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.

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.

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 71,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

In 2011, there were 84 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 121 posts. There were 608 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 59mb. That’s about 2 pictures per day.

The busiest day of the year was August 19th with 688 views. The most popular post that day was Introducing – “The Visual Roleplay Gear List”.

With a bit of a delay (blame school and WoWRoleplayGear.com) we’re at the 7th part. Moving from individual play and activities within the social landscape of the MMOG cities in part 6, we have come to the question of how solo play is situated in this genre which emphasizes collective play and community.

The various activities players engage in individually have varying degrees of connection to other players, or more broadly speaking the community or MMOG atmosphere. I’ve divided the areas of contact into two groups: The immediate circle which I will look at in this part and the community, which will be dealt with in part 8.

The Immediate Circle

The immediate circle consists of the friends online the player has, including guild mates. Players can start up a chat with their friends or converse in guild chat while playing alone for example to alleviate boredom, as Kaeleeyth here explains:

Kaeleeyth: Well grinding rep, experience and long-term goals aren’t all fun.

Kaeleeyth: having a chat is the way to quench it.

As chatting with others can act as a form of entertainment in itself, players also use WoW in parallel to, or perhaps instead of, a social networking service:

Eitrik: it’s kinda like Facebook

Eitrik: or MSN

Eitrik: but better cause there is stuff to do with the other guys

Eitrik points to the gratification of being able to chat with his friends, but also share a platform that facilitates actions and embodiment besides just conversing. Through embodiment achieved by the character, another layer is added to the strictly textual chatting. Avatars are central in producing a sense of presence. Embodied interaction funneled by the character is the difference between playing with someone online and playing online alone while remotely chatting.

Guilds provides another chat channel for a collective of players and this channel can be utilized in much the same way as above, only that the chat is shared by more people and thus the individual player does not need to be active in the guild chat, but can still enjoy other people’s conversations. The guild chat was used by several of the players as they played alone both actively but also passively. Fidell f. ex. was not completely happy with her current guild, which she thought was too quiet. She missed engaging in conversations with guild mates, but also just watching the chatter of other people.

Ironyca: You said they were very quiet. How would you prefer the guild to be?

Fidell: Well, I do still like interaction, so chatting about random things sometimes, or watching others chat about stuff is quite nice.

The guild, but also other public channels, can in that sense provide an experience much like the Third Places described by Oldenburg (1989) – an atmosphere of low chatter in a café or pub. In fact, Constance A. Steinkuehler has written an article called The New Third Place: Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming in American Youth Culture (2005) detailing how MMOG’s (in her case Lineage) fits all the criteria for being a Third Place. Third Places are, unlike First Places (the home) and Second Places (the workplace) characterized by informal social gathering, they are crucial to civic society and engagement. Third Places give a feeling of being a “home away from home”, and home is a description I’ve often heard about MMOG’s, a sense of rootedness and belonging.

Guild membership enhances the social part of the game, and the vast benefits players can get, is a strong incentive to make or become part of one. With achievements that can be earned by the guild as a whole, and a leveling system where the guild levels up by based on the activity of the members, unlocking benefits dependent on the present level, the status of the guild can now be quantified but also become a unified project for the members, creating potential for a stronger guild-cohesion. The higher level the guild is, the more and better benefits the members get. This has made guild-membership almost a necessity and leaves some players joining a guild for the benefits alone. When asked about what type one players’ guild was, he gave me this answer:

Isén: yea 1000 people…

Isén: I joined it today,

Isén: because it’s high level…

Isén: nothing more

The number of members Isén mentions is in stark contrast to the lack of social interaction or even social presence he reports, as no one answers his petitions in guild chat.  So while saying that guild memberships gives the player an organization of at least part of their network in the game, for some like Isén, his guild membership was nothing more than getting the perks as he alleged, that to him, being a part of his guild was the same as being without. Isén is basically playing alone while connected to the group framework of a guild, but without getting any social effect from it.

Related to this, Williams et al. (2006) found in their study From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft, that despite the network qualities guilds generally encompass, a small group of people never considered other players socially significant, and thought of them as a means to an end.

It is therefore important to note that being part of a guild is not de facto a social enhancer of solo play.

A personal worry of mine is that guilds have now been so quantified that they have also been commodified. A long time ago I wrote a very critical post about a player who tried to sell his guild with the unknowing members still in it. I found this to be highly controversial and very much against the idea of a guild consisting of the members within them, a factor that has no price (and shouldn’t get one either), not the bank tabs, guild-level or how much gold the cash flow generates daily. As of now, my impression is that this has completely changed and is not considered a big deal, if a deal at all. I see guild masters trying to sell guilds left and right and under these circumstances I can only remain skeptical to the social status of (some) guilds and their role within WoW.

The title of some of these guilds are very telling

Guilds used to be something you joined for the sheer purpose of networking,  social atmosphere and friendships. Guild membership today is just as much about the perks, and I wonder if this facilitates more solo players to become enveloped in guilds with a social result – OR if it turns guilds into meaningless buff installations that are just one point to check off on the list of character- optimization – a pro forma guild. What do you think?

I’ve thought about joining one of these “free guild perks” guilds for the sake of finding out if they are just like normal guilds or if the members in them are not interested in the guild per se, but the perks alone. If you have experience with a guild like this, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

When I asked players what they were doing when they were alone in the game, the notion of hanging out or idling in a capital city came up in almost every interview. I do this myself, so I was expecting it to pop up. This topic also turned out to be a long post. I tried to split it into more parts, but who wants a series inside a series? So I decided it worked the best as a whole.

Topics I’ll touch upon in this article are first shortly about playing the auction house. Then I go into the public virtual life aspects such as game space, other players/ourselves in the dual-position of being both the audience and the performer and finally transmogrification, status and reputation and how we use these to compare and map ourselves in relation to others.

Playing the Auction House

Idling or hanging out is often done in capital cities, which act as hubs of organization and trade. Players travel to these faction specific epicenters to deposit and withdraw items and materials. The player driven auction houses are also located in the capital cities and form their own little mini game of sales and profit.

Ironyca: You also mentioned hanging out at the auction house, what does that entail?

Dromdum: I sell almost everything

Dromdum: herbs, ores, gems, flasks, gear, you name it :)

Ironyca: okay, so you enjoy the whole selling/buying/trading part?

Dromdum: I love making gold

This type of solo play is by default an activity players engage in individually, and there are countless of blogs dedicated to earning gold in the game, optimizing the art of being a good virtual salesman.

Cities and settlements in the game world can often be found to be the backdrop to group play, such as fashion shows but also more elusive ways of spending time in the game, that hardly fall under a definition of play, as we shall look at next.

Firstly, if we consider how the game space is designed, a large part of the world in WoW is considered “the wild” according to Julian Holland Oliver (2002) the author of The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space in the MMORPG. The wild hosts the dangers that make wandering in these regions unsafe, risky and potentially deadly. These are areas where quests are usually put in context and where the player goes hunting. Settlements then play a different role, they are safe zones where the player returns to repair and recover.

In this way the MMORPG game-scape brings all flows of human action back to the settlement, ensuring that the public is based around a functional dependence on other people. At some point, co-habitation, regardless of moral alignment becomes an inevitable function of game-play; the city or settlement must be the first and final fold. This is how MMORPGs have, at their very core, a mechanism that produces and supports the formation of public-space. (Oliver, 2002, p. 175)

Considering the space inside an MMO to be public, almost resembling a physical city, yields a social angle of understanding player behavior, even when it looks detached from the presence of other players.

In the settlements, as Oliver depicted it, players engage in a type of solo activity they themselves denote idling or hanging out, but when examined further approximate character play or performance while in this social context. This brings us to the intersecting themes of the virtual flâneur, MMOs as reputation games and the occurrence of players engaging in “gear-fashion”.

Flâneurie in the virtual public space

The term flâneur stems from the participation and personified portrayal of the early 19^th century urban Parisian life. While being a “stroller or “lounger”, which is the French root of the word, the flâneur is a type of character observed as a phenomenon of modernity. The flâneur displays the relationship between the individual and the masses, at the same time a metropolitan participant and a disengaged voyeur, the flâneur seeks an immersion in the sensations of the city, he seeks to “bathe in the crowd”.

The expression to “bathe in the crowd” I find really expressive and I can relate to the sensation of sitting in the very populated area between the bank and auction house. Alone, yet surrounded by players, submerged in the buzz of a virtual capital city.

We can view player behavior through the same scope of the concept of the flâneur. A well known example are characters put on display in particularly crowded districts, often for longer durations of time and frequently on an elevated spot.

Let me exemplify with a story from my server, an example that often makes me chuckle:

In front of the auction house in Stormwind there are often two players (a RL couple) mounting Corrupted Fire Hawks positioned on each side of the staircase. I just checked when writing this post and was able to catch one of them posing, but often the other will be on the other side also showcasing a Corrupted Fire Hawk.

I don’t think any WoW players are unsure about what is going on in the picture above – this player is of course showing off his admittedly impressive feat, and having an exquisite mount to show for it is the perfect setup for virtual flâneurie.

In “Alone Together?” Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (2006) Ducheneaut et al. makes this point:

“MMORPGs are in essence reputation games – an avatar wearing powerful items, for instance, is essential to the construction of a player’s identity.” (p. 7).

Flaunting one’s character is a way of enjoying the awareness other players bestow on you, while not needing to exchange gestures or phrases with anyone. The act is characterized by a subtle nonchalance, it’s hard to tell how purposeful it is, but that is in the heart of flânuerism.

The status and reputation of fashionable clothing

When characters are put on display, gear is often one of the central show pieces, although I suspect gear-flâneurie was more common back when raid-progression was steeper. Still, players are always able to get information about what others are wearing by the act of “inspection”, which is possible when the targeted player is within reach or through the Armory, a huge log of everything related to our characters.

Besides flâneurie as purely visual, the players in proxy distance are able to see exactly what clothing others are wearing, the rarity of it and which stats the clothing provide its bearer. It’s like being able to view all the price tags and labels of the clothing someone is wearing in the physical world, but without touching them. The player being inspected is not notified and so this act becomes largely invisible, both to the player being inspected, but also in a public sense, to others.

This allows for what Klastrup and Tosca in “Because it just looks cool!” Fashion as character performance: The Case of WoW (2009) calls “status awareness” and “status anxiety” – the ongoing act of inspecting someone else’s equipment in order to compare one’s own status, both as a way of gauging whether one’s own paraphernalia is up to the general standards, but also out of interest in other player’s creativity in their choices of clothing.

If you've followed my stories on Elford's adventures, you have already seen several pictures from Goldshire showing line-ups of very well dressed characters at the Lion's Pride Inn.

In WoW, the combinations available in the character customization mode when creating the character is limited, and besides some players putting efforts into creating a character that in itself looks unique, a large part of the individualization process is also done by dressing up of the character.

Ironyca: What did you like about roleplaying?

Dromdum: oh hehe dressing up finding special gear showing off my collection companions and mounts and titles

This emphasis of outlining one’s own character from the masses is also noted by Klastrup and Tosca, when players seek individualization through character fashion. Their study showed that players primarily pay attention to what others are wearing when inside a city, and they go on to argue that fashion should not be considered a private state of being but that “It is a social investment that has rewards beyond the aesthetic, as it can reinforce player status […]” (p. 10). Hvaskjer, a player I interviewed says it outright: gear, but also other items and feats, become entrancing when they are rare and sufficiently few players own them.

Hvaskjer: hmm I like having a lot of mounts and trying to have stuff and achievements not everyone got.

When thinking about enjoying the attention of an audience, Dromdum’s story came up when she and I were talking about interacting with random unknown players, and she noted that she also enjoyed interacting with her audience:

Dromdum: ooh hehe well I own some really cool stuff on my main like Sandbox Tiger

Dromdum: and almost all gadgets from archeology

Dromdum: I just put up a sandbox tiger and peeps talk to me asking where I got it

Dromdum: I have a dragon kite which gives me a lot of whispers.

Dromdum says this is something she does more often while in Orgrimmar, a popular capital of the Horde faction and therefore greatly suitable for gathering a personal audience. This example is also related to the notion of a spectacle, preferably one of humor, where familiar players but also strangers can pose as a great source of unexpected entertainment.

Picture created by Saate at Massively Obsessed - http://www.saate.net/gallery/

In relation to this, check out the picture to the right, you’ll need to click it bigger.

It shows the whispers the owner Saate of a Black Qiraji Battle Tank received in the course of ca. a month. You can see his original post about it here, and part 2 and part 3 of even more whispers.

I’m wondering if having something this rare and unique, triggering so many responses from others, can be overwhelming. I get the impression Saate is prompted to interact with his audience constantly, unless of course, he dismounts. If I had an item like this, I’d sure think twice about when and where to mount up – it’s like being a server celebrity!

With the upcoming feature Transmogrification, character looks will become central to everyone. How you present yourself in terms of gear and weaponry is no longer a matter of which gear you have right now, instead you can choose to show off old treasures or a really well put-together set. Furthermore, dressing up is no longer restricted to safe areas, players can now look as they wish all the time, even when in combat, expanding character performance into raids and battlegrounds.

Still, I’m imagining hanging out in cities in the future will provide even more spectacle and showcasing when 4.0.3 and Transmogrification goes live. Personally, I’m looking forward to this dual-position of being both the audience but also the performer.

Through the act of flâneurie and performance, the players differentiate themselves as individuals in the public landscape of other characters. Checking the gear of others while perhaps even showing off a little yourself, is part of the many joys of an MMO, whether you engage with the audience or just enjoy the bustle of your chosen hotspot.

It is these factors that Duchenaut et al. in “Alone Together?” Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (2006) say can appeal to solo players:

While many of WoW’s subscribers play alone, we believe they prefer playing a MMORPG to playing a comparable singleplayer game because of a different kind of “social factor.” Indeed, the other players have important roles beyond providing direct support and camaraderie in the context of quest groups: they also provide an audience, a sense of social presence, and a spectacle. (p. 7)

Next part will look a little further into the experience of social presence, basically the sense of being present in a virtual world that is inhabited and alive.

Several players described playing alone as particularly relaxing, fx when farming (but also questing as in pt 2).

Farming denotes activities in WoW that include gathering of resources, f. ex. picking herbs, mining or fishing, but also performing repetitive tasks such as completing the same dungeon over and over often for a rare item. A defining feature is the repetitive nature of this activity, and this is also the reason farming remains a disputed affair, where some despise it while others enjoy it.

Dromdum:  when I am having a bad day lot of stress I enjoy fishing with my headset on with very loud music.

Farming is suitable when you want to fill up gaps up time, it’s easy to step in and out of and of course, it’s one of the activities some players find relaxing.

Ironyca: What do you usually do in a play session?

Fidell: I guess it varies. I make sure I only play three times a week if I can, as I work full time and have quite an intense job. So this chills me out. I am starting this new char and on my mains, working on achievements unless raid night.

At the same time, one can wonder why players would choose to play WoW for relaxation, when there are much shorter and simpler games available on the internet.

Kallio et al. presents in At Least Nine Ways to Play: Approaching Gamer Mentalities (2010) that if you play for relaxation, the most important factor of game selection is familiarity . This suggests that even very complicated and time consuming games can be played with a ‘‘casual mentality’’ if you’re familiar with the game and know how to use it to serve your own needs.

Not everyone would seek to play alone for the sake of tranquility, as became evident when interviewing players on PvP realms. On these realms, players can attack and be attacked almost anywhere in the game world with very few exceptions. This adds a sense of danger and unpredictability to playing alone as the player only has themselves to count on.

There’s reason to believe that players sometimes seek to play alone in order to affect their emotional state, whether it’s to heighten it or calm it down. Quoting Calleja in Digital Games as Designed Experience: Reframing the Concept of Immersion (2007):

If one’s emotional state is considered to be negative, understimulated persons will tend to choose media content that is arousing whereas overstimulated persons tend to choose calmer media content. Games offer a variety of participatory means of affecting mood as well as allowing players to tweak game settings to bring about the desired affective change. If MMOGs are limited in the players’ ability to change difficulty levels and other game settings, they make up for this by providing a wide variety of activities that can often suit the needs of different emotional states.

The strength lies in knowing how to make use of WoW, to relax or to get a kick. This can also explain why farming can sometimes be calming and other times boring. Here it’s less about whether you’re social or not, but more about how you feel, if you need to wind down or the opposite, then WoW can offer several ways to do that.

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In my last post I wrote about the trip to the DiGRA conference (Digital Games Research Association) in the Netherlands through the use of a gallery. Now I’ll bring up some of the discussions that emerged around the various presentations. If you’re interested in some of the things game academia (the European scene anyways) is talking about currently, you might find this post worthwhile.

One thing that astonished me when I sat down to watch some of the presentations on WoW, was that most of what they said, was common knowledge to me. This is not to say that I’m so clever, but more to say that any WoW player would have been nodding along to what the researchers were saying. It also makes me wonder how much of games research is based on confirming and validating the knowledge that the game community already has.

This presentation was a good example of this:

The WoW based presentation by Kristine Ask was focusing on how different play practices have developed under the same game design. She had taken the terms already found within the community, such as “casual”, “soft-core” and “hardcore” (I’m sure these to a WoW player don’t need explanation).

She used the concept of domestication in the sense that it “highlights the cognitive, symbolic and practical dimensions“. So, how I understand it, it’s about how players handle the game and how they ‘tame’ or appropriate it.

This distinction makes me wonder about how game design is already targeting different play styles by making these wild swipes of totalitarian nerfs to the current tier of raiding, so that casuals and softcores can have fun after the hardcore players have already exhausted it for the sake of competition. Maybe WoW’s answer to the different domestications of WoW has been to tailor their content accordingly. The distinction between normal and heroic dungeon/raiding content, then, is less about progession and recycling as it is about letting different play styles with different values access the same content.

The question remains, is it even possible to cater to both hardcores, softcores and casuals equally? As it is right now, it seems the casuals and softcores are getting the large end of the deal at the price of the hardcores’ interests.

My teachers treat WoW as a little yesterday in terms of what games they deem interesting subjects for research, there’s a lot of research done on WoW already, but I was still pleased to see and hear WoW mentioned several times, even in relation to e-sports.

This panel on practicing masculinities largely dealt with masculinity as the title also reveals, but mainly through e-sports including WoW arena.

The researchers talked about WoW Arena as an e-sport being very peripheral and not considered “sporty” enough. Especially constant patching and class imbalances are problems with regards to WoW Arena’s position within e-sports. Thus, WoW Arena players were actively engaged in creating a sense of their own place, an alternative to the “sportified model” of how the Major League Gaming (MLG) frames e-sports.

Notice how the MLG logo reflects the sporty aspect of e-sports by appropriating the MLB logo.

The presenters also spoke about two main discourses within e-sports emphasizing different attributes and values in play: “the geek” and “the jock”

The geek talks about his gameplay as feeding on highly refined skills, intensive knowledge, mastery and commitment. The geek can take the opportunity to opt out of physical sports, but retain the competition through playing computer games and still perform masculinity this way.

So while the geek thinks about skill as being clever, the jock is a “cyber-athlete” who tends to de-emphasize the technology and puts the body forward as the main tool. For instance they would say that Halo had more in common with fx paintball.

Since the panel was about how masculinity was practiced in these gaming communities, they also spoke about what was usually considered acceptable female participation, that is “Halo hoes”, booth babes and cheerleaders.

These two presentations on identity were also really interesting, and both used WoW (one more than the other) as material for analysis. Surprisingly the discussion quickly turned and started being about gender-bending (playing a character of the opposite sex), a term Nick Taylor (one of the researchers presenting) critizised, saying “sex-swapping” was more suitable. I actually agree even though I’ve called it gender-bending myself, I just mainly adopted the phrasing from the sources I used at the time.

Gender is more about our constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes, while sex is biological. So when you play a character of the opposite sex, you may not act feminine just because the character is female.

A claim was therefore made that sex-swapping for males playing a female character was not transgressive. It’s interesting cause I wonder how far the gaming community has moved on this topic. Sometimes I still see the question arise “why do some guys play a female toon?” as if it’s still this strange phenomenon. However, it’s such a common practice now and male players are already the majority, so this choice of play is not really a big deal, everyone assumes everyone is (a white heterosexual) male in fx WoW anyways. I’ve been called a “he” many times, often I’ve wondered if there even was a point in correcting it. What Nick Taylor did deem transgressive was instead females engaging in sex-swapping – playing male characters.

Nick Taylor also expressed critique about the interpretation of sex-swappers when they say they just want to “look at a sexy behind”. This phrasing is not hard to find on the internet, you’ll find it on the WoW forums in a second. I also suspect that it stems from male players wanting to distance themselves from any string of something not fiercely heteronormative, “it’s not like they’re GAY, GOSH! No no, that’s impossible when they play this female toon because her ass is sexy”. So the “nice butt” argument, I suspect, is more about impression management than these guys actually drooling over their female avatars.

During the discussions the problem of the “raging homophobia” to use one researcher’s own words, was also brought up.

These presentations about theorycrafting had many examples from the WoW theorycrafters and dealt with Elitist Jerks amongst others.

The presentations focused on knowledge production and how the players worked to gain control instead of being controlled by the game. A question was posed by a member of the audience about any counter actions to theorycrafting and I instantly thought of the Ironman Challenge.

In short, the Ironman Challenge is a style of leveling that puts severe restraints on the character. An Iron(wo)man character cannot wear items of green quality and up, nor can they take on a spec, to see the full list of rules, check The Land of Odd and Psynister’s Notebook, who are both authors of this idea. The first character we know of, that has completed this challenge, reaching lvl 85, is the warlock Ironsally, whose journey you can read about on the blog Tome of the Ancient.

I can only speak for myself when I say that leveling my own Ironman Character Elford the (former) Executive, is without a doubt a withdrawal from the extensive theorycrafting that I feel is dominating WoW, even outside of the raiding scene. I’m not a theorycrafter myself and often find the constant demand to stay updated and ALWAYS play with the most optimized setup exhausting.

By playing an ironman character, I feel like I am safely opting out of this race and can play as I want. All the stuff around a character, gemming, spec, enchants, heirlooms etc, is now a blank. There is only the way I play, how I push this character with all it’s restrictions as far as I can, and I find this liberating. This character is flawed, it sucks I know this, but that’s the point. So for me, playing Elford is very much a counter response to the surveillance players exercise on each other.

There were many other presentations but I chose to highlight these as their work drew on WoW as a case study. These were also the ones that really inspired me and had me think about myself as a WoW-player and the community.

As a final note, while the panel on Minecraft was going on, one of the kids was asked if you could win in Minecraft, and the answer was that maybe you could, if you mined the entire world. Kids can be so funny, I’ve got a long way to go to win Minecraft then!

Coming home from a trip that is scheduled to go off right in the middle of everything, means there’s a burden of stuff-that-needs-to-be-dealt-with waiting fot you when you get back. I’m catching up now and have been working on collecting pictures for this gallery post.

I wanted to do an update based on pictures with descriptions instead of a text story, but due to having a broken camera and a lousy phone camera, I arranged with the others to share their pictures with me. Two of them did but they had only taken very few photos. The last one, the guy I KNOW has taken bucket loads, has not uploaded his yet. I’ve asked a few times, but I’m bordering on annoying now, so I decided to leave it and post without his pictures.

This means I don’t have any pictures from the last two days, the 6th day where we went to Amsterdam (including the red light district) and the 7th day where we went around Utrecht again (I tried to find their library but failed).

However, I found the official pictures from the conference and they are taken by pro’s even, so my gallery is now (almost) complete.

I’ll write another post about which presentations I attended and what they were about, if I can remember them all!

So this is the story of mostly the trip itself. It works best to click the first picture in the gallery and continue from there, each picture has accompanying text.

After writing this post, I’ll be packing my bags to go to Utrecht tomorrow evening. Then I’ll be attending the 3½ days the conference lasts and then a day trip to Amsterdam.

There will be panels on a wide variety of topics and I’m already excited about more events than I can actually attend. It feels like it’s a music festival, only the concerts are discussions and presentation events and everything is about games in one way or another. That’s like a festival that only plays your favourite kind of music!

Below I’ve cut out the events I’d be interested in, just to give an idea about what will happen, WoW and Minecraft is mentioned several times and there’s even a session on animal play!

In total I’ll be out of the country for 6 days, away from VisualRoleplayGear, away from this blog. This means my Solo Play series will have to pause for a weeks time. When I get back to it, I will move on to why people don’t play a single-player game since they play alone anyways and finally the question of how the multiplayer atmosphere affects solo play.

I’ll also be writing a post about how this conference went, my first stay at a hostel and going to Utrecht, which looks to be a beautiful place. I’m a nerve-wreck right now and I’m suspecting I’ll be standing in the airport of Amsterdam tomorrow and not really understanding what the heck is going on.

Wish me luck! a good trip!

I love the facial expression of that penguin. It’s that feeling of pride we are going to talk about now.

Another activity players would mention when I asked what they did when they were playing alone, was achievement hunting and in relevance also completing old dungeons, which are outdated in comparison to the current level cap.

The crux of the matter lies in the personal challenge, which then by logic negates group play as an option. When working on an achievement alone, f. ex “Loremaster”, which requires the player to complete a large number of quests throughout the game world, it is not only time consuming, but a personal satisfaction to know, unlike many other feats in WoW, that this particular accomplishment was earned exclusively by oneself.

Fidell: I like doing quests or achievements. I like working on an achievement myself and then when it Dings! Thinking I have done all that myself!

Working ones way through an old dungeon, which was once meant to be tackled by a group of up to 40 players, can pose a new challenge, as the player has to solve these encounters using only their own characters abilities contrary to what the dungeon was designed for.

Nyxija: Secondly, I like to solo tougher raids with this character in particular, sometimes for gold, sometimes for attractive gear, sometimes for the sake of a challenge.

These activities can be motivated by advancement, where reaching individual goals and making progress is valued highly. Likewise it can also be an interest in unraveling the internal game mechanics, which includes the confrontation between the character and a powerful enemy. Figuring out new and tricky ways to overcome these older obstacles by individual force often requires creativity, analysis and a good knowledge of the utilization of one’s character’s skills. Fighting one’s way through an old dungeon is a well known activity by WoW-players and being able to solo them is not defined by any game achievement, but yet widely recognized as a prestigious feat, especially if you’re amongst the first that are able to do it.

Besides going back to tackle old dungeons alone and doing achievements, some players find new ways to level their character with self-imposed restrictions to up the challenge. I have written about a selection of these unusual players in the article “The Overlooked Heroes of WoW – Unconventional Ways to Level” and I think they serve as a good example of another way to reach a great personal achievement, where the individual is the main focus and help from others is often avoided.

When the greatest feats in WoW are tied to group play, I’d argue it’s natural for players to also gravitate towards reaching their own personal accomplishments to get a sense of individual pride. Whether they are a defined game goal as achievements, or not as with the leveling and solo dungeon challenges, it still feels good to think “I did it all by myself”.