Forbuzzall's Reply to my previous post.

Here is Forbuzzall's story: He took time to write this up and it is very interesting and insightful. I think everyone should take a look at it and comment if you'd like. Ask any questions. I can relay the questions onto my guild's forum for him to answer and get back to anyone.

Background: I have been playing WoW for just under 4?years. My son gave me the game for my birthday so that we could play together. We had a father-son guild called Wizard's First Rule. He stopped playing I still play. It was a totally different game back then.
We began on the server Darkspear, where he was in a guild called Tears of Sorrow. When I hit 60 I was going to join his guild and do something called raiding. When my Tauren Hunter was around 35, the guild and my son transferred to Hakkar, rerolled alliance and changed their name to Dominance.
I started a warrior on Hakkar named Troglobyte (my gaming name in every game I have played, and I might add I am the original Troglobyte, I have been gaming since on-line gaming began.) but continued to play my hunter until I reached 42. I was asked by the leadership of Dominance to roll a druid, so I did. At the time druids were the least played class and by far the hardest to level. Since Dominance did not allow anyone under 60 (level cap in those days) in the guild I started out on my own, wandering the shores of Dark Shore.


2. The mindset of girls playing and how they are treated in the game.

The first guild that I joined on Hakkar was called Sinful Retribution. It was a guild composed mostly of young males, probably none above the age of 25. I base this assumption on the level of maturity I observed. There was however, one woman in this guild, whom I gradually began to quest with regularly. Her name was Alida. We leveled together, died together on quests and in instances, along with our co-guildy Rodwravial (sp?).

We were nearing level or just over level 40 when on one particular day, I was asked to join in the killing of a nasty dinosaur in STV. I was invited to a group, composed of 4 people composed solely of members of Sinful Retribution. I suggested that we include Alida in this group. I was ignored. I asked again for them to invite Alida, and was told that they would not invite her. I asked why they would not invite her and was told "cause she's a girl". I immediately left the group and told them that I would no longer be a member of a guild that discriminated because of gender. (What I actually said was not very nice and probably made them cry, which was childish of me, but at their level of understanding).

I have found that generally the way "girls" are treated in wow, is exactly the same way they are treated in real life, why should there be a presumption that in-game would be any different than out-game ?

Generally and I repeat, generally, the age of the male determines how the female is treated. Young males tend to be less inclined to play with girls. Males entering puberty tend to like to play with girls and often the atmosphere of this play is overlayed with sexual innuendo, (the primal urge to procreate is the strongest driving factors in human existence). It could be argued that our sole purpose of existence is to procreate, then to kill each other in war. But that is getting off in to a completely different direction.

This of course directly leads in to #3, the assumption of girl characters being males rather than females.
If the statement "everyone assumes girl characters are actually boys playing them" is true than some of the behavior i have observed in this game is very interesting.

On several occasions I have been "stopped" by a 'female player', who offered to strip and dance for me for X gold. In fact I have had to ask a guild member to stop doing this, because it was giving the guild a bad name. He was male and advertising his "services" in /2.

Gender bending/ gender confusion is just as prevalent in wow as in the real world as is homosexuality. Again, WoW is a microcosm of the real world. I am not saying that males that play female characters are expressing repressed homosexuality across the board, but in some cases this is true. I have often heard the rationalization "I would rather look at a female ass while I'm playing, than a male ass".
I find it interesting that most female players play female toons as their mains, with few playing a male toon as such, while many males play females as their mains. Perhaps this is due to the low female to male in-game ratio thus fewer females are observable playing males as their mains. But out of the women that I have seen playing 99% have female toons as their main.

Now that I have digressed into a female-male maelstrom, pardon the pun, I have observed that most people that have played wow for a while will ask the gender of a toon, where as newer players presume gender. The more experienced player knows to ask, and does not presume to a greater extent. However I have also observed many male players calling people that they know are male 'her', yet they do not call players they know are female 'him'.

I have a 30 something female toon named Calimaria (she is Dreanae, thus the squid reference). At one time I was "chased' by a male player who kept telling me that he would "love to eat Calimaria", even after informing him that I was male. I was followed all over Ashenvale and hounded for several minutes until I told him that I was going to report him for sexual harassment.

Sexual Harassment is just as prevalent in wow as outside the game. I have heard of one particular guild requiring that a female member post a picture of her breasts on their guild website, (Fantastic Product), my son was in this guild and told me that she was being harassed so badly that she left the guild in tears. I could list the names of the people's toons that were guilty of this, but it would be meaningless.It was not just one member of this guild who was guilty of this but several. Most of them are in their early 20's, if that matters, and they still play and can often be seen making lewd comments in the trade channel. I will give you a clue by stating that one is a DK and has the word tity in his name, and was the one who started it. (not surprising).

This ties in to #4: Playing to temporarily escape the responsibilities of the real world.

Any form of recreation is a temporary escape from the responsibilities of the real world.

However this escape can sometimes manifest itself as a escape from more than just responsibilities. It can also be an escape from morality. I have observed every possible type of human behavior in WoW, from racism to the happy little sociopath. WoW is indeed a microcosm of the real world and reflects it well.

5. How the structure of Guilds pertain to society.


Basically there are three types of people. The Pigs, the Dogs, and the Sheep. This is a broad "sterotypification".

1. The Pigs are those that exploit others. They tend to be ego-centric. They are those that have little or no morals/ethics and will do and say anything to get what they want. They are the users and the abusers. They seek power at any cost and care little for whom they destroy or hurt 'getting there'. They tend to be the controllers of society, the politicians, the manipulators, the wealthy, the elite. They believe "the masses are asses".

2. The Dogs are the creators, the thinkers, those that see what is and say it could be better. They can be predatory when necessary, but often prefer to use their intellect to resolve issues rather than their brawn. They tend to be 'different' and are often outside of society. They are the revolutionaries, the inventors, the artists, the intellectuals, the dreamers, the antithesis. They are the ones that call for change and act to bring it about. They are the minority and the driving force behind change in the world.

3. The Sheep are the followers, the latcher-oners. Those that follow blindly and they are seekers of social acceptance. They want to fit in, to conform, not to confront and are reluctant to change. They listen to what they are told and obey. They compromise the vast majority of the species, and are just your average person. They are "the masses".
"Given proper motivation, the sheep will believe almost anything. They will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. Their heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. They can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so all are easier to fool" and to control. (""loosely paraphrased from Wizards First Rule by Sir Goodkind)

Yes this is not entirely accurate, however it is to some extent. I do believe that it reflects the overall stereotypical structure of our society in general, and is echoed in wow.

I restate, wow is the real world, there is no difference. It can not be in existence outside the real world or it could not exist. It is just a subset.


Now for the best part:

1. People meeting on WOW possible leading to marriage or really good friendships.

This is why I play WoW. Friendship. Comradery, the glory of defending the world from evil with people that I like and enjoy the company of. Being a displaced New Yorker, who left most of my good friends behind when I moved to florida, I find what I am missing in wow. (on top of that I moved from the part of florida I had been living in for 5 years and again left my friends too far away for easy social interaction, driving 5 hours... not good). I have made some really good friends in this game, friendships that I hope will last far longer than the game itself.


Ok I hope this mess of words is at least somewhat coherant, I have not had my first injection of caffine yet...

Show about WoW basically or any other online game.

Its called The Guild. There's even a music video, that I'm currently obsessed with.

Here's Episode 1..the rest are on the side. They're like 3 mins long, if that, but super hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grCTXGW3sxQ

The show's website is http://www.watchtheguild.com/.

Ideas for a new post.

So I have been neglecting this blog for too long and I need to get it going again.
I want to get my guild on this site to comment on anything so I can add it into the entries.

Some ideas for topics for later posts:

1. People meeting on WOW possible leading to marriage or really good friendships.
2. The mindset of girls playing and how they are treated on the game.
3. How everyone assumes girl characters are actually boys playing them. Holds true most of the time because the guy to girl player ratio.
4. Playing to temporarily escape the responsibilities of the real world.
5. How the structure of Guilds pertain to society.

I think of people comment about these pending topics I can merge them into a post with the feed back and my own experiences.

Heres an article that pertains to topic #1 that Darth found on WoW.com:
http://www.wow.com/2009/08/05/15-minutes-of-fame-a-world-of-warcraft-love-story/

This video is insane

So I know I need to update, but my friend sent me this video about a kid who got his WOW account suspended by his mother. I think its good enough for a post all by itself. I will update soon!!!




So I found another video and its just of a vent conversation...(which is what most people use to talk to each other on WOW for raiding and such)



Bahaha another video..

Background.

I wanted to talk about the power of video games on one's relationships, time, and life. There is already a lot of research on this, but I feel like my own experiences and my friend's experiences help me realize the vastness of this phenomena. I recently started playing the video game World of Warcraft after a six month hiatus. If you know anything about video games you would know what this game is about, and maybe how it affects a person's life. If you don't know about the game, it's a pay-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). As in most MMORPGs, WoW players assume an identity of an avatar which represents them in the game world. Players explore the virtual world, fight monsters, perform quests, or join others to form raiding parties that battle with enemy factions. Some portions of the game can be enjoyed by solo players, while others are designed to encourage the formation of guilds which can work together for hours, days or weeks to succeed with a raid. Success in the game is rewarded with virtual possessions, gold, experience points and skill levels. All kinds of people play WOW, young and old, girls and boys. Surprisingly, the average age of a player is 28. Not too surprisingly, 84 percent of players are male and 16 percent are female. But female players tend to be older, with an average age of 32. (Most of this is directly from http://askbobrankin.com/world_of_warcraft.html)

There are a lot of criticisms about the game, for example, that it consumes a lot of a person's time and that it costs money to play each month. Some people don't think they should have to pay monthly, but obviously those people choose not to play xbox live or anything similar. There are also a lot of perks to the game such as meeting new and interesting people, letting yourself go and becoming anyone you want to be, and being able to role play if that's what your into.

I decided to make this blog because eventually if I choose to enter into the Ph.D. program I want to have my own personal experiences already written down for my tentative thesis. The thesis would be centralized around the idea of how WOW affects the psychological aspects of a person and how it may be correlated with depression.

As I said before, World of Warcraft takes up a lot of one's time. In the past few days I've probably played maybe 7 hours a day or more. If I count the past four days thats 28+ hours of playing a video game. Just think how much time I'm using up of my summer if I play every day. Last summer I didn't have a job and played a ton. This summer I have one and can't play as often, but I still play for probably too long each day. It's hard to limit yourself, especially in my situation because I have a friend who texted me to ask if I would come back and play after my six month break. He even offered to pay for the most recent expansion pack for the game (and that's $40!). I play whenever he is on so that it's worth the money he has spent to bring me back. And sometimes I feel bad for saying, "Hey I gotta run..I have plans" and etc. When its really important I do get off the game. Other times I purposely ask people to hang out so that I can have an excuse to get off the game.

The pressure of other players certainly affects how long a person plays, but it also affects the intensity of how hard the player tries to level and how fast. Personally, I am a fast leveler compared to most, but that is mostly because I play for so long everyday. I try very hard to level faster so that I can take my time getting gear once I hit level 80. Although, if I don't hit level 80 by the end of summer, I'm not sure what I'm going to tell my friend, but I really do not want to play into the school year. Last year I tried to play WOW during the year and it messed up my sleep schedule and homework schedule (Pssh I used it as an excuse to put off hw). WOW can negatively affect a person's grades in school. I was talking to my friend Neil and when the Wrath of the Lich King came out, his roommate and he played so much that their grades started dropping and they had to eventually lay off a lot on the game to get them back up. He didn't sound too bothered by the consequences of his immense playing time, only that he would get into trouble with his parents. Personally, my grades have not been effected by WOW, but that's because I know when to stop and study.

The one thing that WOW messes up most for me is my sleep schedule. Lately, my eyes have been bloodshot and irritated. I feel tired most of the day. Today, for example, I took a nap after getting off work, because the last of sleep I've gotten all week hit me hard. When I got up after the four hour nap I was still extremely tired. As we speak my eyes are feeling irritated...

I wanted to get into a little bit about relationships, before I came to a close with this first entry (I'm getting tired and I have to wake up early for work). I started playing the game because my boyfriend started after a who knows how long hiatus. I got interested from watching him play and tried the free trial and fell right into things. Sometimes when I am on too long while he is visiting me (when he's not on the game too) he gets upset that I care more about WOW than him. That is not the case, of course. Most of the time I can't get off because of my friends or because I can't say no to free help (like with an instance or getting better gear). Sometimes I even zone out so much that I can't hear him when he talks to me, and he eventually whispers me through the game, before I will notice what he wants. It sounds very pathetic once I write it down.

Some people cut off their relationships when they play WOW, because they end up blowing friends off once or twice to do a raid or something that they feel is more important than hanging out with friends. Then their friends eventually stop trying to invite them anywhere. The person ends up staying in their room all day playing, sometimes only to leave to get food or to go to the restroom. This can lead to depression in some individuals. The guy who ran the EVOKE program I was in as a freshman told me about his friend who's story is similar to the one I just explained. He went into a deep depression, never coming out of his room. He eventually stopped playing and had to freeze his account so that he would not be able to play again. Apparently he periodically looks up his characters, because he has such a strong bond to the game. I'm unsure if he role played or not, but that can make the game more real than for others who choose not to. When people mix up reality with the lives they have on a video game, trouble will ensue. Its hard to bring yourself back to reality, when the game is more fun and feels safer. I, personally, haven't had this problem, but I have heard many stories of people who have.

Well that is all that I think I want to add to this entry. More to come obviously, but for now I must get some sleep. A busy week ahead with work, and less time to spend on leveling my Death Knight, Sadie.

Chow, for now :)