World Of Warcraft

As someone who had not played a video game before this course, I had heard of World Of Warcraft but I never knew what it was. It had been mentioned briefly throughout this course and the reading for this week made me understand it better.

What I took from the readings was that players of World of Warcraft treat the game as more of a ‘space’. The article says “a user who inhabits a space and acts within that space as an individual” which made me think of the world-of-concern concept. The players world-of-concern consists of everything within the space, and it seems like within the game the players can choose what they interact with. This seems like an interesting concept to me because I didn’t realize until this course that there are many different options that you can take within a game, depending on what game you choose. Another point of interest is that while reading about World Of Warcraft it made me think of how the players seem to experience both diegetic and situated immersion while playing the game. The fan base for the game seems very loyal to this particular game, which makes me wonder if all gamers have a loyalty to their particular game franchise, or whether gamers choose one genre of games and stick with it.

The whole concept of massively multi player online games is what I find hard to comprehend because so many people play the game and invest in it, and there must be so many different options to choose within the game. “People grow to know each other by name (character name or otherwise) and so relationships between individuals do form into increasingly complex networks.” People who do not play games always seem to be talking about how antisocial games are, but the quote above and what is written in the article contradicts that. I’m also not sure when this perception of games will change, unless the people talking about the “negative” aspects of games actually play the video games themselves.

http://www.gamescenes.org/2013/01/game-art-world-of-warcraft-explains-feminism-live-2012.html

Something I found through gamasutra.com on feminism within WOW. It’s a long video so I only watched some of it but she begins by playing some of the game and I didn't realize there were so many levels and character possibilities. She discusses the feminist discussions that can occur within the game. She asks other players what they think of feminism and she gets ignored and it goes back to what was said in the representation lecture on sexism. I thought this was another significant example on sexism, as well as explaining some of the game.