World of Warcraft and analysis

I've been playing WoW for about two years now, and it's easily one of the most fun gaming experiences I've had. My friends have a running joke that I'm getting a Master's in WoW, or that I get paid for playing WoW. While I can't honestly say that either of these statements is wholly true or false, I can say that by examining the various aspects of MMOs in general and WoW in particular, my development as a student of digital rhetoric has been substantially furthered.

For example, in Klastrup's chapter on death in WoW, the argument is pro-offered that dying in the game provides a clear penalty for reckless play, but is also a social event. In a game experience, especially one in a community, dying becomes a rite of passage or a joke, more than a painful experience. There is a palpable penalty attached to dying, of course, but in a heroic game such as WoW it makes sense that the player is given many opportunities to succeed, despite such minor setbacks as being horribly murdered.

I found Aarseth's chapter about the spatial experiences of WoW to be the most interesting chapter we read today. It is a strange realization that the game world is comparatively small, but that it is completely understandable to spend multiple days of gameplay exploring all of it. It is an interesting piece of procedural rhetoric to build a fractured, compartmentalized gameworld. The player is never really exposed to how small the gameworld is, but rather finds it expansive. This is because the primary mode of locomotion is foot travel for the first few levels, with beasts of burden accellerating the travel experience later on. It would be a very different and less engaging game if the gameworld were the size of the United States, with real-world travel conditions. By building the gameworld on a smaller scale, the designers made the game playable for casual and die-hard gamers. Additonally, by building natural divisions between the various regions of the gameworld, the player never really feels limited by the comparatively small gameworld. Running from one corner of Westfall to another is tiring, even though you are only moving a few hundred yards. The procedure at play here is the suspension of disbelief, which is critical to building a game as engaging and enjoyable as possible. If the developers need to take a few liberties with distance, then that's perfectly understandable.

As a rich text experience, Krzywinska's chapter explains the combination of fantasy components that creates WoW. In building a game experience that is a rich as one finds in WoW, the developers combined aspects of Tolkein and Jordan's game worlds, among others, to build a cohesive piece of geek culture. Holidays, quest designs, play areas based on fantastic settings, and even NPC names all play a role in welcoming a geek to a full game experience. As a gamer and self-styled geek, having a common background to share with my fellow gamers, which is expressed throughout the gameworld, helped draw me into WoW.

A brief note about the scholarly analysis of game experiences in WoW: You really have to play WoW to understand it. You have to have been slaughtered by a mob of murlocs, or ganked a gnoll, or pulled Petunia away from her hog bodyguards, in order to best understand what is going on in the game. You can read about it all day long, but until you've cast arcane missile against a mob, you really can't know what the game is about.

As for the question of whether or not WoW is a persuasive game, I can't say. I can see the control choices, such as limiting the hotkey interface to twelve options (in a game where, using modifications, a player can display as many as fifty control icons) force the player to specialize his character's playstyle. I can see the proliferation of group quests and instances, where individual players are doomed to failure, as a persuasive procedure to emphasize the community nature of the game. These choices are clearly rhetorical devices, but I don't know that I could say that the game itself is persuasive. I'd like for us to talk about this in greater depth during class today.