I’m currently in danger of being caught talking typing about others while they’re sitting behind me at a coffeeshop, but it seems an appropriate topic for the blog.
Never let it be said that playing video games is a completely unsociable activity. There is a regular gathering of gentleman here at Murky who play WoW at the coffeeshop, strategize with their amigos, and generally socialize like mad around the topic of game play. Seriously, they’re here as often as I am– and its finals at the moment, so I’m here all the time.
Also, what was that we all learned back in gender studies about how male activity tends to involve playing or participating in something together, while women tend to share and communicate as an activity in itself? I’m trying to put together thoughts like this for my final paper, because essentially I’m talking about digital games versus digital play, and I think some of the geeky activities more popular with the ladies (fandoms, etc) fit into the other end of this male/female spectrum quite well.
A random question for the people more familiar with these things:
Can I do things in WoW that don’t involve killing? Is it possible to meet class requirements without killing? Just a question. Or an observation. Something…
2 responses so far ↓
1 Garrison // Apr 22, 2007 at 2:13 pm
I appreciate that the game does require a certain amount of slaughter. Killing is the capital of the video game world, its lingua franca. Per Kline et al.: Thank you, Military Entertainment Complex.
By the same token: Death in video games is largely metaphorical. It provides a visual and aural vocabulary, and something of a “motivation” (although these are painfully thin).
The “Game Developer Top 10″ list from last week suggested that we need to be able to develop more elaborate and satisfying events around synthetic world deaths… but I think just the opposite. We need to admit that the “killing” we’ve been doing in WoW doesn’t really map to “killing” in the real world: The bodies disappear, no one arrives to mourn, there is no loss, our clothes are unstained, there is no prompt to reflect on our own mortality.
As such, the rampant use of “killing” in games is an admission that the games are DEEPLY UNSATISFYING in terms of their interactivity.
Yes, the narrative says you’re “Killing Wolves.” But I prefer to see it as “Removing Wolf icons from the desktop.” That’s the metaphor it more realitically models.
2 Alyssa // Apr 23, 2007 at 2:59 pm
I’ve thought the same thing at points while playing WoW, and this is coming from a girl who loves violence in her videogames. Before anyone draws the incorrect conclusion that I’m bashing on WoW, I want to clarify that it’s exactly the opposite - the world is so immersive, realistic, and multi-experiential, that I go beyond wanting to just kill things and begin wanting to do even more. Last night I was killing nagas (humanoids that look a bit like mermaid snakes) and thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if instead of killing them, I could have a quest where I had to win over their trust somehow?”
Which leads me to an (incomplete) answer to your question. Yes, there are in fact other things you can do. Some of them you are directed to do, as part of your quests. Horde druids, for example, receive a quest to cure 10 of the “sickly gazelles” that roam aimlessly. That’s the sort of thing that you’re asking about, and also expands and enrichens the game experience. Unfortunately, healing-animals quests are not too common, but there are plenty of quests that involve rejuvenating dried-up wells, finding stolen treasure, or carrying items from one NPC to another. In other words, you can certainly gain experience by doing things other than killing, although chances are high you’ll need to kill a few beasties along the way for pure self-preservation. Many quests also increase your “reputation” with various factions, so yet another game goal is to gain high reputations. Players in the Hunter class have a whole additional way to interact with animals - they can tame them and teach them skills. That’s pretty much the opposite of killing them, and can be a lot of fun as well, since various pets learn different skills, eat different foods, and can only be found in specific areas of the worlds.
All of this brings up another option, which is to enjoy the game on a different angle than to merely level up as quickly as possible. The “professions” (mining, herb-gathering, alchemy, engineering, etc.) can be quite fun and rewarding, and you can spend a lot of enjoyable game-time hunting down rare herbs and the recipes needed to make those herbs into potions that will sell for good money. Will it make you level up? Not as such, but who says that leveling is the only way to enjoy the game?
That’s an incomplete answer to your question. There are many other ways to enjoy WoW that I haven’t touched on here, including simply exploring the worlds, which are enormous and visually fantastic.
In the end, though, WoW is most definitely a game, and is based on a definitive, point-driven system. It is simply easier to assign a set number of points to a definitive action like killing something, versus a more debatable action like “bring peace to the two tribes.” Yes, that could be quantified, but perhaps not as simply.
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