Repeated
consumption of new forms of communication is ensured by the societal
constructs from the real world which are crucial systems involved in
the large communal situation of online digital spaces. The academic
analysis of familiar elements in these virtual worlds allow for a
greater understanding of why participants will invest time, money and
effort into an environment which mimics real world behaviours and
situations. By analysing World of Warcraft's similarities to
real world economic and social systems we can discern that virtual
worlds stand as an extension of the real world. Just as forms of
entertainment stand as a reflection of cultural values of the time,
digital spaces must be created with familiar elements in order to be
widely adopted by the population. The theorised bleeding between
reality and cyberspace is being reached by familiarising users with
large scale online games; thus making way for the preference of the
illusory over the real (Torikian 2010). The purpose of this essay is
not to predict that video games will become a future permanent
location in which players time is entirely invested but to suggest
that this new communication technology will pave the way for future
adoption of virtual reality and cyberspace (Lupton 1995).
Blizzard
Entertainment's World of Warcraft (WoW) is an example of a
virtual space which demands a large investment of time and money. WoW
is a Massively Multi-player Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), a
genre existing to incorporate elements of story and adventure from
role-playing games and apply them on a massive scale where friends
can face challenges and overcome them together.
The game serves as a gigantic social platform (the massively
multi-player component) and it does not adhere to the same goals as
more traditional video games which maintain either a score or end
goal. WoW's capability for thousands of players participating on a
single server provide a different measure for achievement, this
measure as in the real world is often defined by gold. Some players
maintain that their only goal is to experience the story or world or
to socialise with others, this is often true however it is the
implementation of a defaulted capitalist economic reality keeping
players invested (Rettberg 2008).
The
business model of all MMORPG's as forms of entertainment require a
large investment in time and money from the player. Given the
relatively low cost of buying into this world (the game also
implements a free trial system), the main source of income for
Blizzard is the monthly subscription fee required for a player to log
in to the game world. A key way to keep players invested is providing
a sense of immersion and escapism. WoW provides a 'capitalist
fairytale' in which progression is fuelled by consistent rewards, as
long as effort is applied (Rettberg 2008). This is contradictory to
the real world economy however as we do not live within a perfect
capitalist environment, the real world is steeped with failures and
unpredictability unlike that of the 'safe' digital world. WoW also
makes an attempt at avoiding typical social binaries and adopting a
morally grey 'truce' (players may still fight one another in
sanctioned player vs. player zones) between the two player factions
the Alliance and the Horde. Both factions harbour varied races which
have been warring against one another for generations but are never
positioned as good or evil. This demonstrates a possible outcome of
virtual environments bridging morals, values and demographics and
providing a connection not previously possible on a wide scale
(MacCallum-Stewart 2008).
A major
theme in the work of novelist William Gibson was the separation of
the human mind from the body in a kind of immortal ascension into a
digital space. WoW's main purpose is to keep players invested rather
than provide a world that one can enter and influence with great
purpose. Blizzard developers (programmers) maintain control over the
virtual space, running servers, maintenance and providing updates.
The large scale expansion 'Cataclysm' completely overhauled outdated
content that was no longer relevant chronologically. The trailer
shows the transformation that occurs between the original 2004
content and the updated content which essentially overwrote the old
(Blizzard Entertainment 2010). This change was implemented as a
feature to maintain immersion for long term players by providing a
sense of an evolving 'real' world. As players grow older they feel
that the game world progresses with them, inviting them to return as
if they had never left and enforcing the concept of WoW as a
'deterrence machine'. The term coined by famous simulation theorist
Jean Baudrillard states that the role of these worlds is to defer
users from real life and create a kind of dystopia in which the
program rules and our bodies lose their role entirely (Crogan 2007).
The crafting of these types of digital environments prepare human
beings for the possibility of complete integration within cyberspace.
Mortensen
(2008) describes the coding of WoW's development plan as a construct
only changeable by the programmers who act as an external source of
rules for the player. These programmers provide rules and constructs
similar to those of the real world such as the passage of time,
gravity and speed. Given the success of WoW one can assume that
such wide popularity can only be achieved when following similar
rules yet limited in their capacity in order to streamline the
experience of life, often resulting in the games being experienced as
'better than real life' (Aupers 2007). The game world progresses with
a 24 hour day cycle, yet you do not have to eat, sleep and rest; it
is in this way that the digital world is an extension of real life.
It is interesting to note that there are players that enter the world
without the aim to take on the role of their character or to
socialise but to simply exist in it. It is rather concerning then
that people will spend more time in a deliberately more limited
digital space and would even consider the possibility of virtual
reality when that technology reaches its pinnacle.
Certain
academics use WoW as a testing ground for ideas, a kind of playground
where mechanisms can be analysed and player behaviour can be
monitored and reflected upon for real world application. Corneliussen
and Rettberg (2008) acknowledge that all essays collected in 'Digital
Culture, Play and Identity' were provided by members of an
in-game guild inside of WoW. They met in the virtual world to study
the very same virtual world, this highlights a startling parallel
between the real and digital in which one must participate within the
culture to critique it. Filiciak (2008, p 88) notes MMORPG's as the
'first interactive mass medium to unite entertainment and
communication in one phenomenon'. Both interaction and communication
have always required a strong sense of identity that has not changed
since the modernist era. Examples such as WoW generate populations
the size of cities creating new identities in the form of 'avatars'
and so is worthy of study.
It is
interesting then that the most 'human' behaviour in WoW occurs during
unpredictable circumstances. On September 13, 2005 a programming
error found after a patch update resulted in the deaths of thousands
of player avatars, although death is not permanent in game it is
still an inconvenience at best. The incident was named the Corrupted
Blood 'epidemic' due to its similarities to real world epidemics. The
problem began when a debuff (negative effect) from inside a confined
'instance' on the affected servers made the transition from inside
the dungeon and into the general population of the game world. Once a
player left the instance the condition would spread to other
characters that came within a certain radius of the other. This led
to a rapid spreading of the plague once the player entered a capital
city, the most heavily populated areas of the world. This unpredicted
event resulted in players behaving instinctively as if it were a real
world situation. Healers would come to the cities and heal the
afflicted, those that could not help would flee the populated areas
to avoid all contact. These behaviours were so surprising to
academics that there were studies performed and documented in medical
journals on this event and was taken quite seriously as an example of
how humans would behave in such a situation (Lofgren 2007). Players
would continue to participate in the game until the issue was fixed a
week later. This problem also highlighted the fact that human beings
were clearly determined to stay inside a digital space that was
tearing itself apart rather than the real world.
Blizzard
took incredible care in creating a world that would require player
investment, through the games reward system to its artistic
direction, every choice was made to immerse the player in a digital
environment to supplement their own reality. User's choose to
dedicate their own time to the world even when situations in the
digital space have negative connotations for the user's in game
identity. By researching these phenomena we are able to predict what
is required of these digital worlds to incentivise users to maintain
their identity exclusively in a virtual environment and separating
their mental and physical realities.
References
Cataclysm reveal 2010, online video, Blizzard Entertainment, Irvine, California, viewed 17 September 2013, <http://us.battle.net/wow/en/media/videos/?keywords=&view#/cataclysm-reveal>
Corneliussen, H & Rettberg, J 2008, 'Introduction: “orc professor LFG,” or researching in Azeroth', in H Corneliussen & J Rettberg (eds), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 1-15.
Crogan, P 2007, 'Remembering (forgetting) Baudrillard', Games and Culture, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 405-13, viewed 13 September 2013, via Sage Publications database.
Filiciak, M 2003, 'Hyperidentities: postmodern identity patterns in massively multiplayer online role-playing games', in M Wolf & B Perron (eds), The Video Game Theory Reader, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 87-102.
Giddings, S 2007, 'Dionysiac machines : videogames and the triumph of the simulacra', Convergence, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 417-31, viewed 4 September 2013, via Sage Publications database.
Lofgren, E & Fefferman, N 2007, 'The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics', The Lancet Infectious Diseases, vol. 7, no. 9, pp 625-9, viewed 12 September 2013, via ProQuest Central database.
Lupton, D 1995, 'Cyberspace and the world we live in', in M Featherstone & R Burrows (eds), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, SAGE Publications, London, pp. 97-112.
MacCallum-Stewart, E 2008, '”Never such innocence again”: war and histories in World of Warcraft', in H Corneliussen & J Rettberg (eds), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 39-62.
Mortensen, T 2008, 'Humans playing World of Warcraft: or deviant strategies?', in H Corneliussen & J Rettberg (eds), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 203-23.
Rettberg, S 2008, 'Corporate ideology in World of Warcraft', in H Corneliussen & J Rettberg (eds), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 19-38.
Torikian, G 2010, 'Against a perpetuating fiction: disentangling art from hyperreality', Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 100-110, viewed 13 September 2013, via Project Muse database.
