the Greater Nomadic Council

A month in the arms of . . . (an ode to World of Warcraft)

Mallarme’s GTA post has finally motivated me to write a little something about my own recent gaming. Because, really, honestly, my first response was . . . who gives a fuck about GTA anyway? You want immersive, interactive, unpredictable? Nothing – and trust me, I’ve played a lot of video games – but nothing in the medium can hope to compare in richness and depth with Blizzard’s new World of Warcraft. If you’re a serious gamer and you’re playing anything else, you might as well be drinking raw sewage.

I had not done much online gaming at all before this winter – I played a few days of Dark Age of Camelot, but thought it was boring and visually bland. I played the beta of a game called Saga of Ryzom, which was beautiful but utterly lacking in compelling gameplay. But despite these disappointments, I have continually thought about the possibilities of these sorts of games, imagining the ideal experience even when faced with the often lackluster reality. World of Warcraft is the game I had been imagining in my head – a game in which, while you may or may not occupy the persona of a different person (depending on the customs of your particular server), you undeniably enter a different world, a world whose logic will grip you just as forcefully as the logic and customs of the real world. I’ll give you an example.

My brother, who I introduced to the game, has an addictive personality and is now, after a couple of weeks, quite a bit more powerful and connected within the game than I am. He’s a member of a pretty powerful guild, membership in which, as they would say, has its privileges. The problem is, he’s told me there are a couple of guys in the guild who are openly racist, and the other members at least tolerate this. So I’m faced with a dilemma – do I take a moral stance and give up the chance to be part of a prestigious organization, or do I tell myself it’s just a game and join up, ignoring the wider implications? This is the sort of quandary that is unlikely to emerge in Grand Theft Auto. You kill the hooker – there is no moral debate.

Of course, this is a computer game, not Ethics 101. What any video game has to be is fun – and World of Warcraft is fun like Suicide Girls are sexy. The combat is complex, frenetic, and unpredictable, even if you’re just fighting one-on-one against the computer (what’s known as PvE, or Player versus Environment). Once you’re working in a group with other people, the complexity and the fun start to compound geometrically. Once you’re working in a group, against another group of players, you have a recipe for some of the most joyful chaos you’re likely to ever experience on a computer screen.

But I wouldn’t be bothering with this ringing endorsement if it was just ‘really, really fun.’ The first Knights of the Old Republic was really, really fun, but even though I got the sequel to that game for Christmas, I literally haven’t touched it in the month since. World of Warcraft exemplifies the potential of the Massively Multiplayer genre, and that potential reaches into something beyond fun, into a realm that - well, I’ll let Julian Dibbell tell his side of the story –

The games we choose for our amusement are becoming so complex, so involving, that the line between gameplay and career, between gameworld and society, begins to blur. In the course of [Dibbell's Play Money] project, I met many players of UO who were just as much laborers in the UO economy, even if they wouldn't have said so themselves. I also encountered ethical dilemmas, questions of economic justice even, that would never have troubled me as they did if the economy in question were merely a game.

Dibbell is concerned with the economic side of these virtual worlds, which is in itself fascinating. But there’s much more to it than that, a subjective experiential element that I must admit is just on the border between inspiring and disturbing. Interacting with other humans in a game context is a fantastic experience, but this is also found in non-persistent games like Counterstrike and Rainbow Six. Unlike the undeniable ‘game’ status of these experiences, there is an overwhelming realness to time spent in the completely digital realm of Azeroth. A few experiences that have, at least for me, carried a disconcerting amount of weight include the sense of wonder that overwhelms me upon discovering a new realm, or a new type of adversary; the deep anxiety that comes when I’ve accidentally stumbled into an area where I’m far outclassed by every creature present and have to move with extreme care to not attract their attention; the heart-pounding tension of being attacked by another player and having to make split-second decisions to defend myself – followed sometimes by the deep satisfaction of beating another player in combat . . . the list goes on.

The richness of these experiences, though dependent on the well-balanced and smooth gameplay, isn’t guaranteed by these features. To my mind, their weight is primarily based on the persistent and entirely unique nature of your avatar – a uniqueness that arises not from anything so minimal as appearance, though showing off your ‘leet gear’ is one of the game’s many pleasures. The true uniqueness rises from an experience that no other type of game can reproduce – your character has an entirely unique, linear history. There is no saving in the game, no ‘going back’ to a previous moment in time. For the first time in a game time flows irresistibly forward, and thus has meaning. There is only one ‘first time’ that you will accomplish any one thing with a particular character (and given the time involved, most people will have one character their primarily invested in). The experience is a microcosm of life itself, and while I have done my best to resist the gravitational pull it exerts to pull me away from real life, I can understand how some people lose that battle (people who lose jobs, lovers, jobs over games like this). Because even though my own life is not without its ups and downs and substantial accomplishments and little dramas, my fake life has, for the last month, been frankly just as important to me. And as worrying as that is, it's also quite fascinating.

And damn, it's fun.