Canned Goods

The following is based on my experience playing a MMOG for the first time and my attempts to figure out why I, and other people, play video games:

Of significance to playing World of Warcraft or any MMO—for that matter, taking part in any community—is the realization that a player’s motivations might differ too greatly from that of the community with which they are interacting. While I share the same principles of player conduct with my guild:

• Maturity In Game Play
• Friendly Attitude
• Helping Others
• Enjoy Working As A Team
• Having Fun In Guild Chat
• Making Friends
• Progressing In WoW

. . . my motivations are primarily Immersion (discovery & escapism) as well as Achievement (advancement), mixed with a dash of the Social (socializing, relationships, and teamwork) (Yee 4). These motivations to play create tensions when inhabiting the virtual world with others (just as it does in RL)—at least on my part. Although I was initially fascinated by the idea of potentially interacting with thousands of people from across the globe, I realized I had no real interest in meeting real people who wanted to be themselves in a virtual world. I wasn’t playing to be a virtual version of myself. I wanted to be someone else. Just as I read science fiction and fantasy books as a child, teen, and adult with the intent of escaping the real-world and immersing myself in the narrative, the characters, and the other worlds, I play role-playing videogames with the same intentions.

And although both Bartle and Yee concede that one’s motives are undoubtedly mixed, their conceptualizations of gamer psychology fail to take into account how the game technology/environment influences players’ identities and the way they use the game technology. As in the case of my experience within WoW, researchers must also consider the game world as more than simply “a backdrop, a common ground where things happen to players” (Bartle). My lifestyle as well as the rules of the game created constraints regarding my interactions in the virtual world.

Further, in light of Sherry Turkle’s research on MUDs, a given player may, at any time, be trying out an identity, and so the resarch conducted by Bartle and Yee seems to become muddied. Bartle and Yee appear to see players as having a unitary identities that they bring with them into the game space; however, any study that attempts to nail down why and how a person plays an MMORPG may merely be taking a snapshot of the player at the time of data collection. How I played The World of Warcraft initially may change in the future. I might decide to be more social and begin my own guild. I might decide to become a rogue, delighting in picking pockets and ganking other players.

If I were to have been surveyed by Yee when I first began playing WoW my answers would have categorized me differently than if I were to adopt one of the aforementioned identies and retaken the survey. With the complexity that is apparent with any assessment of motivations to play, it seem most important that game developers and researchers simply understand that motivations vary from player to player and from one occasion to the next.

And, although pithy, the same goes for students as they navigate the world of school.

I’ve come to that point again where, after bingeing on WoW for a couple weeks, I’ve had my fill. I got revved up as I approached lvl 50 (those 40s lasted nearly a year–at the pace I play), but now it’s becoming a bore again. Reasons? I had entered two new areas of the world, and I was excited to explore them, but now I have. And I had found lots of soloing quests to complete, but now they’re nearly done.

But ain’t this like real life? Well, if not like yours, it’s like mine. I usually do things in clumps. I pick a project and do that ’til I’m done with it and move on to the next. For instance, in school I focused on just a few things: art, reading (not school stuff), and football; and I did these things to the exclusion of everything else (how did I make it thru high school?). It’s more difficult in grad school since there are many more responsibilites than simply your coursework. I won’t bore you with a list. You probably have your own.

“What does this (and my other gaming blogs) have to do with education?” Betty asks. In my case (because I can’t speak for others, and I don’t have any research to back me up here), I’d say that my bingeing is tied to my style of learning. I get an itch, begin to scratch and can’t leave it alone until it’s gone (or at least until the doctor castigates me, ties my arms to my sides, and bandages the wounds). Yesterday, for example, I scratched an itch I’ve had for several days–I started reading Asimov’s Foundation, and I read thru 100+ pages. If only I could get into my seminar reading like this!

Simply put, school isn’t (usually) about itches and scratching (except for those electives, I guess; luckily, I was able to take 1-2 art classes a semester during high school) unless you consider the itch to escape from your seat. And it doesn’t seem capable of dealing with learning/interest binges. But if one were to attempt to make school like a video game for folks like me, I suppose it would need lots of save points facilitating the waxing and waning of a student’s interest in a subject.

I’ve recently fallen off the wagon and become slightly addicted to WoW again. Can one be slightly addicted? Maybe I’m merely slightly obsessed. Well . . . in the least, I have really enjoyed playing recently.

WhenI had suspended my account in June of last year, I was a lvl 43 hunter and didn’t play again until the beginning of February (I had leveled up to about 47 during this time). Over the course of this semester, I became frustrated becasue most of the quests I had on my list to do needed 5 person groups, and I play solo much of the time. After completing such “mini-games” as make-yourself-some-cool-armor I came across some quests to solo that also took me to an new area to explore: Un’Goro crater (filled to the brim with angry dinosaurs that would like nothing better than eating the flesh from my Night Elf bones. Or perhaps they were just acting out their programming.

I entered the crater and found many quests that I could do solo that also rewarded player with several thousand experience points (XP) . I admit that I’ve spent nearly 15 hrs in the past week (to chagrin of my wife) leveling up to 51. And I want more!

But I have a stack of papers to grade tonight. If only I could get addicted to grading papers .

I’ll frame this post in a way that will hopefully keep me from seeming like I’m wasting my life away (part of believes I am, actually). I’ve been getting back into the swing of running again, and when that happens I feel a need to run even more and a withdrawal when I don’t. If one were to get addicted to running, we would most likely applaud that person’s dedication to physical fitness, but playing a videogame is different(?). There’s something about getting something in return for the investment of time, and maybe we need to quantify what it is that people are getting out of games.

I thought I’d give it another go yesterday and put together a group to do the instance, Uldaman. It took an hour, but it finally happened, nad it was a well-balanced group that might have taken us through the entire dungeon. But there were new problems: contrasting player intentions. A couple people wanted to simply kill things and hope for good loot, while three of us wanted to do the quests in there that, ironically, require killing everything and getting the loot. In addition, one pair started to whack everything, effectively draw several mobs to us at once–a very deadly maneuver.

Eventually, the other two got frustrated and left. This group lasted less than the last group. My solution, I decided to work on what you could call a mini-game. A a leatherworker, there’s a set of armor I can make, but I had to find the patterns (mob drops) and get my skill up, so I took to hunting, killing mobs that have a good percentage chance of dropping the patterns I needed and the scorpions that drop the leather and scales that I can use to make the armor (I was also able to complete a couple solo quests along the way).

It’d be nice to have a good group, but that requires joining a guild, and guilds mean a social commitment I don’t want to make. So my interests in games are based on my interests in Composition, and I’m focused on player motivation and types (Bartle, Yee), as well as collaboration. (there’s the whole thing about production and consumption too–player generated content, inside and outside of the game).

I’ve written in my gaming log about the tension between casual and hardcore gamers and that casual gamers would like to be rewarded for the time they have to spend within the games they play. A game like Halo does this wonderfully. You always feel like you’ve made progress and moving on to the next level or cutscene (revealing more of the plot) is the reward. WoW, at the higher levels, simply isn’t rewarding a casual gamer such as me in a way to keep me interested. Levels 0-20 are incredibly satisfying for gamers I’ve spoken with–either those who have the time to group or need to solo adventure. I was even able to reach 45 mainly through soloing.

However, without doing hours of research in search of solo quests, I have to enter areas of the game that require groups. Last night I sat down and put aside 2.5 hours just for this. The first 40 minutes went something like this “LFG [looking for group] for Uldaman!” That’s me repeating the message over and over in the LFG chat channel. I eventually got 4 people together, but this was a poorly balanced group: 2 hunters, a priest, and a warlock. We met at Uldaman, where the hunter other members decided to go in the back door, allowing them to get to the section they needed for their quests–leaving me with no reason to be there since I needed something from near the other entrance. I continued on with hopes to get a few good drops. Things quickly fell apart, as the priest wasn’t very good at keeping the hunter’s pet alive–the pet that was acting as our tank. Eventually, the group disbanded–no one having completed anything.

Okay. It took me a couple weeks to get thru HALO. I had given up on WoW for a while because I was at a point where I had two choices: 1) spend 3-4 per sitting to find groups and then work on some quests, or 2) go online and find out what all the high level soloing quests are and do those.

It isn’t that I don’t like playing WoW for 3-4 hrs at a time; rather, I don’t have that time without giving up sleep or falling even further behind this semester. Query: Why do these academic organizations schedule conferences during the academic year? Answer: If you go to or present at every one available, you may never have to see your students? I’m feeling guilty myself for missing a day for MI Academy, and next week (the week after Spring Break, I’ll be gone for 4Cs). That means I will have had class 2/3 of the time, including the day before break started where 6 out 19 students came. Also, I’m taking 3 courses, teaching, and doing a slew of other stuff. Long hours of going thru a dungeon? Right. I’m forced to be a casual gamer, and a game like HALO fits my lifestyle.

This makes we curious about game sales becasue sales are down, but WoW keeps growing. More and more people are taking part in a virtual world that demands long stretches of time to play the game. Maybe this is because more people have faster connection speeds and can play MMOs. It’s new, fresh. And so,maybe, the slump in game sales is due to people buying games like WoW and spending months playing thise rather than completing one game and buying another.

But will the same thing happen to others as it did to me. I switched to a single-player game that allowed me to quit when I needed to. There wasn’t any peer pressure to stay.

And maybe when the shine wears off the sales of non-MMO games will increase.

Last night Jim Gee had a student playing HALO. It was difficult for me to sit there, fighting the urge to grab the controller and take out Convenant troops. We discussed what made this game so engaging (for some). We talked about tension–right away you (the player) understands that you are Master Chief, brought out of cryo because you have to keep the ship’s data (and AI construct) safe from the enemy (think Luke Skywalker and R2D2 in A New Hope); you have only a few moments to get the sleep out of your eyes, as the enemy is literally breaking down the door to get at you (think Leia on the ship, putting the Death Star data in R2). You have a purpose, and everyone is depending on you. So here we have a compelling narrative that places the player in the role of the protagonist (again, think Luke Skywalker–who wouldn’t want to be a Jedi?).

This game is a completely different experience than playing WoW. First, WoW is third person–I never feel like I’m actually the avatar on the screen. And I know I’m not there to save the world/galaxy/universe. Second, WoW forces collaboration to happen between players (in Star Wars speak–Luke would never have gone to Cloud City without a healer, hunter, and off-tank), and I find this frustrating for many reasons. And third, WoW doesn’t come with a narrative, a story-line that drives the gameplay. Although every player can go from level 1 to 60, essentially, the narrative for each player (the avatar’s “life”) is different, if you want to call this a narrative.

But what does all this mean in terms of learning (my oft asked question this semester)? First, we realized that not all players enjoy HALO-like experiences. Gameplay styles may be associated with learning styles, so it may not be possible to design an edu-game that engages all students. Second, I can see how embodying a character thru 1st-person and thrown into a tense situation would compell students. Instead of Master Chief, perhaps Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak or Sphere. (Not knowing a great deal about edu-games, there are probably many that do this–but well?) Third, we discussed how allowing students to work at their own pace (for example, you can hang out in the safe area of HALO until you have mastered the controls for movement).

School doesn’t seem to allow for this–the content drives the narrative of school. I see this in my syllabi each semester. But, then, this seems problematic in the current educational model; could a 7th grader struggling with algebra (or writing, for that matter) stay in that algebra class until they get it? I don’t see a 12th grader in 7th grade algebra simply because of the stigma attached. Heck, putting myself in that situation I might take the C or D just to move on to the next class and possibly cheat to do it. Reminds me of 7th grade Spanish, actually. Never liked it or “got” it, so I made little cheat sheets for vocabulary; I wasn’t very good at cheating (always thought Mrs. Rutan was looking at me), so I only got Cs and Ds. Seems that intrinsic motivation was at work here. So everything gets really complex. Giving me more time in Spanish wouldn’t have worked for me, but a videogame where I had to learn Spanish to accomplish a compelling goal might have.

Again, I’m struggling with how I can bring the learning pricinples that games demostrate into the writing class–a compelling, immersive rhetorical situation and role, for one. We know that writing for a grade or the teacher or learning how to find sources isn’t good enough.

I have to log my experiences more often for Jim Gee’s Video games and Learning course; I haven’t been keeping up with it. Anyway, when I played the first time I often took whatever money I had and bought upgrades for my gear (armor, weapons); as a result, I was always poor. But I’ve learned to work hard and save my money (seomthing translatable into real life). This time I’ve taken to collecting resources (leather and herbs) to sell in the auction house, while never buying any upgraded gear for my self. Part of this come from a bit of boredom. Much of the early game involves getting quests that can be completed solo for money, items, and experience points, but this is what I did the first time, and I really didn’t feel like going thru this process again. Also, there are quests and places you can go in groups, but on the server I’m playing, which is full, there isn’t much collaboration going on. I’m not sure if this is an unbalance in the player population (horde vs alliance) or the area I’m in, but I rarely hear calls for groups.

Well, I’ve taken to occasionally popping on for a half-hour or so to collect herbs, head back to the auction house and post them. I’m making a nice profit that is way more than I would receive while doing a quest, although I’m gaining experience points more slowly. Yet, this isn’t a problem; I’m actually interested in seeing how long it will take me to hit 100 gold (the cost of a mount that you can buy at level 40)–something I didn’t do until level 43 with my hunter because I didn’t have anywhere near the cash, and, then, I still had to grind out gold killing monsters and selling their drops for about 6-8 gold per hour (I needed 75 gold; you do the math).

I already have 25 gold based on my gather/sell/save economic model. If only life were this simple. But what I’ve learned, and what other players may be learning, is a lesson about what happens when you save your money for something you really want (in this case, a mount) instead of making impulse purchases. Although my mother always gave me this advice, I would say learning this lesson in the game (in a risk free environment, to boot) is situated, experiential learning in action and was more effective than getting a lecture; it was conrete.

I’ve been playing video games since the Atari 2600, and recently I feel like the romance has been lost for me. It’s kind of like my experience with figuring out that if I follwed a formula I could get an A on all my papers. Before that I saw writing as, well, magical. So maybe my troubles with becoming immersed in the worlds of and roles in video games is similar and tied to studying games. The curtain has been pulled aside and revealed the old man at the controls.

However, I’ve realized that my feelings are different with different types of games. In WoW, I’ve never really felt like a Night Elf Hunter or a Undead Rogue. I’ve felt like it was me playing going through the motions of these roles–though never feeling I was the role. Maybe part of this is the 3rd person pov of WoW; seeing my character all the time, from a god-like perspective, may have distanced me from the role I should be playing. (Or maybe I need to try harder.)

Contrarily, when I play a 1st person shooter such as HALO I feel as though I am Master Chief–perhaps because I’m seeing the world through his eyes (and faceshield). This may be why there were so many complaints about HALO 2; players took on the role of Master Chief, again, but they also played as a Covenant Elite (the enemy in both games). The switching back and forth seems to have given gamers an identity crisis, leaving them to wonder: Who am I?

This issue becomes more complex and interesting when thinking about my experiences playing rpgs where I control 1-6 characters at a time. And more extreme than that, Homeworld, a RTS game where players control a fleet of ships. I curiously felt more emotionally invested in my Hiigarans (Homeworld) than my WoW Rogue.

For me, my feelings tell me that becoming an Other isn’t a simple process, and I see each of my gaming experiences as I would roles in real-life (RL). When I was working on fishing boat in Alaska, I was a fisherman. When I was in the Army, I was a soldier. And as I’m in graduate school, I am a teacher and student. But when it comes to my students in FYC I feel this itch that I haven’t been able to scratch–who are they supposed to be when writing? What roles should they be playing to give meaning to what they do? Is playing a role in FYC even necessary for students?