With the introduction of the internet into the daily lives of the masses, the inception of a "virtual reality," long a favored concept in science fiction and other forms of story telling was inevitable. The new virtual reality seems to have come to us in the form of the Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (The MMORPG for short), most popularly, Blizzard's World of Warcraft (Or WoW .). WoW provides gamers with hours and hours of entertainment in a fantasy world occupied by "Dungeons and Dragons" and "Lord of the Rings" style scenarios and characters, but the social implications of the game cause it to take on a setting that looks less like a virtual reality and more like an alternate dimension. Much can be learned about the current state of humanity by studying the events of any WoW server, and how some players managed to manipulate the reality of the World designed by Blizzard in such a manner that benefited the few and the powerful, and kept the game from being fun for the masses.
The game setting is a familiar one: You take on the role of a virtual character (Anything from human to undead to the minotaur-like tauren), you kill monsters and carry out quests for experience, you hit your maximum level, at which point you gather with larger groups of people in order to destroy massive bosses with high-quality treasure rewards.
It all sounds very cut-and-dry, but upon reaching end-game is when most players find they run into problems progressing through the game. Once you reach the maximum level of 60, you can not progress further into the game without a large group of people. The very first end-game dungeon requires ten people, two of them require twenty, and the most difficult dungeons (With the best treasure) require a whopping forty people. Such a demand for people in MMORPG's gave rise to the concept of the guild.
The purpose of a guild is to play together and "raid" the most difficult dungeons together under a common moniker for the purpose of conquering end-game content. The most successful guilds treat the game as more of a job than a game, and this professional (Nicknamed "leet") attitude is necessary in order to keep moving forward regularly. For a guild to progress through the first forty-man dungeon, it means night after night of six to eight hour practice sessions with (Ideally) the SAME GROUP of forty people until your practice finally pays off and all forty of you have mastered your role in this dungeon then you start all over again in a new one. The learning curve of some forty-man dungeons can take weeks or even months for such a large group of people to work past, and this is before you enter in the probability of players taking a break, quitting the game, or otherwise simply becoming burnt-out due to all the time they're putting into a video game. Guilds must also work OUTSIDE of a dungeon to achieve their goals, and not just in terms of maintaining a reputation and recruiting fresh players. They must spend hours upon hours farming consumables and buffs over and over again that are required in order to achieve victory in some dungeons. In this sense, many successful end-game guilds spend more time "working" outside of a dungeon than they do inside.
The time-intensive nature and the sheer bulk of manpower required of these endgame tasks is what draws most of the game's criticism. However, through these same elements, many players are finding they've developed life-long friendships with people across the planet that they will never even get a chance to meet in real life. After all, they're not just playing together, they're essentially working together as a group, and depending on each other for success. Much of what transpires in dungeons and guilds can be compared to a massive trust exercise.
I myself had a chance to meet a few of the people from my own guild in real life (They happened to live twenty minutes from my grandmother.). It's an opportunity I'm glad I took the time for, as it was nice to see the faces of the real people instead of two undead guys and an orc running around on my computer monitor for a change. I was amazed at how much we had to talk about, both concerning the game and concerning our real life escapades. During a tour of their college dorm, they also revealed to me their social interaction with other players outside of the game. They were already planning a road trip to New York in order to meet a mutual online friend, and were planning a possible second trip to meet even more.
What we have here is an amazing example of the positive influence that a simple video game can have on an individual's life. I made new friends, they made a new friend, and they were off to go and make more all thanks to their interaction with computer generated cattle.
However, it doesn't take a psychologist to figure out that putting any large group of people together to any end will inevitably result in some sort of negativity. The concept of "guild drama" in WoW is a time-honored tradition and is also something of a game in and of itself. It takes many forms, and it even tends to follow a pattern and demonstrate what many would call a microcosm of the human condition: WoW servers are giant, virtual ant farms, and while most ants can play well together, many simply can't fathom the concept of working well in a group.
Maintaining a successful guild for any length of time is a feat, and can be very stressful and unrewarding at first. If you don't have enough people to raid a dungeon, then you're that much more likely to lose players to other "better" guilds, so without loyal players, recruiting at first often seems fruitless (Many of the higher-end guilds on my server took flack for "stealing" players from other guilds, and many long-term grudges were tempered that way). It's also not simply a matter of recruiting sheer numbers: One must recruit the correct character class make-up (Ideally, a raid should consist of five each of eight different healing, damage, and tanking classes. This is a model that rarely occurs, even for the most successful guilds.).
The real problem with a guild community, however, is that it is difficult for everyone in the guild to progress at the same pace: With forty people minimum, inevitably a minority of the players will acquire all the treasure they want from a specific dungeon. You might find yourself spending six to eight hours in a dungeon for the twenty-second time this year, even though you don't need anything, but your guild-mate, whom you don't know in real life (And whom you may not even like) wants a chance for his magical sword to drop off of a dragon that only spawns once a week once the concept of acquiring a reward of your own is taken out of the equation, such activities tend to lose their appeal. As a result, what often happens is that smaller groups with the most "gear" in a guild will find other similarly-geared groups, abandon their old guild, and form a new guild with the new group of more "geared" people in order to acquire better treasure faster. This has happened to nearly every single guild I have ever seen or heard of on my own server, and it happens more regularly when Blizzard introduces a new dungeon with "fatter loots." I've seen real life friends cease playing with each other, and in some cases, even totally lose contact, all because one joined a guild that zoomed past his friends in terms of game progression.
Needless to say, guilds splitting apart tend to result in hurt feelings, a sense of abandonment, a feeling of betrayal, and all manner of negativity and drama that Blizzard could not have foreseen. I've seen grown men cry over guild drama. The best and worst example I can think of is an in-game friend of mine, something of a typical frat-boy personality-wise, who stayed behind in our guild after such a split, and who'd just had an in-game meeting and chat with the players who'd left around a campfire one of them had built. I asked him how he was doing, and he responded, "I'm the last person left sitting in front of a fire that went out hours ago " He later wrote on the guild's forums, to paraphrase, "We're breaking up the best group of players ever ..." This same player ended up walking away from the game for a period of months, because it simply "wasn't fun anymore," and he sorely missed his friends. That scenario more or less sums up the psychological trauma left in the wake of such guild drama: Heartbreak as a result of a mere video game that was intended to be fun.
Arguably the most dangerous aspect of WoW is an inherent trait of the entire internet: the lack of ability to interact with each other in a physical manner. At best, it creates a double-edged sword: Dealing with a person strictly in internet form means that even if they turn out to be an axe murderer, you'll never become one of their victims. By the same token, however, people can do or say whatever they want without fear of being punched or imprisoned. As such, people who are inclined to "guild-jump" and leech treasure off of one guild until greener pastures open up in a different guild have nothing to fear, and can get away with doing this, multiple times even, and with no regard to the cost of abandoning players and even friends who assisted them every step of the way. Items are sold for ridiculous prices on a server's auction house, and with barely any retail competition, sellers can mark up the price as much as they want on many items. A disgruntled guild master can completely empty out a guild's "bank character" of all its gold and treasure and move to a different guild that is further along in progression. A raid leader can steal all of the treasure off of a boss that took forty people to kill, and he can either find a new guild or he can change his character's name or even transfer servers, never to be seen or heard from again. Such activities in a real-world setting would cause a person to be terminated from their job, arrested, cause a divorce, or can irreparably tarnish their social reputation. And while not all of these events are common, they do happen, and in the World of War-crack, where opportunists are seen as a commodity to fuel the train of game-progression and addiction, and not a social liability, there is often little if any retribution for such selfish actions.
The problem is that many people who see the game as a lifestyle and as a "job" simply don't care about the social or Machiavellian implications of theirs or anyone else's in-game activities. They want to advance in the game, and it's not that they're trying to hurt anyone in the process, it's just that hurt is a natural side-effect in their eyes, and this minority of "leet" players, quite frankly, doesn't care. The favored excuse of unsavory in-game activity is "It's just a game, don't get so upset over a game." The favored response is, "You're right, it is just a game, so why are you taking it so seriously that it's worth creating all this drama and hurting so many people?" Another favorite is, "I'm paying fifteen dollars a month to play this game, and I should be able to play it anyway I choose." Never mind the other people who helped me that are also paying fifteen dollars a month for heart-break and abandonment.
The introduction of the internet has resulted in sweeping strides in communication and technology never before possibly, but it has also resulted in the greediest, most socially inept generation of Americans in the history of our country. Since the creation of the first chat client on the internet, people (Children especially) have been acting-out on the internet in a manner that would be condemned in real life. Oftentimes, it's easy to forget that there is a real person sitting behind the name in that chat window you're talking to, and paying any amount of respect towards a set of "ones and zeros" can seem pointless and unentertaining, especially to impetuous, reactionary youth. And since their identities are completely hidden, and they have nothing to fear, they can lob all manner of profanity and personal insult at someone once a debate breaks out. Many members of the youngest generation now coming of age in America were raised as "children of the internet," and as such, many of them have retained the social skills they developed early on in these unsupervised chat rooms. Another negative effect of the internet is the instant gratification factor: At a young age, children learned early on that they could download music, movies, and even television shows and video games free of charge and with the simple push of a button. The result is arguably the most-spoiled rotten generation raised in this or any other country: Generation Now, many of which who ate up WoW like it was candy. In a game that was originally designed to be dependant on patience and delicate social interaction, this group managed to twist the rules of the game around to their own ends and minimized the importance of these two key elements to any MMORPG. The influence of Generation Now took a hefty toll on Blizzard's most successful creation, and nearly destroyed it for all but the most hardcore video game addict.
Blizzard went to great effort to correct these issues in the development of the game's expansion pack. The maximum number of people required for a raid has been reduced to a more obtainable twenty-five. Items and treasure are much easier to acquire for players who must venture through the game solo. There is much, much more content to delve through at the new level cap of 70 in small groups of five or ten people than previously available in the original game.
The inception of the expansion created something of a "virtual apocalypse," because since the rules of the game were about to change so drastically, many players saw this as the end of their way of playing and "living." Some players fled for themselves by quitting the game and uninstalling. Many players who had quit previously returned to explore new content with old friends. Nearly every single large guild on every server, previously tooled for raiding the now-obsolete forty-man dungeons, splintered into smaller guilds or simply exploded on contact with the expansion. Guild banks were raided. Drama ensued. Feelings were hurt. But gamers had a new toy to play with, so they didn't particularly care.
Generation Now managed to pervert the game and create massive amounts of stress for the game's designers, who took great lengths to limit the negative impact people and their natural tendencies would have on their game and on other players. Blizzard hasn't "policed" their virtual world in order to act as saviors, they're simply trying to maintain more customers and garner more profits. Their efforts are worthy of being lauded, nonetheless. However, now that their ant farms have been re-vamped, the question is, will the same sort of drama erupt in the expansion, even with all the new rules and fail-safes put into place? Will a minority of socially-inept hardcore gamers and impatient, Machiavellian conspirators succeed a second time in ruining a video game that was supposed to be accessible to the masses? It's possibly too early to tell, but we do have one piece of news from the virtual world that may already be an indication of trouble brewing
A French player became the first player in the game to reach level 70, and he did it in a matter of hours by "cheating the system" and receiving in-game help from up to thirty-five different players. Chances are, Blizzard will alter the game to insure that nobody else can pull off such a feat, but the question is, since it could be weeks before his friends reach the same level, how long will this player end up waiting for other players to catch up so they can progress? How long will he be willing to wait before he finds a group of people his own level? Will that same group of people just happen to be the guild he formed for the expansion, or will he find a new guild, and will the pattern repeat itself once again? Will we finally being to bare witness to more and more examples such as my own journey to meet my new friends from my guild, and less and less examples of abandoned, solo players sitting by campfires that burned out hours previous?
Only time will tell.