Message to the Planet Teenager

WARNING: This post contains spoilers about the game of life.


If there is one thing that sends me scrambling through the vents in my home and shrieking into the woods it’s gamers who buy into the myth that gaming is an anti-social activity. This perspective is only possible if one still inhabits the Lip-Locked BFF OMG 24/7/365 world that is teenager brain; that demented stage of life where one is actually glad that the phone call is for you.


Gaming is anti-social compared to what, exactly. Compared to the soccer game where the total amount of social interaction consists of 10,000 people all screaming in unison and rampaging on the pitch. Or perhaps you are thinking of the theater where people sit in total silence for two hours, where the only acceptable vocal expression is laughter (provided it’s actually a comedy) and any actual conversation is greeted with a scowl and a shush. No wait, you must be thinking of that great beacon of social interaction, the one that Americans have on in their home eight hours a day, called a TV. Yeah that’s it: family time. Where everyone sits for hours saying nary a word, eating popcorn, watching goofy strangers on a box that truth be told if they found those people in their home under any other circumstances the police would be called. On-line gaming is anti-social compared to the ubiquitous TV? Really, you believe that? Incredible.


Now I’m certain that you think that adults have all the fun. Error. Error. Error. Work life is just like high school only it’s filled with people old enough to know better but don’t. However social you are as a teenager that’s the most social you are going to get. Yes, I know that the media tells you differently. They lie. There is nothing interesting or even remotely eventful about the office Christmas party or the gang going out after work to the bar. The bar has a TV in it. That’s your first clue. The office party is filled with your co-workers….the same ones you have seen all year. That’s your second clue. If simply gathering a bunch of people together in the same physical space constitutes socialization then not only are sports matches and cocktail parties social events but so is the subway, the airplane, and the traffic jam.


On-line games, for the most part, are intensively social activities. Running instances requires you to interact with strangers in order to achieve a group goal. Selling or buying crafted items or trade skills on the trade channel requires skills in advertising and negotiation. There are plenty of small group quests available. And those are just social aspects of the game for people who, like myself, don’t even belong to guilds. Guilds and raiding add an even deeper and more immersive social aspect to game play. Yet somehow simply because this social activity doesn’t take place face-to-face it’s not social. Well neither does a phone conversation, instant messaging, or texting. Why are those social but vent is not? It’s stupid.



I don’t wish to imply that on-line gaming is the most social activity existing. It’s still possible to have a backyard bar-b-que with those real life strangers, your neighbors. Or you can volunteer at church; or get involved with a political party; or actually play a sport instead of watching it. But let’s be honest: hardly anyone does those things anymore. I actually think that on the social interaction scale on-line gaming sits right in the middle at about a 5/10. Teenagers only think it ranks a 1/10 because they think all life will be like teenagerhood. It’s not. For many people on-line gaming is actually a constructive improvement in their social life. If you think that’s sad or that’s scary, grow-up. I mean that literally: grow-up.


The point I want to get across is that you think there is something inherently interesting about the movies, or about smooching, or sending 24,000 text messages a month. There’s not. In fact, all those activities are actually boring as hell. You think you're seeing reality when you are only seeing the artifacts of your own mind at this stage in your development. Your brain physically changes as you get older. You didn’t think all that stuff was cool when you were six and you wont think it’s cool when your 36. That’s why adults call that OMG mental fog “teenager brain”. It’s not a crime; we went though it too. But it doesn’t last; your brain develops beyond teenagerhood. And that means the party ends.


I warned you at the beginning that this was a spoiler. And I’m sorry if I ruined your day. But you shouldn’t despair. As I tell my teenage nieces and nephews, being a teenager is great. It’s the only time in your life where you have all the physical and mental capabilities to cause trouble and for the most part people won’t hold you accountable for using them. Enjoy this fantasy. It’s the only time in your life you actually get to live it.

Praising or blaming – different approaches to train your raiders

Some guilds love it; others think it poisons the atmosphere and should be banished.

I’m referring to the Failbot addon (nowadays replaced by EnsidiaFails), which mercilessly will point out the poor player who hasn’t moved out of fire, shadow crashes or failed otherwise during a boss fight that is designed to test the individual performance of a raider. Everyone in the raid will know who is to blame for the failure, not after reading the wws report later on, but instantly in the raid chat. It’s shame and blame in its purest form.

Big Brother helper
We don’t use it in my guild. We do use Big Brother though, which is somewhat related. This addon will announce in the raid chat any player who hasn’t used a flask or two elixirs or eaten buff food. After some initial annoyance when we first started using it a couple of months ago, it has been accepted and is now a natural part of our raiding environment. We don’t see it as a blaming tool, but rather as a helper to remind us to renew our flasks. It’s well needed now that they only last for an hour for non alchemists.

However, so far no one has seriously suggested that we should start using a fail announcing addon. This doesn’t mean that people who make critical errors during a fight won’t get to know about it. They certainly will, publicly, in a class chat channel or in whispers, depending on what kind of error it was and how it affects the rest of the raid.

When negative feedback is given, it’s in a more mannered way and often in general terms, telling mages to shape up their counterspelling, hunters to keep better track of their pets, or whatever issue we’re currently struggling with. But we don’t have it as a standard procedure to call out errors of individual players, addressing it publicly by the means of an addon, and I think this is a wise approach.

Positive reinforcement
I know there are many ideas about how to best train a dog or for that case raise a child (not that I claim it’s the same thing). I can only speak for myself, and I haven’t trained any dogs, but from my experience as a parent and as a group leader at work, I’ve always succeeded much better using a positive approach. Of course there are moments when you have to be very straightforward and give negative feedback about an unacceptable behaviour or lousy performance. But my focus has always been on reinforcing the good things I see. Without having any specific numbers, I figure the proportion of my praising compared to my criticizing is 80/20, if not more.

This isn’t any exceptional management approach; in fact it’s rather common practice in real life. (I probably should at: “where I live”. The styles of leading seem to vary quite a bit between different countries as well as business sectors.) But in Azeroth it seems to me as if it’s quite the opposite. It’s somewhat expected that the more hardcore and successful a guild is, the more abuse and negative shout outs will there be in the raid channel. The question is: is it really an effective way to make people perform better? Do those outbursts really help you reach your goals quicker? Do the players who have failed suddenly improve just because you tell the world that they suck? Will you really achieve quicker bosskills at a lower cost in repairbills and time spent on corpse runs? I doubt it.

Actually I think the effect can become the opposite. A fail announcing addon is likely to make more of your raiders miserable and annoyed with each other. Some players can even become nervous and tense about it, thus making more mistakes, and this can be the beginning of a spiral heading downwards.

How to feedback
Negative feedback should in my opinion preferably be given in a smaller context and be directed to the ones that are concerned.

Positive feedback on the other hand could be sprinkled generously. Of course it must be relevant, true and not taken out of the blue. If you praise people that are just performing at their expected basic level they’ll look right through you, wondering what you’re getting at. But what you should do is to notice when people are assigned to a new, challenging task for the first time and succeed reasonably well. You should point out players who look more to the outcome of an encounter than their position on the dps chart. You should direct the attention towards players who act responsibly, who can read the situation and dare to take independent and wise decisions on the fly when it’s necessary.

Put the spotlight on whatever kind of action you’d like to see more of in your raid. People don’t necessarily need extra dkp or loot to feel appreciated and motivated to perform better. Just a little bit of attention works remarkably well as incentive.

A praisebot addon?
The reason why I came to think about this topic was a little post by Swiftmend, whose guild is running Failbot in raids. They finally became tired of constantly listening to the negative messages, so they changed it into the opposite: “Player X is incredibly awesome at Shadow Crash”. Of course everyone still knew that it was a blame addon, but it gave them a laugh and hopefully took out a bit of the potential drama in it, so it’s probably a good thing to do if you insist on running it. “Fail in style”, as their raid leader stated it.

I couldn’t help start thinking about it seriously though. How come that there isn’t (as far as I know of) any Praisebot addon, spitting out positive messages about things that are done exceptionally successful in the raid? And if there was one, what kind of things should it inform about? Would it have any effect?

A blunt Swiss army knife in action

I did it! I brought my baby druid to Deadmines and I tanked one of the bosses. Sort of. Almost. It didn’t turn out exactly as I had hoped or expected, but after all, it was a quick run, around 30 minutes, and not a single death, so I shouldn’t complain. I felt like a blunt Swiss army knife.

Arasil The Tank
In my vision it would have been quite different. In the motion picture Arasil The Tank running in my head, I saw how I was the one that arranged the epic event, invited and led crowd in the mission to seek out and kill this evil Mr Van Cleef.

Arasil would be that strong, sturdy tanking bear, probably a little bit grumpy, but solid as a rock, putting up a steady pace for the run - not overly quick, but yet efficient. I pictured how I’d take quick and wise decisions about how many mobs to pull. I would mark, if not every single defias, at least most of them. And I would assign people, telling them in which order to kill them, what to cc, what to aoe. I would deal with the loot issues. I would praise the ones who deserved it. I would probably not criticize much, because that’s not my way of leading people. To put it short: I would be godlike.

Nothing of this happened.

The preparations
I had planned it all so well, probably putting a lot more effort into it than a normal sensible player would do for an ordinary five-man run. After all this was one of the activities on my 33-things-to-do-before-I-quit-the-game list and I wanted to do it properly. My gear wasn’t exactly top notch, but I had thrown on a couple of low level enchants and some leatherworking enforcement on my armor, whatever I could to improve a bit. I had loaded myself with elixirs to get an extra boost. Considering the size of the stack you could think I was about to do a progress raid, but that’s just how I am.

I was prepared, but above all I was motivated, eager to give my brand new druid girl a real challenge. I felt as if I just had gotten one of those clever multi-tool devices and I wanted to fold out every single blade on it to try it out.

I'm sure that Gnomeaggedon and some other valued friends of the Kirin Tor will consider me a traitor, but since I’m always truthful in this blog I’ll admit it to you: I have reluctantly fallen in love. Reluctantly because there are way too many druid bloggers out there already as it is – they certainly don’t need any more to join their ranks. Reluctantly because I’ve always thought that one of the wisest things I’ve done in this game was to focus on my main rather than split my game time on thousands of project, not completing any of them.

But it would take a ton of resistance gear to withstand the joys of shapeshifting, the pleasure of healing, tanking, spellcasting, cc:ing, in short being capable to adapt to any situation you can think of in the game. It’s as far from the fireball-fireball-fireball spam as you can come. No wonder I couldn’t make myself put the druid on pause until I had managed to get a guild-only run. And that’s how it came that I ended up in the LFG channel, and before I knew it I had been invited to pug-party.

Tank competition
I can only blame myself for what happened in this run. I should have spoken up, being clear about what I wanted, saying that I was a tank, take it or leave it. Instead I mumbled like a school girl, giving a little speech, saying that I was ”specced into feral and that I’d prefer to tank if possible, since I wanted to try out something new, but oh, wait, I’m all new to tanking, so if I suck too much, just tell me and I’ll leave.”

I figure it’s not the best way to introduce yourself if you want gain the trust of a group.

As we ventured the tunnels of DM it became apparent that this party didn’t have one tank but three of them. Me and two paladins were all fighting like crazy to get the aggro. I growled and did everything I came to think of, pushing all those new unfamiliar bear buttons, trying to at least get some of the mobs glued to me. And the others did just the same.

Miraculously enough this zerg method worked reasonably well through the whole run. The only victim in this was the poor priest who ran out of mana in his efforts to keep up the health on three wanna-be-tanks. I was the only one who paid any attention whatsoever for his requests for breaks. The paladins just pushed forward, grabbing another bunch of mobs before I could do it, saying that the priest should blame himself for not saving his mana better.

When we entered the forge of Gilnid I finally dared to raise my voice, asking if they couldn’t let me tank this boss. And finally they let me. It wasn’t as organized as I wanted it to be and I pulled him prematurely together with some of the remaining trash wandering around. But he went down alright and I had kept myself steady in the top of the Omen meter. I smiled for a second, until I saw the paladins disappearing into the next corridor and I realized I had to catch up and fight if I wanted to have my share of love from the mobs.

My first tank insights
All in all, this wasn’t quite the run I had imagined. But I brought one thing from it: my first insights about what’s going on in the mind of a tank. Grabbing not only one but several mobs and keeping their interest was far from easy. The race on the Omen meter can obviously be quite a nightmare. This time it was self inflicted – the paladins knew what they were doing and it didn’t cause us any problem. But I could very clearly imagine how stressful it must be in a harder context.

Was I proud of what I had accomplished? No, far from. I was probably one of the bluntest army knives every seen. Still: it was a milestone in my personal WoW career, a noticable step forward in my general knowledge and understanding of the game.

On the loot side, if anyone wondered, I ended up with the Emberstone staff. Maybe it's a sign that my next instance experience should be as a healer? Hopefully I won’t have two other players fighting to perform the same task this time.

The motion picture about Arasil The Healer is already running in my mind.

To be continued.

Why I rather take abuse from a living jerk than listen to the polished speech of an NPC

Would you like to play WoW as a solo-game? Many players would, according to a recent post by Tobold.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After all there are many ways to play WoW and this richness of the game is probably the major reason for its success. It’s like a huge supermarket with aspects and features for every taste.

Yet I couldn’t help shaking my head in disbelief, wondering: if those guys don’t like to interact with other players, why did they start playing an MMO in the first place?

The annoyances of interaction
In his post Tobold discusses the social interaction in MMOs. He says that some kind of social interaction is necessary; if it was a pure soloing game people probably wouldn’t be prepared to pay monthly subscription fees.

But he also points out some problems connected to the socializing with other players. One is the requirement of coordinating your playtime with others. A part of your time online will always be wasted while you’re waiting for players to come online or get to the spot where you have agreed to meet up. Pick-up groups can dissolve halfway through the instance when someone suddenly leaves without any explanation.

Another issue is the player the player behaviour, or rather the lack of it. Shielded by the anonymity of Internet, people will behave much worse than they would in real life.

Indirect interaction
Based on those observations, he predicts that the future for MMO lies in what he calls “indirect social interaction”. Player economy is one example. When you’re playing the AH in one way interacting with others as you’re fighting competitors and trying to predict how to consumers will act. But you’re not talking to them, them, you don’t know or care about if they’re online at the same time as you are. Tobold also mentions achievements, which give some players a kick when they can show off in front of other players, without actually saying something about it.

According to Tobold it’s just a matter of time before we’ll see more games where players will interact without meeting each other online. They could engage into cooperative projects, such as building guild bases and they could deal with “politics”, which is a concept I don’t quite understand, but I suspect Tobold rather is referring to guild politics than to real life political ideologies.

Larísa’s point of view
So, what is Larísa’s take on this? Well, it’s quite possible that Tobold is right that this is going to happen. My knowledge about the MMO genre is very limited. It dates only back to the beginning of 2007 and it doesn’t include any other game than WoW. I'm really not the right person to question an authority as Tobold. So I can only speak from a strictly subjective perspective when I say this:

I love the direct social interaction. WoW wouldn’t be the same to me without it. Not at all.

Yes, of course I run into people that are annoying. I’ll meet them in pugs or I hear them yelling in the general chat channels in the capitals.

Yes, I too encounter asshats from time to time, people who are abusive, selfish, stupid and take actions that somehow intervene with my plans or ideas about how the game should be played.

Yes, there have been moments when I’ve been wondering what I’m doing, trying to play games with immature, annoying teenagers who I have nothing in common with and can’t be trusted for a single second.

But do you know what? If I never had to be exposed to those or to anyone else, if my gameplay was instanced in some manner and we only interacted asynchronously, I would soon grow incredibly bored.

There would be pretty sceneries and there would be NPCs to speak to, but they would be scripted and therefore completely predictable. I would surely admire it for a while, but something would be missing.

If I would be presented the choice between taking some abuse from a living jerk or listening to the polished speech of an NPC, I would pick the jerk anytime. Because there’s a real person behind it.

The potential of the unexpected
In the end, all those annoying people actually helps to bring life to Azeroth, just by being online. Either I interact with them or not – the very thing that I COULD talk to them if I wanted to adds another dimension: the potential of the unexpected. They helps me feel, they make me laugh and giggle and they make me rage sometimes, which also is a part of being human.

Visiting Ironforge or Stormwind resembles a bit of strolling around in a real life metropolis or sitting at a café watching the street life. There are voices, there are smells, and there is noise, always something interesting going on that can catch my attention. Being out in the wild of Kalimdor you won’t see as many people around, but you’re quite likely to start a conversation with the few you see. And you never know where it will take you – will you make another friend or a foe?

The MMOs haven’t yet evolved so far that there are built in sensors (imagine the day when we can play WoW as if we entered a holo deck!). But the here-and-now presence of other living players definitely adds to the illusion that I’m actually visiting a different, inhabited, virtual world and not just sitting by a computer, pressing some buttons, void of any emotions whatsoever.

I hope Spinksville is right in her recent post where she suggests that we’re still in the beginning of the MMO era and that our way of handling it will improve. Maybe in 30 years time we'll look back and laugh a bit at the problems we’re now facing.

And I sincerely hope that the solution we'll come up with isn't to construct the games in such a manner that players don’t have to interact. Call me naïve if you want to.

A moment of clarity - how I finally turned my back to AT

Why am I doing this? I don’t enjoy it the slightest anymore!

The insight hit me like a rock as I was slowing down to land in the middle of a bunch of scourge, assembled on an ice field, waiting for their daily execution.

Yeah, by killing those creatures I could make some easy gold and make another faction admire Larísa a little bit more than they did before. I would get currency to get one more pet to forget to display. Looking at it briefly it seemed efficient enough – I’d get two quests done at the same time, since killing one scourge counted for both. The amount of gold and vanity loot I could make per hour was decent, not to say amazing.

It was just one thing. One little thing, but nevertheless important. The very thought of doing those quests another time was revolting. I was totally done with it.

Why had I even bothered to pick it up? Had I completely lost my mind?

From theory to action
I’ve been writing a few posts touching on this issue lately. Some readers have pointed out that I seemed to be on the verge of burnout from daily questing, suggesting that I’d look for a change. And after some therapeutic ranting at PPI, I’ve finally agreed with them. What is more important: I won’t let it stay as a thought experiment. Just as Gevlon preaches, I’m actually doing something about it.

I landed my bird on a safe spot. I felt that this was one of those blessed moments of clarity. There would be no more jousting. No more flying all over the world to kiss a frog and get a sword. No more scourge massacre. At least not for a long time, though I won’t say “never again”, since the itch may come back at some point. But for now being I refuse to spend another single minute on a grind I don’t enjoy. The decision was taken and it was such a relief.

I decided to immediately put Larísa to bed – it was not a raiding night and I just couldn’t come up with anything fun to keep her occupied. Now what? Suddenly I remembered something. Didn’t I roll a little druid a month ago? A blue-faced creature, with tattoos all over her face, currently sitting in Darnassus, collecting dust, waiting for her mistress to finish this tournament business?

The awakening
A few minutes later I found myself bravely attacking level 12 mobs in the deep forests of Darkshore. The loot was about as far from epic as you can come. I got copper instead of gold. I cheered at an offhand giving me +1 intellect, which I hoped would make my mana pool increase slightly. But what mattered more was that I needed to be on my toes all the time, as I was trying to figure out when to be a bear and when not to, when to root and when to heal myself, how I would make best use out of my mana or rage

Trust me; facing a rabid bear is far scarier than taking out defenceless scourge, if you’re not overpowered by higher level or better gear.

I became aware of things that had faded away from me during all those months spent in endgame. Like the huge aggro range of low level characters and what it’s like to make corpse runs when you’re questing and the graveyard is in the other end of the zone.

How had it happened that I had forgotten how fun this game can be – outside of the raids? This was an awakening. Admittedly the zone wasn’t as polished and artistically interesting as Northrend is and the quests were pretty simple, not sophisticated at all. No phasing, no movies, no vehicles. I was back to killing 20 boar, sorry, bears. But at least it was 20 bears I had never seen before and the spells and attacks were all brand new.

Once again I was a noob, slowly learning how to druid. To my astonishment I also looked at Darnassus with completely new eyes. It wasn’t just the deserted city where the lack of NPC:s to ask makes it annoyingly hard to find your way around. It had turned into my home town, a peaceful spot in the world, which I wanted to defend against the threat from the evil forces of the world.

It was a complete change of perspective, a brave new world to inhale, more than can just be explained by my change of height, from gnome size to nightelf.

The Deadmines project
Does this mean that Larísa has turned in to an altoholic, giving up raiding, giving up her struggles to reach worthy, and challenging end-game goals? No, absolutely no! My mage and her ability to raid will always be my main priority. But as the game has evolved in WotLK there isn’t the same need even for a dedicated raider to grind between the raid nights as there once was. It isn’t hard to get the gold you need to finance repairs and consumables. And the only rep grind that is required for maximising your gear is the Son of Hodir, which I’m done and over with since long. When I did this AT grind was rather done out of habit (“grinding is what you do when you don’t raid”) than out of desire.

So what’s next? What are my aims for my druid? Actually there aren’t many. I haven’t made any progression plan. I picked skinning and leatherworking as professions for now, not because I’ve made any deep analysis how it will fit into the team of my other characters, but because they’re new to me and seemed to be OK for a druid.

I don’t rush anything. For the first time in a long time I can honestly say that I’m not in any hurry whatsoever. I’m levelling alone, so there isn’t any “I should keep-up-with-the-others stress”. I don’t know if I’ll even reach 80. The only clear goal I have is to make an old dream of mine come true: to clear Deadmines properly, without any boosting, at the right level.

I don’t expect it to be all easy to find a willing party to join me in this mission once I’m in the DM level range. Who wants to spend hours wiping in an instance the proper way, when you can get boosted and get the loot and xp you want in just 10 minutes? Who wants to put up with a newbie druid, who never has tanked or healed anything in her life before and probably needs some direction? It’s as far from a free lunch as you can come.

But maybe there are a few likeminded people out there. People who have been hit with a moment of clarity and want to slip out from the burden of the daily grind. I hope so.

Was it good to you too? – about shifting perspectives

The raid night was just about to end. The last piece of loot had been handed out; a portal to Dalaran was trembling in the air. We were staying in the raid just another minute, so that the dkp addon handlers could finish their work. Then we would disassemble, some of us eager to gem and enchant their new shiny loot, others itching to cool down in a battleground or just completing the last few “must-do” dailies. A few just waited for clearance to log off so they could head towards the bed as soon as possible.

Our raid leader gave his short conclusion speech about the night, as he always does: “It was kind of messy, but we oneshotted the bosses and got the job done. Good effort of everyone”. He sounded pretty pleased, using his “pink voice”, not to be mixed up with his darker and displeased voice. That doesn’t happen too often. He’s quite picky and can be a little bit harsh when we deserve it, which is one of the reasons why we love him so much.

Indeed it was an enjoyable night. I had once again gone fire, giving it a new chance. I still felt slightly unused to it, struggling to keep up the living bomb, messing around with new key combinations. At least it wasn’t such a disaster as the previous time. I felt hopeful.

The post-raid analysis
Then a question occurred to me: was it as enjoyable to everyone else in the raid? Actually I wouldn’t take it for granted. It’s a bit like the classic bedroom question: “was it good to you too?” You never really know, do you?

To make a post-raid analysis and evaluation, describing what has just passed on a scale from “fail” to “success” is a very personal matter. I’ve more and more come to realize that even if you look at something that appears to be an objective, undisputable fact, such as a wws chart, you can’t be sure that everyone will agree about how to interpret it. What is fine with one player – “we didn’t wipe once!” – can at the same time be a disaster for another: “there were several deaths and people had to cover for others mistakes, we’ll never be able to do this on hard mode if we don’t shape up!” It all depends on from where you’re coming and what expectations you have.

There have been moments in my raiding life in WoW when I’ve been completely taken by surprise by the discussion following a raid. I remember once (a long time ago, in another guild), when I had enjoyed what I thought was a very good, successful, efficient night in Karazhan. We had been focused and the bosses had fallen like bowling pins. I expressed how pleased I was to another raider, and got a response: “do you really think so? It was one of the worst raids I’ve ever been in. The atmosphere at TS was poisoning. No one said a word, it was absolutely horrible. I’ve lost my lust for raiding altogether!” Listening to him you could hardly believe that we had experienced the same raid. And in one sense I guess we hadn’t, even though we technically were wearing the same raid ID.

Seeing it from the other side
So what am I trying to say? It isn’t exactly any revolutionary insight I’m presenting in this post. Anyone who has attended school has probably been presented this picture, which can be seen in two alternative ways, as an old lady or as a young girl. People see things differently, yeah, we know.

But thinking about all the guild drama you hear and read about it seems to me as if some players haven’t grasped it yet. Many, many of the conflicts I hear and read about come as an effect of lack of communication and a refusal to try to see things from “the other side”.

So what can you do about it? Unfortunately there isn’t yet any way that I can enter the mind of someone else and see the world through their eyes, as they did in the excellent movie Being John Malcovich, if someone remembers it. But you can use your curiosity and imagination. And you can talk to your guildmates. Ask them what they thought about the raid. If they discuss their experiences in a class forum on your guild website – follow it, even though it’s not about your class. It can be quite an eye-opener.

Another idea if you want to see the raid from a different perspective is to ask if someone could record it. One of your tanks recently finished a movie from one of our Sarth+3d kills. It’s nothing spectacular, there are no comments or instructions and his UI looks even messier than mine, which says a lot. But to me it was still refreshing and interesting to see the fight from this new angle; somehow the additional perspective also adds depth in my perception and gives me a better general understanding of what’s going on.

Don’t forget that when the raid is finished there are 25 mental recordings of what happened. They’re unique. Sometimes they’re contradictive. Yet they’re all true in their own way. Share it, put the pieces together and learn from it.

And maybe you won’t even have to ask the “was-it-good-to-you-too question” next time. Because you already know the answer.

The Good People of Azeroth

Life sometimes hands us odd coincidences that upon reflection turn out to be telling. In my case, I completed the Amber Ledge quests in the Borean Tundra the same day Obama released the previously secret torture memos from the Bush administration. For those of you who have short memories, the Amber Ledge quest chain includes the quest The Art of Persuasion where the character is required to repeatedly jab a captive enemy prisoner with a “Neural Needler,” with each jab producing increasing amounts of psychic pressure until he confesses to the secret location of a captive ally. For those of you with really short memories, Bush was the President of the United States before Obama.

I actually didn’t realize this coincidence had happened until a day later, my mind too absorbed by the game to pay attention to the news. But even at the time the parallel was too obvious for me to ignore. My initial reaction was to abandon the quest chain because there was no way I could condone this type of behavior from my character. But I was only a few quests short of the Nothing Boring About Borean achievement and I didn’t want to waste the time to track down new quests. So I tortured the captive and went on with the game, a little bile in my throat.

An amoral universe

One aspect of the World of Warcraft that has always left a vague distaste in my mouth is that Azeroth is essentially an amoral universe. There is no real moral conflict. By this I do not mean that the world does not present the character with moral situations. Rather, it’s the fact that those situations are all biased towards whatever gets the character loot, experience, achievements. The real problem with the Art of Persuasion quest isn’t that the player is asked to torture a human mob; that’s a genuine moral situation. The real problem is that the reward structure is entirely biased towards torture. Torturing the captive grants the character experience, gold, and a quest completion that counts towards a variety of in-game achievements. Refusing to torture grants the character absolutely nothing.

Another example of this amorality is the quest chain in Zul’drak called Betrayal. Here the player is required to infiltrate a Scourge bastion and through a series of heinous acts earn the leaders trust, find out his plans, and eventually slay him. From a game play perspective that sequence of quests and their scripting was amusing and fun; in fact it is one the better quest chains in the game along with Saving Sharpbeak and the Swift Flight Form quest for Druids. But I remained troubled throughout the quests by the implication that it’s acceptable for the good guys to lie and to deceive to get what they want. Lost in such design is the question that if our actions don’t separate the good from the bad, what does.

Morality versus Reputation

On the surface it would be easy to jab Blizzard with condoning or promoting torture but it’s actually a result of a fundamental choice in game design. Many games at least have meters where the cumulative total of a player’s actions slide the bar closer to good or evil. The original Dungeons and Dragons paper game had the concept of alignment with the dual poles of good/evil and law/chaos. While in some games the character’s alignment is merely cosmetic (has no affect on game play) and there is the occasional annoyance of disagreeing with the developers idea of what constitutes a good or evil action, those games at least gave a nod to the fact that actions had moral consequences. It’s a fundamental truth that what gets measured gets managed and in the World of Warcraft there is no way to manage your character’s morality because it simply isn’t measured. Morality as a meaningful aspect of game play is completely absent.

But that doesn’t mean their aren’t choices to be made; players need to perceive that their actions make a difference somehow. Instead of changing alignment characters gain Reputation with the various game factions. Gaining high reputation with one faction often comes with various rewards including unique gear and titles. Indeed, one of the most difficult achievements in the game is gaining the title “The Exalted”, which is awarded for gaining exalted reputation with 40 of the 44 factions in the game. It’s a telling point that a major game achievement is awarded not to the character who behaves closest to an ideal good but simply to the person who serves the greatest number of powerful interest groups. To be as plain as possible: in WoW kissing the right ass, going along to get along, is what works; morality is irrelevant.

Playing for Good

A similar debate ensued over at Wow.com regarding this issue a few days after I completed The Art of Persuasion quest. Alex Ziebart argues that the best way to envision characters in WoW is as mercenaries. On the other hand, Daniel Whitcomb believes that Varian Wrynn is in the moral right. It’s possible that both views are correct; the non-player characters of Azeroth live in a moral universe while the player characters live in a reputational one. But it leads to some decidedly awkward questions. Alex says that “saving the freaking world is reward enough” for us mercenaries but it’s difficult to imagine why we would care: which achievement is that again, who is that rep grind for. We’re not really Jesus and we’re not really Pontius Pilot; we’re just the guards that stick god with a spear and then cast lots for his garments.

The tragedy of a moral player in an amoral world is that there is no way to play for good. The lone alternative to evil is to simply not play. If you think torturing is wrong and you want your character to reflect that, your only choice is to walk away. One is then left with the awful choice between not playing or not doing good. It’s an uncomfortable dilemma.