SL vs WoW - war or peace?

For this assignment I have chosen to take a look into Second Life, a MMOW, and World of Warcraft, a MMOG.  I chose these games to represent their respective categories for many reasons.  The first being both are one of the largest in their respective categories.  Second, both have grown well beyond the original expectation, and as such many things have spawned off which are interesting to observe and compare.  Finally, I have experience with both which enables me to comment on more specific intricacies.  That said I have played much more WoW than SL, so forgive me if it leans towards that. 

Community is a big aspect of why people play both MMOG’s MMOW’s.  Pearce describes these groups as forming from simple common interests, and I believe this is true in both WoW and SL.  Pearce also relates virtual worlds to theme parks, which I disagree with.  Unlike theme parks, where a group of people might get together because they enjoy roller coasters, communities in these online games go much deeper than that.  There is a certain level of pride in what sort of guild tag you have in WoW.  In some cases it can even define what kind of person you are by saying what sort of people you associate yourself with.  It has been argued that guilds are only in existence because of the content that is presented in MMOG’s, but that doesn’t explain why people that don’t raid stay in guilds, and above that why non-raiding guilds exist.  While game space may be constricted in MMOG’s and less in MMOW’s, both provide an experience which goes way beyond that of a theme park.  

Gender representation in SL versus WoW is quite different, and has changed since the MMO’s release.  WoW started out as very male-oriented, a sort of “kombat lingerie” as Fullerton et al refers to it.  The males were dressed in large armor vs. females in feature accenting gear.  As the game progressed though, despite there being clear differences, the male and female gear has come to more of a median.  As mentioned previously, SL leaves clothing open to modification in addition to most other aspects of the character.  While there are many examples of people dressing in more revealing clothing, it is up to the user.   How the character is dressed plays a more prominent role in SL than in WoW.  Because of the higher connection to the actual character in SL, how you dress says something about who you are and what you represent in the virtual world.  Just as clothing is an attribute of personality in the real world, SL takes on this form of identity.  In WoW, there are fewer options.  There are some options as to what you can wear when around towns or talking to people, but when it comes to raids the gear is forced upon you by developers. 

Pearce discusses the “boundaries between play and production” in relation to how MMOW’s and MMOG’s are played.  I feel like WoW and SL come to more of a median when it comes to in-game economy.  SL present s a world in which you can be a buyer or a seller.  SL even allows for players to open up shops and run a business in the game.  While WoW doesn’t allow this much freedom, it shows aspects of this freedom also.  There is an auction house in WoW that allows players to buy and sell items, and different realms hold different economies.  This leaves very little freedom like SL does, but the outside skills of business still come through.  Players have devised strategies and guides to using knowledge of economics and applying these to in-game economies.  Said strategies have become very popular, and while less noticeable, this shows a link between MMOW’s and MMOG’s.  While gold sellers and account selling is something widely associated with WoW, it is not endorsed by Blizzard, and therefore I don’t feel is something that is relevant in terms of actual game play and its role with the player.

  Representation of space differs greatly in SL compared to WoW.  In SL, tools are provided which allow the users to create content.  This gets a little of the stress of development off the shoulders of the creators of the game, and can keep the users occupied.  Morningstar and Farmer saw this as a problem when they spoke of it in relation to Lucas Art’s Habitat.  Often content developed by the users can surpass that of the developers.  Pearce describes the Uru creations as a perfect example of high quality user generated content.  This brings into question what we are paying for in games that don’t allow this, such as WoW which has content completely controlled by the developers.  One of the issues with controlled content is that players finish the content that Blizzard provides and as such are stuck in a waiting game.  Where the initial leveling content in WoW is solo, the end game objectives follow the MUD ideas that Curtis describes; that of social activities being the only obtainable objectives.  This social aspect makes people stick around and play while they wait for more content from Blizzard.

I want to close this comparison with what I feel is the most important aspect of any MMO these days, community.  In both SL and WoW, groups of people create smaller communities in which you have more interaction as you play through the game.  In WoW this is guilds.  In SL these groups tend to form around like minded people, whom enjoy interacting in the world in similar ways.  The communities tend to play a larger aspect in the game play for MMOG’s, where in MMOW’s its more for social reasoning.  Taylor mentions that the entertainment value of communities carries across both venues.  In terms of how these communities are regulated often follows with how tightly the developers deal with content.  The more free they are with content tends to be a tell to how free they will be with community regulations.  As such, in SL there are very few global rules, allowing the individual communities to set rules based on how they enjoy their interactions. This style is described in depth by Mnookin as he speaks about LamdaMOO.   In WoW, most guilds are forced into a mold that Blizzard has set.  That said how developed the community is depends on the people in it, and even in the structured environment people come together based on mutual interest in their own interaction in the game.

 

Work Cited:

Curtis P. Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities.

Farmer, R. & Morningstar, C. (1990/1991). The Lesson of LucasArts Habitat.

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). A Game of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space. In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia. 1-11.

Mnookin, J. (1996) Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a Special Issue, June 1996.

Pearce, C. (2007). "Narrative Environments from Disneyland to World of Warcraft." In Space, Time, Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. 1-6.

Pearce, C. (2006). "Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up." Games & Culture. Volume 1, Issue 1. 1-8.

Taylor, T.L. (2003). Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them. International Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 19, No. 1. 25-34.