World
of Warcraft of course I don't have to worry too hard. Where do I fit in
on the player typology from bartle? Achiever, socializer more than the
other two. I don't explore stuff and I don't like perpetuating the
cycle of the "killer". I describe myself thus because I enjoy
overcoming the game world challenges like raiding and questing but I
really don't care that much about the intervening space between the end
points/goals. I guess one of the reasons for that is I feel goal
oriented but the goals I am most like to follow are the ones I make.
Often times to me it feels like the designers of WoW have designed
content to give equal time to achievers and explorers and i'm not much
into the exploring part so i find it a drain on my main resource which
is of course time. In abstract I love the idea of an expansive world
that can be explored and awesome information learned about. However,
there is only so much time I can devote to the game an so I play the
way that gives me the most reward for that time.
"There
are all these people I know who exist for me only in terms of my
interactions with their avatar. I don’t know really how old they are,
what they do. It’s all based on the avatar thing" (taylor multiple
pleasures). I totally agree with this person even with the advent of
voice over internet programs like ventrilo a lot of how i percieve and
construct a mental image of a person is based on the avatar I see.
Though the more alts they have the more likely I am to associate with
voices first and characters second. I really feel like this
quote from taylors interviews sums up how things work in any
interactive environment that is removed from visuals. People depend so
much on visuals that anything even if you know its not real can become
a part of the mental model for interaction with a person.
I
wonder how environment affects the mental modeling people do of other
players in the game. For instance I think that after looking through
these types that if a game doesn't really have the affordances
necessary to show "killer" tendencies then its very unlikely that
somebody will have that precise definition attached to them. Like in
Second Life griefing would be extremely difficult because of the "game"
design though not entirely impossible. But in WoW its probably
extremely easy to earn the reputation of a killer/griefer because
theres a great deal of affordance towards violence and interrupting
other players if you like playing that way. Thats not to say killers
are the only people you will find in Wow but that you will find them
more often ebcause of the game environment.
Jerald Parker.
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