Experiences of Playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games: A Phenomenological Exploration

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Duquesne Scholarship Collection

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Summer 2015

Experiences of Playing Massively Multiplayer

Online Role-Playing Games: A Phenomenological

Exploration

Jacob Rusczek

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EXPERIENCES OF PLAYING MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE

ROLE-PLAYING GAMES: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXPLORATION

A Dissertation

Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School

of Liberal Arts

Duquesne University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Jacob R. Rusczek, M.A.

August 2015

iii

EXPERIENCES OF PLAYING MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE

ROLE-PLAYING GAMES: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXPLORATION

Jacob R. Rusczek

Approved July 15, 2015

________________________________ ________________________________

Eva Simms, Ph.D. Will Adams, Ph.D.

Professor of Psychology Associate Professor of Psychology

(Committee Chair) (Committee Member)

________________________________ ________________________________

Lori Koelsch, Ph.D. Leswin Laubscher, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Associate Professor of Psychology

(Committee Member) Chair, Psychology Department

________________________________

James C. Swindal, Ph.D.

Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate

School of Liberal Arts

ABSTRACT

EXPERIENCES OF PLAYING MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE

ROLE-PLAYING GAMES: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXPLORATION

Jacob R. Rusczek

August 2015

Dissertation supervised by Eva Simms, Ph. D.

This dissertation presents an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the experience

of being engaged in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). These

games have become increasingly popular over the past decade and have earned the reputation of

being highly engrossing or even addicting. In this study, five long-term players were interviewed

in person. For a portion of the interviews, the researcher observed the participants playing their

games. The interviews were transcribed and subsequently analyzed using interpretive

phenomenological analysis, which yielded individual and shared themes. Individual themes are

first presented, which provides a rich sense of each participant’s particular way of engaging with

his or her game. Shared themes across participants are then detailed, with an emphasis on one

prominent theme common to all participants: investment. This theme revealed that engagement

in an MMORPG is structured upon investing time and effort in order to earn rewards. These

findings are consistent with the position that MMORPGs are attractive to players because they

offer the opportunity to engage in pursuits congruent with modernist ideologies, such as

capitalism and instrumental rationality. However, my participants also invested in ways that

exceeded modernist values, such as forming relationships with other players and engaging with

the narrative and thematic dimensions of their games.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First and foremost, thank you to my participants for sharing your experiences with me.

Without your openness this research would not have been possible. It was a privilege to have a

window into each of your worlds.

Thank you to my director, Eva Simms, and to my readers, Will Adams and Lori Koelsch,

for providing valuable guidance, thoughtful feedback, and encouragement and for being willing

to work during the summer on my behalf.

To Shannon Carter and Laura Halvorsen: Thank you for your friendship this past year—it

has been much brighter because of you two. And an additional huge thanks to Laura for editing

this entire dissertation!

Leah Boisen, thank you for being a steadfast friend and dissertation-writing inspiration—

more than a few times when I was stuck, I would open up your dissertation to see how you did it.

My parents also deserve recognition for providing me with a reliable backdrop of love

and secruity, which has enabled me to pursue projects like this one throughout my life. Thanks

for always being there Mom and Dad.

And finally, thank you to the Duquesne University psychology department in its

entirety—your influence will forever be woven into my being-in-the-world.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract...........................................................................................................................................iv

Acknowledgement..........................................................................................................................vi

Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1

A brief history of MMORPGs ................................................................................................. 1

A brief description of MMORPGs .......................................................................................... 4

Time commitment of MMPORG players................................................................................ 6

The goal of this research........................................................................................................... 7

Literature review ............................................................................................................................ 8

Video game addiction research from a behavioral perspective............................................... 8

Research on motivations for play ........................................................................................... 10

Approaches from outside the field of psychology................................................................. 12

Bonnie Nardi’s ethnographic approach ............................................................................ 12

Timothy Rowlands’s semiotic approach.......................................................................... 17

Scott Rettberg’s cultural critique ..................................................................................... 20

David Golumbia’s philosophically-informed critique..................................................... 21

Summary................................................................................................................................ 23

Methodology and research procedures ....................................................................................... 24

Methodology.......................................................................................................................... 24

Research procedures ............................................................................................................... 27

Preliminary steps.............................................................................................................. 27

Participant recruitment..................................................................................................... 27

Data collection .................................................................................................................. 28

Data analysis.................................................................................................................... 30

Preliminary self-analysis............................................................................................................... 33

Pre-research impressions of MMORPGs ............................................................................... 33

My gaming history................................................................................................................. 34

My academic interest in MMORPGs ..................................................................................... 35

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Experiences in the world of Rift ............................................................................................. 36

Impressions of Rift................................................................................................................. 45

Results........................................................................................................................................... 48

Ben….. .................................................................................................................................... 48

Description of the interview.............................................................................................. 48

Ben’s gaming career ......................................................................................................... 50

Individual themes ............................................................................................................. 51

Being invested ............................................................................................................ 51

Striving to be a skilled player ..................................................................................... 54

Gear ............................................................................................................................ 60

Social comparison and self-image .............................................................................. 63

Rankings ..................................................................................................................... 65

Big numbers............................................................................................................... 67

Socializing .................................................................................................................. 69

Instrumental interactions............................................................................................. 73

Dispelling stereotypes ................................................................................................ 78

Immersion ................................................................................................................... 80

Closing thoughts............................................................................................................... 82

Jeff .......................................................................................................................................... 82

Description of the interview ............................................................................................. 82

Jeff’s gaming career ......................................................................................................... 84

Individual themes ............................................................................................................. 84

Harmony with real-life................................................................................................ 84

Enjoying the sense of progress.................................................................................... 86

Gear ............................................................................................................................ 88

Socializing .................................................................................................................. 89

Instrumental interactions............................................................................................. 91

Competence ................................................................................................................ 96

Always more to do..................................................................................................... 97

Closing thoughts............................................................................................................... 98

Shawn ..................................................................................................................................... 98

Description of the interview ............................................................................................. 99

Shawn’s gaming career .................................................................................................... 99

Individual themes ............................................................................................................ 100

Achievement orientation............................................................................................ 101

Efficiency................................................................................................................... 103

Plot progression......................................................................................................... 107

Busy work.................................................................................................................. 109

Multi-tasking ............................................................................................................. 111

Convenience at the cost of immersion ...................................................................... 112

Imperfect communication......................................................................................... 114

Instrumental interactions ........................................................................................... 117

Feeling at home ......................................................................................................... 120

Long-term investment............................................................................................... 121

Closing thoughts.............................................................................................................. 122

Crystal................................................................................................................................... 123

Description of the interview............................................................................................ 123

Crystal’s gaming career .................................................................................................. 124

Individual themes ............................................................................................................ 125

Grinding.................................................................................................................... 125

Having many characters............................................................................................ 130

True characters .......................................................................................................... 132

Immersion into a character ........................................................................................135

Costuming with gear ................................................................................................. 137

Limited socializing ....................................................................................................141

Role-playing with others ........................................................................................... 143

Playing with a partner............................................................................................... 144

It’s just a game .......................................................................................................... 145

Engaged in the story.................................................................................................. 146

Closing thoughts.............................................................................................................. 147

Robin ..................................................................................................................................... 148

Description of the interview............................................................................................ 148

Robin’s gaming career .................................................................................................... 149

Individual themes ............................................................................................................ 150

Enjoyable social dimensions ..................................................................................... 150

The demands of cooperative play............................................................................. 157

Seeking independence and freedom.......................................................................... 158

Enjoying the content of the game............................................................................. 158

Being rewarded ......................................................................................................... 161

The importance of aesthetics .................................................................................... 162

Closing thoughts.............................................................................................................. 163

Across-interview analysis..................................................................................................... 163

Unique themes by participant......................................................................................... 163

Ben ............................................................................................................................ 163

Jeff............................................................................................................................. 164

Shawn ........................................................................................................................ 165

Crystal........................................................................................................................ 165

Robin ......................................................................................................................... 166

Shared themes across participants .................................................................................. 166

Skill ........................................................................................................................... 167

Instrumental interactions ........................................................................................... 168

Big numbers.............................................................................................................. 168

Socializing................................................................................................................. 169

Negative social experiences...................................................................................... 169

Freedom from ............................................................................................................169

Immersion.................................................................................................................. 170

Narrative and lore...................................................................................................... 170

One theme to rule them all: investment........................................................................... 171

Investing..................................................................................................................... 172

Progress and rewards ................................................................................................ 175

How MMORPGs facilitate investment ..................................................................... 177

Summary of results................................................................................................................ 180

Discussion.................................................................................................................................... 181

Work or play? ....................................................................................................................... 181

The formal characteristics of play................................................................................... 182

The nature of work........................................................................................................... 183

A consideration of work-like activities............................................................................ 185

Raiding …........................................................................................................................ 194

Role-playing..................................................................................................................... 196

Interactions with other players ........................................................................................ 197

A variety of activities to consider.................................................................................... 198

An underlying ideology in MMORPGs................................................................................. 198

A final look at the data........................................................................................................... 203

Ben .................................................................................................................................. 204

Jeff................................................................................................................................... 205

Shawn .............................................................................................................................. 206

Crystal.............................................................................................................................. 207

Robin ............................................................................................................................... 208

Closing thoughts.............................................................................................................. 209

Limitations of this research ................................................................................................... 209

Directions for future research................................................................................................ 212

References .................................................................................................................................. 214

Appendix 1: Flyer....................................................................................................................... 218

Appendix 2: Posting on Reddit.................................................................................................... 219

Appendix 3: Consent form........................................................................................................... 220

xii

Appendix 4: Ben’s interview transcript....................................................................................... 222

Appendix 5: Jeff’s interview transcript ...................................................................................... 270

Appendix 6: Shawn’s interview transcript................................................................................... 300

Appendix 7: Crystal’s interview transcript.................................................................................. 339

Appendix 8: Robin’s interview transcript.................................................................................... 384

Chapter 1: Introduction

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs

) have become

increasingly popular since their inception in the late 1990s. These games are based on elements

from pen and paper role-playing games, which have been transformed in the matrix of video

game and internet technology. Players and onlookers alike have been struck by just how

engaging MMORPGs can be. It is common for players to become heavily invested in these

games, devoting dozens of hours per week over a course of years. In some cases, other life

activities such as work and intimate relationships suffer as a result of extensive play, which has

led many experts and laypeople to view MMORPGs as addictive. Highly publicized incidents,

such as Shawn Woolley’s suicide after playing EverQuest for nearly two days straight in 2002,

have contributed to the impression that MMORPGs have an uncanny ability to hook their players

(Spain & Vega, 2005). In response, psychologists, sociologists, and thinkers from other

disciplines are attempting to better understand the appeal of these games. This study is my

contribution to this relatively recent and ongoing inquiry.

A Brief History of MMORPGs

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games were born in the late 1990s, and

became widely popular over the course of the following decade (Rowlands, 2012). Despite being

a relatively new genre, MMORPGs’ roots can be traced back to earlier types of games, such as

pen and paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons (first published in 1974) and text-

based online role-playing games, referred to as multi-user dungeons (MUDs), which were

Due to the unwieldy nature of the full acronym, MMORPG is sometimes pronounced “mor-peg” (Castranova,

2005) or shortened to MMO.

popular during the 1980s (Rowlands, 2012). In both MUDs and pen and paper role-playing

games, the player is typically in control of a single character who is situated in a virtual world—

more often than not a medieval fantasy world—populated by the characters of other players. In

both cases, players are usually engaged in defeating enemies for various rewards (currency,

equipment, experience, etc.), which typically make the character more powerful.

In pen-and-paper RPGs, a group of roughly three to ten people gather in person to play,

sometimes using miniatures to represent the action of the game at certain points. Rulebooks

provide the game mechanics (i.e., what can happen in the world and how) and dice are used to

determine the outcome of events. Players usually voice-act the speech of their characters. A

single participant, called the “dungeon master,” is in charge of controlling all enemies, non-

player characters (i.e., characters not being controlled by a player, but rather someone like an

inn-keeper or blacksmith that the party of adventurers might encounter in their travels), and the

environment. In short, he or she controls all elements of the world that the other players’

characters inhabit.

In MUDs, the rules are programmed into the game, so the need for rulebooks, dice, and a

dungeon master is obviated (Bartle, 2004). Players type out the actions of their characters. For

example, if a player wants her character named Illuin to say something, she would type “/say

how is everyone?” To other players, this would appear as “Illuin says: how is everyone?” If she

wanted her character to sit down, she would type something like “/sit” which would appear to

other players as “Illuin sits down.” Often different color text is used for actions, vocalizations,

and environmental occurrences (“It begins to rain” or “The door is locked”) to make it easy for

players to differentiate between the different kinds of messages that appear in their text windows.

Since the game occurs entirely in text, it is up to the players to imagine the action of the game.

As personal computers grew increasingly powerful during the 1990s, it became feasible

to visually represent the events of role-playing games via computer graphics. Early efforts such

as Meridian 59 were sometimes referred to as graphical MUDs. The term MMORPG was coined

by Richard Garriott to describe his game Ultima Online, a fully graphical fantasy role-playing

game released in 1997 (Safko & Brake, 2009). The game was a success and followed by two

other major releases in 1999: EverQuest and Asheron’s Call. These three titles were the most

popular MMORPGs of the late 1990s and were largely responsible for establishing the genre.

Despite their positive reception and loyal followings, they still represented a fairly small niche in

the video game world—subscription rates for these games peaked in the hundreds of thousands

(Geel, 2013).

In late 2004, World of Warcraft (WoW) was released and, in the following years, brought

the genre to new prominence. Global subscription rates rose steadily from five million within a

year of its release to a peak of 12 million in 2009 (Geel, 2013). Currently, there are still seven

million subscribers (Karmali, 2015). WoW became a household name, a cultural phenomenon,

and a subject of much curiosity and concern. South Park, famous for having its finger on the

pulse of the zeitgeist, released an episode in 2006 about the game titled, “Make Love, Not

Warcraft,” which pokes fun at the tedium involved in WoW and asks: “What is it all for?” The

episode won an Emmy (“South Park: Awards,” n.d.). Along with bringing MMORPGs into the

mainstream culture, WoW has also dominated the MMORPG market, controlling over half of it

for most of the existence of WoW (Geel, 2013). Over the course of WoW’s ongoing reign, there

have been other successful MMORPGs, some of which emulate WoW’s successful formula (e.g.,

Rift) and some which deviate considerably from it (e.g., EVE Online).

A Brief Description of MMORPGs

In an MMORPG, the player controls a character called an avatar that is situated in the

virtual world of the game (Castranova, 2005; Nardi, 2009; Rowlands, 2012). The player

progresses through the game by completing quests, killing monsters, and doing other activities,

all of which earn the avatar experience points. Most questing takes place in the persistent world

of the game, though there are also areas that are set off from the rest of the world, which are

referred to as “instances,” dungeons,” or “instance dungeons.” When a group of players enters a

dungeon, an instance of that dungeon is created exclusively for that particular group. Dungeons

typically involve a linear progression through an area, dungeon-like or not, that involves fighting

enemies along the way. Usually, they culminate with a particularly powerful adversary referred

to as a "boss." When the avatar accumulates a certain number of experience points via questing,

dungeons, and other activities, he or she “levels up,” which earns him or her new abilities and

increased “stats” (i.e., the statistics measuring the prowess of the character such as strength,

intelligence, dexterity, and so on). Avatars can also become more powerful by accumulating

increasingly better “gear,” such as weapons and armor. Gear is dropped by slain enemies or

otherwise found, bought, or traded for throughout the game. The project of continuously

improving one’s avatar though leveling up and acquiring gear is central to the design of

MMORPGs.

MMORPGs are designated as “massively multiplayer” because the computer-generated

world of the game is shared by hundreds of players at once. Players interact with one another in

various ways. For instance, two players with no prior contact may realize that they are in the

midst of the same solo quest and team up in order to more quickly complete the content by

combining their efforts. Most games also have a “looking for group” feature, which helps players

find a group for playing content that requires a set number of players, such as dungeons, which

typically require five participants. In addition to forming temporary “pick up groups” (PUGs),

players establish persistent and organized communities called guilds. Guildmates work together

towards common goals, complete group content together, share resources and knowledge about

the game, and form lasting social relationships.

Raids—more extensive instances that tend to emphasize the boss fight at the end and

require a larger team of players—are typically the most challenging content in MMORPGs. They

require a degree of cooperation and organization that can only be achieved by a group of players

who have learned how to skillfully coordinate their efforts, much like a sports team. Players who

aspire to raid join “hardcore” or “raiding” guilds, which contain one or more raid groups.

Raiding guilds usually have a hierarchical rank structure, a formal system for distributing loot, a

set schedule of raiding times (often with attendance requirements), and an application processes

for prospective members. In contrast, “casual” or “social” guilds are often simply a loosely

organized group of gamers who want to enjoy the benefits of a social network and a pool of more

familiar players to occasionally team up with.

MMORPGs do not have an endpoint, but rather an array of progressively more difficult

quests, dungeons, raids, and other endeavors. The vast array of solo and group challenges is

always undergoing expansion in an MMORPG that is financially alive and well. Developers

typically release small updates every few months and major expansions every one or two years.

Unlike most video games, MMORPGs often require that a player pay a subscription fee. A

subscription to WoW, for example, costs $15 per month. The constant evolution of these games

allows players to continue in the game on an ongoing basis.

Time Commitment of MMPORG Players

Because of the periodic expansions, an MMORPG can potentially be played for years.

Additionally, the time-consuming nature of many game activities, such as gathering materials for

crafting and leveling up, means that players can spend many hours per week playing. According

to one survey-based study, the average number of hours played per week across all MMORPGs

is 21.9—about three hours a day. Approximately one in five gamers plays over 30 hours per

week, while a small percentage (1.6%) play over sixty hours per week (Yee, 2004). Eighty

percent of MMORPG players agree that they have played more than eight hours in one session,

which is almost double the rate for non-MMORPG video gamers (Ng & Wiener-Hastings, 2005).

The amount of time people put into MMORPGs has played a role in making them

infamous and given them a reputation for being addicting. The term addiction is applied to

MMORPGs by mental health professionals, players, and the general population alike. Debates

about whether and how the term addiction should be applied to video gaming (Griffiths, 2000,

2005, 2007, 2008; Wood, 2008) and how to distinguish between addiction and benign high

engagement (Charlton & Danforth, 2007) are ongoing. Regardless of whether the construct

addiction is applied to MMORPGs, millions of people are spending a great deal of time playing

these games. As of 2010, WoW players alone had collectively logged 5.93 million years of play

(McGonigal, 2010)! An informal Google search for “how many hours have you logged playing

WoW” (the game keeps track) turns up forum posts of players who have logged hundreds of days

of playtime—many people have actually played for several solid years! Although these are

outliers, MMORPGs clearly lend themselves to long-term, intensive engagement.

The Goal of this Research

The fact that players spend so much time with MMORPGs provoked my curiosity: What

are they up to? What keeps them engaged for such vast amounts of time? What do they find so

compelling about the activities in these games? In order to explore these questions, I set out to

design a study that would allow me to systematically explore the experiences of players so as to

shed light on the ways in which they become and remain engaged in MMORPGs.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

A great deal of the psychological literature on MMORPGs is oriented towards either

discerning the features of these games that hook players (Smahel et al., 2008; Choi et al., 2007)

or understanding the effects of the games on players (Smyth, 2007; Snodgrass, 2010). Because I

am interested in exploring the question of why players spend so much time playing MMORPGs,

the former is most relevant to my project. Generally, this body of research is couched in terms of

“addiction” from a behavioral perspective or “motivation” (i.e., what are the motivations that

MMORPGs satisfy). There are considerable limitations to these approaches, so I have expanded

my literature review to include sources outside the field of psychology. Ethnographic,

sociological, and other approaches also explore the extensive engagement that these games

foster. These investigations often involve more nuance and consideration of the larger cultural

context in which MMORPGs and MMORPG players are embedded.

Video Game Addiction Research from a Behavioral Perspective

With the rise of arcades and the introduction of home-gaming consoles in the 1980s,

journalists and educators quickly raised the prospect that video games have the potential to foster

addiction. Psychologists drew attention to the fact that video games often rely on some of the

same behavioral reinforcement mechanisms that can be found in certain casino games, such as

slots. Video games typically offer the player a number of different rewards, each of which is

meted out concurrently on different reinforcement schedules (King, Delfabbro & Griffiths, 2010;

Griffiths, 1991, 1995). For instance, the player may complete a mission assigned by the game,

which unlocks more missions, rewarding him or her with new game content; at the very same

moment, the player may also be earning in-game currency, which will allow him or her to

purchase new items. One of the principle findings in behavioral research is that the sooner a

reward follows a behavior, the more likely that behavior is to be repeated. Video games, much

like slot machines, can dispense rewards immediately. Psychologists contend that this may

account in part for the “addictive” quality of video games. Similarly, researchers have found that

gamblers often interpret “near misses”—situations in which they come very close to winning, but

fall short at the last moment—as being nearly identical to successes, which encourage them to

continue playing (Griffiths, 1990). Similarly, one can come close in video games to completing a

challenge, such as fighting a difficult enemy at the end of a mission, only to die at the last

moment. According to this line of thought, the player will not see this as a failure, but as a “near

miss,” which motivates him or her to turn around and attempt the mission once again (King et

al., 2010).

Although the parallels between video games and casino games provide insight into how a

player is reinforced once he or she has become invested in a game, it does not explain how the

player got to the point of being invested in the first place. The rewards offered by the game can

only be construed as rewards on the assumption that the player has already come to view them as

valuable. Under the conditions of a capitalist economy, it is obvious why someone would find

that winning $200 from a slot machine is a reward, since money is a secondary reinforcer. It is

less obvious why someone would find that earning 200 virtual gold coins in a video game is a

reward—the key question of how it is that the rewards offered by a game become reinforcers in

the first place remains unanswered.

Research on Motivations for Play

In another line of inquiry, researchers have attempted to answer the question of why

certain people play MMORPGs in terms of their motivations. The supposition is that players,

because of their individual dispositions, find certain aspects of the game to be satisfying.

Motivation theorists suggest that not all players share the same set of dispositions, and thus

different motivations account for their desire to play. The goal of this line of research is to

identify the most salient motivations of players.

One of the classic and frequently cited efforts to account for the motivations of players in

terms of their dispositions is offered by Bartle (1996), who designed three MUDs in the late

1970s and early 1980s. He indicates that there are four types of people who play MUDs

achievers (who focus their efforts on achievements such as aquiring expensive or rare items and

creating powerful characters), explorers (who enjoy exploring and learning about the world of

the game), socializers (who primarily enjoy social interactions with other players), and killers

(who take delight in killing the characters of other players). Each type’s disposition results in

different game activities and priorities. He describes the ways in which the four types interact

with one another and suggests that a balance of the types creates a healthy in-game community.

Nick Yee (2007), a researcher who has studied MMORPGs extensively, believes that

although a model like Bartle’s is on the right track by emphasizing pre-existing player

dispositions, he believes that a typology is too rigid to adequately account for the variations of

Despite this model being about MUD players, the ways of taking up these games discussed by Bartle are all

applicable to MMOPRGs as well, so his model is cited in MMORPG research.

different players. He offers an empirically-based “components” model instead. Using a factor

analysis to statistically examine the results of survey data, Yee found that players of MMORPGs

generally had three different motivations:

 Achievement: Players who are motivated by achievement are interested in

accumulating power and status within the game. They enjoy completing missions and

reaping the rewards offered by the game. They often focus on optimizing their avatar’s

characteristics and competing with other players.

 Social: Players motivated by the social aspects of the game enjoy meeting other

players and forming relationships with them. They often work in teams, collaborating

with other players in order to complete missions and solve puzzles. Many of these

players like to use their in-game relationships as the basis for the formation or

continuation of out-of-game relationships.

 Immersion: Players who are motivated by immersion like to “lose themselves” in the

game. They enjoy exploring new areas, paying attention to the storyline behind the

game, and customizing the appearance of their avatar. These players sometimes use the

game to distract themselves from “real-life” issues.

Unlike Bartle’s typologies, Yee suggests that achievement, socialization, and immersion should

be thought of as three dimensions along which all players vary. Although every player will enjoy

achievement to a certain extent, some people will deem it a primary motivation and others will

find it to be secondary to other motivations.

Yee and Bartle both contribute frameworks that, in broad terms, help to make sense of

what players get out of playing MMORPGs. Problematically however, they “psychologize” these

factors by situating them as “internal” features of the player’s mind that exist independently from

the game. This conceptual framework does not consider the dynamic exchange taking place

between the gamer and the game, nor does it consider the broader cultural context within which

the gamer and the game are situated. No person is invested in creating a level 85 character with

top tier gear prior to playing WoW—surely the desire for this particular achievement arises out of

engagement with the game. And just as surely, the game is a part of our culture. Another issue of

contention is that the concrete, day-to-day activities of engagement are deemphasized in such a

model. This limitation stems from both the conceptual framework and the methods that are

utilized in this line of research.

Approaches from Outside the Field of Psychology

Bonnie Nardi’s ethnographic approach. Bonnie Nardi is an ethnographer who studied

MMORPGs without any prior exposure to them. As her research tradition dictates, she immersed

herself in the “native culture” by playing WoW extensively, making the long journey from

clueless beginner to fully-fledged raider. The value of Nardi’s ethnographic approach is that she

has engaged in the daily activities of playing an MMORPG for a prolonged period. Nardi situates

her approach in opposition to the empirical methodologies by citing fellow anthropologist

Marilyn Strathern:

Ethnography is...the deliberate attempt to generate more data than the researcher is aware

of at the time of collection...Rather than devising research protocols that will purify the

data in advance of analysis, the anthropologist embarks on a participatory exercise which

yields materials for which analytic protocols are often devised after the fact. (2004; as

cited in Nardi, 2012, p. 28).

Thus, when Nardi began her fieldwork, she did not start with a narrowly focused question or

hypothesis. Her goal was simply to participate in the culture and gather as much data as she

could. In her analysis, she draws extensively on her own play to provide the reader with concrete

descriptions of the experience of engagement, such as this excerpt from a description of a typical

day of playing WoW:

5:30 p.m. Time for a raid. It’s early in the evening for me, but many of the people

in the guild are East Coast, so we have to get moving before it’s too late for them. The

raid won’t start until 6:00, but “invites” go out 30 minutes in advance. To make sure I get

a spot in the raid, I log in promptly.

I still have fifteen minutes before the raid. I fly to Terrokar Forest and locate some

good fishing spots. In a few minutes, I have lots of the Golden Darters needed for the

Golden Fish Sticks buff. I cook them up and feel prepared for the raid. (p. 9)

She also uses excerpts from chat logs, material from guild websites, and other game-related

content to substantiate her observations and analysis.

Nardi begins her analysis with the question “why do players enjoy WoW so much?”—

similar to the question that drew me to study MMORPGs. She rejects the idea that WoW is

nothing more than an expertly designed reinforcement system that hooks players. Instead, she

draws on John Dewey’s concept of active aesthetic experience to account for the compelling

experience of play. According to Nardi, Dewey “formulated aesthetic experience as participatory

engagement in activity that is organized into distinctive stages and in which a satisfying

completion or end point of actions which are themselves pleasurable” (p. 48). Thus, both the

means of arriving at a goal and the culmination are experienced as pleasurable. Dewey cites a

craftsman practicing his craft as an example of lively engagement with one’s surroundings. The

satisfaction of the crafting process and the final result are inextricable:

An engraver, painter, or writer is in process at every stage of completing his work. He

must at each point retain and sum up what has gone before as a whole and with reference

to the whole to come...The series of doings in the rhythm of experience give variety and

movement; they save the work from monotony and useless repetitions. (Dewey, as cited

in Nardi, p. 49)

Nardi emphasizes the fact that both the “means” and the “ends” are equally important in activity

theory. Activities that are taken up only for the pleasure involved in the completion or end result

of the activity do not qualify as active aesthetic experience. In such cases, the “end” is not a

satisfying “culmination” of engaging activity, but rather a relieving “cessation” of an

unsatisfying activity.

Nardi notes that Dewey formulated his model of active aesthetic experience in response

to the toil, monotony, and mechanization of modern society. In Dewey’s view, aesthetics have

been removed from everyday life and sequestered into fine arts museums only to be passively

consumed. Rote industrial labor is a prime example of an activity that is done only for the “ends”

such as a wage. In such cases, one would rather acquire the ends without having to endure the

means. By contrast, in active aesthetic experience, the means are satisfying and enhance the

value of the ends.

According to Dewey’s theory, no activity is inherently aesthetic, but Nardi believes that

MMORPGs are well-suited to offering players active aesthetic experiences, which arguably

accounts for their popularity. She asserts that MMORPGs are composed of varied and often

enjoyable activities that culminate in a satisfying reward. One example she provides is questing

in order to increase a character’s level. She argues that quests are varied activities that eventually

culminate in a satisfying endpoint: leveling up. Assuming that a player enjoys the activities of

questing, the conditions for active aesthetic engagement have been met.

According to another line of thinking, Nardi considers the engagement involved in WoW

in terms of both work and play. Nardi draws extensively on Johan Huizinga’s (1950) classic

treatise on the nature of play, and thus, I will briefly touch on this analysis prior to discussing

Nardi’s position. Huizinga submits that play is set apart from the demands of “real-life”—a game

is not played for any reason that is reducible to anything outside of itself. A child throws a ball

against a wall so it will bounce back, hopefully to be caught, not for some purpose that underlies

or transcends the play itself. Further, play is voluntary; something that is forced on a person

cannot be considered play. However, Huizinga counters any position that would assume that play

is not serious. Huizinga notes that often play is taken up with the utmost of seriousness. Gadamer

(2004), who also grapples with the nature of play, goes a step further and proposes that play

requires seriousness—otherwise play falls short of being “wholly play” (p. 103). Through

seriousness, one becomes absorbed into the world of play. The boundary between the world of

reality and the world of play is referred to as the “magic circle.” Playing a game, then, can be

thought of as entering a particular ordering set apart from regular life. Order is a critical feature

of games. In the world of a game, things are more elegantly conceived than the everyday world,

owing to implicit or explicit rules and tasks of the game. This act of stepping aside from one’s

normal attitude and comportment allows the player to become absorbed in the rhythm of the

game world. An element of tension or chanciness is another feature of play and games; striving

to end that tension energizes the play. Ending a tension could mean catching a ball, solving a

puzzle, or beating an opponent at a card game. It is in this striving that the player exerts his skill

and prowess, hoping to achieve the excellence for which the ordering of the game calls.

While playing WoW, Nardi noticed that the concepts of work and play frequently

appeared in statements made by guildmates. At some times, players sharply contrasted the

unsatisfying drudgery of their regular jobs with their satisfying engagement in WoW while at

other times, they characterized certain game activities as work. Nardi focuses on farming or

grinding, which are repetitive activities undertaken to earn experience, currency, or other

valuable items. At first, she was surprised by how readily and uncomplainingly players engaged

in such monotonous activities, though eventually came to realize that “from the player’s point of

view, farming in World of Warcraft was a logical activity undertaken for well-defined ends” (p.

111). Drawing on Huizinga’s characteristics of play, she proposes that farming is not work, and

when taken up voluntarily and within the “magic circle” of play, it is a transformation of

everyday experiences of work into something more satisfying:

Farming in World of Warcraft transformed the pervasive, familiar cultural experience of

boredom—which we all undergo, to varying degrees, in school and at work—to one with

positive valences. It allowed players to confront anxieties about boredom and recast and

reshape them in a context where they were played out and resolved differently than in

ordinary life. In the everyday world, boredom is frequently an isolating, frustrating

experience. The end result of perseverance in sticking to necessary but boring activities is

too often an inadequate paycheck or report card or just another load of laundry. The

culmination of farming in World of Warcraft, on the other hand, yielded a meaningful,

exciting reward. A new piece of gear or an enchantment emerged as the product of the

tedium, advancing a player in the game and enabling measurable better performance.

(And it might be sparkly, too!) The reward directly addressed a player’s object of

performative excellence and continual striving to “improve yourself,” as Mark [a fellow

player] put it. (p. 113)

Nardi’s analysis puts a decidedly positive spin on work-like activities in WoW. As we shall see in

the following section, not all share her perspective that MMORPGs liberate players from the

drudgery of the modern workplace.

Timothy Rowlands’s semiotic approach. Timothy Rowlands, whose work spans

sociology, anthropology, communications, cultural studies and new media studies, authored

another substantial qualitative work on MMORPGs called Video Game Worlds: Working at Play

in the Culture of EverQuest (2012). Rowlands played EverQuest for several years as a “regular”

player and then, after deciding to study it academically, for another two years as a participant

observer. His analysis is grounded in his extensive experiences in the game, which he describes

in detail. He also draws on informal interviews and other interactions that he had with an in-

game friend who was a participant of the hardcore raiding culture of EverQuest (a culture which

Rowlands never gained fully entry to).

While Nardi’s work leans in the direction of a hermeneutics of faith, Rowlands’ analysis

of the culture of EverQuest leans towards a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur, 1970). He

utilizes semiotics to “render the underlying logic” of the culture of EverQuest visible (p. 8). By

studying the way gamers talk and act, and therefore think, he attempts to uncover the taken for

granted “natural attitude” that they adhere to and reproduce. He notes that MMORPGs “emerged

from a rich genealogy of virtual worlds” which allowed for freeform identity play (cf. Turkle,

1994), yet that is hardly the way they have typically been utilized. Instead, he observed that the

activities of gamers in EverQuest were “relatively consistent, routine, and surprisingly

homogenous across the population” (p. 21). In short, activities of gamers had become

institutionalized. Rowlands wondered why a game that had promised to offer an open space for

play had become such a limited one.

At the center of Rowlands’s analysis of the institutionally prescribed approach to

EverQuest is the “Holy Trinity camp group”—a practice to which he refers as the “dominant

strategy.” The holy trinity is a combination of three complementary character roles: healer, tank,

and DPS (short for “damage per second,” indicating a character class that has a high DPS and

therefore excels at dealing damage to enemies). A group with the right balance of these three

roles is optimized for dispatching MOBs

. “Camping” involves staking out a favorable location

for repeatedly killing MOBs. The MOBs are “pulled” from the surrounding area to the camp

where they are killed by the group. The tanks are responsible for damage mitigation, which

usually involves absorbing the brunt of the attacks by MOBs. Healers focus on keeping the

members of the group alive, especially the tanks, since they should be the ones who are being

attacked. The DPS characters kill the MOBs. This arrangement is optimized for gaining

experience and gold in the least amount of time and at the cost of novel experiences and

spontaneity. Players often spend hours killing the same few kinds of enemies over and over again

on the same patch of virtual ground. Rowlands provides an extended and illuminating description

of a session of play using the Holy Trinity camp group strategy that indicates just how repetitive

and work-like this activity is. In addition to describing how the dominant strategy works in

MOB, short for “mobile,” is a term carried over from MUDs that is used to designate the various enemies that

populate the world of the game.

practice, Rowlands examines how veterans train new players to follow it. The result of their

indoctrination is that it becomes difficult for new players to even imagine playing any other way.

The significance of the dominant strategy is that its internal logic consists of “a set of

beliefs, orientations, and dispositions” that become natural, prereflexive, and commonsense to

the gamer (p. 18). Thus, the dominant strategy profoundly affects the way players engage with

and experience the game. Rowlands argues that at the core of the dominant strategy is an

emphasis on the ends over the means: “players eschew the process, yearning instead of the

markers of success (levels, alternative advancement points, and gear)” (p. 51). Within this mode

of engagement, “everything in the world [including other players]...simply becomes a means to

an end defined in terms of rational, individualistic (market-based), self-interest” (p. 19). For

example, enemy monsters are not considered in terms of their appearance, their mythical

qualities, or their place within the world and narrative of the game, but instead for how difficult

they will be able to kill and the rewards yielded for doing so. This pervasive orientation to

MMORPGs is “an instrumental form of gaming in which play has been colonized, become work-

like, or it has actually become work” (p. 19).

Finally, Rowlands examines how the underlying logic of the dominant strategy and the

game content (including the lore, the narratives embedded in quests, and the programming of the

game) reproduces capitalism, rationalism, colonialism, and other aspects of modernity. Thus,

rather than functioning as an alternate world where players can experiment with different ways

of being within the magic circle of play (as the medieval fantasy theme suggests they might),

EverQuest serves as a new “corner of the universe into which we seamlessly extend our labor

and with it our instrumentality and emphasis on efficiency, optimization, and technique” (p. 17).

Rowlands contends that, “simply put, MMOs are everyday spaces for their users” and that

MMOROGs are “characterized by the natural attitude because they become an extension of the

working reality” (pp. 84-85). Thus, Rowlands’s analysis contrasts with Nardi’s, which

conceptualizes the activities of MMORPGs as playful re-workings of everyday life in the

modern world.

Scott Rettberg’s cultural critique. Scott Rettberg (2011), a researcher in the field of

digital culture, also used his own experience of playing WoW extensively as data to inform his

research. Like Nardi and Rowlands, he is struck by the abundance of work-like activities in WoW

and other MMORPGs, noting that “the majority of the play involved in advancing a World of

Warcraft character is mindless and repetitive to the extent that it verges on Taylorism. There is an

assembly-line mentality to many of the quests, many of which involve killing a staggering

number of a certain type of beast or enemy (grinding), over and over again” (p. 30). His analysis

attempts to make sense of why players are willing to work so hard at a game. He finds that it is

not just that players are willing, but that the work involved is at the heart of what makes playing

WoW compelling. His analysis attributes the success of WoW to its ability to provide a

“convincing and detailed simulacrum of the process of becoming successful in capitalist

societies....a capitalist fairytale in which anyone who works hard and strives enough can rise

through society’s ranks and acquire great wealth” (p. 20). Thus, players are engaging in a game

of capitalism—a game suffused with the same ethos, methods, and ways of seeing the world that

capitalism entails. He argues that such games provide an excellent education on not only “know

how” related to capitalism but also on “how to be” a good capitalist. In addition to the work that

the quests and other activities entail, he points out that some of the game content also contains

implicit capitalist messages. For instance, the very first quest for players with orc characters is

waking up peons who are sleeping on the job by whacking them with a blackjack! Paradoxically,

then, the escape from the demands of regular life that MMORPGs promise is instead “a second

professional life, a world of work” (p. 26). Rettberg believes that engaging in work during leisure

time appeals to the unconscious Protestant work ethic that says play is evil and work is good. He

states that: “When play feels like labor, and one toils to achieve objectives, play does not feel

like a waste of time” (p. 32). Thus, MMORPGs offer the experience to players of feeling

productive, and therefore virtuous.

David Golumbia’s philosophically-informed critique. David Golumbia (2009) also

questions whether video games such as WoW (which he played) are, in fact, games that involve

play. He reflects that “It seems clear that we call these programs ‘games’ because of the intense

feelings of pleasure experienced by players when we engage with them and be-cause they appear

on the surface not to be involved in the manipulation of objects with physical-world

consequences. On reflection, neither of these facts proves very much” (p. 193). To provide a

more sophisticated analysis, Golumbia reviews various philosophical perspectives on the nature

of play. Based on these conceptions of play, he concludes that:

It is not clear, on almost any score, why it might be legitimate to call the activity that one

undertakes inside of WoW and other MMORPGs “play.” It is not loose or unstructured; it

is not without consequence; it does not admit of significant breaking of the rules or their

suspension for social purposes; and an extensive part of the actual activity one undertakes

there is extremely goal-directed and prescribed, in many ways the opposite of what we

have heretofore called play. (p. 201).

Although play is possible in these spaces, MMORPGs do little to facilitate it; players are

restricted by a “surprisingly rigid, uncompromising, and even authoritarian” (p. 188) range of

possible actions (which are mostly violent), activities (which are usually repetitive), and goals

(which are mostly economic).

Golumbia continues his analysis by investigating what it is that is pleasurable about

MMORPGs and other video games if they do not facilitate play. In a similar vein as Rowlands

and Rettberg, he sees MMORPGs as extensions of the modernist view of the world into new

spaces. He contends that “If they simulate anything directly,” these “games simulate our own

relation to capital and to the people who must be exploited and used up for capital to do its

work” (p. 194). Golumbia characterizes the desire that spurs players to do the tasks needed to

level up and acquire better gear in terms of Nietzsche’s concept of lust for power. He asserts that

“these games turn on an almost pure lust for power: they repetitively enact the accrual of more

and more power to a central, perceiving subject, with the rest of the world reduced to objects to

be killed or consumed” (p. 189). Golumbia is, of course, referring to the fact that the primary

action that players can undertake is to kill enemies and that the main motivator is economic gain,

which is a gain in power.

Golumbia also argues that the concrete activities of the game—questing, farming,

gathering materials—are similar to the computer-mediated tasks of our present-day workforce.

He muses that,

Surely there is little to separate standing in front of a copper vein with a simulated axe

picking up pieces of metal ore, or standing in front of a cooking ﬁre with “raw clams,”

and then “cooking” them, from any number of other computer-based activities such as

data entry, that we would readily recognize not as play but as work. (p. 191)

He considers how the computerized nature of such work—whether in a MMORPG or in the

workplace—offers the worker “distinct and palpable feelings of pleasure” that are “often of a

type relating to some kind of algorithmic completeness, a ‘snapping’ sense that one has

completed, with digital certainty, a task” (p. 191). MMORPGs offer a potent version of this kind

of pleasure to users through tasks that are discreet, well-bounded, attainable, and can be achieved

with rational certainty—all features that enhance the experience that Golumbia describes. Thus,

“what seems to be ‘entertainment’ in many ways simply replicates and simulates the precise

world of employment and movements of capital that do, in fact, define much of the world in

which we engage as Western adults” (p. 197).

Summary

All of the research detailed in this chapter seeks to understand the question of why so

many players find MMORPGs engaging. This research also, in one way or another, indicates that

the systems of reward that are woven into the fabric of these games are central to the answer.

However, the question of why these rewards, structured as they are, are so enticing is open to

debate. Nardi indicates that WoW and other successful MMORPGs are designed in such a way

that fosters active aesthetic experience—a rhythm of goal-directed activity that ends with a

satisfying culmination. Rowlands, Rettberg, and Golumbia, on the other hand, believe that the

activities of MMORPGs are better characterized as work than as play, and that the experience of

being successful in an extension of our modernist, capitalist world is the enticing experience that

is offered.

Chapter 3: Methodology and Research Procedures

Methodology

In preparation for conducting this research, I spent about 300 hours playing Rift, a game

that is similar to WoW. Though this immersion familiarized me with the ins and outs of an

MMORPG, I certainly didn’t play for long enough to use my experience as the primary data for

this study. Thus, I conducted interviews with a sample of dedicated, long-term players.

Gathering data from participants rather than utilizing my own experiences as a participant-

observer sets my study apart from, and thereby expands on, the contributions of Nardi (2010),

Rowlands (2012), Rettberg (2011), and Golumbia (2009). However, having played an

MMORPG provided me with increased access to the experiences of my participants, given my

familiarity with MMORPGs.

This project aspires to elucidate the lived experience of playing an MMORPG, so as to

understand what it is that players find engaging in these games. Thus, I sought a method of

analysis well suited to: (1) identifying and describing salient experiences that illuminate the

practice of playing an MMORPG, and (2) exploring the practices, attitudes, and understandings

that constitute these experiences. In other words, my method was selected on the grounds that it

would serve to reveal both the conscious understandings of explicit experiences deemed

important by players, as well as the implicit contexts or “horizons of meaning” that lie outside of,

yet constitute, the conscious experiences of play. My rationale for giving credence to both

explicit and implicit meanings follows from a presupposition that people are neither entirely self-

transparent nor entirely self-obscure (Walsh & Koelsch, 2012).

A phenomenological approach is well-suited to the goals I have outlined. As Finlay

(2009) indicates, the general consensus among phenomenological researchers is that

phenomenology “aims for fresh, complex, rich description of a phenomenon as it is concretely

lived” (p. 1). Edmund Husserl (1962) first developed phenomenology as a method of setting

aside presuppositions and theoretical understandings in order to freshly appreciate the

phenomena of experience as they appear in consciousness. Martin Heidegger (1962) expanded

Husserl’s original project by demonstrating that phenomena appear or reveal themselves though

the horizons of meaning that constitute them. According to Heidegger, we are fundamentally

embedded in worlds of meanings that extend beyond our own individual consciousnesses.

Finlay’s (2009) systematic consideration of the varying emphases within the wide field

of phenomenological methods proved to be a helpful guide in choosing a method that was

consistent with my goals. One dimension that was especially pertinent to my study is the

normative versus ideographic continuum. On the normative end, approaches like Giorgi’s (1975)

Empirical Phenomenological Approach aim to discover “essences” that structure the experience

of all participants, and by extension, all members of the population of study. The intended

outcome of this method is a description of a general structure of the phenomenon in question.

Though normative approaches are valuable, I believe that for my objective of exploring the

experiences of play, such an approach would go too far in terms of smoothing over the

complexity, impact, and groundedness of individual experiences. In contrast, an ideographic

approach would be oriented to developing rich descriptions of unique experiences. Since the goal

of my research is to dwell in the particular, I sought a method of analysis that makes ample room

for individual experiences to be described on their own terms before moving to a general

account. Jonathan Smith’s Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a method that tends

towards the ideographic end of the continuum. Smith et al. (2009) indicate that IPA aims at

“offering detailed, nuanced analyses of particular instances of lived experience” (p. 37) and that,

“In a good IPA study, it should be possible to parse the account for both shared themes, and for

the distinctive voices and variations in those themes” (p. 38). These priorities are well-suited to

the goals of my research, and consequently I selected IPA as my method of analysis.

IPA also provides a balance between appreciating and describing the conscious accounts

of participants and looking beyond them to the constitutive dimensions of the phenomenon in

question. Smith et al. use the phrase “double hermeneutic” to indicate that IPA researchers use

both the hermeneutic of faith and a hermeneutic of “questioning” to understand the experiences

of participants. As such, IPA does not position the participant as entirely aware or entirely

unaware of the meanings of his or her experience. Following this logic, I will situate myself as

both trying to understand and re-present my participants’ own understandings of their play, as

well as attempting to trace the implicit, taken-for-granted dimensions of their experience from

my vantage point as a researcher, phenomenologist, and psychologist. Thus, my position as an

outsider, despite all of the associated limitations that such a position entails, is a condition for

new understandings to emerge.

As a qualitative researcher, I will prioritize transparency about the process by which I

gathered and analyzed my data, so that readers have a clear view of the evidence for my findings

(Walsh, 2012). Therefore, I have presented my work in such a way that maximizes the potential

to discern how my experiences and thoughts steered my research in certain directions, thus

situating my findings within the context of my particular approach (Walsh, 1995). Being explicit

about my process should also provide readers with an accurate sense of the limitations of my

work (Walsh, 2003).

Research Procedures

Preliminary steps. In the service of making my preconceptions of MMORPGs as

explicit as possible—to myself and to my readers— I followed Walsh’s (1995) suggestion to

write an “acknowledgement of a priori assumptions” (p. 341) as the first step of my research.

The process of writing out my preconceptions allowed me to explore them and to bring them into

the foreground of my awareness. It also provided me with a record that I could refer to

throughout my research process, thereby facilitating reflexivity. Additionally, the inclusion of the

preliminary self-analysis in chapter 4 allows readers to appreciate the particular viewpoint that I

brought to the research.

Next, I submitted a protocol to Duquesne University’s Institutional Review Board in

order to attain approval to conduct research that involved human subjects. This submission

documented the way I planned to recruit participants, obtain their informed consent, and protect

their anonymity, and it addressed other considerations related to participants’ rights as research

subjects. Duquesne University’s IRB approved my proposal on August 8th, 2013.

Participant recruitment. I sought participants through several settings, including online

forums, local gaming stores, and a large online community. I posted invitations on online forums

dedicated to MMORPGs, which did not yield any participants. I also posted flyers in two local

gaming stores; one of my participants responded to one of these flyers. After these methods

failed to generate enough responses, I turned to Reddit, which is a large online community that is

divided into “subreddits,” including one for Pittsburgh. Posting on the Pittsburgh subreddit

allowed me to easily reach a large number of local people. I recruited four additional participants

through this channel. In my printed and online postings, I indicated the following: (1) the

purpose of the study is to explore the day-to-day experience of playing an MMORPG, (2) that I

would interview the participant where they normally play, (3) that the interview would be audio-

recorded, and 4) the interview would last for no more than two and a half hours, one hour of

which I would watch them play. I also stipulated that in order to participate, the individual must

meet the following criteria: (1) he or she must be 18 years old, (2) he or she must have played a

prototypical MMORPG (e.g., WoW, EverQuest, Rift, Guild Wars 2) for at least 15 hours a week

and for at least one year, and (3) he or she must live in the greater Pittsburgh area. See Appendix

1 and 2 for the full text of the printed and online postings.

Data collection. The goal of each interview was to gather data on each participant’s daily

engagement with the game and what he or she finds to be compelling and worthwhile about

playing. For the first hour of each interview, I only talked with the participant. During the second

hour, I asked him or her to log into the game and play while we continued the conversation. The

purpose of this “gaming session” was for me to get as close as possible to the lived, ready-to-

hand experience of playing. Each participant determined individually what he or she felt was

most important to show me during the gaming session.

To help guide my questions during both phases of the interview, I created a list of content

areas that I believed were relevant to the goals of my research. These content areas are as

follows:

 Brief history of video game play with a focus on MMORPG play

 Whether MMORPGs are preferred over other video game or other entertainments

 Current game being played, guild affiliation

 Character(s)’s setup, equipment, backstory, etc.

 In-game relationships

 Play schedule, the way that gaming fits in with rest of life

 High points/low points of gaming career

 Routine activities, how game time is spent and why

 Aspirations and hopes, what the activities are allowing player to build towards

By attempting to cover this list of content areas in each interview, I hoped to gather similar sets

of data from each participant so that I could consider similarities and differences during the

analysis. Of course, I was also interested in the unique nuance of participants’ perspectives that

may have been outside my preconceived notions of important content areas, so during the

interviews I followed their leads whenever possible. Usually, my participants would cover most

of these content areas without prompting. They also discussed things I would not have known to

ask about and may not have emerged had I used a more structured approach to interviewing.

After each interview, I transcribed the interview from the recording and then emailed a

copy of the transcript to the respective interviewee, asking him or her to review it and add

anything that came to mind by annotating the text or writing out additional thoughts in an email.

This process of having participants review their data and contribute their additional perspectives

is referred to as a member check. Three of the five participants said that they didn’t have

anything to add to the transcript, while the other two submitted brief commentaries on what they

had said during their interviews.

Data analysis. After the member check, I began the process of analyzing the data

through IPA. I followed the step-by-step procedure described by Smith et al. (2009), which is

summarized in the remainder of this section. Steps one through four are applied to each transcript

in turn. Step five accounts for the transition from one transcript to another. Step six involves

considering all of the data at once.

The purpose of the first step, “Reading and Re-reading,” is to become immersed in the

data and focus one’s attention on the participant’s life-world. Smith et al. recommend repeatedly

listening to the interview and reading the transcript. They also suggest annotating initial

impressions the first time through and then setting them aside, since initial connections can be

overwhelming and make it difficult to dwell with the data in a receptive way.

The second step, “Initial Noting,” involves reading through the transcript and recording

exploratory notes. Smith et al. recommend first focusing attention on the “participant’s explicit

meaning,” (p. 83) which will involve the things that are important to them and their meanings.

From these descriptive comments, it becomes possible to make additional interpretive notes,

considering context, language, and patterns in the data. Smith et al. emphasize that this stage is a

process of engaging the data in detail and “exploring different avenues of meaning” (p. 91). I

found that it was easiest to undertake this phase by using the comment feature in Microsoft

Word, since it allowed me to link the comments to a particular point in the transcript.

In the third step, “Developing Emergent Themes,” the goal is to gather the initial notes

into more concise groupings while maintaining complexity and fidelity: “Whilst initial notes feel

very loose, open, and contingent, emergent themes should feel like they have captured and

reflect an understanding” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 92). In this phase, I worked closely with my

initial notes and the transcript, reflecting on the content and thereby arriving at more focused

meanings. There was a significant interpretive dimension to this process, since I was using my

own understandings of the data to formulate the emergent themes. I created a column alongside

my transcript for the themes, which were usually demarcated by a few words or a brief phrase.

This arrangement made it possible for the initial notes, emergent themes, and transcript to be

simultaneously visible on my screen and in the same document.

The goal of step four, “Searching for Connections Across Emergent Themes,” entails

“drawing together the emergent themes and producing a structure which allows you to point to

all of the most interesting and important aspects of your participant’s account” (p. 96). This

structure is composed of “final” themes that account for the emerging themes. The authors

suggest finding a method that allows the researcher to freely experiment with different possible

arrangements of themes. I found that what worked best for me was having all of the emergent

themes in one Word document, which allowed me to easily arrange and rearrange them into

different clusters by using the copy and paste functions. This process had an organic quality;

groupings would split into multiple groupings, be absorbed into one another, disintegrate, and so

on. Because I was immersed in the data after arriving at a list of themes, I decided to document

the themes for each participant (which I refer to as “individual themes”) before moving on to the

next transcript. The writing process proved to be an extension of my initial efforts to arrive at

themes, since I continued to refine them during the time that I recorded individual themes.

The fifth step, “Moving to the Next Case,” involves transitioning from one interview

transcript to the next. I prioritized attempting to appreciate the way the analysis of the previous

transcript influenced preconceptions, allowing me to be aware of how my mindset influenced the

next analysis. Since I wrote up the individual themes for each participant prior to moving onto

the next interview, I had a substantial record of how I ended up thinking about the data. When

analyzing subsequent interviews, I would sometimes notice that I was gravitating towards similar

themes, prompting me to consider the validity of that theme in light of the new data.

Once I had analyzed each interview, I moved on to step six: “Looking for Patterns Across

Cases.” As the name suggests, this is the point where the researcher investigates connections in

the themes developed for each interview. In my across-interview analysis, I wanted to account

for both convergences and variations. To do so, I compared the individual themes for each

participant and developed a new set of shared themes, which generally required creating themes

with broader meanings in order to accommodate similar individual themes. I also noted the

individual themes that were unique to each participant. To take the analysis to a more

interpretive level, I also created a single, super-ordinate theme that tied many subordinate themes

together and addressed the orienting question of the research: how do participants engage and

remain engaged with playing their MMORPG?

Chapter 4: Preliminary Self-Analysis

Pre-Research Impressions of MMORPGs

I first became aware of the MMORPG genre around the year 2000 when I was 16 years

old. At the time, I played PC games regularly (mostly real-time strategy and first-person

shooters) and was subscribed to PC Accelerator magazine, which was composed of PC game and

hardware reviews. I remember occasionally coming across references to EverQuest, which was

portrayed as an uncannily addicting game and jokingly referred to as “EverCrack.”

Thus, the

association between addiction and MMORPGs was embedded in my first exposure to the genre.

I also vaguely recall reading that one had to spend lots of time killing snakes and rats before

one’s character was strong enough to fight respectable enemies. Needless to say, I wasn’t enticed

by these reports, nor was I drawn to online games in general. I liked the experience of being

privately immersed in another world that single-player games provided. I found that the presence

of other people in online games diminished this sense of immersion.

It wasn’t until 2006 that I actually saw an MMORPG being played when a friend’s

boyfriend showed me WoW on his laptop at the college coffee shop, which provided me with a

sense of the graphics and interface that is characteristic of these games. After this brief encounter

with WoW, I would occasionally read things about MMORPGs in the popular media. These

reports almost always referenced their addictiveness. Consequently, my impression was further

World of Warcraft has likewise been referred to as “World of Warcrack.”

solidified that EverQuest, WoW, and other MMORPGs were played excessively by hardcore

gamers.

My Gaming History

As I look back on my introduction to MMORPGs, I am actually surprised that I wasn’t

more interested in them since I have always gravitated towards both gaming and the fantasy

genre. Since my childhood, I have enjoyed fantasy literature such as Lord of the Rings. I have

also played many video and non-video games set in fantasy worlds including the popular

collectable card game Magic: The Gathering, real-time and turn-based strategy PC games, and a

host of miniature-based tabletop games published by Games Workshop, most extensively

Warhammer:The Game of Fantasy Battles.

Even more closely related to MMORPGs, I played a pencil-and-paper role-playing game

a few times in middle school and thoroughly enjoyed it. Besides the fun of being with my friends

and collectively imagining and playing out the heroic endeavors of our characters, I was excited

by the anticipation of my character—a human named Brutus—becoming increasingly powerful.

He began as a lowly bodyguard, with nothing but a few skills, a leather jack, and a set of trusty

knuckledusters. I remember looking though the various careers in the rulebook and seeing that if

Brutus gained enough experience points by completing quests, he could spend them to progress

into new careers and gain new skills. He could also acquire improved weapons and armor. I can

distinctly remember pondering the various career choices in my mind, building excitement about

the possibility of Brutus eventually becoming a freelance knight or a judicial champion.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to keep playing for logistical reasons and poor Brutus has

remained a lowly bodyguard forever. Despite having only played a few times, I was left with an

understanding of the enthusiasm associated with progressively improving a character.

My Academic Interest in MMORPGs

During my first year in the Ph.D. program at Duquesne University, I was required to

choose a research topic for the “Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods” class. At the

time, I was enthusiastically involved in my own hobby: Warhammer, which involves collecting

and painting an army of fantasy miniatures and then pitting it against an opponent’s army in a

strategic battle. It was clear to me that there were some superficial similarities between my own

hobby and MMORPG gaming. Both share the fantasy setting and are strategy-oriented games.

Both tend to involve a degree of ongoing involvement and dedication. Both require painstakingly

cultivating something: in Warhammer, one’s army of miniatures; in MMORPGs, one’s avatar.

My awareness that my own hobby shared some features with MMORPGs was difficult to

reconcile with the lack of appeal these games held for me. In fact, I looked down on MMORPGs

in a manner that reflected the usual negative stereotypes. I couldn’t understand what was

compelling about them. The combination of failing to grasp the appeal of MMORPGs while

being engaged with my own, apparently similar, hobby stoked my curiosity about these games.

Just as I did not consider spending hundreds of hours to paint an army of miniatures to be a

waste of time, surely the legions of MMORPG players felt the same way about their time-

consuming pursuits. Just as I could describe the many reasons I found Warhammer to be an

engaging and worthwhile way to spend my time, undoubtedly MMORPG players had their own

reasons for playing their games. And just as I could go on and on about the complexities and

nuances of my hobby, I am sure they could do the same for theirs. Thus, tabletop gaming with

Warhammer provided an empathic bridge that made me want to learn more about the world of

MMORPGs rather than continue to base my judgments on stereotypes. Thus, I chose the

experience of playing MMORPGs as my research topic for the “Introduction to Qualitative

Research Methods” class and have continued researching it since.

Experiences in the World of Rift

In a subsequent research class, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on MMORPGs,

which primarily consisted of playing one myself. In line with the purposes of my research, I

wanted to play an MMORPG that was representative of the genre. However, I also wanted to

take my own preferences into account, since a native player would do the same. On account of

its long-standing popularity, WoW was an obvious candidate, but its cartoonish graphics were

unappealing to me. Rift, a new fantasy MMORPG, was the next game I seriously considered.

Reviews indicated that Rift was not an innovative game, but rather one that effectively combined

the tried-and-true features of its predecessors, especially WoW. Additionally, it had realistic

graphics and a darker theme, both of which appealed to my aesthetic predilections. Thus, Rift

suited my research requirements and personal preferences, so I purchased a subscription and

downloaded the game!

The next step was creating an avatar. In Rift, one’s avatar could belong to one of two

factions, each comprised of three races each. There were also four broad classes: warrior, mage,

rogue, and cleric. Each class consists of eight subclasses or “souls” (a term related to the

metaphysics of the fantasy world of Rift), but these are not selected during character creation and

can be changed throughout the game. The faction, race, and class cannot be changed, however,

so I would be stuck with whatever choice I made unless I wanted to start over with a new

character. In addition to these functional choices, the game also includes the ability to adjust

many elements of the avatar’s appearance, such as height, build, hairstyle, makeup, tattoos, and

facial features. I experimented with several possibilities and eventually decided on a human

warrior who looked like a rugged version of Matthew McConaughey. Lastly, I had to name my

character. After some failed attempts at making something up myself, I pulled out my copy of

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, looked through the name index, and settled on “Galdor.”

Once I had finished the character creation process, Galdor took to the screen for the first

time with nothing but a short sword and a shield. The game began in a large stone sanctuary

populated by angelic figures that corresponded to each “soul” or subclass. By talking to them, I

was able to select the three souls that I wanted Galdor to embody. I chose Champion (heroic

slayers who wield massive weapons), Paragon (deft martial artists who fight with a weapon in

each hand), and Riftblade (warriors who infuse their attacks with magic). Functionally speaking,

each soul had its own pool of abilities from which Galdor could choose his upgrades. My

intention was to focus primarily on the Champion skill set since I imagined Galdor as wielding a

large two-handed weapon and having a brute force-oriented approach to fighting.

After making my selections, it was time to step out of the sanctuary and into the fray!

There was an ongoing battle in which NPC (non-player characters) soldiers, along with a few

other new players like me, were facing off against skeletal fighters against a backdrop of dreary

skies and gnarled trees. It wasn’t long before I was assigned my first handful of quests, all of

which involved killing a certain number of this or that variety of the undead enemies on the

battlefield. I had only two attack abilities, so dispatching my enemies was just a matter of

selecting them with my mouse and then clicking one of my two ability buttons several times.

These particular MOBs weren’t strong enough to put Galdor in danger of dying, so killing them

to gain experience points was straightforward and without risk. After repeatedly killing enemies

for about 20 minutes, I leveled up for the first time. This resulted in the increase of my basic

statistics (strength, constitution, and so on) and the acquisition of a skill point, which could be

spent on one of my three skill trees. I used it to gain the ability “Bull Rush,” which let Galdor

charge over a great distance to make an initial strike on an enemy. In addition to accumulating

experience points, I was also looting gold and items from my slain enemies. Not long after

leveling up, I acquired a hefty, ancient-looking two-handed sword, which I equipped in place of

my short sword and shield. Once I had finished all of my quests, I decided it was time to move

on to the next area by following the only available road.

Once I crossed the threshold into the new area, everything the environment changed

dramatically, including the scenery, the color of the sky, and the music. In contrast to the stark,

war-torn landscape of the starting area, the new zone was a lush forest called Silverwood. I

savored walking down the road and taking everything in—it did feel like I was in a “world.”

Eventually, I happened upon a cluster of NPCs who assigned me a new set of quests, purchased

my excess gear, and sold me a few basic items such as healing potions.

As I continued playing, I found that quests almost always involved either killing MOBs

or gathering items. In the latter instance, the items would either be carried by MOBs (meaning

the MOBs would have to be killed in order to acquire the item) or essentially sitting on the

ground in a given area. Another less common variant is a delivery quest, where an item would

need to be brought from one NPC to another. Quests were almost always assigned by NPCs; a

NPC who had a quest to assign was indicated by an exclamation point over his or her head.

Clicking on a NPC with a quest to offer resulted in a window popping up with various pieces of

information related to the quest. To illustrate an instance of how the information is delivered, I

will use the quest “Beckoning of the Blessing” as an example. First, there would be the dialogue

from the NPC—essentially the communication from the NPC to my character in the game, which

in this case was: “The Aelfwar have turned from the gods. In their fervor, they have allowed a

seed of disease to sprout within them, staining all they touch. My shrines have become corrupted,

and as Hylas’s power grows, my light in these woods dwindles.” Accompanying the dialogue

would be a short description that summed up the quest in terms of concrete objectives: “Prove

your resolve to the Spirit Guide by killing Mirror Defilers and Conspirators in the Mirror of

Ages.” Additionally, there would be a bulleted list of the objectives provided in even more

concrete terms:

OBJECTIVES

 Kill Mirror Defilers and Conspirators 0/10

 Return to the Spirit Guide in Mirror of Ages

The rewards for completing the quest were also listed, which included the amount of gold,

experience, reputation, and sometimes items that would be bestowed upon completion. Often, the

completion of a quest results in the immediate assignment of a new one (e.g., you successfully

have collected the plant samples, now go deliver them to the professor who needs them).

Conveniently, all the quests I had been assigned were all automatically added to a

sortable list. When a given quest was selected from the list, the area on the map relevant to the

quest was indicated on the in-game map. Thus, questing involved consulting the list of quests,

choosing a quest to complete (or possibly a few to tackle at the same time, since completing a

few quests in the same area is more efficient), traveling to the appropriate location, and then

completing the objectives. Once I was done with the quests I had set out to do, I would return to

the designated NPCs, collect my rewards, sell extraneous items, and replenish my stock of

healing potions.

Questing inevitably involved a lot of combat. Even if the quest objective was to gather

items that were not possessed by MOBs, there would still be MOBs populating the area, so they

would have to be dispatched anyway. Since fighting MOBs was such a ubiquitous aspect of

questing, I will say more about MOBs and combat. MOBs in Rift included all manner of beasts,

humanoids, humans, and undead creatures. Almost invariably, MOBs were evenly spaced out

across a given area and usually meandering around without a clear purpose. The fact that they

were spread out allowed me to choose the number of enemies Galdor fought at once, which was

important because I could usually only handle one enemy at a time. If I accidentally engaged too

many MOBs, Galdor would be easily overwhelmed and die (running away is rarely possible).

The basic procedure for questing usually took the form of engaging a single MOB in combat,

killing it, looting it, healing myself if necessary, and then moving on to the next one, usually a

short distance away.

Combat consisted of using Galdor’s various attacks and other abilities to reduce hostile

MOBs to zero health. Since he was a warrior, most of his abilities dealt close-range, physical

damage to his targets. The effects of abilities play off one another in various ways, which meant

that it was possible to for me to sequence them strategically for optimal performance. In order to

deal as much damage as I could, I followed the common practice of establishing a standard

“rotation,” which was essentially a pre-determined sequence in which I would use my abilities.

Thus, once combat began, I would start going through my rotation of abilities while the MOB

used its abilities on Galdor. When things went well, the MOB’s health bar would decrease faster

than Galdor’s and before long the creature would be dead. I found that it was more efficient to

quest in areas where Galdor was significantly more powerful than the MOBs, because I could

kill them more quickly and the risk of dying was minimal. Questing in locations where the

resident MOBs were much more challenging for Galdor was inefficient, since killing them took a

great deal longer, more time was spent between fights healing, and I would die much more

frequently.

While there was no permanent penalty for dying, it was an inconvenience. I had to run a

ghost-like version of Galdor from a designated starting point all the way back to where the he

had died, which took about two minutes on average. Though this wasn’t much of a burden every

now and again, it quickly became frustrating when several deaths occurred in short succession.

Over the course of about 300 hours, I gradually leveled Galdor all the way up to the

maximum level of 50, mostly by earning experience through solo questing. However, I also

partook in some multiplayer content. In addition to traditional quests, Rift featured “world

events,” which were periodic invasions of MOBs that players can team up to defeat. I would take

the opportunity to join up with a group of other players to participate in these events whenever

one started. I found that fairly minimal communication and cooperation was required—for the

most part, players just formed a loose group that collectively attacked enemies. Consequently I

still felt as if I were playing alongside, rather than with, other players.

After reaching level 50, it occurred to me that I had neglected to develop my three

professions, which were mining, armor-smithing, and blacksmithing. Leveling any profession

requires one to progressively pay a master in that discipline for training. Mining involved finding

ore deposits (which was the time-consuming part) and then “mining” them, which amounted to

Galdor hammering at the deposit for about 20 seconds while I watched the progress bar fill up.

Blacksmithing and armor-smithing involved purchasing recipes, either buying or gathering raw

materials, and then using the recipes and raw materials to craft items at the forge. After making

approximately 10 or 20 of a given item, Galdor would level up, granting him access to new

training that allowed him to purchase new recipes. Early in my game play I was more focused on

leveling Galdor, so I ignored my professions altogether.

Once I had finished leveling Galdor however, I decided to fully level at least one

profession. I did some research online and decided to switch one of my existing professions to

rune-crafting, since I needed runes (which could be added to gear for bonuses) more than I

needed any of the weapons or armor that I would be able to craft. There also seemed to be fewer

materials required to craft runes, which would make it less costly to quickly level the profession.

As it turned out, I was able to progress from a level 1 to a level 50 rune-crafter over the course of

a few gaming sessions. I had to use a considerable amount of gold to buy all the materials that I

needed from the auction house (where other players sell items that they have gathered

themselves), but purchasing them saved me the time-consuming process of gathering. Thus,

leveling rune-crafting consisted of going to the rune-crafting master to buy training and recipes,

going to the auction house to buy materials, and then going to the forge to craft runes, which is

where I would gain the experience points. Once I gained enough experience points to level up,

the process began again with a new recipe. After much running back and forth, I worked my way

through all of the trainings and recipes and reached the maximum level. By this point, Galdor’s

gear was fully upgraded with runes. This satisfied me since it made him that much more

powerful, though the process of becoming a master rune-crafter was profoundly boring.

Around the time that I reached level 50 and leveled my rune-crafting profession, I

received an unexpected invitation to join the guild “Scarlet Shields.” I hadn’t been selected for

any particular reason—Scarlet Shields was a new guild and they were apparently inviting anyone

they came across who didn’t already have a guild affiliation. The guild turned out to be a loosely

organized community of players who were only in the early phases of establishing dungeon and

raid groups. The main thing that guild membership added to my experience was the guild chat

channel. Most of the chat involved members either being welcomed when they logged on or

congratulated when they leveled up. There were also guild-related announcements and people

saying things like “I’m going to try to sneak in a few more hours of play—hope my wife doesn’t

wake up and notice I’m not there!” Despite this fairly limited amount of contact, I did feel like I

was much more a part of a community than I had before.

Because the guild hadn’t yet organized groups for raiding or dungeons, I decided that I

should use the “searching for a group” feature if I wanted to experience that content. This feature

automatically teams you up with other players that have enlisted to do the same content.

Although dungeons weren’t significantly more complicated than normal questing, I initially

found that keeping up with other group members was challenging. I hadn’t realized before that

point that dungeons provided the fastest way to level up characters. This meant that most players

had repeatedly completed the same dungeons for experience points, so they would rush through

as quickly as they could. As a DPS character, my role was straightforward—I just had to attack

whatever MOBs the group encountered. Sometimes the process would become slightly more

complex, such as when we needed to attack bosses in a certain order. Usually, the group leader

would issue instructions over the text chat to keep everyone on the same page during the

encounter.

Dungeons were indeed profitable, but I didn’t find them to be enjoyable or aesthetically

appealing. When I picture a group of heroes descending into a dungeon, I like to imagine them

avoiding traps, using specialized skills like lock-picking, making difficult decisions, and fighting

skirmishes with a handful of foes here and there. In Rift, dungeoneering was more of a headlong

rush through scores of enemies. The tank would “pull” all of the enemies into a close bunch

around him- or herself. Meanwhile, the DPS characters unleash a barrage of attacks against

them. This was a strange sight indeed—there would be a huge mob of enemies all pulsating

around a tank that was peppered with flashes and other animations from the barrage of attacks. It

didn’t look remotely like real combat.

I completed about a dozen dungeon runs, and this was the most difficult content that I

endeavored. In order to raid, I would have needed to continue to improve Galdor’s gear to the

point where I could gain membership in a guild that had a raiding group. As things turned out,

my interest in the game sputtered out before I started down that road. At an unremarkable point, I

found that I had become tired of going through the same motions again and again. The rewards,

which had previously motivated me, ceased to be worth the time and trouble it took to obtain

them. I didn’t decide definitively at any particular moment to stop playing, but instead noticed

that I hadn’t logged on for several days and had lost the desire to do so.

All told, I had played Rift for about 400 hours over the course of about a year with one

break that lasted several months. My typical session took place on a weeknight and lasted for one

to two hours. In an average week, I probably played between eight and 10 hours. Occasionally,

when I was particularly motivated, I would play longer sessions that lasted up to four hours.

Since stopping the game, I have rarely felt an interest in reopening my account.

Impressions of Rift

Overall, I felt “into” and engaged with Rift during most of the time I was playing, even

though certain activities or even whole sessions could feel dull. The primary motivation to play

was the satisfaction of leveling up or improving Galdor in some way. Learning new abilities was

the most engaging aspect of leveling up , since a new ability presented new possibilities in the

rotation. Thus, at these points I was prompted to rethink my rotation—a problem-solving

challenge that I found interesting. This process would often involve guesswork and

experimentation to decide the optimal way to cycle through abilities. Experimenting with new

combinations added some welcome novelty to the repeated slaying of MOBs. Furthermore, it

was also one of the few challenges that I encountered during the leveling process that felt truly

strategic to me.

As mentioned previously, level-ups occur when a certain amount of experience points

have been gained since the previous level up, as tracked on a progress bar. It probably took me

an average of six hours to level up once. Progress during this time could be uneven. When I was

absorbed in the game and the bar was filling up quickly, I had the sense that I was making

progress quickly and that felt satisfying. At other times, it felt like the progress bar was barely

moving and that I wasn’t accomplishing much, which felt frustrating.

While leveling up was rewarding, I especially relished acquiring new gear. New gear not

only improved Galdor’s performance as a fighter, but I also got to see his appearance change

when I swapped out an old piece for a new one. In this regard, he served as a digital version of a

paper doll! As Galdor progressed through the game, his gear looked increasingly impressive.

Early on, he wore a mismatched collection of armor pieces and wielded a war hammer that

resembled a croquet mallet—an awkward phase for Galdor. At around level 25, he had a set of

armor that made him look like a gothic gladiator, including a horned helmet, skull knee-pads, a

leather skirt, pauldrons, and a huge, two-handed sword. At level 50, he wore a suit of full plate

armor trimmed in gold.

Perhaps what struck me most about my experience was that although the gameplay itself

wasn’t particularly fun or intrinsically rewarding, I did feel motivated to quest in order to obtain

the rewards that would improve my character. The times I remember enjoying Rift the most were

when I would log on during a weeknight and play for an hour or two while I wound down with a

beer. After a long day, going through the familiar motions of questing was often relaxing rather

than boring. However, in addition to the relaxation, I also had the feeling that I was

accomplishing something. Thus, the game provided an uncommon combination of relaxation and

productivity.

Chapter 5: Results

In this chapter I present the results of my analysis, which was carried out according to the

steps of the IPA method described in Chapter 3. First, I immerse myself in the experience of each

participant individually. Before presenting the findings, I provide a description of the participant

and the interview itself. I also include a summary of the participant’s gaming career.

Subsequently, I describe the individual themes that emerged using the first four steps of the IPA

method. After presenting my findings for each participant, I proceed to step six of the IPA

method and detail the results of the cross-interview analysis.

Ben

Ben was a 22-year-old single white male who grew up near Pittsburgh. He responded

with enthusiastic interest to my posting on Reddit inviting participants to my study, indicating

that he could show me the competitive side of WoW gaming. When he contacted me, he was

weeks away from completing his bachelor’s degree in engineering and would soon thereafter

start his new job as an engineer for a large manufacturing company. We managed to schedule the

interview during the few weeks between the end of his schooling and the beginning of his job,

during which time he was living with his parents.

Description of the interview. When I drove up to his parents’ house for the interview,

Ben emerged to greet me. He was over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, and had a mop of

brown hair and a good-natured, youthful face. He wore jeans and a WoW hoodie. Before I

arrived, Ben had warned me that his parents’ house was a “disaster” because both he and his

sister were preparing to move out in the next couple days. On top of that, a family member had

recently passed away, so many of his belongings were being stored there temporarily. Ben guided

me into what I suspected was the dining room. It was difficult to tell because, as promised, it was

filled with boxes and sundry items. Ben’s large gaming laptop, monitor, keyboard, and gaming

mouse (that he would later show me had twelve thumb buttons) were temporarily set up on a

round table that had been pushed up against a wall. WoW was already open on his screen when

we got situated for the interview. He sat facing his computer while I sat off to the side, facing

him yet also able to see the screen at an angle. He immediately put on a pair of black wrist braces

and made a quip about his hobby being bad for him. During the interview, he frequently leaned

way back in his chair, giving his physical presence a dynamism not usually associated with

sitting at a computer.

Throughout the time that the interview lasted, Ben was energized and in good humor. He

joked and laughed often, both with me and with his guild mates over voice chat. Ben made my

job as an interviewer easy, as he seemed to have a clear sense of what he felt was important to

share and presented it efficiently. To augment his descriptions, he often pulled up information on

websites and addons

and provided apt examples from his experience. He would also

occasionally simulate a stream of consciousness so I could get a sense of what goes through his

head while he is playing. We covered a tremendous amount of ground in what turned out to be

almost three hours, though when I drew the interview to a close I had the feeling that he could

have gone on for another hour or two!

Addons are programs that add features to the software of the game. For instance, a player might use an addon that

tracks and displays the amount of damage his or her character does throughout a fight.

Throughout the interview, the presences of his mother, father, and sister—whom I greeted

at various points—were apparent in the background. They would occasionally pass through the

room, talk in the background, or say something to Ben. Several cats also made their way in and

out of the room as the interview progressed. Also present were his companions in WoW. For the

first hour or so of the interview, he wasn’t actively playing but did have WoW running and would

occasionally receive text messages from guild mates and quickly type out responses. As things

drew closer to the end of the first hour of the interview, a raid group was in the final stages of

forming. Somewhere around this point, he turned up the volume on his speakers so he could hear

the other members of the group on voice chat and occasionally contribute by speaking into his

microphone.

Once the raid began, he continued the interview, rarely needing to stop in order to focus

on the game. I found this capacity to multi-task impressive. Sometimes he would describe what

was happening on-screen or explain what his guildmates were saying over chat (which I could

hear but not always understand). At other points, he would be talking about something unrelated

to what was going on in the game, apparently not having any difficulty talking about one thing

while doing another.

Ben’s gaming career. Ben had played WoW for the past five years, with occasional

breaks for school that lasted several months. He estimated that he had spent between nine and 24

hours raiding per week at different points in his career, often with hours of preparation before the

raiding began. Ben said that the amount of time he played weekly had varied considerably over

the past five years, though in general he had played extensively. At one point he claimed, “I’ve

played an absolutely insane amount of time, you know, a quarter of my life, when I have WoW

available to me I spend about a quarter of my life playing it.” When he first contacted me, Ben

indicated that he has logged 9,500 hours—over a year—of playtime. During the interview, he

explained that he had taken a long break in order to focus on school and that this break had

ended a few months ago. After the break had ended, he joined a new guild and was still in the

process of getting his character’s gear back up to speed. He stated that although he was

enthusiastic about playing again, he didn’t want to get as caught up in the game as he had in the

past.

Individual themes. Below are the individual themes that I found during my analysis of

Ben’s interview transcript.

Being invested. One important theme that emerged in my interview with Ben was about

how he became invested and has remained invested (or even addicted) to WoW. Prior to playing

WoW, Ben was already playing other online games, such as Starcraft and Warcraft III (both real-

time strategy games published by the same developer) “obsessively,” so when he heard about

how popular WoW was, he decided to steer clear to avoid getting hooked. As fate would have it, a

girlfriend bought him the game as a gift. He felt like it would be rude to return the game, though

instead of opening it right away, he took the more cautious step of downloading the free trial

version and playing that first.

Initially, Ben was not particularly impressed by WoW. He explained that early on, your

character only has a few unimpressive abilities that you use to fight equally unimpressive

enemies on boring, chore-like quests. After playing for a week or two, his character’s abilities

became “flashier” and he got more into the game. However, he hit the level cap of the trial

version, which meant that he was stuck at level 20. He wasn’t aware of the cap, however, and

was frustrated by his stalled progress. Eventually, he realized that all he had to do was enter the

code from his copy of WoW and he could continue leveling up.

Ben believed that the point in which he became fully invested in WoW was occurred with

his decision to open his physical copy of WoW:

That was the point where it became important enough to me to get stronger that I was

willing to just go ahead and okay, yes, I will do this quest, I will do this, I will kill this

boar, I will run to this town, and I just wanted to get stronger. I didn’t want to be weak, I

didn’t want to be watching stronger guys run around, I didn’t want to have to run away

from this animal and it just, I don’t know, it something about the game, at that instance

saying “hey, you can’t get stronger until you do this” and I did it and I was just like

alright, now, now I’m invested in it, now I have money in it, now I’m just going to get

something out of this game, I’m going to get stronger, I’m going to be something.

From this point onward, he didn’t look back. Over the next few months he completed all the

quests in the game and fully leveled his character and all of his professions.

Of course, Ben’s engagement with WoW did not end with fully leveling his first character.

He explained that once his character hit the maximum level, raiding became his new focus,

which dramatically shaped and fueled his engagement with the game:

Once you start raiding, you’ll all a sudden find, like, not only are you getting ready for

raid, but you’re also on four hours before raid doing dailies, doing this, doing that, doing

EVERYTHING for no reason other than, heh, um, that, you know, you’re now invested

in the game again, and you just get stuck in that.

Progressing through a raid is the process of the raid group gradually defeating increasingly

difficult bosses. Since raiding requires the full roster of players, raid groups play on a schedule,

which provides a fixed point around which other in-game activities revolve. Ben noted that he

typically logged on hours before the raid group meets in order to complete various tasks to get

his character ready for the action.

Ben flatly stated that he considered the intensity of his investment in WoW to be nothing

short of addiction. Since withdrawal is usually considered a feature of addiction, I asked him

what it’s like when he has to take an extended break for school. In response, he simulated the

thoughts that go through his head:

Ahhh, I should be doing my dailies to get my tokens, I should be raiding right now, I’m

gonna fall behind on my gear, I don’t want to fall behind on my gear, cause then it’s a

pain to get caught up, I don’t want to fall behind on players, I don’t want to fall behind on

boss strategies, like uhhhh god it’s going to be so hard to get caught up again.

After this description, he explained that getting caught up and staying caught up are the most

powerful motivators to keep playing:

It’s about keeping up. Like I said, you fall behind so quickly. So as soon as you are

caught up, so as soon as you are caught up, you have that desire not only to stay caught

up but get to the very bleeding edge.

Since MMORPGs are designed so that new content is periodically released, the standard is

always rising. Patches and expansions feature increasingly powerful enemies who drop

increasingly powerful gear. Thus, the power level of enemies and avatars increases reciprocally

so that the enemies are challenging but still beatable. The most proficient guilds progress through

new content the fastest—they are on the “bleeding edge” that Ben refers to. Naturally, anyone

who takes a break from playing while this upward trend of power continues will be quickly left

behind.

Striving to be a skilled player. Striving to be a skilled player was at the heart of Ben’s

engagement with WoW. Much of what he conveyed during the interview was centered on striving

towards improved performance. I learned that there are two basic factors that play into

performance in WoW: the power of one’s avatar and the skill of the player. The power of the

avatar is determined by the avatar’s level (which is, by definition, the maximum possible level

during the endgame

) and the avatar’s gear. These two main factors determine the potential for

what the avatar can do in the game, such as how much damage it does per attack. The other

factor is the skill of the player, which is the focus of this theme. Being a skilled player is

essentially determined by how well the player makes use of the avatar’s potential. In considering

an analogy between a racecar and driver, the avatar would be the car and the player would be the

driver. Even the best driver can’t win a race in a slow car, whereas an unskilled driver will make

poor use of a fast car. At the time of our interview, Ben characterized himself as a skilled player

using an “undergeared” character, which indicates that his character was not particularly

powerful due to having outdated gear.

Of course, Ben didn’t start out as a highly skilled player. For the first year or so that he

played, he was what is referred to as a “casual.” He was a member of a casual guild, and he,

along with his guildmates, would enjoy leveling, doing old and no longer “relevant” content,

The “endgame” begins once a character has reached the maximum level. Up to this point, the player is oriented

towards fully leveling his or her character. Once this is achieved, the game provides a new set of possibilities to

pursue, which are collectively referred to as the endgame.

chatting, and even playing hide-and-seek. However, things began to shift when Ben and a few of

his guildmates started doing dungeons with a much more skilled player from a different guild.

This player did vastly more damage than Ben and his friends, which bewildered and irked them.

They decided to investigate how to improve their damage output:

Now we start paying attention to the damage meters, now we start paying attention to

what abilities we are using, whether or not we were optimizing our rotations, which, I

don’t know if anyone’s covered that with you, is basically what order of skill usage will

do the most damage, started paying attention to that, started paying attention to whether

we had the right stats on our gear, like “Agility’s good but strength is better, okay, so I

need to make sure I have as much strength as possible on this guy,” started paying

attention to that. And that is when it went from logging on every day to have fun with my

friends and ... be better, but only, I only had to be good enough to do what they were

doing, which wasn’t really anything serious, um, to now, “Okay, I gotta make sure this

gear’s right, I gotta make sure my rotation’s right, I gotta make sure damage is up, why is

my damage low? What can I do to make it better?” Um, Googling online, you know:

“Hey, how do I warrior DPS? What am I doing wrong? How is, you know, I see, okay I

was doing this and I should be doing this.

Since this shift in attitude, the pursuit of excellence had consistently been a driving factor in the

way Ben played WoW. Throughout the interview, he made reference to the capabilities skilled

players possess, which I have accounted for later in the analysis.

One point that Ben emphasized was how quickly players must make decisions during

combat. The “global cooldown,” which is the length of time before one ability can be used after

another, is between 1–1.5 seconds. Thus, a player makes a decision about what ability button to

press next on a second by second basis. In order to make the most of their avatars’ capacities by

making an optimal choice, multiple variables must be taken into account, including situational

factors and various game mechanics. To deal with these stringent demands, players establish a

“rotation,” which is an optimal sequence in which to use their avatar’s abilities. In their simplest

incarnations, a rotation may be just that: abilities that are used in a set rotation. However, when a

player becomes more sophisticated and takes more variables into account, a rotation becomes a

complex decision tree. Having the capacity to design a rotation and follow it is a significant

aspect of being a skilled player. Ben explained that his character, an undead warrior, had around

50 abilities that may be useful at any given moment and Ben’s standard rotation involved 38 of

them. In the following excerpt he discusses his rotation and simulates his decision making

process during a fight:

Ben: It’s depending on the situation, it’s depending on whether this has proc’d

, its

depending on whether I have this buff

or not, I have to do this, I have to do this, there’s

38 different situations I could be in hahahaha.

Jake: Yeah, so you’re keeping track of—

Ben: Yeah, I have to keep track of them. And the global cooldown

is, you know, say a

second long, it’s actually a second and a half but with haste it’ll decrease the global

cooldown down to a minimum of a second, so if you have a lot of haste, you have to

analyze the situation, read your buffs, read your debuffs, read what you’re doing, and

then use the right ability every second. Once a second.

Jake: So once a second you are making a decision.

If something has “proc’d” it means that a “process” has been activated. For example, a sword might have a 10%

chance of reducing an enemies armor by 25%—when this ability becomes activiated in a fight, it has proc’d.

A buff is a spell or other ability that improves the character’s capacities in some way. The opposite is referred to as

a debuff.

The global cooldown is the amount of time a player has to wait after using an ability to use a new ability. All

abilities have their own particular cooldown time as well. For instance, an attack might have a two minute

cooldown, menaing that it can only be used once every two minutes.

Ben: Yeah. Okay, so I’m reading it, alright I got this buff up, I got, you know a Raging

Blow proc, and I have Colossal Smash debuff on the boss. Raging Blow just came off

cooldown, okay, this oh, and I’m rolling, I have three buffs up that are increasing my

strength, so I really, this is a great time, I’m going to use Raging Blow, it’s a hard hitting

ability, I’m going to use it right now. K, Raging Blow, good, okay, but that used one of

my buffs, and now two of my debuffs are running out, should I use, I have, should I use

Raging Blow again because I still have one more proc of it, or should I wait until I can

get Colossal Smash back up and use Blood Thirst to build my rage so that I can use

Raging Blow, because Raging Blow takes 10 rage to use. So should I pool my resources

and wait until I have a better time that’s going to do more damage, or should I just go

ahead and dump it all into this next attack and then hope that before I have full resources

I can get another Raging Blow proc and use it again. So basically is it best to use it right

now, is the situation optimal? The first Raging Blow proc situation was optimal,

absolutely, very clear I needed to use it. Second one I can use it, the situation is not

optimal. So the question is whether I wait for an optimal situation, or I use it and hope

that it comes back up before the next optimal situation hahahahaha.

Jake: And you make that decision in a second.

Ben: And I have one second to make that decision across eight abilities. Every single one

of those abilities I have to decide whether that’s the right one to use for that situation or

not, and I only have a second to do that decision in total haha.

Jake: Uh huh, so you’re just making decision after decision.

Ben: Yeah, decision, decision for 16 minutes

. Once a second for 16 minutes.

Skilled players like Ben are able to quickly make optimal or near-optimal decisions consistently

throughout the fight.

Sixteen minutes is the approximate length of a raid fight.

In total, that’s 960 decisions in 16 minutes!

Later on in the interview, I was able to observe Ben participate in two raid-boss fights.

After being staggered by his description of how much information is processed on a second by

second basis, I expected that Ben would need to focus intently on the game during combat.

Instead, he continued the interview with me, rarely missing a beat. He explained that being able

to keep track of one’s rotation is like “studying for a test, if you study a lot it’s not, you don’t

find the test difficult.” Navigating his 38-step list was something he could flow through

effortlessly because of how much he had played. I was genuinely impressed by Ben’s skill, and

even more so after I found out that he actually did more damage points than a player who had

significantly better gear. Ben was able to do more with less—all while being interviewed!

Possessing finely-tuned situational awareness is also vital to skillful performance, since

there is so much to keep track of during a raid fight. Being aware of what the boss is doing and

how it is affecting the party is critical. It is often also necessary to position one’s avatar

strategically, usually in order to avoid or mitigate the damage of certain abilities. Awareness of

what is happening to other party members and intervening when possible can also make or break

a fight. Ben provided the example of a potentially catastrophic situation of too many debuffs

building up on both tanks. He explained that a paladin is the character class that possesses the

ability to solve this problem, but the one playing a paladin would need to be aware of the

situation in order to take action:

Because a great paladin, a really good paladin is going to notice that, Hand of Protection,

right away and fix the problem before it becomes a problem and then you go on your

merry way. An okay paladin, you’ll have to ask him to do that.

This kind of awareness takes factors into consideration that are pertinent to more than raw

damage output. For example, during one of the fights that took place during the interview, Ben

explained the following scenario:

So what I did was come out here to deal with this Dark Shaman, or I mean Archweaver,

so he’s casting spells, so I’m going to use abilities that can stop him from casting his

spells. Same thing I just did there, I saw that he was casting, even though I wasn’t close

to him I had the wherewithal—and this is, again, something a lesser player wouldn’t do—

to charge over to him and interrupt him before he can do anything.

Ben explained that cultivating this degree of awareness is difficult to teach another player and is

not something “you can just learn from a guide.”

Skilled players, Ben clarified, are knowledgeable about all elements of the game because

they do relevant research. Any adept player will know how to optimize his or her character’s

performance with regards to gear, rotation, and spec

. Additionally, a hardcore raider is expected

to know all of a boss’s abilities and how to respond effectively by studying online resources. Ben

emphasized the importance of research:

If you’re doing a raid, a hardcore raid especially, um, you’re going to research fights,

strategies, you’re going to research your gear, you’re going to—I know—not right now,

but right before I quit I knew every single upgrade I wanted for my paladin, I knew where

it dropped from, I know what its drop chance was, I knew everything about the gear that I

needed I knew everything about the bosses, I looked up the bosses, I watched videos on

the bosses, I watched other people fight the bosses, I did everything that I could possibly

do so that when I got there, it was less strenuous. I talk about learning the fights, and you

“Spec” is short for specialization, which referes to the set of upgrades that a player chooses in order to make his or

her avatar suited for a particular function in the game. For instance, a player might choose a healing spec instead of a

damage spec on a particular character class.

do have to learn, there’s a little bit to learn as far as just being there, but as far as actually

becoming familiar with the strategy, that’s something a high level of raiding that you’re

expected to know before the fight, before you even get there.

Ben went on to point out that this degree of preparation outside of the game is something that

only a higher level player would do.

Gear. The skill of a player is independent from the avatar he or she is using, yet playing

with an underpowered character will limit what even then most adept player can accomplish. For

example, before Ben’s raid began, someone asked if he would be willing to play as one of the

party’s tanks. Ben declined and subsequently explained to me, “There’s no way. Regardless of

skill, I do not have a gear level that will make me capable of tanking this content. The boss will

hit me way too hard.” Ben is essentially saying that the amount of damage the boss would have

been dealing to Ben’s character is simply more than he could absorb due to inadequate defensive

attributes provided by his gear. This is true regardless of how well Ben performed.

Because gear is such an important contributor to overall performance, acquiring first-

class gear for one’s character is a major focus of endgame play. The best gear is acquired from

vanquished raid bosses who drop “loot,” which includes gear, other items, and currency. Ben had

an addon that displayed the various pieces of gear that each boss had the potential to drop along

with the odds of the gear being dropped. Each time a boss is defeated, a few pieces of gear drop,

which must then be distributed amongst the party members, often by the raid leader. Since each

character has 16 available slots for various pieces of gear (e.g., there is slot for headgear, a chest

piece, a cloak, bracers, gloves, rings, etc.), players have to play through a raid many times before

everyone is equipped with gear from that raid.

Ben’s group killed two bosses during the interview, so I had the chance to observe loot

distribution after each victory. This process involved lots of excitement and impassioned

discussion over the voice chat. The raid leader had the final say in to whom each piece of gear

was given, though others participated in the decision-making process. For the most part, it

seemed that gear was given to the player who had the greatest need for each piece, though the

degree to which the player contributed to the guild was also a factor. Much of the discussion

involved players making a case for why they needed a given piece. The second boss dropped a

belt that Ben needed. He explained how much better it was than his current belt. While he waited

impatiently for the leadership to investigate the claim of another player, he turned to me and

hissed “just give it to me!” and laughed.

I observed that the players were quite ardent about acquiring new gear, which led me to

wonder just how much of a difference having the latest gear makes. During one of the fights, Ben

compared his character’s damage output to a character with up-to-date gear to demonstrate the

difference for me:

Ben: And you can see, you’ll see actually on the DPS meter, which I have right up, right

over here, that, this is me right here, this character, um, the effects of having poor gear.

It’s really, it’s really hard to explain to someone who hasn’t played it how bad it is having

poor gear. I’m, I have gear which is actually on, up to date with this patch, it’s just not up

to date, I just don’t have any gear from this patch, so I have gear from the last patch, up to

date, so far, and still, you can see this guy is doing um an enorm—he’s doing five times

my damage because he has gear from this patch.

Jake: So as soon as you drop behind the curve a little bit you’re not even close to—

Ben: Not even remotely close to being able to keep up.

Thus, every time a new patch is released, there is a new set of improved gear to acquire and a

new group of bosses that players will need that gear to defeat. As I have mentioned, taking even

a short break from gaming inevitably results in falling behind the curve, which is exactly what

happened to Ben and why acquiring new gear for his character was a top priority.

In addition to its function of boosting an avatar’s performance, gear is an obvious marker

of success in WoW because it indicates how powerful a character is on account of the gear’s

attributes, and the content that has been completed with that character in order to earn that

particular gear. Thus, judging another player‘s achievement level by their gear is fairly reliable.

To top it off, better gear is more impressive-looking. Ben described the experience of assessing

other players’ gear:

Ben: And you could look at a character and say oh he’s wearing tier five shoulders, so

he’s only—you know, if the current tier, if the newest tier is tier seven and he only is

wearing tier five, which—I should have mention it builds up, so like the current tier I

think is tier 15 so, um, tier seven, if I’m wearing tier seven and he’s wearing tier five,

therefore, I’m a better player and it was obvious because anyone who played the game,

you knew what you were fighting for, you knew what gear you were in you knew that

right at that point in time you’d only been able to kill up to a tier five boss and you were

wearing tier five gear but you kinda dream, you had that vision in your mind of your

character all beefy and at tier seven so when you see someone run by with tier seven,

you’re like “oh man!”

Jake: It’s that goal right in front of you.

Ben: Yeah, you’re like “look at that guy, he’s killed, you know, he’s killed Arthas, he’s

killed, you know, any number of bosses,” and it’s, you’re like, “Ugh! Look how cool he

looks! Alright, I gotta, you know,” *mimes playing hard*

I left the interview with the impression that acquiring increasingly powerful gear is integral to

endgame play.

Social comparison and self-image. Becoming a skilled player and acquiring powerful

gear are pursuits that play out in a social context in which others attempting to do the same. As

several of the previous excerpts indicate, concern about how Ben stacked up against other

players was a salient part of his experience of playing WoW. The game lends itself to

comparisons between players, since the attributes, gear, and accomplishments of their avatars can

be readily examined within the game or on the WoW website.

Ben often cited striving to be as good as or better than others as motivation to improve

his skills as a player and acquire better gear. For example, early on in the interview, he said:

You want to be someone that people look at and say “hey, wow, that’s like … you know,

look at that guy’s gear, oh my god, he must be really good, you know, look at this, look at

that. Oh my god he killed that boss, that’s incredible, you know. I can’t do that.” I didn’t

want to be the person who said “I can’t do that.” I wanted to be the person people were

looking at like “holy crap how did he do that?”

In this case, Ben comparing himself to other players was motivating. At another point, however,

Ben recounted a different example that had a more negative tone:

Ben: A few people I had ended up kicking out of the guild for bad attitudes had went on

to higher ranking guilds than Goof Troop and succeeded when I’m like, “Hey, I know I’m

a better player than them” I know I’m so much of a better player than them I kicked them

out. *laughs*

Jake: Right, right. *laughs*

Ben: So, now I see them in the city, and they’re wearing better gear than I am.

Jake: Right, so what impact did that have?

Ben: Yeah, it was frustrating, it was very frustrating, because I knew they were not a nice

person and not a good player. *both laugh*

Jake: And they had better gear.

Ben: And they had better gear than I did.

Jake: Yeah.

Ben: So a stranger walking around, they’re going to look at him and be envious of, more

envious of him than of me, and I mean it was just like, it was grating.

Words like “frustrating,” “grating,” and “envious” indicate the degree to which Ben’s esteem can

be wounded.

In addition to Ben’s retrospective descriptions in which he compared himself to other

players, Ben also drew comparisons between himself and other players while he raided. For

instance, at one point a player was dropped from the group instead of Ben. He delighted in this

opportunity to compare himself favorably with another player:

Ben: I don’t know who we dropped, we dropped the other paladin. Oh heck yeah, okay, I

didn’t get dropped, because there was a guy doing even lower DPS than me. If it’s set on

damage done, set it to DPS, see the Sideway guy? That’s the guy who got dropped.

That’s a ret paladin

, oh yeah that’s definitely a ret paladin. So, now, because I want to

stroke my ego, I want to see what kind of, what kind of gear he was in *both laugh* to

see if—

A “ret,” short for “retribution,” paladin is a particular spec of paladin that is a DPS and thus could be directly

compared to Ben’s character, who was also a DPS.

Jake: To see if he had better gear but was doing worse?

Ben: Yeah hahaha.

Jake: Well if nothing else you know he wasn’t in the middle of an interview.

Ben: Oh yeah! He’s got way better gear, he’s 531 … So he had 20 more item-level

than

me, so he should have been doing somewhere in the neighborhood, given his gear he

should have been doing about 200,000 DPS and he was only doing 83. So *both laugh*

he is a worse player that I am.

This exchange indicates that Ben is not shy about his competitive attitude. He explained that he

views the desire to be skilled at something as universal and that WoW provides him with a way to

fulfill it:

Um, you know, like nowadays I am a desired quantity as far as being a stronger player

because I’d been gone for the last three months and the first thing I see when I log in is

“Dude where were you we need you?” hahahaha like, like “Are you available Wednesday,

because we need you...now,” hahaha, yeah. Um, yeah and I think the desire to be part of a

group and the desire to be good at something is, I think that’s fairly universal. It just

happened that be that this thing was something that was in a game.

Unlike single-player games, which tend to be played in private, the massively multiplayer format

of WoW introduces a layer of competitiveness and social comparison that significantly factored

into Ben’s experience.

Rankings. Rankings came up early and often in the course of Ben’s interview. In fact,

before we even began discussing WoW, he mentioned that he attended one of the “top three

engineering schools” and was at the “top of [his] class.” As Ben described his WoW career, the

Item-level is a number indicating how powerful a piece of gear is. Here, Ben is referring to the character’s average

item-level.

rank of players, guilds, and even servers proved to be an integral part of the story. Ben explained

that the game itself does not have a ranking system, though it does keep track of many statistics.

The rankings that he referenced are actually compiled by various independent websites that pull

data from the game. Ben also explained that high ranking guilds submit what are essentially

portfolios of their achievements to these sites. During the following passage, he was showing me

WoWProgress.com—the most popular ranking site—and discussing the rankings of his current

and past guilds and servers:

So these are all different servers. Um, the server that I used to play on, it has been coming

up on rankings, 77, but when I played on it, this was my first server, when I played on it

was like 200 something in ranking, yeah, so it was bad. There were not good players on

there, it did not have a good reputation, so we all server transferred to a new server that

had a good reputation, good players, good guilds, and we were one of the top, um, so

Magtheridon is 22nd ranked, and see even right now, the guild I’m in right now, even

without me they’re still sixth ranked on the server, so they’re sixth ranked on a 22nd

ranked server, honestly that pretty much means they’re probably, they’re about top two

percent but when I was with that guild of players in Cataclysm, which included the three

players that left for Silver Slayers with me, all three of them were with that 10-man that

sectioned off we were top two or three on the server and we were, basically we had, not

only, we had credit, we didn’t have to recruit, we had people, like if we needed one spot,

like a guy had to quit for school or something, we would have people come to us, people

would come to our—and also all these high ranking guilds also have websites, um even

Ecstatic Strike has a website. Um, so they would come to us, they would email us, they’d

say “hey, I’m looking to transfer—I will transfer servers, I will pay $25 for the right to be

with your guild and kill bosses with you” hahaha. Um, cause we were high ranking, and,

but we were friends too.

In addition to talking about the rankings as compiled by these websites, Ben also made reference

to the informal ranking of players within guilds with statements like the following:

I got with this group, which is Ecstatic Strike, and I quickly, I was healing actually, on

my paladin for that, and I quickly became one of their high ranking people, and there are

people who are in this guild who are better than me. Honestly, uh, two or three of the top

ranking players in this guild are uh world-first quality players.

The above quotes along with the various other times that Ben mentioned rankings reminded me

of athletes being ranked, traded, and moved up to the big leagues.

Ranking seems to serve as both the quantification of skill and as the recognition of that

skill. In a game without built-in high scores or a way to beat the game, the player-created ranking

system serves the function of accounting for who is “winning,” who is the best, or who is closest

to the “bleeding edge” that Ben mentioned earlier. Thus, rankings make it possible for

competitive players like Ben to measure themselves against one another. The frequency that Ben

mentioned rankings suggests that they are integral to his competitive, performance-oriented way

of engaging with the game—he used the word “rank” and its derivatives 68 times during our

interview. Across my other four interviews, there were only two other times rankings were

mentioned.

Big numbers. Numbers are ubiquitous in WoW. During fights, for instance, numbers pop

up to display the damage done by every attack, which results in a cloud of numbers that can be

thick enough to partially obscure avatars and MOBs. While I was watching Ben play, there was a

moment when he scored a “big crit”—a critical hit, which is an attack that hits for double its

normal damage. He announced it excitedly and pointed out that he had an addon that

prominently displayed the amount of damage done by his critical hits. Exclaiming “Big crit!”

reminded him of a video that he wanted to show me. A few moments and another critical hit

later:

Big crit! I just hit that guy for a million damage. Big crits, big crits! Um, big numbers,

that is actually what reminded me of the video, is me thinking “big numbers,” um

because big numbers make me happy, they make everyone happy. Big numbers—the

bigger your gear, the better your gear gets, the bigger your numbers are, and the happier

you are because your numbers are huge.

At the end of the interview, Ben played the video for me. It showed the screen of the narrator

while he played in a PvP

match. The ostensible point of the video was to make the case that an

unpopular spec (fury) has merit in PvP, though the tone is comic rather than serious—the narrator

isn’t really attempting to make a coherent argument so much as clown around and make people

laugh. The following is an excerpt relevant to Ben’s reason for showing me the video:

Look at the—Boom! You can’t deny those numbers, you cannot deny those numbers, you

cannot deny the fact that numbers fly around when you play the game....with fury. That’s

the satirical fuckin’ addiction that we’re all addicted to with fury....Buh Bam, fuckin’

numbers! You can’t believe it! Numbers make me fuckin’ want to play WoW!

Ben explained that the video captures the excitement and the satisfaction of seeing your

character’s attacks do large quantities of damage. It’s worth considering that it’s the numbers,

rather than the animations, that really stand out—the animations don’t change based on how

PvP stands for player-versus-player, which involves individuals or teams of players fighting one another. Some

servers are designated as PvP servers, in which it is possible to attack other players at any time. Additionally,

players on any server can participate in organized PvP matches.

powerful the attack is, but the numbers do and thus become a focal point. The fact that Ben, and

many others, choose to have an addon that displays the amount of damage of their critical hits is

telling: There’s nothing like basking in the glory of a big crit!

The seemingly fundamental desire to increase the size of numbers and the resulting

satisfaction was a theme than ran consistently throughout Ben’s interview. In these excerpts, Ben

is explicitly talking about the numbers that correspond to damage dealt, but numbers pervade the

game: Characters have levels, gear has levels, professions have levels, and characters have

various other statistics.

Despite the importance of numbers in WoW, there were instances where Ben indicated

that “big numbers” is not what it’s all about. For example, he said that sometimes things with a

particular raid group are simply “not be working” even though all the numbers look right. He

continued that “you could do it again with different people, and all of the numbers will look the

same, but for some reason this time it worked hahahah.” He also mentioned that bosses that were

difficult simply because they hit for a lot of damage and couldn’t take a lot of damage are boring,

whereas bosses that were difficult because they required a lot of fine-tuned coordination

provided an enjoyable challenge. Additionally, skilled players don’t only focus on their DPS, but

consider other factors in the fight that are also crucial to success.

Socializing. Ben explained that during difficult content (which is, for the most part,

fighting raid bosses), it is best to stay “straight-faced” and focus on the task at hand. However,

there is a lot of downtime between bosses that is spent waiting for people, getting prepared for

the next boss, and fighting the easily dispatched “trash MOBs” which precede each boss. During

all of this downtime, players often joke around and chat

with one another. For example, at

several points during the interview party members teased Ben about him being an incompetent

player even though they knew he was underperforming because of his gear. At another point a

player text chatted “Be right back, pouring Coke” and someone else responded “Be right back,

snorting coke.” This led to an outburst of jokes over the voice chat about players not being

allowed to raid high. Ben confirmed that joking around and bantering during easy content is

commonplace and an enjoyable part of playing WoW.

During the gaming session, I also got a sense of how Ben and the rest of his party

enjoyed the content of the game as a group. At one point, I heard a buildup and then a crescendo

of yelling over the speakers. Ben explained that everyone in the group had died but the boss had

been down to one percent health! In the following passage, Ben describes an even more dramatic

experience of shared pathos:

I remember that I got very badly yelled at by one of my neighbors when we killed the

final boss in the expansion, because we killed the final boss in the expansion, because it

was like two in the morning and we had been working on it for like two months, and,

actually, I might, I have a picture of it, I think it’s on facebook actually, maybe not

though, but there’s a picture of us on the internet having killed that boss, we did a group

To understand communication in most MMORPGs, it is necessary to distinguish between text based chat and

voice chat. Text-based chat is built into the game, and involves typing out messages to other players. Voice chat is

hosted on external servers and allows players to talk as a group as if they were on a conference call. Ben would

normally listen to his voice chat through his headset, but for my benefit he put it over the speakers so I could hear

what his guild mates were saying. Ben explained that being able to talk is necessary for coordination during difficult

content, though it also facilitates socializing. In both cases, the key allowance that voice chat makes (that typing out

messages doesn’t) is that it doesn’t interfere with gameplay, which requires the player’s hands to be occupied with

the mouse and keyboard.

picture, we were like “Hey, group up, let’s get around this body, of this dead boss and

take a picture,” and we were so happy, it was like, it was really fun.

Witnessing the fun of sharing the experience of such a near miss and imaging the sense of shared

accomplishment gave me an appreciation for the appeal of group play over solitary play.

In addition to joking around and commenting on in-game events, Ben indicated that

conversations over voice chat would sometimes drift towards life outside the game. In the

following passage, Ben describes socializing with guild mates during his early days of leveling,

questing, and dungeoneering with his friends:

Jake: So you guys were just chatting all along while you were doing things?

Ben: Yeah, just talking, chatting, doing things, laughing, having fun. Um, normally the

more relaxed you are with the content, the more the topic strays towards real-life, it strays

towards actual, you know, you might as well picture a group of people sitting in a room

just, you know, having a couple beers, chatting, because that’s really what it is. In fact,

some of them were having a couple beers hahaha.

He explained that through talking with one another regularly they actually knew a great deal

about each other’s lives and that discussing personal problems and providing support to one

another was typical. Through this kind of intimate contact, Ben has formed several long-term

friendships in WoW that have lasted for years and continue to this day.

Sometimes his friendships with WoW friends crossed over the boundary into real-life in

one way or another. The most dramatic instance of this was having a long-term romantic

relationship with a woman in his guild named Beth about two years ago. He first met her in

person when he travelled to Texas to meet up with her and other guild members. Their

relationship began sometime later on and she ended up moving to the Pittsburgh area, partially to

be closer to Ben. I expected that the transition from being “just” guildmates to in person

romantic partners would have been a dramatic one. Ben’s portrayal surprised me:

Jake: Okay, so what was it like shifting relationships, like going from being in-game

friends to meeting her in real-life?

Ben: Absolutely no effort.

Jake: So just transitioned really—

Ben: Cause we played together, raided together for three years, knew each other, talked,

knew of each other’s personal problems, blah blah blah, and that was kind of how we

started progressing from just friends to more than friends was that she had just broken up

with her boyfriend and for like two months, and I kind of like helped her right after that

and then after that we talked more personally for like a month and a half, but as far as

knowing each other, knowing our personal lives, we’d known that for like, you know

same thing as any friend you might know, but that was when it transitioned from being

friends to being more than friends was because we were already friends, we were helping

each other out with problems in our lives and getting closer, but it was super effortless,

there was no effort, I mean I met her and that was the first time I had seen her in real-life,

but as far as talking to her it was, just picking up, it was just another day, it just happened

to be that we saw each other in person this time so.

Jake: That’s interesting.

Ben: There’s was no, I mean, I think we ... yeah. She pulled up, cause she actually gave

me a ride from the one guy’s house that I had been staying with that was the guild leader

and literally the first thing I think I did was make fun of her after I saw her. But it was

cool, because we were friends, like I think I made some joke about her being a typical

Cali girl because she pulled up in this bright yellow car and these huge sunglasses and

was fiddling around with her iPod and I’m like, with you know her blonde hair, and was

like … just making fun of her, but because we felt so comfortable with each other you

know. I think the first thing she said to me in real-life was “Oh shut the fuck up” heh

hahaha now that I think about it heh heh heh.

Ben’s account challenges the idea that there is something meaningfully different between an

online relationship and one in real-life. It also speaks to the degree of familiarity and intimacy

that he has cultivated with his WoW friends.

Instrumental interactions. Of course, most WoW players don’t group up just to chat and

joke with one another or even to form friendships. Ben explained that since the advanced content

in WoW—raids—can only be completed with groups, players rely on one another to play. Raiding

guilds are comprised of players who share the desire to raid and group up explicitly for that

purpose. Because these groups have a definite purpose—successfully progressing through

raids—many of their interactions are instrumental in the sense that they are related to that

purpose. These instrumental interactions play out in various elements of the game, such as guild

membership, raid participation, loot distribution, and the strategizing and coordination that

occurs during the raids themselves.

The reason for gathering players together into raiding guilds is ultimately to defeat raid

bosses. This undertaking is something that requires a significant degree of planning and

coordination. Each boss has its own set of abilities that present the raiders with unique

challenges. The group must formulate tailored strategies for each boss and then carry out their

plan in the frenzied environment of simulated combat. The raid leader is the one in charge of

orchestrating the group’s strategy, though all players are expected to know the ins and outs of

each fight. Ben’s strategic overview of the raid boss Morchok, a giant golem, provides a sense of

the strategies involved in boss fights:

He’s got a stomp, um, he puts a debuff on the tank that basically makes the tank take

more damage, so you have to swap tanks because the debuff is specific to him, he’s

gonna do, after like three stacks

you’re taking 30% more damage, the healers have to

work 30% harder, so you switch and the debuff might have a 24 second timer, so after 24

seconds it falls off, yeah, the other guy probably has three stacks at this point so you

switch back. Not too hard to deal with, all it requires is a taunt

, which is to change the

boss’s attention from one tank to the other. Uh, Resonating Crystal, so he drops a crystal

on the ground, um that explodes after 12 seconds doing massive shadow damage, and it’s

split between three random players, but if there’s no players there, it hits everyone, so

what you do is you’ll put three players in there and put a shield on them, and they’ll

tank

that damage, it’ll hit them hard but it won’t kill them. Meanwhile, like say if those

three players weren’t there, it might kill everyone hahaha so you specify, “you three

people go over here, you three people go over here, grab these crystals” all good. Um,

Furious, just at 20% remaining health he gets stronger and uh he does like an earthquake

thing every 25 seconds, which you have to run away from him because he’s going to

stomp on the ground and do big earthquake damage. That’s normal mode. Heroic mode,

after, at 90% health, so after you’ve done 10% of his health in damage, he splits into two

which do exactly the same thing as normal mode, so now you have to do the normal

mode fight twice at the same time which requires the tanks switching with each other

without getting them too close, because if they got too close, they would do a large

amount of additional damage because they were close together so you had to spread each

other out so far that the healers could barely heal both groups, so you had to split the

Stacks refer to defuffs that accumulate or “stack up” each time the ability is applied, thereby making a character

progressively weaker.

An ability that will cause the targeted MOB to attack that character rather than other characters.

Though "tank" is usually used as a noun to designate a particular role, it can also be used as a verb that means

absorbing damage efficiently. In this instance, characters with a shield cast on them can endure the damage of the

exploding crystal.

healers too and then, so you’d have five men on this guy, five men on this guy, and then

they would have to switch, which you could imagine would cause some problems.

Each member of the raid must know what each of Morchok’s abilities do and how he or she is

supposed to respond. At various points, multiple members have to carry out a sequence of

actions in unison, such as three appointed raiders running over to a Resonating Crystal while

another casts a shield on them. Of course, players must perform their usual role-related duties

such as tank or healer in addition to carrying out these fight-specific sequences.

When the group fails to beat the boss, they regroup, assess what went wrong, and adjust

their strategy for next time. During the interview, I had the opportunity to listen in on this

process after the group wiped. Ben summarized the upshot of the conversation for me:

Ben: Basically, it’s, I guess there was a tank issue, and he dropped an Ashen Wall, which,

the, one of the bosses will drop an Ashen Wall, it’s a wall of elemental guys that do an

enormous amount of damage if you get near them apparently, so, here’s you tank, and

your boss is facing the tank, he’ll drop the wall parallel, well, perpendicular, to him

across a line where the tank is standing, so they’re saying that the tank um, dropped that

wall in a bad spot, and, so, assuming, say that’s the raid over there doing damage, so if he

faces it this way there’s no issue, but if he for some reason turns—

Jake: Yeah. He’ll split up the group.

Ben: The wall will run right through the group and it can kill them in one or two shots, so

that was the issue that they’re talking about.

After a failed attempt on a different boss, Ben took a more active role in figuring out what went

wrong by analyzing the combat logs to determine how the first group member had died and then

shared his findings with the group. The group then prepared to give it another try, now with more

awareness of what to avoid.

The way Ben was being “carried” by his guild—that is, included in the raid group despite

his sub-par gear—provides another example of an instrumental interaction. The purpose of this

arrangement was to make Ben, and by extension the group as a whole, more powerful. By

carrying Ben through content for which his character was undergeared, the group was helping

him catch up much more rapidly than he could have without their help. This was a good

investment on the group’s part because the sooner his character was geared appropriately the

sooner they would fully benefit from his contributions. As the raiding party progressed through

increasingly difficult bosses, however, there would come a point where they would have to drop

him from the group because they would no longer be able to compensate for his character’s

compromised performance. During the downtime between fights, I could hear the leadership

discussing who to drop and who to keep onboard. It seems that their decision-making process

was based on a variety of factors, such as players’ performance, the other available players from

the guild, and maintenance of the right balance of character classes.

So far I have discussed instrumental interactions that occur within an already established

group. Another category of instrumental interactions that factored prominently into Ben’s

account was related to players moving from one guild to another. Guilds want to recruit the best

players that they can, while players want to be in the best guild possible. As a result, guilds have

websites that showcase their achievements and advertise open positions, while player submit

applications and undergo trials to gain entry. For example, Ben described being tested out by the

first competitive guild that he joined:

I joined the guild, and like two minutes later, they’re like, “Hey, look, we’re going to test

you out, put on your gear, we’re going into Icy Sea,” which was, at the point, the current

raid tier, like *smacks hands together for emphasis* that was the current thing, that was

the hardest, that was what everyone good was doing, and they threw me in there to a boss

I had never done and then they made me tank, so I was on the front line, and I was

completely confused, I had no idea what I was doing, but we killed the boss in one shot,

and they gave me gear, and I was like “Well I guess I’m here now.” Hahahaha. They

were like “No, you did alright for your gear, so here, take these bracers, we’re going to

get you geared up, we’ll see how you do.”

The instrumental function of giving a potential new member a tryout is to ensure that only

players who will perform adequately gain entry into the guild.

Ben has switched guilds several times throughout his career. In each case, he made the

move because he felt he had outgrown his current guild’s level of performance. Ben explained

that it is important for him to have the sense that there are better players than him in the guild:

I kind of figured out after playing that when you’re the absolute top in your guild, that’s,

when you’re top one or two, that’s when the pressure to move up a step really starts to

show, cause you feel like you’re kinda carrying people through things, you’re like “Ugh,

look at these guys, they’re doing terrible, like, oh my god, I wish I was with players that

could keep up with me.” And eventually that grates on you enough that you bounce, and

you go with players that can keep up with you.

Ben’s goal was to be a skilled player doing the most challenging content possible, and this

required that he was with a group of players that were on his level. When he had reached points

in his career where he felt that he could no longer improve as a player in the context of his

current group, he moved up.

Dispelling stereotypes. At many points throughout the interview, Ben made reference to

negative stereotypes about MMORPG players and how these generalizations frustrated him

because he didn’t think they were accurate. At one point I joked, “You’re just breaking all the

misconceptions tonight” to which he replied, “I’m trying. But that’s because I, I, that’s why I

hate them so much, because they’re not true of everyone.” The primary stereotype that Ben is

referring to in this example is of a socially inept and unskilled individual who thrives in a world

where he or she can hide behind a computer and compensate for a lackluster existence in real-life

through in-game success. The implication is that people who play MMORPGs are unable or

unmotivated to do worthwhile activities and are instead wasting their time on a pointless one. It

is also implied that WoW is easy enough for anyone to succeed at.

Although Ben didn’t deny the existence of players who fit the negative stereotype, he

insisted that at its most difficult levels, WoW is extremely challenging and the players who are

able to play at these levels are highly competent individuals in real-life. His most complete

statement on the topic is as follows:

I think the biggest misconception is that a lot of people who play WoW are the nerds that

are hiding in their closet, and there are a ton of people who fit that description that play

WoW, but as far as your high ranking players go. *dad walks through* What’s up dad?

*dad says hello* As far as your high ranking players go, you’ll find they’re not those

people. The most successful group I was ever with had two doctors—like medical

doctors—three engineers, a dentist, um, a war vet who was an engineer in the military.

You know, these are intelligent people because in order to figure out these strategies and

to execute them repeatedly, you’re not going to find your 12-year-old kids—they’re not

going to be able to do it. Your highest ranking guilds are extremely intelligent people who

are skilled in real-life and out, and they have careers that, you know they make good

money, this happens to be their hobby ha and they’re very good at it.

As the above passage indicates, Ben made a parallel between in game and real-life skill and

success, thereby legitimizing skilled WoW players as worthy of admiration rather than derision; if

you respect doctors, engineers, and other professionals for the skills they possess, then it is only

logical that you respect top-notch WoW players for their skills as well.

Ben also discussed women and dating in WoW. Though he didn’t say this explicitly, the

stereotype he seemed to be challenging was that people who date in WoW are undesirables who

wouldn’t be able to find a partner in real-life. He made an effort to disprove this characterization

with regards to his relationship with Beth. Not long after mentioning her for the first time, he

pulled up a picture of her on Facebook specifically to dispel the notion that female WoW players

are all unattractive. He also made the point that their relationship was in no way inferior to non-

WoW-initiated relationships:

It was actually by far the best relationship I’ve ever been in which is, um, odd to say

maybe, because I’ve been in five relationships that all lasted more than a year, so I’m not

unfamiliar with relationships, it’s not like I latched onto the first person that I met. No,

like I’ve been in relationships before that, I’ve been in relationships after that, easily the

best relationship I’ve ever been with was the girl who I met on WoW hahaha.

When Ben referenced negative stereotypes, I had the sense that it was important to him to

disprove them to me and, through my research, to a greater audience. He occasionally made

statements indicating that he was invested in the outcome of my research and was concerned

about the way my other participants had represented MMORPG players. It’s hardly a stretch to

say that being a WoW player is an important part of Ben’s identity and I think that on some level

he was making a case for himself and others like him: intelligent, successful individuals who

have chosen WoW as their hobby because it provides a worthy challenge.

Immersion. This theme is comprised of a somewhat loosely related series of experiences

that Ben described in his interview that are usually considered immersive.

Ben indicated that he hadn’t fashioned life stories or personalities for his characters like

one would in a role-playing context. However, he did have a sense that each character was

unique because each provided a different experience:

I just, you kind of, I think you play a little differently depending on who you’re, what

character you’re on, just because, um, maybe something about how you as a person

developed while you were playing that character, I’m not really sure, but I’d say I do play

all my characters a little differently, I might be a little more snarky on this character or

something haha but, um, it’s kind of hard to put a finger on exactly why.

It seems that although Ben did not explicitly role-play, he still had a vague sense of inhabiting his

characters.

Ben also described experiencing the action of the game viscerally. The nature of the

experience varied depending on what character class he was playing. For example, I asked him

what it was like to play his current character, a warrior:

Um, it’s intense, it’s my, I mean warriors are always melee, they’re always up in the fight,

so it’s, I think I probably get the most intense, as far as really pumped up playing this

character, because warriors, um, they have abilities called charge, so you literally charge

across the battlefield really quickly, and all their abilities are physical, they have no

magical abilities, so I just, I kinda get this feeling/image that when you’re in a fight,

when you’re doing a boss, when you’re doing really well. And for some reason knowing

that you’re not doing a lot of damage kind of nullifies that, like I don’t really feel very I

don’t feel it as strongly. But when I’m top DPS and I’m banging things out and I’m, you

know, I’m on top of my game, and, you know, a new add spawns and I’ll turn and charge,

and hit a Raging Blow, and it crits, and it completely destroys his health and you just get

really, really into it, and you feel really, you know, an intense kind of satisfaction and it’s

very visceral.

Ben contrasted this intense, visceral, pumped up feeling that he gets when playing a damage-

dealing class to what it feels like when he plays a healer: “As a healer, it’s almost more panicked,

kind of, like oh my god, like holy crap, I have to save this guy, what is going on with my life.”

He explained that as a healer, you have to constantly be monitoring everyone’s health which

means that you are more focused on looking at health bars than the action on the screen. You

carry a lot of responsibility, because if you fail to allocate your limited resources effectively,

someone will die and the raid will likely start to fall apart. Thus, when playing a healer Ben feels

anxious and frantic instead of invigorated.

Ben also mentioned during the interview the experience of being intensely focused during

boss fights:

It’s really intense, because these fights—that’s another thing—these fights, the longest

ones with go 15–16 minutes and you’re a hundred percent concentrated for those 15–16

minutes , you cannot think of anything other than spell, spell, spell, do this, do this, do

that, oh god this is happening, okay next part of the fight, now I’ve gotta go over here,

um, absolutely insane having to focus on everything that you’re doing, making sure

you’re using the right spells for the right situation.

Though the vast majority of Ben’s time spent in WoW is fairly low-key and relaxed, this

description indicates the intensity of engagement and focus during a boss fight.

Closing thoughts. My most significant take-away from the interview with Ben was a

greater appreciation for the skill involved in playing an MMORPG. Prior to the interview, I

thought that the highest achieving players were simply the ones who had created the most

powerful avatars by sinking the most time into relatively straightforward content. Accordingly, I

thought success was mostly a function of time spent playing the game rather than skillfulness.

Ben explained and demonstrated that, although improving one’s avatar is part of the equation for

success, the best players possess a skill-set that is independent of their avatar’s power level.

Jeff

Jeff was a 28-year-old white male who lived with his fiancée, Sara, in Pittsburgh. He

grew up and attended college in the mid-west, where he majored in video production. After

graduating, Jeff did video editing work in New York City for five years. One year prior to the

interview, he moved to Pittsburgh to be closer to family and for the lower cost of living. He

continued to work as a video editor at the time of the interview.

Description of the interview. Jeff responded to my post on Reddit. We scheduled the

interview on one of the two nights that he normally raids. When I arrived, Jeff and his fiancée

greeted me warmly. Jeff was tall and broad-shouldered with short brown hair and a full beard. He

wore a flannel shirt and jeans. He offered me a drink and, only half-jokingly, mentioned that he

had a fresh batch of home-brewed beer. He guided me to a room in the back of his spacious

apartment where his computer was located. Jeff had a large, clutter-free desk that housed a huge

desktop computer, dual monitors, and high end speakers (he explained that he needs a robust

setup for the video-editing work he does). The room seemed to double as a storage area on

account of the shelves and other items (including brewing equipment) that lined the walls.

During the first half of the interview, Jeff sat turned towards me in his plush office chair.

He spoke about his engagement with WoW in a straightforward, non-sensational way. He

portrayed it as something that he had enjoyed doing for a long time and continued to fit into his

life, but not something he saw as an inherently valuable activity. He answered questions readily,

but looked to me to guide the conversation. As a result, the interview assumed a question-and-

answer pattern of interchange.

When he began playing, he turned away from me and I watched his screen over his

shoulder. For the first 10 minutes or so, he travelled around killing MOBs with the hopes of

turning up a Lesser Charm of Good Fortune—he needed one more to buy a War-Forged Seal,

which would provide him with a better chance of getting valuable gear during the upcoming raid.

After he had acquired one, he joined up with his party, which was gathered around the raid boss

they would be facing. The raid boss appeared to be a towering elemental creature composed of

water. Though they had defeated this boss before, they reviewed their strategy before the fight

began. Once the action was underway, Jeff often had to stop talking to me in order to focus on

the game, though he would sometimes give brief descriptions of what was happening. Chat

between group members was also fairly sparse during the fight; the raid leader was the most

vocal, periodically relaying instructions to the rest of the party. They beat the boss on their

second try and made a failed attempt on the next boss, who they had yet to defeat. At that point

they were an hour into their raiding session and took a break, during which Jeff and I wrapped up

the interview.

Jeff’s gaming career. Jeff didn’t consider himself someone who characteristically played

video games, though when he did get invested in a game, he tended to stick with it. The first

game he played extensively was a MUD based on The Lord of the Rings called The Two Towers,

which he characterized as “pretty much the nerdiest thing you could ever do.” He played with a

group of friends during middle school, often in the context of a sleepover or hangout. After a

long hiatus, he picked up the game again during college. He also tried WoW for the first time

during his college years. Many of his friends were playing it, but he found that he didn’t have

much enthusiasm for the game and so didn’t play for long. It wasn’t until about four years ago

that he started playing WoW regularly, largely because the rest of his life was able to

accommodate his gameplay. Over the past four years, he had played for varying amounts,

sometimes as much as 30 hours per week. At the time of the interview, he was playing on a

limited and fixed schedule: raiding with his group for three hours every Tuesday and Thursday.

Individual themes. Below are the individual themes that I found during my analysis of

Jeff’s interview transcript.

Harmony with real-life. Jeff emphasized that he began playing WoW regularly not on

account of a powerful draw to the game, but rather because at a certain point, it fit into the rest of

his life harmoniously. He explained that when he and Sara moved into a new apartment about

four years prior to the interview, their TV and his computer were situated in the same room.

Because of this arrangement, it was possible for Jeff to play WoW while Sara watched TV—a

felicitous solution to their longstanding difficulty with finding something that they both wanted

to watch. Jeff explained that while Sara watched TV, he could play WoW:

I was able to be at the computer and still be engaged, you know, in talking to her and

half-watching this show, and she would be like “Oh my god can you believe that just

happened?” and I can, you know, I know what’s going on in these shows, but at the same

time I’m not really watching them.

They both enjoyed this arrangement, which they referred to as “separate but together time.” WoW

was well-suited for this purpose, since questing doesn’t demand constant attention, thereby

making it possible for Jeff to unproblematically shift his attention between the game and the TV

show. This arrangement made playing WoW more tolerable as well: Being with Sara and having a

TV show playing in the background took the edge off the repetitive, boring quality of questing.

Jeff characterized quests as “stupid errand[s]” that are not sufficiently interesting to warrant his

full attention. Thus, he tended to be “20%, 25% involved, maybe up to 50%” with WoW while he

watched TV with Sara. Jeff also noted that going out in New York City, where he lived at the

time, was prohibitively expensive, so playing WoW was an inexpensive alternative.

At the time of the interview, WoW fit into Jeff’s life much differently than it did while he

lived in New York City. His computer is no longer in the same room as the TV, so “separate but

together time” was no longer possible. He now plays on a set schedule, raiding with his raid

group for two three-hour sessions per week. He noted that when he played all the time, it was

just another part of his daily routine, but now that he only played twice per week, he looked

forward to it. Furthermore, Jeff no longer quested or played other repetitive solo content at the

time of the interview; instead, he exclusively raided with his group, which required intense

focus. Thus, playing WoW went from being a pervasive background activity to an occasional,

high intensity event.

Enjoying the sense of progress. Jeff emphasized that making progress though difficult

content is central to his engagement with WoW:

The way I play the game—I mean there’s a lot of different ways to play WoW—and the

way I like to play the game to be challenged with things ... when I log off I want to be, I

want to have made progress during that time.

He said that his biweekly raiding sessions provided him with “something to you know, try to

accomplish, because we are always doing different stuff in the game, trying to make progression

through some of the harder, more difficult things that are happening, so it gives me like, a goal.”

The goals Jeff emphasized are related to progressing through the current raid:

I’m happy every time we make new progress in the raid, because the raids … to me, as

somebody who does the PvE

instead of the PvP stuff, raids are what you strive to do.

And, the raids are split up into different versions, you know easier and harder versions,

right now our group is pushing the harder, the hardest version, the heroic versions of a lot

of the bosses, so we’ll spend hours trying to kill the same boss over and over and over,

and then we’ll die, and then we’re like “Hey, maybe we should try this instead” and then

we die and then it’s like “Hey, maybe don’t stand in that fire” and then we get past that

part and then we die on something else so everyone’s learning, everyone’s adapting, and

then when you think back to when you first “Alright here it goes, we’re going to pull this

PvE stands for Player-versus-enviornment, which includes questing, dungeons, and raids—essentially any content

where a player is playing against the entities in the game that are controlled by the software rather than by other

playes.

boss in like three seconds” and you die in the first three seconds of the fight, going from

that point to “Alright we’re going to pull the boss in three seconds” and then you kill it,

that, to me that’s what it’s, that’s why I play it, because there’s a challenge in front of me

and it’s not easy to do.

Jeff was clear that his engagement and the satisfaction that he derived from it was structured

around making progress towards and realizing challenging goals.

Increasing the power of his character in the service of raid progression was another

pursuit that provided Jeff with a sense of having accomplished something:

Doing something useful to me means getting a new piece of gear, or getting valor to

make the gear better, or getting tokens to get a bonus roll, which would in turn give you

more gear, which you would use valor points to upgrade.

By increasing the power of his avatar, he would make that much more impact in each raid fight

and the group would be that much more likely to succeed.

Jeff contrasted his pragmatic, progress-oriented emphasis with players who invest in the

aesthetic and immersive elements of WoW. For example, he mentioned that some players seek

out items just to improve the appearance of their avatar, whereas Jeff would not consider this to

be “useful” and therefore not worthwhile. In this vein, he said that he has no interest in role-

paying his character: “When I’m playing, I’m not a priest, I’m just me playing hah, you know?”

When he talked about his character, he only mentioned functional attributes, such as: “One of the

bad things about being a priest is that you don’t really have any spells that you can cast when

you’re moving so you can really only move slowly.” The lore of the game was also of no interest

to him. At a certain point during the raid, he closed a window that contained lore related to the

raid, indicated it was irrelevant to him. I asked if he ever had any interest in the lore and he

replied, “No, I don’t care, I had no idea what that was even about.”

Despite the centrality of progress and goals to Jeff’s way of playing WoW, he added that

the goals are, in some sense, “pointless.” I asked him what he meant by this and he elaborated as

follows:

Jeff: It’s just a game, I mean, I used to play that Two Towers game all the time, and, since

that was a typing game, I can type pretty fast now, but that’s all I got out of it, you know,

that and Lord of the Rings lore, which I already knew a little about, so...

Jake: So you’re not playing for some—

Jeff: Yeah, I’m not, even, there was this article I read a while ago about somebody who

was like “Yeah I’d love to hire WoW players to work for my company because they have

these certain skills that hardcore raiders have and stuff,” and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s true I

guess, but you’re also in an environment that is meant to be beaten, so it’s not like you’re

all that awesome if you can do it—good job you did what you’re supposed to,” you know.

So, it’s nothing that I’m gaining any skills from that I can use outside of the game.

There seemed to be a certain self-consciousness with the way Jeff talked about his in-game

goals. Within the context of WoW, they defined for what they were worth striving. But from the

perspective of life outside the game, they were pointless and useless.

Gear. Jeff spoke about the importance of gear several times throughout the interview. As

indicated previously, acquiring improved gear is critical to progressing through a raid, while

dispatching raid bosses is also how players earn better gear. Jeff highlighted the excitement he

feels during the moments between defeating a boss and finding out what loot drops by portraying

his internal dialogue as an animated, “What-do-we-get! What-do-we-get! What-do-we-get!

What-do-we-get! What-do-we-get!” He added that the anticipation was enhanced when there

was a particular piece of gear that he was hoping to acquire. He tended to know in advance what

gear his character needed by referencing online resources, such as a website called “Ask Mr.

Robot,” which analyzed what gear your character needed. Jeff also spoke about using different

in-game resources wisely to maximize the attributes of his gear, such as using Valor Points—one

of many currencies in WoW—to upgrade gear. He explained that since he didn’t play enough to

keep everything fully upgraded, he had to allocate his resources all the more wisely.

Socializing. Jeff explained that socializing with the people in his raiding group figured

prominently into his enjoyment of WoW: “Everybody’s nice, everybody’s fun or funny, or just,

interesting, and I just think it’s fun. If I was playing with my friends, we’d be having the exact

same conversations that these people are having, you know.” He had been with his raid group for

eight months (he joined after his previous group fell apart) and his guild for longer. One thing he

especially liked about his raid group was the diversity of players:

We have a grandma in the group—she has a 4-year-old grandson, we have uh, two people

from Wales—I think they are engaged—that play so it’s always fun making fun of their

accents, and they make fun of us in the States, so it’s always interesting.

While Ben played, he put the voice chat over the speakers so I could hear the group talking.

Although much of the talk was focused on the raid, there was plenty of banter as well. For

example, at one point the group got engaged in a discussion about an actor on whom one of the

women in the group had a crush.

In addition to joking around with one another over chat, playful interactions also

extended into the game itself. For instance, Jeff explained that his favorite ability, which allows

him to teleport another character to his character’s location, can be used for fun during

downtime. At one point during the game session, he used it to mess with another player:

So we need to get to the next phase and get up there and hit that button that pops up, but

that guy was running up faster than me, so just for fun I grabbed him and pulled him

back, which turned him around to face me, so he kept running forward but actually it was

backward and then I hit the button instead of him.

Though Jeff usually enjoyed the company of his fellow players, the social dimension

wasn’t always agreeable to him. He noted that once they had to get rid of a member who made

the rest of the group miserable by constantly trying to be funny and never shutting up. He also

cited interpersonal conflict as the most common cause of an unpleasant raiding session:

Jeff: The times that are the worst are when we are trying to do different stuff, the more

complicated stuff, the heroic bosses, and then somebody starts to get frustrated, and then

it turns into people just blaming other people for losing, like “Why’d you do that it was

all your fault!”—like “Whoa, chill out,” when it gets like that. And when it gets like that

early in the game, early in the raid, everybody gets real quiet—it’s like when you’re with

a couple and they start to fight and it’s like “Ooooo” and it turns into that, and it’s very

awkward. And then you have these two people that start fighting and then instead of

having a third wheel you have a third, fourth, fifth, 10th wheel, you know? Hahaha.

Jake: So yeah, you’re kind of feeling the tension.

Jeff: It’s very, it’s very unpleasant then, I mean nobody wants to be there anymore. and

you can tell too because he gets frustrated because nobody’s doing their job and then he

gets frustrated and then it gets awkward and then everybody starts to do worse so it

makes it extremely unpleasant.

Jake: Hm, but people hang in there?

Jeff: Yeah, people hang in there. Sometimes if it’s really bad it’s like “Let’s just call it,

we’re done, see ya later.” And then everybody comes back and they are like, “Sorry I was

being a bastard.” You know? They know. That’s the worst.

The impact that one person getting frustrated had on the group underscores that raiding is at its

core a social endeavor. Jeff’s description of someone getting frustrated also indicated just how

attuned players are to each other, despite not being face-to-face with one another.

Instrumental interactions. Although Jeff made it clear that he enjoyed the

companionship of his fellow players, he spoke more frequently about their interactions that were

related to their mutual goal of raid progression, which was the group’s raison d’être, after all.

The satisfaction of making progress in a raid was also one of Jeff’s primary motivations for

playing, so it is unsurprising that he stressed the significance of interactions that are instrumental

to success. It’s worth stressing the point that in-game success comes as a result of the group

performing well as a unit. Thus, success is inherently group success: “The best is when

everybody works together and it’s a well-oiled machine and is a team and does what they came

to do.” The instrumental interactions that this theme refers to are all related to achieving the ideal

of a well-oiled machine.

The foundation for success is a group of players who are present for raids and

satisfactorily perform their functions within the group. The first requirement necessitates the

enforcement of an attendance policy. In Jeff’s guild, members were expected to be logged in on

time each raid night unless they let the group know that they would be absent in advance, which

gave the group time to arrange for a replacement. Jeff described an incident where the guild had

to kick a member out once because he failed to log in on three separate raiding nights. Though

this may sound like a strict policy for a video game group, the absence of one person results in a

night wasted for the other nine people. In addition to being on time for raids, players must be

competent enough to effectively carry out their role (i.e., tank, healer, DPS) and readily learn

boss-specific mechanics. Having a reliable and talented group of players are the necessary

conditions for the challenging work of formulating strategies to defeat raid bosses.

Jeff described the process of gradually developing and honing strategies that are tailored

to the unique challenges posed by each boss:

So we’ll spend hours trying to kill the same boss over and over and over, and then we’ll

die, and then we’re like, “Hey, maybe we should try this instead.” And then we die and

then it’s like, “Hey, maybe don’t stand in that fire.” And then we get past that part and

then we die on something else so everyone’s learning, everyone’s adapting.

The process involves collaborating in order to get everyone contributing optimally:

Different mechanics happen and different things happen you’ll find that like one person

struggles with one thing, and you do what you can to help that person out, whether it’s

having them do it a different way, where maybe like, “Oh, you won’t be able to attack the

boss if you stand over here but then again, you won’t get hit by that tornado.” So, yeah,

you try to figure stuff out to have the whole team work together a little bit better, or have

one person change up one thing, so you can succeed.

Figuring out what everyone should be doing involves being able to think strategically about the

fight mechanics. Before his group defeated the first boss, Jeff explained their strategy for beating

him in detail:

The first boss, when you’re doing him on heroic, there’s one boss in the middle and

you’re attacking him, and once you get him down to zero life, he’s still alive, but he

explodes into these drops of water, and you have to kill these drops of water or heal them

depending on what they are, as they go back towards the middle, and once they get to the

middle, the boss reforms, and then you do it again. When you’re doing the heroic version

of that, there are these other things that he summons, I don’t even know what they’re

called, but all I know is that if I attack them too soon, to kill them, they all come running

over to me, because the tank was supposed to attack them first, and hold them, because,

you know, he’s the tank, these things can beat on him and nothing happens, but if I attack

them first, they come over to me and they kill me super fast. And if they kill me, they go

to someone else, and they kill them, if they kill them, they go to somebody else and then

everybody dies. I’m sure you’ll see that happen later. Um, but if you do it the right way—

well that’s the thing, if you do it too soon, that happens, if you end up doing it too late,

you’re going to end up dying because the more you attack the boss during that phase the

more damage you take, because you’re supposed to switch to these other little guys, but if

you switch to them to soon they attack you, if you switch to them too late, then you die

from the boss, so it’s very important to do it at the right time.

When describing fighting as a group, Jeff emphasized their interdependence with remarks like,

“You could really screw over the nine other people that you are playing with” and “A lot of little

things like that impact more than just yourself.”

Jeff put the voice chat over the speakers, so I was able to listen in before, during, and

after the fights. During the fights, talking was sparse and focused on the task at hand. The raid

leader spoke the most often, usually to give out instructions. Jeff explained, “I generally don’t

say too much because there’s nothing for me to say that’s beneficial that the raid leader isn’t

already going to say if it needs to be said, so I really don’t talk a lot.” After the group failed on

their first attempt, they analyzed what went wrong and how to avoid it next time—in this case, it

had to do with where everyone was positioned during different phases of the boss’s attacks. After

a successful second attempt, they discussed their strategy for the next fight, which involved

dealing with a mechanic that required them to pass something from one player to another. Here is

a segment of their conversation:

Russell (raid leader): So, Andy on blue, throw to John on green, throw it to Mary on blue,

and throw it to Jeff on green, so when he’s, when he’s doing his Desperate Measures, it’ll

just be John and Jeff on green, um, and, yeah the DPS following it around, but, Mary and

Andy will stay on blue until, once it’s dead you can run off and chase it.

Mary: Now I’m not sure what my cooldown is once I hit it that second time, um, hang on

a second.

Jeff: Probably two minutes.

Mary: Um, yeah it says two minute recharge—is that going to be a problem?

Russell: No, but the second time it might only have one charge rather than two, so just let

people know. When you’re throwing it to other people try and, since you’re usually not

going to be able to do much or anything, with immunities up, just watch your timer and

count it down as soon as you get it, so you’re throwing it to whoever in, “three, two,

one,” throw it, so they know when to expect it.

Mary: Okay.

Russell: Cause you don’t want it to get a hit off and do a shit ton of damage to someone.

Mary: Okay, so I wanna count down when i’m gonna throw it off, right? Okay.

Russell: Right.

Although I didn’t understand the finer points of what they were saying, it was clear that they had

to communicate and coordinate their actions effectively in order to deal with that boss’s

particular abilities.

Sharing resources is another way in which Jeff and his fellow raiders interacted to further

the success of the group:

A lot of the things I do too, I do to benefit the group, like if a certain piece of gear

drops—which actually, the opposite happened last week, a certain piece of gear dropped

and somebody else got it and I was like, “Ah, I really needed that” and he was like “Oh,

you can have it” and I was like “Cool! Thanks!” you know? and I’ve done that before

too, where I’ve gotten a piece of gear and the person was like “Ah man I really needed

that piece” and I’m like “Here, take it, you need it more than I do, I mean it’s going to

help the group more if you have this one thing, so you take it.”

They also helped each other out by sharing the items that they could craft and gather on account

of their avatars’ professions. Jeff’s character, for example, is an enchanter, so if another group

member needs an enchantment, Jeff would craft it for him or her. Even Jeff’s mount—a Grand

Expedition Yak—had capabilities that benefited the whole group. From his yak it was possible

for all party members to sell goods and reforge gear—activities that they would normally need to

travel to town to accomplish. Reforging gear on the fly is useful during a raid: “So before we go

into the boss fight, one of the healers, he plays one spec, he’s a discipline priest most of the time,

but then when he goes in to fight one boss it’s better to be a holy priest for that, so he’ll reforge

all of his gear to be more suited towards a holy priest.”

Competence. When Jeff spoke about performance in WoW, he tended to emphasize the

way the group performed as a unit over how players performed as individuals. When he did talk

about individual performance, the emphasis was on being competent enough to perform one’s

function within the group. Performing one’s role requires a great deal of skill and knowledge.

Jeff spoke about his deep familiarity with his character’s class and how he had his abilities linked

to keys on his keyboard in such a way that he could hit the right one almost instantaneously in

the midst of a fight (he noted that his large hands allow him to reach more keys that the average

player!). He also explained that awareness, timing, and adaptability are important qualities for

players to have—these are the capacities that make it possible for a player to take the right action

at the right time, even when this means deviating from a plan. For example, “You all stack in the

middle and that’s a great plan, cause it needs to happen, but don’t stack in the middle if there’s

poison under you, so it’s like, figure out what’s going on, you have to know what’s happening so

you can do what you need to do.” At one point during a fight, Jeff failed to have sufficient

awareness of what was going on, resulting in his death:

So that was my fault I wasn’t paying attention. I kept attacking this guy, and dispelled

myself but not quick enough. But I died because like I said if you don’t switch off the

boss you take more damage, which is exactly what just happened. Now I have to run over

here and kill all these little drop things. And I did a bad job because I tried to kill too

many when I could have just focused on a few and actually killed them.

In this instance, Jeff’s death led to the failure of that attempt at beating the boss, since the group

couldn’t recover from losing a player.

Always more to do. Another theme that came up at various times throughout the

interview was Jeff’s sense that there is always more to do in WoW. Early on, he spoke about the

many activities one can pursue:

If you wanted to make a different character and play as a different class you could go and

do that, play different things out, and do, and do different dungeons, and do different

things that they have in the game, like seasonal things, and stuff like that ... “Oh it’s

Halloween, let’s go do all those fun, different Halloween things they put in the game” …

you know.

At a later point I asked what keeps him playing, and he responded, “The fact that you can’t win

is good.” Besides the absence of a victory condition, Jeff explained that the regularly released

expansions prevent him from having the sense that he has reached the end or done everything

there is to do. Instead, he played with the knowledge that there will always be another chapter,

another raid, another territory, another set of gear, and so on. Jeff explained that he got especially

excited to play when a new expansion came out:

The new expansion came out, it’s called Mists of Pandaria, when that came out there was

a whole new island that you were exploring, there were, they increased the level cap from

85 to 90, there were all new dungeons and raids and scenarios, and different classes and

different races, and different talents, and everything, every time there’s an expansion they

kind of, at least slightly, overhaul something, I mean everything, and sometimes there’s

major overhauls and stuff. So there was more of a sense of urgency to play then just

because it was all different, and I wanted to learn it, and I wanted to experience that.

It seems that knowing that the content of the game will continue to expand indefinitely makes it

possible for players like Jeff to take up WoW as an ongoing pursuit rather than as a consumable

piece of media.

Closing thoughts. Like Ben, Jeff emphasized raiding, teamwork, and socializing.

However, for Jeff, WoW seemed to be a much more casual pursuit in the overall scheme of his

life—this disposition was indicated in his Harmony with Real-Life theme and the fact that he

only played six hours per week. It seemed he wanted to express that although he enjoyed playing

WoW, it wasn't something that he saw as inherently valuable. Despite this attitude towards the

game, he took his responsibilities to his raid group quite seriously.

Shawn

Shawn was a 29-year-old white male who had lived in Pittsburgh since he began college

in the city. He responded to the post on Reddit, indicating that he thought the study was a “cool

concept.” During the interview, Shawn told me that he was a video game writer and, as one who

also thinks and writes about games, was particularly interested in my research.

Description of the interview. When I arrived at Shawn’s apartment on the night of our

interview, he greeted me enthusiastically and then dashed back into his living room, indicating

that he was in the midst of something. As I entered the room, I could see that he was playing a

game on a vintage arcade console that occupied the corner of his living room. He later explained

that it was originally a 1983 Donkey Kong console, later converted into a Duck Hunt, and then

converted once again into a Nintendo Player’s Choice, which lets the player choose between

various Nintendo titles.

Shawn was tall and slim, and wore his dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. He was

dressed in a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey and corduroy pants. His living room—which was where

he played his MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV)—was visually dominated by aqua-colored

carpeting. The walls, by contrast, were white and mostly bare. Several bookcases filled with

neatly organized video games circled the room. In one corner sat a large LCD TV and in the

other the vintage arcade consol. Across from the TV was a couch and large coffee table. Shawn

was in the middle of his dinner (pizza and soda), so we chatted while he finished eating and then

began the interview.

Shawn spoke in a confident, energetic, and almost theatrical manner throughout the

interview. He used a sophisticated vocabulary along with a wide range of expressions; some,

such as “that’s pretty much the size of it,” had an old-timey feel, whereas others were derived

from contemporary internet culture. The fact that he was a video game writer was evident when

he made allusions to meta-issues, such as how virtual economies work.

An hour into the interview he logged into FFXIV, which he played on his Playstation 3

hooked up to the aforementioned LCD TV, rather than on a computer. Shawn seemed invested in

sharing as much as he could with me, making a point to show me different elements of the game

such as questing and cut-scenes. As our time was running out, he lamented that he still hadn’t

been matched up with a group in order to show me a dungeon. Just before we called it quits,

however, he was assigned to a group, so I got to see him complete a dungeon run as well.

Shawn’s gaming career. Shawn began playing video games when he was three or four

years old and they have remained a passion of his ever since. At the outset of college, he wanted

to be a computer programmer, but soon realized that writing suited him better. He gradually built

a career on writing about video games for various websites and publications. At the time of the

interview, he played and reviewed games for work in addition to playing games during his

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leisure time. On account of his long video-gaming career and his profession, he had played a

wide array of games.

Shawn indicated that the Final Fantasy series was a longstanding favorite of his. It was

also the series that introduced him to MMORPG genre, since FFXI, released in 2001, was the

first MMORPG that he tried. Several people in his college social group were playing it, so he

and his girlfriend at the time joined in. Shawn ended up playing FFXI for nine years. He made

the switch to the new Final Fantasy MMORPG—FFXIV—about five months prior to the

interview, since he was ready for something new. He explained that FFXIV has an interesting

history: it was a complete disaster when it was initially released and the developers eventually

took the entire game offline, revamped it, and then re-released it. Shawn didn’t get onboard until

after it was re-released.

He played for 40 hours a week on both week nights and weekends. Often, he alternated

between playing and other activities such as chores and other media. He belonged to a small

guild that consists of friends of real-life friends (he has only met one of them in person while

traveling). However, they played significantly less often than he did, so he was often the only

one from his guild logged on. Since his guildmates were usually not available, he used the “Duty

Finder” (which is equivalent to WoW’s “Looking for Group” feature) to group him with other

players to complete group content such as dungeons.

Individual themes. Below are the individual themes that I found during my analysis of

Shawn’s interview transcript.

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Achievement orientation. Shawn characterized himself, according to a classic article on

MUD players (Bartle, 1996), as an achiever type, which means that he was oriented towards

earning in-game rewards such as a leveling his character’s professions, acquiring premium gear,

and accumulating wealth. Shawn pointedly explained that “Bigger numbers are better, that’s

pretty much the driving force behind every RPG ever made, bigger numbers are better.” While

elaborating, he referred to a “sense of increase” that is part of the experience of making bigger

numbers bigger. Since virtually all elements in the game are quantified—profession level,

character attributes, damage, currency, and so on—all things can be increased, which, for Shawn,

was the driving force of most game activities.

Shawn explained that FFXIV includes 33 different professions, some of which are

combat-oriented, while others are disciplines of crafting and gathering. A character can specialize

in all of the professions, though can only be in one professional mode at any given time. Thus,

characters switch from one profession to another based on what task they are taking up in the

game. Shawn had fully leveled his character on several professions and was currently working

on a handful of others. This endeavor involves earning experience points by completing quests

and dungeons, gathering materials, crafting items, and other activities that are relevant to each

profession. To illustrate, he completed a quest for his botanist profession, which required that he

gather 15 units of laurel for a townsperson who desperately needed it for a dinner party. Reading

from the screen, Shawn explained, “This quest is going to yield me 90,000 experience points, a

new hatchet, and some gear.” Collecting the laurel took about 15 minutes, though his progress

was interrupted by a band of brigands ambushing him. Upon being attacked, he switched to his

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warrior profession, defeated them in combat, and thereby earned experience points for the

warrior profession.

In FFXIV, each profession has requisite gear: Martial classes have weapons, fishers have

fishing poles, botanists have hatchets, and so on. Ideally, gear is improved in tandem with the

character’s level. In fact, gear has levels that correspond to the profession levels, so it is easy to

tell when a character is due for a gear upgrade. Since superior gear contributes to the power of

the character, part of the process of leveling professions is acquiring gear by finding, crafting, or

purchasing it. Shawn showed me a table that he had drawn on a white board that listed all of the

pieces of high-level gear he was seeking.

The endeavor of leveling and gearing professions was Shawn’s focus at the time of the

interview—this was the form his achievement orientation to the game had assumed. He noted

that there’s “always a next thing to do,” which means the game always provides an opportunity

for further achievement. Shawn mentioned that an upcoming patch is rumored to include guild

housing, which would introduce the possibility of purchasing, finding, or crafting furniture and

other home goods. When I asked what was attractive about the possibility of having a house, he

replied that it would give him a place to showcase “fruits of labor.” He imagined a guildmate

checking out his abode and thinking, “Hey, Shawn pounded through enough levels of carpentry

to make that thing, isn’t that shiny.” He also indicated that “There’s going to be, you know, ‘my

house is nicer than your house’—that kind of stuff is always going to be there.” These quotes

indicate that achievement occurs in relation to other players who can function as admirers and

competitors.

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Efficiency. Shawn indicated that he savors obtaining the fruits of his labors, though he

emphasized that much of the satisfaction lies in the process, the “means to the end.” He went on

to say, “To me, there’s a certain kind of pride in figuring out how to make big numbers get bigger

as efficiently as possible, kind of a, ‘Okay I’m going to analyze the logic behind this, I’m going

to read up on some of the mechanics.’” Thus, for Shawn, playing is about the striving for the

markers of success as skillfully as possible, with skillfulness often taking the form of efficiency.

Playing efficiently involves understanding the mechanics of the game and using that knowledge

to maximize productivity. For instance, at one point during the interview he crafted a weapon

using his blacksmith profession, which involves a mini-game that he explained as follows:

In order to complete the synthesis you have to fill up the progress bar by using actions

that increase progress and decrease durability. If you want to make a high quality version

of the item, you also have to increase the quality bar, which increases the probability of

an HQ item, as indicated by the percentage underneath, but using those actions also

decreases durability. You have to balance which of those takes priority and still finish

crafting before the durability all goes away.

The simplicity of this mini-game makes it a convenient example of game mechanics, though

most endeavors in the game are much more complex.

Shawn implicitly and explicitly mentioned efficiency and mechanics in relation to various

elements of the game during the interview. On the most general level, he chose what to do each

gaming session based on which activities would be most valuable according to various factors:

Really depends on what my priorities are at the time. I mean, right now just getting

experience points and leveling up jobs is a little devalued because there’s a patch coming

out in a couple days that is going to redo how experience points are gained on certain

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classes. So I’m like “You know, I’m going to hang back and work on my gathering and

my crafting levels at this time,” while still doing some dungeons, getting stuff to get

shinier pieces of armor.

In this case, Shawn was attempting to make the most of his time by selecting the activities that

would contribute most in advancing him towards his goals. In a similar vein, it was clear that the

way Shawn managed his resources—currencies, gear, crafting materials, and so on—was based

on an understanding of how the economy works and therefore how to make the most of what he

has. This approach to playing materialized in situations during the gaming session as well. For

example, when Shawn was collecting laurel and was unexpectedly waylaid by brigands, he made

the most of the opportunity by earning experience points for his warrior profession. He chose his

warrior profession over other fighting classes that he had available because it was the most

efficient response based on various considerations:

Jake: So why did you choose to be your warrior class instead of your dragoon?

Shawn: Well, as you can see from the data over there by the timer, this is a level 27 fight,

and mostly, these particular fights are best for gaining experience points, and since my

dragoon is already at maximum level, he can’t gain experience points. I could have done

it on my bard, but then I would have some durability issues, so I grabbed the next best

thing. Also, the warrior can actually dish out some decent damage, whereas if I would

have switched on to my paladin, it would take a whole lot longer to kill any particular

MOB. More durable though.

Jake: So durability issues mean that you would have a greater chance of dying?

Shawn: Yeah. In this case against this level MOB, the warrior can get by just using his

own abilities to heal himself, whereas—oh hello, you’re not dead yet, let me fix that—

whereas bard would have to dance around for seemingly ever just to get anything done.

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When the brigands arrived, Shawn made a series of calculations to determine the most efficient

and profitable response.

The most explicit discussion of efficiency arose with regards to something that Shawn

doesn’t have any control over: the random group of other players he is assigned to when he uses

the Duty Finder to do dungeons and other group content. The best outcome is to get teamed up

with a group of adept players and get through the dungeon as efficiently as possible. The worst

outcome is the opposite: “People doing everything wrong, and my wanting to throttle them.” He

explained that efficiency is important “because some of these dungeons you might have to run it

ten times per week to cap out at this particular currency that I’ve been collecting, so you know, if

you have an option between 150 minutes or 300 minutes, you’re going to save yourself the two

and a half hours, right?” During the game session, I witnessed the unfortunate scenario in which

Shawn got assigned to an incompetent group of players. In this particular instance, they were

playing what was essentially a raid boss fight against a harpy named Goroda:

Shawn: She’s going to create those big tornado zone things, and I’m going to get bounced

around them, because the tank didn’t pull her to the right corner fast enough, and then die

again. Now she’s going to call two little sister things, one of them is going to have a

green line attached to her, and that is the one we need to focus fire on. And I’m dead

again. And the folks in the fight don’t even know the correct strategy because they’re

hitting the wrong one.

Jake: So this would be an example of an inefficient fight?

Shawn: Yeah. The red one just makes Goroda hit harder, and that can be dealt with more

readily because usually the tank is fairly well geared and the healers can focus on him,

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and they’re fine. In this case, they decided to ignore the green one which just restores

Goroda’s health and is a lot more difficult to deal with in the long run.

The group continued to perform poorly until one frustrated player quit, which precipitated the

dispersal of the remaining players. In Shawn’s view, this was an instance of wasted time, since

nothing was gained in the 15 or so minutes spent trying and failing. The reason for the failure

was that the players didn’t understand the mechanics of the fight.

Dungeons and other group content offers the most complex challenges in terms of

mechanics. During the fight against Garoda, Shawn was playing as his dragoon profession,

which happened to be the one with which he is most familiar. Thus, he was able to maximize his

character’s potential with ease, using his abilities and positioning for optimal damage output. By

contrast, at the end of the gaming session, Shawn was grouped up to complete a dungeon as a

white mage, which is a healer class—a role he rarely plays. At first, he struggled to make optimal

use of the white mage’s unfamiliar array of abilities and to stay on top of his responsibilities as

the group’s healer. He was surprised, for instance, how difficult it was to keep all of the party

members poison-free. As time passed, however, he became increasingly competent. The

following passage provides a sense of the mechanics that he was learning to master:

Shawn: Alright, I’m getting the gist of this a little bit better. It’s a learning experience, it

really is. Especially since there are two healer classes and they act very differently. *long

pause* Good practice in any effect. Alright, we should be coming up on a boss room

again. Oh come on. *long pause* Yeah getting the sleep rotation down is certainly

making things a bit easier.

Jake: The sleep rotation of...

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Shawn: Getting things slept so they’re not dealing damage to the tank and basically

further conserving my resources. Again, a thing as I’ve mostly played melee DPS before

I’ve never even had to consider up until this point.

Jake: And your resources are what?

Shawn: Magic points and the time I have to spend between each cast.

It was instructive to see how he learned the mechanics and adjusted his approach for better

results. In this case, he realized that using his sleep ability on a MOB reduced the amount of

damage on the tank and other party members, which reduced the demand on the resources

required to heal them. Sleeping a MOB proved to be a more efficient use of his magic points and

time than just using healing abilities to try to stay ahead of the curve. Shawn clearly enjoyed the

process of working out strategies for a new corner of the game and making himself that much

better rounded of a player.

Plot progression. Shawn explained that FFXIV involves various plotlines that unfold as

you level your character’s professions. There is a main plot, a plot for each profession, and

“prestige class” plots that occur once a profession is at max level. In all cases, a series of quests

build on one another to form the bulk of the narrative, and cut-scenes at every five levels portray

crucial events. Shawn noted that alongside his desire for achievement was excitement about

progressing through plots:

Part of it is bigger numbers are bigger, part of it is that for each different job, whether it’s,

you know, archer, or blacksmith, or everything, there’s a story line and a progression of

plot, that goes along with you know just gaining levels and making big numbers bigger.

So part of it is, okay I want to see the next event that’s going to happen here, and a couple

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of them really sink in, I can think of a couple particularly interesting bits of plot that paid

off at certain points.

He reiterated that a big part of the motivation to keep slogging through the levels is getting to see

what happens next; after seeing a cut-scene for the first time, his reaction is typically: “Okay that

was really interesting, that’s going to drive me a little bit right after seeing that chunk of plot and

making me want to get to the next point.”

Shawn showed me one of his favorite cut-scenes, which is the final cut-scene for the

armorer profession’s plot. Prior to the scene, Shawn’s character has entered a competition with

another member of the armorers guild (a cantankerous old man who is averse to the inclusionary

policies of the current guild leader) to determine who can craft the best suit of chainmail. The

scene portrays the series of trials by which the suits are judged against one another. While the

scene played, Shawn theatrically narrated the action:

You didn’t know how she was going to test it and it turns out that she’s going to stick a

guy in each suit of armor, and then send dudes to just beat the shit out of them. Filmed in

nausea-vision. And the guildmaster is kind of shocked as shit that this is how it’s going

down. The old curmudgeon of the guild is like “You think this is something, you wimp?”

Heheha. And he’s still talking smack and armor is still standing! The admiral is quite

impressed by this display … and then takes matters into her own hands. *the admiral

draws two pistols and fires a shot into each of the two subjects wearing the armor*

Guildmaster’s a little bit upset, but, that’s what it was there for. *one of the subjects

wearing the armor falls to his knees* But, oh hey look, his armor cracked under pressure,

turns out the guy just couldn’t stand getting the shit beat out of him and then a gunshot

wound. I win. That felt good. And when I talk to folks about the different crafting jobs,

they say that the storyline for the armorer is the weakest, until the cut scene where it’s

just like, “Okay, okay that was pretty darn cool.”

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I asked Shawn if this was a big moment of satisfaction, and he replied, “Absolutely,” and

attributed the sense of satisfaction to “getting to see that particular chunk of plot, getting to see

this boastful curmudgeon finally get put back in his place, the fact that it took a couple of

gunshots to do it—certainly entertaining. And you hear a round of applause ‘cause you just saw

two guys get shot.” Witnessing this scene—along with Shawn’s enjoyment of it—gave me a

concrete sense of how fully leveling his armorer profession was not only an achievement in

terms of making big numbers bigger, but also the satisfying culmination of a story about which

he cared about.

Busy work. As I have mentioned, I watched Shawn undertake a quest that involved

collecting laurel during the gaming session. To complete this quest, he first had to travel to a

certain area of the map that he knew was a suitable location to forage. Once he arrived, he set to

work, which consisted of walking in a circle between four bushes while avoiding hostile mobs.

When he arrived at each bush, he selected it and then navigated a “harvesting menu” in order to

harvest the laurel along with whatever other flora there was to be found. After about 15 minutes

of running through this cycle, he had collected the required amount. He admitted that, “There’s

kind of a sense of busy work about it,” owing to the repetitive and undemanding nature of the

task. He added, “I wouldn’t really do it as an entertainment value, I do it more as a means to an

end,” yet, “there’s something relaxing to it, knowing that I accomplishing a goal, in a manner of

speaking.” The combination of relaxation and productivity reminded me of my experiences of

questing in Rift.

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Later on, when Shawn completed the quest by delivering the laurels, he, with trumped-up

indignation, exclaimed:

Shawn: There’s your stinkin’ laurels—I feel like I’m saying that a lot.

Jake: Hahaha—there’s some resentment in that.

Shawn: Well, there were brigands, and I had to beat them down, so it took a while. You’re

welcome. Now I’ll go back here—I don’t think an MMO would qualify as an MMO if

there wasn’t just running back and forth for quests like this.

Despite the toilsome nature of quests like the one just described, Shawn considered such

activities to be essential to MMORPGs. Curious about why, I questioned him about the

significance of busy work:

Jake: Yeah. What do you think would be different if the game just didn’t include this sort

of stuff? Like it just had the more, I don’t know, the content that requires your full

attention?

Shawn: Um, well I don’t know if I’d really miss it. *long pause* You know I think I

actually would miss it a little bit if only because I can’t really think of any other means by

which to acquire these things, that would be, you know, anything other than just throwing

money at it. At least here you can go out and harvest things for yourself if you know

you’re going to be cooking a whole lot of, say, acorn cookies, you can go out and get the

acorns yourself, which will probably, in the long run, take more time and effort than just

buying them, but at the same time it gives you a little bit more engagement, even if it is

running around to the same four bushes.

At a later point I followed up my question with another on the same topic:

Jake: I’m curious, I’m getting the sense that there’s a lot that this kind of game involves

that is like not instantly gratifying, like it’s stuff that you’re sort of, like working.

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Shawn: Absolutely, you’re building up to it.

According to Shawn, advancement and achievement wouldn’t work in the same way if actual

labor wasn’t a part of the system. He explained that the work involved in gathering materials is

the only thing that prevents the market from being flooded, which would ruin the game’s

economy and the endeavor of “making big numbers bigger” along with it. The satisfaction that

comes with achievement (both in terms of acquiring valuable items and in terms of overall

success) is tied to the fact that it is not easily attainable—it requires actual work. The

aforementioned importance of efficiency is also closely related to the presence of work, since its

value is derived from reducing work, which would be meaningless if the amount of work was

negligible. Thus, the sense of achievement that Shawn experienced relied on the inclusion of

tedious work in FFXIV—this is why he would miss work-like activities if they were not a part of

the game. Shawn also indicated that doing in-game work also provided him with a sense of

engagement.

Multi-tasking. Shawn explained that he mitigated the drudgery of some of the more

mindless activities in FFXIV by multi-tasking. While collecting the laurel, he noted that, “If you

weren’t here I would almost certainly have something on Hulu or something just to share my

attention of the moments of downtime I get.” His laptop would normally sit on his coffee table

that is in front of the couch, so he could easily have both screens in view and switch his attention

between the two of them. Of course, certain activities, like dungeons, required most of his focus,

but when it comes to rote activities, “It’s nice being able to patch something else in there.”

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Multi-tasking also came in handy with regards to waiting for the Duty Finder to assign

him to a group, since it could sometimes take over 30 minutes. He could use this free time to

work on in-game tasks, or for virtually any other activity around his apartment, such as “making

fried rice,” “checking Facebook,” or playing Mario 2 on his arcade console, as long as he was

able to hear the notification that sounds when he is assigned to a group. He said that FFXIV is

often on in the background while he was home in the evenings and that he would frequently

switch back and forth between in-game and out-of-game activities.

Shawn stated that he liked to multi-task in all spheres of life and thus avoided activities

that require his full attention, such as reading comic books. His penchant for multi-tasking

seemed to be an extension of his orientation towards efficiency. FFXIV provided him with many

opportunities to multitask in a way that offered him a satisfying sense of being efficient: He

could be watching a TV show and gaining experience points, waiting for the Duty Finder and

making dinner, waiting for his guildmates to log on and be playing an arcade game. Anything he

did outside of the game was infused with an added sense of efficiency because it was paired with

pursuits in FFXIV. Thus, through multi-tasking, the pleasure he derived from efficiency extended

outside of the game and into real-life activities.

Convenience at the cost of immersion. When Shawn first showed me his character—a

humanoid cat called a “cat-boy”—he explained that he didn’t have a designated class, unlike

avatars in most MMORPGs. In FFXIV there are professions instead of classes, and a character

can level all of the professions. Additionally, a character can instantly switch from one profession

to the other simply by switching the primary weapon or tool that is equipped. Onscreen, the

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character’s whole outfit changes in a flash. When I asked him if he had a sense of his character

having a back-story or personality, he replied that the fact that his character could master a wide

range of professions all in one lifetime spoiled the illusion that he was a “mortal character” and

that the “gaminess” and “artifice” of the game shows through in this way. I asked if this bothered

him, and, comparing FFXIV to its predecessor, he replied:

On the one hand, coming from IX where to change jobs you actually had to go to an inn

or a certain place and could only change it there, it does lose a little bit of the, kind of

sense of immersion, but on the other hand it is so much more convenient, so much more

convenient.

When Shawn read the text to the foraging quest, I got the sense that his mocking tone reflected

his experience of the artifice of the game showing through in that instance as well:

*reading from the screen* “A dear old friend of mine has found himself in a predicament,

he’s in dire need of a botanist’s aid.” What the hell kind of predicament would you need

to be in where you would need to enlist the help of a botanist?

In this case, the fact that the game is structured around providing opportunities for characters to

gain experience points for each profession is in tension with the fact that there would only be so

many townsfolk desperately in need of a botanist. There were other features of the game that I

noticed that seemed to offer convenience at the price of immersion. For example, it was possible

to teleport from one town to another, which diminishes the sense of distance between areas,

though it saves the player from having to travel that distance. The duty finder serves as another

example, since it saves the player the trouble—and the realistic experience—of having to seek

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out companions the old fashioned way: going to the local tavern and approaching other

adventurers “in person.”

The streamlined design of FFXIV makes it possible for players to be efficient. “Time

sinks” (a popular term, though not one that Shawn himself used) such as travelling, finding a

group, and switching characters are not necessary in the gameplay, saving players time that can

be used productively. In this sense, FFXIV itself is more efficient at getting players into the

action. Sacrificing immersion is the main tradeoff that Shawn mentioned, and, although he

regretted this loss, he seemed willing to accept it.

Imperfect communication. One thing that stood out to me during the gaming session was

how limited communication was between Shawn and other players—he probably only sent out

two or three messages during the entire hour-and-a-half that he played. One contributing factor

was the fact that Shawn played on a PlayStation 3 without a keyboard or headset, which meant

that he had to input messages by navigating an onscreen keyboard. This proved to be slow and

cumbersome, creating a significant interruption to the flow of play. Shawn confirmed that

because of the time and effort it takes, he only sent messages when it was essential.

The paucity of messages surprised me since I had the understanding that frequent

communication was vital to coordinated group activities such as dungeons. Shawn explained

why sending messages isn’t as essential as I had thought:

Jake: Yeah, so it sounds like, it seems like when you do the dungeons and raids you have

to cooperate, right? I mean it sounds like it’s not...

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Shawn: We do, but the end game stuff really is so familiar to everyone right now, that you

know where you are, and it’s just kind of taken as read.

Jake: So as long as everyone knows their stuff you actually don’t really need to say much

to each other to pull things off.

Shawn: Exactly. And even then, if there’s something I need to say, I’ll say it, but there

isn’t really that much you need to say, if everyone’s … again we’re in that lull where

everyone is so familiar with this material that more often than not you’re just going to get

in and go.

In another vein, Shawn indicated that the difficulty of sending messages to other players could

actually be an advantage when he got frustrated:

Admittedly, my playing on PS3 helps my temper a little bit, because sometimes I might

be a little more caustic than I prefer to comport myself, but if I actually want to tell them

off, I have to type everything in using a D-pad and buttons, and I just don’t want to take

that time so I keep my mouth shut.

In these instances and others, Shawn indicated that he views the barrier to communication

imposed by playing without a keyboard as unproblematic.

During the game session, I observed that, in lieu of sending messages, players

communicate using a marking system, which allows them to place symbols over MOBs that are

visible to other players. Marking a MOB doesn’t have a set meaning, but often players can infer

one based on the context. For instance, during the raid boss fight, Shawn marked a MOB, hoping

that the party would get the message that they should attack that one first (they didn’t). Later on

when Shawn was doing a dungeon with another group, the tank marked two of three MOBs,

leading Shawn to believe that he should cast Sleep on the third:

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Shawn: Okay, now that I’ve got his targeting down, I know which one I can safely sleep,

and then black mage just wakes that one right back up.

Jake: What do you mean now that you have his targeting down?

Shawn: Now that I’m realizing “Okay, when he marks two targets, that means that there’s

actually three, and the unmarked one should be slept.”

Jake: Mmm. So you have the Sleep spell?

Shawn: I do. I just recently realized that I do.

Jake: Okay. So how do you know that that’s what he—

Shawn: I, from how other tanks have operated in the past, it’s mostly an educated guess.

Jake: Uh huh.

Shawn: And that time there’s not a third, so I’m just going to Sleep the second one. May

have defeated my entire presumption there.

Jake: Hahaha. So it seems like you really have to kind of operate on a kind of an

imperfect communication system.

He agreed, and went on to explain that he used to play on Japanese and international servers, so

he is used to relying on indirect communication.

Though none of his guildmates were online during the interview, he indicated that

communication is almost as limited with them as it is with players he doesn’t know. This defied

my expectation that Shawn would want to be able to chat with his friends so as to enjoy their

company, but he indicated that it was not a priority:

Shawn: Um, well I don’t really communicate with that much of anyone except, you

know, the people in my guild, and they’re the ones who are actually worth typing things

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out—I mean I could get like a USB wireless keyboard but the upgrade that it would pose

to my current play is minuscule at best, I don’t feel like spending the money.

Jake: Huh, so it really must limit your ability to type things to each other, if you’re doing

it through … I’ve never done that so I’m not sure, but it seems like it would take a long

time to type anything.

Shawn: It does, which is why I usually save my words for if there’s something I actually

really want to say, or you know, if it’s one of my friends, who needs a response from me,

they get a response, even if it takes me longer to type it.

He added that in rare instances he hooked up a keyboard for the purpose of teaching them new

content, since in that case there was no way to avoid sending a significant number of messages.

Most of the time, however, he wasn’t able to quickly and easily communicate with his friends.

Instrumental interactions. Although Shawn didn’t utilize FFXIV as a medium to

socialize, other players still factored significantly into his experience, since he relied on them to

complete group content such as dungeons. Shawn explained that when he was assigned to a

group by the Duty Finder, he hoped to be paired with other players who knew how to complete

the dungeon efficiently, thus furthering his achievement-oriented goals.

The fight against Goroda, which pitted Shawn and seven other players against a raid boss,

was one instance in which Shawn frequently remarked on the instrumental interactions between

players. The group proved to be incompetent, offering a prime example of what Shawn hoped to

avoid. Shawn was most vocal about the failures of the tanks, with statements like: “Tank not

nearly moving fast enough, managed to wipe most of us,” and, “Why are the two tanks on top of

each other? This is going to hurt bad.” He explained that the main tank should be keeping the

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boss still, making everyone else’s job easier, thereby boosting the overall performance of the

group. Shawn’s character, for example, dealt extra damage when he attacked the enemy from the

flanks and rear—this was more easily accomplished when the MOB was stationary. He made

similar remarks about his companions during the dungeon run that occurred later in the gaming

session:

Now this is normally the point where … (a) these little MOBs running along the sides

would be taken care of, and (b) the other caster would consider throwing out a couple

heals himself. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Ideally the tank would be holding all of

those MOBs simultaneously and would not have had the MOB standing inside of the

room to poison everyone right at the beginning of the fight.

In this case, the demands on him as the group’s healer were greatly increased by the tank failing

to prevent everyone from getting poisoned and failing to prevent the less durable characters from

being targeted by MOBs. Shawn also noted that ideally the other player with some healing

abilities would have pitched in. Shawn’s commentaries during both the dungeon and the raid

boss gave me a vivid sense of how the actions of other players had a considerable impact on his

experience despite minimal communication.

Since Shawn was playing an unfamiliar profession (white mage) and role (healer) during

the dungeon, he made his share of mistakes too.

At one point, he accidentally locked himself

out of his healing abilities, fatally leaving the group without a functioning healer. He reacted by

saying, “Uhhh, well, that was stupid. Hehe, now I feel horrible!” He remarked on his

shortcomings as a healer at other points as well:

One might wonder why he would have played as a healer during the interview if that was not what he usually

played. The reason is that he wanted to get assigned to a dungeon as quickly as possible, and since there tended to be

fewer healers than tanks and DPSs, signing up as a healer usually speeded up the process.

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Shawn: Aw shit.

Jake: What happened?

Shawn: My targeting got messed up. And we’re currently in combat so I can’t raise him

either.

Jake: So the paladin died?

Shawn: Yup, cause I’m not very good. Well admittedly I don’t really have very much

practice at healing. I want to call it that before I get into any particular slights against my

own skill.

Shawn’s reactions to his mistakes gave me a sense of how responsible he felt towards the players

with whom he was randomly grouped. He confirmed that he had a sense of responsibility to

other players in an email following the interview, in which he stated that it is important to him to

“hold up [his] own end” and “make everyone else’s run that much better because [he’s]

prepared.”

During the dungeon run, Shawn remarked on how playing different classes and roles

improves one’s capacity to be a team player:

Shawn: I think it’s one of those situations where the more you play, the more diverse your

experience the better it is in the long run. Cause instead of just thinking you know what

the healer has to do in a circumstance, you actually have hands on experience knowing

“Okay, this is where the healer wants me to be.”

Jake: Yeah.

Shawn: And then that contributes, like I said, to how everything flows together and how

at some point you don’t really need so much communication because not only does

everyone know the fight in and out, but they know multiple aspects of the fight.

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Jake: It’s almost like you have to have a certain kind of empathy for what other people

are trying to do and how what you’re doing is affecting what they’re trying to do.

Shawn: I certainly agree. And I feel like, you know, specifically these Final Fantasy

MMOs where you can play all of the classes on the same character really encourages

moving throughout the classes and learning those things a little bit more intimately that

you would if you had to pick one class and stick to it.

The ideal that this exchange suggests is one in which each player is attuned to the circumstances

of every other player, which has the effect of optimizing the group’s performance. Achieving this

degree of awareness is especially valuable in a context where direct communication is difficult to

actualize.

All of the above indicates the degree to which players interact as a team. Players must be

aware of their role-based responsibilities and, ideally, how to assist other players with theirs.

When the members of a given party were successful, Shawn felt a satisfying sense of things

having gone well. When players struggled to play adeptly enough, he became frustrated. And

when he was the one struggling to fulfill his role, he felt a sense of guilt for failing the group. All

of these scenarios speak to the interactive nature of group content.

Feeling at home. At one point, I asked Shawn why he had chosen to play FFXIV over

other MMORPGs, since they all offered him the chance to pursue achievement in the manner

that he described. He explained that since he had played all of the Final Fantasy games to date,

he was at home in the world of FFXIV in a way he wouldn’t have been in other games:

I mean, I’ve played a little bit of actual real time strategy Warcraft so I know a couple of

the things, but if I tried playing WoW I’d just go “what the heck is any of this supposed to

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be?” Whereas, with XI and XIV I can go “okay those are Chocobos, I can see how this is

working out, there’s going to be a guy named Cid right … good” and it’s hitting all of

these touchstones and making me feel at home in it.

At another point, Shawn noted that, beyond being set in the Final Fantasy universe, FFXIV is

suffused with references to content from other Final Fantasy games, often for the sake of humor.

Shawn enjoyed this playful dimension of the game content and the feeling of being in on the

joke:

There’s a kind of referentialness to it that I find entertaining from a humor perspective

mostly because it’s exactly the kind of stuff that’s running through my head as well and

they’ve tried to smash together as many Final Fantasy references as possible. Like you

can go through a cut scene and go “Okay that’s from FFVIII, they’re referencing

something from FFVII, that’s a recurring theme, that’s a recurring theme” and they’ve

just tied it up into an MMO that I enjoy playing. I suppose it’s my familiarity with

everything else in the series and how they’re taking another look at it.

All of the familiar references gave Shawn a sense of intimacy and at-homeness: “It’s one of those

things where the more you know about the series the more you get it, the more you get the in-

jokes, the more you get the references, and it feels a little more intimate to you.”

Long-term Investment. Shawn expected that he would play FFXIV for a long time,

largely because the game would continue to expand: “You know how MMOs kind of cycle:

‘Okay here’s a new patch and a whole lot of content, and then roll roll roll, you get through that,

‘Oh here’s a whole bunch of new content.’” At the time of the interview, Shawn anticipated the

release of the next patch, which was expected to add PvP, new dungeons, updated versions of old

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dungeons, and, as I mentioned previously, guild housing. The anticipation of future updates

keeps him invested even after the existing content has become stale:

Compared to a lineage of Final Fantasy games where what was on the disk was pretty

much all there was, the fact that you know expansions are released and patches are

updated, there’s you know a refreshment of content. Even if I get to a point where I’m not

so, I’m not as interested in this as I might have been before, there’s still a part of me that

going, “I’m going to stick around because I’m expecting this.”

In Shawn’s case, “sticking around” doesn’t just mean playing something else until the new patch

is released—he was actively preparing for it by diversifying his resources so he could get a jump

on the new content. He noted that, because of the development team’s track record, he had

confidence that future updates were worth the wait: “With the new patches that they’ve got

rolling out, it seems like they’ve really got the timing down. More so in this than there ever was

in FFXI, there’s a feel of connection between the development staff and the players.” Shawn’s

expectation that the world of FFXIV would continue to expand at a satisfying rate made it

possible for him to make a long-term investment in the game; he could continue to enjoy the

“fruit of his labor” as the game unfolded indefinitely.

Closing thoughts. Shawn was primarily oriented to mastering the content of his game,

not only in terms of being a skillful team player when it came to combat-oriented group content,

but also with regards to determining the most efficient way to approach economic activities. In

both instances, he relished the challenge of analyzing the game's underlying mechanics. Shawn

also delighted in the narratives and the familiar thematic backdrop of the Final Fantasy universe.

I had the sense that Shawn was very much in his element when he played FFXIV.

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Crystal

Crystal was a 39-year-old white woman. She lived with her husband, Peter, in his parent’s

home, which was located in the Pittsburgh area. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania, then moved

to the city in the late 1990s to pursue a degree in computer animation and multimedia. Though

she hadn’t yet found a job in that field, she hoped to someday. At the time of the interview, she

worked for a large corporation as a “pencil pusher.”

Description of the interview. Crystal found one of the flyers that I had posted at a local

gaming store. She informed me that both she and her husband have played WoW for many years

and that she was eager to participate in my research. We scheduled the interview for a Sunday

afternoon, since she had the most time to play on the weekends.

When I arrived for the interview, Crystal greeted me and guided me up to her and her

husband’s bedroom, which was where their computers were located. The room occupied the

entire attic level of the house and had a pleasant cave-like feeling due to dormer windows, clay-

colored paint, and sloped ceilings. The decorations made it feel more like a game store than a

bedroom: The walls were liberally decorated with Star Wars memorabilia and costume props and

several bookcases filled with neatly organized books, many of which were related to gaming.

Crystal and Peter each had a computer desk that sat about six feet from one another. Nearby was

a couch oriented towards a TV. For most of the interview, Crystal and I sat side-by-side on the

couch. Peter was present for the entire interview, sitting nearby at his desk. He alternated

between playing WoW and painting a miniature with his back turned to us. Though he

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occasionally made a comment or answered a question from Crystal, for the most part he stayed

out of the conversation.

Crystal was on the shorter side and somewhat overweight, with a friendly, round face and

lively eyes. She had her straight dark hair pulled back into a bun and wore pajama bottoms and a

black tee-shirt that said, “I’m not a minion, I’m upper management.” Peter was thin, had a long

ponytail, and wore glasses, sweats, and a fleece pullover. Crystal was friendly and

accommodating, making sure I had what I needed throughout the interview. She had an

energized, unfiltered, and blunt way of speaking that was punctuated by laughter, groans, and

other expressive vocalizations.

Crystal’s gaming session was different than those of my other participants in that she

spent the entire time showing me her different characters and their various costumes instead of

playing game content per se. I could have requested that she do a dungeon, but since the

characters and costumes seemed to be at the heart of her engagement with WoW, I decided that it

was more important to learn about them.

Crystal’s gaming career. Crystal had enjoyed fantasy books, miniatures-based gaming,

and pen-and-paper role-playing games since her teens. At the time of the interview, she played

Werewolf, a pen-and-paper RPG, with Peter and a group of mutual friends on a weekly basis. She

had also been a long-time Star Wars fan, and belonged to a Star Wars costume group, which

involved making her own costumes and participating in group functions such as charity events.

She had also participated in live action role-playing and reenactments. Crystal viewed

MMORPGs as part of the same family as her other hobbies, especially role-playing.

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The first MMORPG that Crystal played was Final Fantasy XI, which Peter played too.

When WoW was released in 2004, he switched to WoW and encouraged Crystal to join him. She

was initially resistant to the idea because she felt invested in the world of Final Fantasy and

didn’t particularly like the cartoony graphics of WoW. However, she gave it a try and never

looked back. At the time of the interview, Crystal typically played for a few hours after work

each weeknight. On the weekends, she would play for longer stretches.

Individual themes. Below are the individual themes that emerged during my analysis of

Crystal’s interview transcript.

Grinding. For many players, fully leveling a character is just the prelude to the endgame,

which is where the real action starts. This was not the case with Crystal; she explained that she

loved leveling characters and that once she had fully leveled a character, she preferred to move

on to leveling another rather than engage in endgame content: “For me, it’s just going from 0 to

90 and then once I hit there, you know that’s cool.”

Crystal’s approach to “level grinding” or “power leveling” consisted of repeatedly

running her characters through dungeons with pick up groups, which is the fastest way to gain

experience points:

When I am level-grinding, I don’t quest. I don’t go out of my way to go here to there to

here, you know, go over there, kill so many people, come back. I don’t do that. That’s too

time-consuming to me. All I do is when I hit 14 or 15, go straight into the dungeons, and

that’s all I do. To me that’s the fastest way of leveling.

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She had fully leveled nine of her dozen or so characters using this approach, and was actively

working on another pair (she preferred to work on two different characters at a time so she could

alternate between them for the sake of variety).

Her typical night of WoW involved completing as many dungeon runs as she can. Since

she didn’t belong to a guild, she used the Looking for Group feature to link up with other

players, since dungeons require a party of five. Depending on how quickly she got assigned to

groups, she could complete between two and six dungeons in an hour. Her attitude toward

dungeon runs was: “Get it done, get the experience, get the loot, get out of there, done.”

One of the consequences of Crystal’s approach to power-leveling was that she had done

each dungeon many, many times. How many?

I do have my favorites and stuff like that, but I’ve done every single dungeon 100s of

times. At different times, you know, like I’ll have a lowbie

versus, you know, my

highbies, you know, but, yeah, it’s, I’ve done dungeons hundreds and hundreds of times.

There are 75 dungeons in WoW—if she really did mean all of them and her estimate of a 100s of

times each is accurate, she has completed at least 20,000 dungeon runs overall! As a result, she

has become intimately familiar with these virtual spaces:

They’re so familiar, yeah, I mean I know every little crook, crevice, I know where I’m

going, you know, I can, with my warrior right now, it’s crazy because half the people are

just trailing behind me cause I’m just boom, next person, boom, next person, I’m just

going crazy, pulling everything, you know, as long as the healer can keep up with me,

then I’m going through that dungeon in five seconds, you know. They almost yell at me

A lowbie is a low-level character while a highbie is a high-level character.

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to slow down because they need to loot everything, cause I’m not concerned about

looting either, I’m just boom, next person, boom, next person.

The bread and butter of Crystal’s engagement with WoW was running through these dungeons,

time after time, character after character, slowly grinding out levels.

Crystal indicated that she enjoyed the sense of progress and achievement that comes with

leveling characters. When I asked her to describe what a typical night of character-grinding feels

like, she replied: “To me it feels good because I see progression, I see that I’m working towards

my goals. If I see that little bar moving, then I’m happy.” When she gets a character to max level,

she feels a sense of completion: “Then that progress bar goes away at 90 haha and then that’s it!”

I got the impression that Crystal enjoyed the straightforwardness and familiarity of leveling

characters and the definite endpoint of hitting level 90.

Crystal did sometimes play with characters that have already been fully leveled, but not

for the purpose of making them more powerful. To do so would involve grinding for gear, since

once a character is fully leveled, the only way to increase its power is via better gear. Crystal

explained that she abhorred the process of grinding for gear, which, in the endgame, is done by

completing daily quests for reputation points. Daily quests, or “dailies” as she sometimes called

them, are quests that can be done once per day. Each time a daily is completed, the character

earns reputation points, or “rep.” Thus, a player who is grinding for rep would do the same

handful of quests every day for as long as it takes to gain the number needed to purchase a given

piece of gear. Crystal was also outspoken with regards to how much she disliked the daily quest

format:

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I’m not gonna, like those same five quests every day, and I have to go back to that place

again and again and again, it just does not do it for me. I can’t do, I can’t do those. My

husband can, I can’t, no, I, nooooo!! Haha.

She explained that being required to do the same thing every day was unbearable, especially

since she was playing for her own enjoyment. In addition to disliking the format of dailies,

Crystal was also deterred by the fact that acquiring a new piece of gear provided her with only a

fleeting sense of accomplishment, since there will always a better piece at some point:

It’s just something in my head that gear grinding to me … and and too, I know this upsets

my husband too, is like, once you get the best gear, within a few months, it’s crap, it’s

crap. And you have to grind it all out again … I just don’t, I think it’s the uncertainty

cause once you get that best gear, there’s nothing out there that says that’s it. But once

you hit 90, that’s it, there’s nowhere else for you to go.

Because Crystal was not part of a guild and therefore couldn’t raid, daily quests were the only

avenue by which she could acquire the next level of gear for her characters.

At a certain point, we both noticed the apparent contradiction between her attraction to

level grinding and her aversion to gear grinding, since they are quite similar in terms of both

content and structure:

Crystal: I have, I’ve tried, it’s just, it never seems, like I can’t make myself do that same

thing, those dailies—that’s an evil word for me—dailies—is like, ugh, monotonous. But

yet I like repeated stuff, so, I don’t know what it is about it that, I guess it’s the forcing

me to do it.

Jake: Hm, yeah because you sort of do the same dungeons daily.

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Crystal: Yeah, so I do that, but I don’t understand why I can’t get over, why does

instances not bother me but dailies do?

Jake: Yeah. Is that just a mystery for you?

Crystal: It’s a mystery, it’s a complete mystery. Because Peter loves them. My husband

can do dailies till the sun doesn’t shine. And he’s, you know, it’s a good way to get cash

and money and all that other stuff, but I just can’t, I can’t do it, and I don’t know why, I

don’t know, it’s a complete mystery, I have no idea why I don’t like it, cause you would

think, with the way that I am I would love it but I can’t, I don’t, nooo!

Jake: Well it seems like the thing that—

Crystal: Cause it’s got a progress bar too, because you can see the reputation going up

and up and up, but I don’t know, I have no clue why that bothers me so much, it just does.

That is really strange.

Jake: Is this something that you’ve been aware of or is this something that just, us talking

about now—

Crystal: Yeah I just never really thought about it until now, and it’s just like, well I do like

all those things, so why can’t I stand it? And it’s just in my head, it’s like that word

“daily” is just like ahhhh! *sigh* And you would think I would love it because it’s the

same stuff, but I don’t, and I don’t understand it, it’s a weird thing.

She couldn’t stand the monotony of doing the same quest every day, yet her activity of choice

was repeatedly running the same dungeons. She felt motivated by the progress bars for

experience filling up, yet not for the progress bars that corresponded to reputation. She chose

routine, yet couldn’t stand to have it imposed upon her. Although she couldn’t say why, it seemed

that grinding was at the heart of what Crystal loved and hated about WoW.

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Having many characters. Typically, players have a primary character (called a “main”)

that they strive to make as powerful as possible. Crystal stated that the idea of having a main

didn’t appeal to her; instead, she preferred to have many characters, so that she could play as

many of the 11 classes as possible. Having a wide range of options at her disposal allowed her to

tailor her experience at any given time:

I like all the different characters, because if I’m healing and stuff is wiping or I’m tanking

and things are just not working out correctly, I’ll just switch to DPS and just go crazy, but

I have that option you know, that’s what I like about it: if I don’t want to do one thing I

don’t have to.

The capacity to choose from an array of roles allows her to match her function in the game with

her mood:

I can do whatever I want to do depending on what my mood is and you know I have it at

the maximum amount that I’m allowed to have—I might not have the best gear, but I can

still go out and do it, it’s just, do I want to do it?

As I describe in more detail later, each character’s function (along with his or her personality),

called forth a different mood for Crystal. Thus, she was able to match or modify her mood

through her choice of character.

Having so many maximum level characters also made it possible for her to have each

profession fully leveled on her account (each character can practice two of the 11 possible

professions). In WoW, a profession makes it possible for a character to either gather a certain type

of raw material or craft a certain type of item. Often, players in guilds will freely share their

gathered materials and crafted goods with one another. It is also possible to buy these items at the

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auction house from other players. Since Crystal was not in a guild, she covered all of the bases

with her own characters instead:

I almost have every single profession covered at the maximum level, so if I need a jewel

for one of my characters, this character has it, so I don’t have to go to the auction house

and waste my money on somebody else to do my work. I’ll go out and grind the crap out

of my materials. I’m not going to sit there and spend thousands of gold.

In addition to being able to outfit all of her characters with crafted items, she could offer them to

Peter’s character as well, which she found satisfying. Her array of characters occasionally cane

in handy in other ways too. For instance, at one point she fully leveled her rogue to help him earn

a particular achievement:

Crystal: Peter needed help with only a rogue, a rogue, there’s a certain item that Peter

needs to increase one of his, uh, his reputations, and you have to go up into this instance

and steal lock-boxes—pickpocket them and only a rogue can pickpocket, so I had to max

my rogue out so he could go into this place and pickpocket all these boxes so he could

turn them in for rep[utation]. But he doesn’t like level grinding, I do.

Jake: So it worked out.

Crystal: So it worked out. I had to have one, I had to have a 90. He needed a rogue, you

know, to finish up his title and so it just happed. So what he’ll do is he’ll take my account

over, go take my rogue, do what he’s gotta do, and then, so he’ll just, he’ll hijack my

character for a little while. So then, some of the things I do for my husband is he loves

those achievement things and stuff so I’ll help him out finishing out what the best gear is

and tell him what he needs—that kind of stuff.

Having many different characters expanded the scope of what Crystal could do and experience in

WoW.

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True characters. Crystal’s characters were more than different combinations of classes,

professions, and other functional attributes—they were characters in the true sense of the word.

She created a back-story and personality for each one, which was usually reflected in their class,

specialization, and gear. Some of her characters had been “with [her] forever” and she spoke of

them fondly. She explained that she was in the habit of creating depthful characters for pen-and-

paper RPGs, so it was only natural that she did the same in WoW:

I’ve started with pen and paper. To me, role-playing—and that’s why I think I’m on a

role-playing server, and I do this through my own MMOs, but role-playing is not

mainstream anymore. I mean, pen and paper is a lot different than MMOs: more character

concepts, more coming up with ideas, costumes, personalities, feelings, you know, that

kind of stuff, and that’s not really done as much with MMOs.

Role-playing (RP) servers are designated for players like Crystal who want to role-play their

characters. These servers are the minority in WoW, accounting for approximately a fifth of total

servers.

Crystal spent the gaming session showing me several of her characters while describing

their personalities and back-stories. One of them was her orc mage:

I made sure she had the blue eyes, but she has the green skin, so kind of like Thrall

where she might be more human, like maybe be more like a half-breed. But she was

trained by humans and stuff like that, so that’s why I kind of gave her a mage, because a

lot of the mages and teachers and schoolings—it’s not quite orcy, you would think orcs

are more like, shamans and stuff like that so that’s why I kind of gave her more blue eyes

and she more, looks a little bit more like a—she’s not tribal or anything—more human,

has a human background a little bit or maybe gets along better with humans than most

One of the characters in the WoW narrative.

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orcs would, so that’s kind of like my mindset with her … so I figured she would be more

of a, you know, she’s not quite all orc, so orcs might actually distrust her and that’s why I

kinda gave her the blue eyes cause it’s unusual, for her, so that’s why I figured she might

have a little bit of human in her somewhere maybe in her background or something, she

just never quite was a full orc but ehhh.

One piece of gear that this character had equipped made it possible for her to understand the

communications of Alliance characters (the faction consisting of humans, dwarves, elves, and

other orderly races), which are usually unintelligible to members of the Horde (the opposing

faction to which orcs belong). Though this item didn’t convey much of an advantage to Crystal’s

character in practical terms, she valued the way it reflected her character’s familiarity with

humans. She also noted that this character had always been a fire mage and, despite the fact that

frost mages are more powerful at this particular point in time, she wouldn’t change

specializations because it would violate the integrity of the character.

Crystal’s imaginative involvement with her characters extended beyond their roles and

functions within the game. For instance, she imagined that her blood elf paladin was, among

other things, a cat lover:

My paladin to me is not somebody that’s snooty, it’s somebody down to earth, is used to

working with his hands, you know, get the job done more like a mercenary up for hire.

*Peter makes an effeminate hand gesture* Oh stop that, he’s not gay ha. He just likes

kitties ha, he does, that’s his quirk, he likes cats. He has all the cats, like all the little cute

cats and stuff like that. and I actually want to try to get and artist, to, like, I could draw it

myself but I don’t think I could get it quite right, so I wanted to try to get a professional

to try to draw my character with all these cats lying around him, and he’s in this super

uber armor you know, and they’re like laying across his shield, and he’s like you know

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haha, you know, I just thought I’d be really funny, is like, he’s lounging on one of those

chaise lounges and have all these kitties draped around him and he’s petting them and

stuff but he’s all in this big bulky armor and stuff like I that and I just thought it would be

hilarious and he has that one like, you know, game show host grin with the little twinkle

in the corner of his teeth you know, haha, you know that cheesy grin.

Crystal’s obvious delight in this dimension of her paladin’s personality indicates how much she

enjoyed imagining her characters as fully fledged persons.

Towards the end of the interview, we discussed the ways in which the personalities of

Crystal’s various avatars reflected different elements of her personality and background:

I still stay close to home, meaning that those characters have concepts of me in them, and

it’s easier for me to understand than a berserker running around with a two-handed sword

chopping people down. I’d be that other person with a shield going “No you can’t!” or

you know, healing that person.

She noted that many of her female characters had a “den mother mentality” and were either

healers or tanks in order to best portray this disposition. Another common theme across many of

her characters, including her orc mage, is that they were in some way defying expectations or

fighting to overcome stereotypes. This theme captured some of Crystal’s experiences as a female

gamer:

Crystal: Yeah or whatever, probably more guys than girls, cause even when I go to the

gaming store I could count on one hand how many girls there are versus how many boys

are running around you know, so...

Jake: Right, so you’re kind of, blurring the boundary of what a gamer is a little bit?

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Crystal: But I’m not, yeah, but, even gamer girlfriends, they go there, most of the times,

from what I’ve seen, they’re going there just because their boyfriends kind of pushed

them into it, not because they want to. I do. And I haven’t met too many people like me

so, it’s just not the stereotypical, and that’s usually how I play my characters.

Although many characters reflected facets of her personality that are familiar to her, others got

her in touch with aspects of herself that she experienced less often. For example, her warlock—

whom she described as diabolically evil— provided her with a chance to “let loose” and embody

her “crazy” side.

Immersion into a character. Crystal explained that becoming immersed in the mindset

and mood of the character she is playing was a vital dimension of her engagement with WoW:

Crystal: There is fulfillment in being a character, you know, and not being yourself for a

while.

Jake: What do you get out of that? Being a character and not being yourself for a while?

Crystal: It’s relaxing because I don’t have to worry about my own problems, you know,

that I can be into this role and I might have a different set of problems, but it’s a game, I

can turn that off, you know, and then go back to my real-life, so it’s, it’s you know, it’s an

escape for me.

Jake: So when you’re playing a character, you’re sort of seeing the world through their

eyes—

Crystal: Yeah, how they would react to something versus how I would.

Crystal is describing the experience of becoming immersed in a virtual self. Part of the appeal

was leaving herself and her problems behind, yet remaining “close to home” by playing

“characters [that] have concepts of [her] in them.” She found that playing as either a healer or a

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tank resonates the most with her usual sense of herself, though she experienced the strongest and

most dramatic sense of immersion when she played her undead warlock (a DPS), who she

described as follows:

He’s sneaky, you know, he’s evil, like he’s got evil intentions. To me when I play him is

like, you know, I might be the most nicest person in the world, I’ll be like, “I’ll be your

best friend” but I’m that best friend with the knife on your back hahaha you know? On

the front I’m “Yeah, everything’s fine, everything’s good, let’s go to this party” you know

or whatever have you but at the same time he’s slipping that whatever in your drink haha

you know, it’s like, you know, “What do you need?” you know and stuff like that, but at

the same time it’s like well if I do this for you you’re going to do something for me, in

the long run, or something like that, so I kind of play him like that. But he’s also a little

bit wild and crazy, so you know.

Unlike her tanks and healers, who were oriented towards the wellbeing of others, her warlock is

completely self-interested. She often played him when she was tired of worrying about other

players and wanted to let loose:

It’s like that once in a crazy way, that one day, that full moon of the week haha, that I’m

just like: “Oh my god, I’m stir crazy!” You know haha I want to let loose, you know, but

the other two are very rigid, and, I have to do this and this is what my purpose is, this is

what my responsibility is, but then there’s that full moon, every once in a while that

“ahhhhh.”

At another point she said:

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But, if I get into him, I kinda get a little bit, I don’t know I get too excitable ‘cause I’ll

like PvP with him, and I’m just throwing out DOTs

like crazy and stuff, I mean I might

die but they’ll die with me hehehe you know

Jake: So it seems like there’s a certain feeling for you that goes along with that, like being

kind of crazy?

Crystal: Uh huh, that’s my crazy character haha

Jake: So what does it feel like to be in that mode?

Crystal: I get too rambunctious and I’ll start yelling at the TV hahaha or my monitor, I’ll

be like “Oh no he didn’t!” you know haha and stuff like that and uh, I have to stop myself

sometimes so I can’t do that for too long cause then I just get too excited at my computer

and start messing things up.

Crystal’s warlock seemed to provide her with ready access to a less characteristic way of being,

which had a powerful cathartic effect.

Costuming with gear. Crystal stated that she was not concerned with acquiring high-end

gear and also pointedly expressed her aversion to grinding for it. However, she enjoyed

collecting gear for the purpose of modifying the appearances of her characters. Although players

can’t design their own gear in WoW, there are such a vast number of existing pieces that they can

be combined into almost infinite combinations, making it possible for Crystal and like-minded

players to create unique looks for their characters. She noted that the appeal of creating outfits

for her avatars is the same as the appeal of making herself Star Wars costumes. In addition to

collecting gear used for costuming purposes, Crystal also sought out other items for their

DOTs are attacks that progressively inflict damage over a specified amount of time, rather than all at once at the

moment of the attack.

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aesthetic qualities, such as novelty items (which look or do something unusual and don’t have a

practical function in the game), pets, and mounts.

During the play session, Crystal showed me many of the pieces that she had collected

over the years. Her enthusiasm is apparent in her description of her paladin’s assortment of spare

gear:

So here’s all of his stuff. So like, down, here’s all that gear I have. It’s tons of it. I have

the tuxedo pants, there’s the shorts that I was wearing for my, hah, I have the witch’s hat

that I thought was cool for Halloween, you know, there’s the sandals hahaha, you know,

there’s a really cool sword that summons pumpkins, you know pumpkin minions, so

that’s, you know that’s just something funny that I had, you know that kind of stuff. And I

just went out and bought—not bought—but got, like, that’s a cool looking shield, um,

you know, just kinda weird odds and ends stuff like this one’s my favorite because it’s a

skull and it was really hard to get back in the day, there’s the Sword of a Thousand Truths

that was on South Park … There’s a pair of bunny ears hah—don’t ask! Hahaha!

She also showed me one of her favorite novelty pieces, which was a mask that gave her character

the ability to make the headless horseman laugh. These various items were entertaining in their

own right and, along with regular gear, could become the raw material out of which cohesive

costumes are composed.

Although she didn’t explicitly make this distinction, it was my impression that Crystal

created two types of outfits: clothing and gear that reflected the personalities of her characters

and themed costumes to dress them in for fun. For example, her warlock had a wild, gothic look

with dark robes and a mohawk. Crystal was especially enthusiastic about the appropriateness of

the scythe he carried: “perfect for a warlock, come on ha, you know?” To further complement his

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look, he usually rode a nightmare, which is a black horse with flaming hooves. His appearance

was consistent with his evil, unhinged personality and the death-oriented magic that he wielded.

Her orc mage, on the other hand, was dressed in a “wild West” outfit, replete with gloves, boots,

and a black cowboy hat—a look that didn’t have anything to do with her backstory, as far as I

could tell. Crystal noted that dressing characters up in costumes is common on role-playing

servers, especially for planned gatherings:

People come in all different kinds of costumes, and they plan on this stuff for ages and

stuff and I think that’s why it’s cool on an RP server, because RP servers, most of the

times they’re more concerned about what they look like than what they’re doing, so you

know that’s kind of fun to see all these different outfits and things that you would never

think would look cool but “Oh my god that’s awesome!” you know, and I think that’s

where the RP side of me, and the costumes that we do, you know, it kind of triggers in

my brain.

Since Crystal’s emphasis on aesthetics over functionality is shared by many on her server, she

was able to enjoy costuming communally.

Mounts, essentially another class of item in WoW, deserve a special mention, since

Crystal was willing to go to great lengths to acquire her favorites. For instance, in order to

purchase a Sandstone Drake (a dragon that can seat two characters), she took the chance of

buying gold from Chinese gold farmers—something for which she could be banned from the

game. She was also engaged in an ongoing effort to get the Headless Horseman’s Mount, which

she described as follows:

It’s a green, glowing you know, evil looking horse mount that’s half undead—it would be

perfect for [my warlock’s] Ghostrider, you know thing, If he didn’t want to ride his

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nightmare, he could ride this thing and he could fly with it, I can’t fly on my nightmare, I

could fly with this! You know, and stuff like that, and it’s just cool looking, every time it

stomps it’s like green flames around its legs, and it’s just like ah yeah.

This mount cannot be purchased—it can only be acquired by completing a short quest that is

exclusive to the Hallow’s End event that occurs each October. The quest can only be attempted

once per day and once per character and there is only a small chance of the mount dropping

when the boss is defeated. Crystal had been running the instance once a day with every character

she has for the past three Hallow’s Ends! She remarked:

I swear to god Blizzard is laughing at me somewhere! I’ve tried! And it’s just something

that I’ve gotta have and I will do it every—and it’s in my head, it’s clicked in my head

that I will have it haha.

Crystal explained that she placed a premium on mounts because they provide a special chance to

complement a character’s outfit and personality:

Some of my mounts, like for him [her blood-elf paladin], I only use red mounts, I don’t

know why, but in my head, he only rides like the Flaming Hippogryph, the Red Dragon,

or like a red colored wyvern. Some of my other characters, like one of my priests, I, she’s

a troll, she’s got blue skin, she will only use blue mounts. In my head—I have no idea! I

guess it’s cause I have these concepts in my head of what my characters are like, and they

have preferences just like other people do.

Again, with mounts she prioritized the integrity of her characters, since this constituted a vital

dimension of her engagement in WoW.

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Limited socializing. When she plays WoW, Crystal preferred to stick to herself and

largely eschewed socializing with other players. She had been in guilds in the past, but was

disappointed by her experiences with guildmates; she found that they formed cliques and

squabbled with one another:

They start pointing fingers, things don’t go right, you don’t have the right kind of leaders

but yet you can’t say anything, you know, or whatever had you, and it just got pointless.

It was high school all over again and I just, that wasn’t enjoyable. I’m not paying 15

dollars to be in high school again.

She also found it difficult to connect with and trust people whom she only knew through text and

voice chat:

And I find it a little hard because I don’t see their face. I hear a name, or I might not even

know their real name, or anything like that, but all I hear is a voice, you know, and who’s

to say who’s on that other side, they could be telling me “Oh I work as a lawyer, you

know this that and the other,” but how do you know?

Despite these limitations, there were instances in which she formed a friendship with another

player, though only to find that people move on capriciously.

Crystal: Um, we’ve had a few people that we’ve talked to and things like that, but they

either move on ... you know they find new friends or you know, we were the hot item for

a little while, but then their interest floats other ways, which is fine we understand that, I

mean that’s the nature of people and the way it goes.

Jake: What do you mean you were the hot item?

Crystal: Well I mean they don’t find many couples that play together and stuff like that

and they want to talk to us and we’re older and we had a few like, I think there was a girl

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up in Canada that we talked to, and she had some problems and I don’t know, some sort

of family life, and we talked to her for a while, you know just to help her out and stuff

and tell her some of our experiences because we were older and stuff, but eventually she

found somebody else that apparently talks to her too and, you know, I don’t know things

just didn’t work out and she decided to say that she was gonna drop the guild and move

on to someone, to something else so it’s like, “Okay, you know, whatever, you know, you

do whatever it is that makes you happy.”

As a result of these disappointments, Crystal hadn’t been affiliated with a guild for many years.

She added that because she has two large groups of friends in real-life, she didn’t feel a strong

need to find friendship in WoW anyway.

Since more intimate relationships in WoW hadn’t worked out, Crystal’s interactions with

other players tended to be anonymous, transient, and remote. The Looking for Group feature

made it possible for her to find pick up groups for dungeons without having to talk to other

players. During dungeon runs, players usually stay focused on the task at hand and don’t

communicate much, if at all. In between dungeons, she did keep an eye on the trade chat, which

is essentially a general chat for all players in the game.

I’ll watch what they’re talking about and every once in a while I’ll input something you

know, or they’ll start screaming out a song and I’ll, I’ll like type in the next piece of it or

you know, but I’m just like reading what other people are talking about and I might

comment while I’m waiting and interact with them that way. But I try not to troll, because

I see trolling happen all the time and I’m not going to be evil or be real mean about stuff

but, you know, if I set time aside on the weekends or whatever then that’s different. But I

do interact with people, you know, and talk to people when I’m waiting, you know, or I’ll

strike up a conversation.

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Perhaps her favorite social interaction was attending costume parties thrown by a guild on her

server:

There’s a group that holds weekend parties sometimes or special events, and it’s called

Club Styx, and they actually pump music, that like, through one of their websites, and

you can go to their website and listen to them DJ music while you’re at the party, so

there’s people there, there’s tunes there, and it was a beach party, so I actually went out

and bought clothing that looked like beach attire, you know, like a pair of thong sandals

and a pair of shorts and a little tank top and stuff and I went there and just, you know,

danced around and listened to their DJ music and stuff and it was fun, I thought it was

fun. People come in all different kinds of costumes, and they plan on this stuff for ages.

It seemed that although Crystal enjoyed the presence of other players in the game, she tended to

stay at a distance where she wouldn’t get ensnared in the unpleasant dynamics that she has

experienced in the past.

Role-playing with others. Although Crystal didn’t tend to socialize with other players,

she would occasionally participate in a staged role-play. She enjoyed role-playing in general,

which of course was reflected in her commitment to playing characters with developed

personalities and the fact that she participated in pen-and-paper role-play on a weekly basis. In

the past, she was affiliated with a role-playing guild, and thus had frequent opportunities to

participate in role-plays. Peter was still affiliated with that guild at the time of the interview, so

when they need an extra person, she would sometimes join them:

They needed somebody to die and their characters, their guild people were gonna come

kill me. You know, and that was fun to me, that was great. I mean I got to sit there and

sneak up on them and typed it all out that I, you know I was a hunter at the time, and I

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camouflaged myself, you know, and I was, had this outfit on, and I was sneaking through

the snow and stuff like that you know and then when they caught me it was like “Oh my

god!” you know and I had to, you know, “You guys are liars!” you know, “You’re a

bunch of ... !” So I got to play that, so that was fun. I mean it was a couple hours out of

my day, and they got to have fun, and I was like, “Ugghh!” gurgling and “Nooo! You

can’t!” and they were carving my eye out and torturing me and stuff, and it was just like

“Ahhh!”

She also engaged in what might be considered a lighter version of role-playing that went hand-

in-hand with the fun of dressing her characters up in costumes. For example, she sometimes put

“Ozzy glasses” on her warlock and ran through town yelling “Sharon!” She also came up with

the idea for her and Peter to get Mechano-Hog mounts (which are essentially motorcycles) and

biker outfits and ride around the outskirts of enemy towns like a biker gang.

Playing with a partner. Crystal enjoyed playing alongside her husband Peter. Although

they often play at the same time, they are usually doing different things in the game since they

each have their own priorities. Unlike Crystal, Peter was focused on pursuing traditional

achievements and was part of a raid group. Crystal appreciated the chance to watch him raid so

she could experience the content without the stress of doing it herself. She also liked helping him

pursue achievements using her various professions and character classes. Occasionally, they did

play together using characters that they created for that purpose:

So it’s funny, Peter and I came up with an idea and we’re actually playing twin monks—

he’s Ying and I’m Yang. So it’s like, everything about us is the same, we wear the same

clothing, the same everything, um but his hair’s black and mine’s white. So that’s the

only thing that you can tell them apart, because you know ying and yang is black and

white mixed together.

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They casually quested or just “goof[fed] off” with these characters when they play them,

enjoying the fun of experiencing the game together.

It’s just a game. I noticed that Crystal would often say something to the effect of “it’s just

a game” after describing a facet of WoW that she avoided because she found it too stressful and

anxiety-provoking. For instance, she didn’t like the demands of guild membership, such as

performance expectations and interpersonal conflict. Raiding was another thing that involved too

much pressure for her to enjoy:

I’m not going to put my characters in there and have all that, you know, anxiety on me,

pressure, to, you know that kind of stuff, cause then I can’t concentrate on the game, I

have to concentrate so hard on what I’m doing, and I’d rather watch the story.

In a similar vein, she avoided playing newly released dungeons:

New expansion out and all these new dungeons come out, I don’t want to play right away

because they have to come up with the mechanics first so I know what to do, I’m not one

of those people that can just willy-nilly go in there cause I mean, I don’t have a guild with

me and friends that I would know, and if we wipe too many times, they’ll be like “Oh,

you suck” and all that kind of stuff and I just don’t want to deal with that, this is a fun

game, I don’t want to deal with that.

She preferred to wait until she had watched guides posted by other players so that she could feel

confident that she knew how to complete the content successfully.

Crystal’s aversion to feeling anxious shed light on her preference for running through

familiar dungeons repeatedly. At one point, she indicated that she takes comfort in the fact that

the familiar array of dungeons is “always there, and it’s never changing, not really. I mean

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sometimes they change, but it’s not that bad … I could run, uh, Black Phantom Depths 500 times

and know exactly where everything is and what’s going to happen.” She also enjoyed playing

content that was easy and thus stress-free. For example, when I asked her to recall a particularly

fond memory, she described running an old raid with characters who were leveled well beyond

the difficulty of the content:

Yeah we were like 90s, but this raid that was back like during the 60s, so everyone that

was in the group was 90s and could run around like cats, I don’t have to conform to that

group standard, that I as a tank had to go out and there’s a certainty of death or wiping.

We could just run around like crazy and be fine. So that was fun to me, like that was

ridiculous fun, because we just went back ... so it’s just kind of fun to go back and do

those content but not have all that kind of responsibility on you that you have to do it in a

certain way.

Her preference for playing content that she knew she could count on beating was congruent with

her tendency to play WoW as a way to wind down after a day at work. She was not seeking

challenge and novelty—rather, she wanted to relax with familiar activities.

Engaged in the story. Crystal had always felt engaged in the unfolding story of WoW,

which chronicles a longstanding conflict between the Alliance and the Horde. The content of the

story is revealed through quests, dungeons, raids, and cut-scenes and progresses every time a

new patch or expansion is released. Crystal had also read supplementary materials like comic

books so as to further enjoy the depth of the game’s lore. She explained that the story was a

significant part of her involvement with the game:

I want to know where things are going to go, I’ve always been—like I love reading, I

read a lot. And even like a lot of RP games, I really do enjoy reading the stories and

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things like that. And I do like playing too but you know, it’s just knowing what’s out

there, where it’s going to go, how things progress. I like the characters changing—you

know, having Thrall still being the overlord, whatever have you, it’s nice to see a change,

even if the change was bad, you know, but the story’s moving forward, you know, things

can’t always be rosy all the time. And that’s what, Star Wars is like that, you know,

there’s always going to be a time of rift and change, but then it’s going to be for the better

eventually if you can just last through it, you’ll be better off for it. It’s that whole, even in

The Hobbit, you know, there’s always that story of the dark times before you move onto

something better and I think that’s what appeals to a lot of people about WoW is that story

line you know, there’s always going to be good, bad.

She based her character concepts on the lore of WoW and noted that sometimes she researched it

expressly for this purpose. Because she was so invested in the story, she didn’t think she would

stop playing WoW until they stop developing new content:

In the long run, I still want to experience the content, I wanna see where the story goes.

Even if it’s bad, even if I don’t approve of it, I’m still gonna play, because it’s not going

to stay that way forever, you know, just because I might not enjoy certain things doesn’t

mean that it’s not going to change and they’re always going to come out with new

classes, new whatever, levels are going to go up, you know, whatever have you, so there’s

always going to be something that I’m going to want to do or experience, so I don’t ever

see myself stopping unless the game stops.

Ongoing expansions provided her with a sense there will always be more for her to enjoy in

WoW and that she would be playing it well into the future.

Closing thoughts. Crystal used WoW as a medium for imaginatively crafting characters

and role-playing them—an approach to MMORPGs has become less common as the genre has

developed (Rowlands, 2012). It was interesting to note that despite her divergent priorities, fully

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leveling and accessorizing her numerous characters required her to undertake many of the same

activities that more achievement-oriented players do. Thus, although she had a different

orientation to the game, she still engaged in the structure of grinding for levels, resources, and

loot, though primarily for the purpose of leveling and accessorizing characters.

Robin

Robin was a 54-year-old white woman living in the greater Pittsburgh area with her

husband, 20-year-old daughter, and two cats. She also had a 28-year-old son who lived nearby.

She worked from home typing up inventories and doing computer tech work. Robin explained

that she had multiple medical conditions that affected her mobility and described herself as

disabled.

Description of the interview. Robin responded to my posting on Reddit and stated that

she was interested in participating. As things turned out, Robin had to reschedule the interview

several times because of health and family issues. When a date finally worked out and I arrived,

Robin greeted me warmly. Robin was of average height, above average weight, and had short,

dark hair flecked with grey. She was dressed simply, wearing black pants, a dark fleece pullover,

and a few adornments. She guided me to a room in the back of her house where her computer

was located. On the way, I met her daughter, who seemed shy but curious about the interview.

The room that housed her computer room doubled as a storage room and office. Both her desk

and the shelving that wrapped around much of the room was constructed with 2x4s and plywood.

Everything on the shelves—mostly books, computer games, and labeled storage bins—was

arranged neatly, though some exercise equipment cluttered up the middle the room.

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For the first half of the interview, Robin sat turned away from her computer and faced

where I was sitting in a dining room chair that her daughter had brought in for me. Robin tended

to speak at an even pace and often looked off to the side while she was composing her thoughts

or remembering things. She described her experiences in a matter-of-fact way, often making

summative statements like “it’s just fun.” Robin tended to tell stories about things that had

happened in the past; a great deal of them were unhappy ones. I had the sense that she

appreciated the chance to talk about some of these less-than-happy events with a sympathetic

listener. At other times, however, she recounted things with fondness and would break into a peal

of high-pitched laughter.

An hour into the interview, Robin logged on to Guild Wars 2 (GW2), the MMORPG that

she played. I pulled my chair up next to her so I could watch over her shoulder. For most of the

gaming session, she participated in a “world versus world” event called “Edge of the Mists,”

which involved two large teams battling over strategic locations spread across a large swath of

territory. For a significant portion of the event, Robin simply tried to join up with the main group

of players on her team—the map was large enough that finding and catching up with them was

time consuming. There were, however, a few instances where I got to see her in the thick of

combat. While fighting, she had to focus intently and couldn’t continue talking to me.

Robin’s gaming career. Robin considered herself a gamer through and through—at one

point she joked that she had told her kids to take her out and shoot her when her eyesight

declined to the point where she can’t play anymore! She started playing PC games in the early-

to mid-1980s when she was often stuck at home raising her young son. Adventure games and

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RPGs were her favorite genres, though she played “anything [she] could get [her] hands on.” She

was also involved in MUDs and other online communities during the early days of the internet.

She enjoyed the detail and the character-creation in RPGs and thought it would be fun to enjoy

these elements in a social environment when that became possible with the advent of

MMORPGs. She tried WoW not long after it was released in 2004, but balked at the “cartoony”

graphics. About a year later she started playing Guild Wars 1, a game that she found visually

pleasing and affordable.

Initially, she found it difficult to find in-game companions, but eventually joined a guild

that suited her. After some time with this guild, the leader was in a car accident and couldn’t

continue playing. Robin volunteered to replace her temporarily, but her post ended up lasting for

years. Due to the many responsibilities her position entailed, Robin was logged in for hours

every day. This arrangement held until she got sick and had to take a month off from her position

as guild leader. When she returned, the guild was in shambles, which was deeply disappointing

to her. That was essentially the end of her involvement with Guild Wars 1 (GW1) and roughly

coincided with the release of GW2 in mid-2012. She had been playing GW2 steadily since then,

usually logging in daily at 8:00 pm and playing for a few hours.

Individual themes. Below are the individual themes that emerged during my analysis of

Robin’s interview transcript.

Enjoyable social dimensions. Throughout the interview, Robin often made reference to

the enjoyable social dimensions of GW2, such as her in-game friendships, guild-related

activities, and group content such as dungeons. Robin had also played with her son and daughter,

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though lately both of them had been too busy to play. She especially enjoyed “hanging out” with

the members of her guild that she knew well, which consisted of playing while conversing over

voice chat. The group might have been discussing topics related to the game or just chatting. She

indicated that she had a handful of friends that she talked to regularly, including one of her

current guild’s co-leaders—a woman with whom she had a lot in common. She also mentioned a

male friend, Johnny, who referred to Robin as his in-game “wife.” In turn, she called him her

“faux hubby.” Robin explained that her daughter liked him as well, and described their playful

interactions:

She always wants to come on and talk to Johnny, pick on him and drive him insane cause

if I’m his wife then she’s his daughter you see, and she’ll pick on him you know haha

she, she uh, haha, she um, she um, she private messages him sometimes and she says

“Daddy where do babies come from?” and he messages me “Why is your daughter asking

me about this?” Hahahaha and I said “To torture you” haha. But that kind of stuff, it’s

just silly. Just silly. But um, he’s trying to level up newer characters too so sometimes

we’ll get together and do that, just screw around or whatever, you know, it’s fun, so.

Robin spoke fondly of these opportunities to enjoy the companionship of others. Additionally,

she discussed less personal yet still satisfying instances of grouping up with guildmates for

various in-game activities. She also described GW2 players as generally supportive and friendly.

The demands of cooperative play. Although Robin often enjoyed the social elements of

online gaming, she also spoke frequently about instances where playing with others was

demanding and even upsetting. In fact, Robin spent more time describing negative social

experiences than positive ones. This could mean that they are more salient to her experience of

playing MMORPGs, though it might also be the case that she was simply making good use of a

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sympathetic listener. Either way, she made it clear that group play has often been a source of

stress and discontentment for her, especially during her time as a guild leader where it was her

responsibility to mediate conflicts between players. She had also repeatedly experienced guilds

and friendships falling apart, though Robin had come to accept the impermanence of online

relationships.

Robin’s many years of playing GW1 was defined by her long stint as the leader of a guild.

She spoke often of the various demands of guild leadership during the interview. The first thing

she said was: “I’ll never be a guild leader again, it was horrible.” She explained that she had

never aspired to the position in the first place, but after the leader of her guild had abruptly

stopped playing due to a serious car accident “somebody had to volunteer to keep it all going.”

She took up the post “assuming the other leader would come back eventually and then one of us

found out that she wasn’t coming back and I was kind of stuck with it and nobody else really

wanted it.” She remained the leader of the guild for six years until she had to take a month-long

break because of a serious illness. When she returned, the guild had completely fallen apart,

leaving her feeling bitter and unappreciated.

As a guild leader, Robin felt burdened by her many responsibilities and had to log on for

hours daily in order to fulfill them. For instance, she said it was important that she kept a close

eye on the activities of new guild members “because people would guild up and try to extort stuff

from other players and whatever and you’d have to, you know, put a stop to that before they, you

know, made everybody broke.” She also enforced rules regarding appropriate language because

“not everyone was a 30-year-old adult or whatever, you know, we had kids, and being a mom I

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was, I felt responsible for everybody, you know.” Although she did have help from other officers,

she explained that “ultimately everything kind of fell on [her] and [she] had to log in a lot more.”

There were also times that Robin would have to get rid of members who were causing problems

within the guild, such as in the following instance:

We had a youth minister um, who came in and he was god’s gift to Guild Wars, you

know, he was just the best player in the world and um, and started, like he seemed to be a

nice guy at first and he wasn’t that great of a player even though he was in his own mind,

but he was okay, and um, but then he started talking about his kids and his ministry and

what trouble they were and, you know, and like, just started getting really like verbally

abusive in a way, you know like, what he was saying didn’t match who he said he was

and, you know, we had younger people and stuff and he was like, if somebody screwed

up he would be the first to tell them and, you know get on them as though they’d done it

on purpose you know what I mean, such a bad player, and like I said he wasn’t the perfect

person anyway, but yeah, so we had to get rid of him, and uh, I don’t know, we had some

people I’ll tell ya.

In addition to maintaining the guild by policing disruptive and socially unacceptable behavior,

she also had to participate in weekly guild meetings and monthly meetings with the leaders of

allied guilds—she told me that these meetings got “really old” after six years.

While the various responsibilities related to maintaining the guild were tiring, the most

challenging element of leadership for Robin was dealing with conflict. She explained that:

Whenever you have a mix of people with different ideas you have conflict, and um, so it

just became a never ending conflict for whoever was in charge, you know, like “This

person wasn’t on longer,” or “This person didn’t do this,” or you know, “I’m doing more

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of this than anybody else,” and, “Why can’t we have that?” or “Why is this person still

with us?”

She said that guild members often wanted to institute changes that were at odds with the guild’s

existing priorities. For example:

We had new members, some new members that came in who really wanted to just change

the guild and change the alliance and decided that they knew better than any of us did and

um, you know, one guild in the alliance had been with us, the one that was made up of

families, had been with us from the beginning, you know what I mean. And they weren’t

with us to be, you know, a competitive edge, they were with us because they were loyal

to us and we were friends and we liked each other but somebody didn’t like the way that

guild leader played in a certain situation, and he has to do this but he won’t listen, he

wants to do it this way with this character blah blah—well don’t play with him then, you

know what I mean? It’s that simple, you know instead of getting rid of that guild and

getting another guild that would be more cohesive to you, you know, just don’t play with

that person, play with somebody else other, you know, there’s like a bunch of other

people here you know, but it was that kind of thing, you know, we had about four or five

guild meetings over teamspeak about this, it just wasted time, nobody could play because

we were just dealing with all this crap and um, yeah, it got old really fast.

She said instances where guild members wanted different things led to "constant mediation,

constant constant mediation" which took a great deal of her time.

Robin emphasized how draining it was for her to constantly have to attend to her

responsibilities as a guild leader:

It was just, you know, after a while sometimes you just want to log in and be invisible

and play the game, you just want to play and you don’t want to think about what anybody

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else is doing and you could never do that if you were an officer or a guild leader, you

could never do that.

At another point she said, “There were times that I did not want to log in towards the end

because it was so miserable.” During a certain period of her career, Robin was essentially

logging in to do her job as the guild leader, rather than playing a game for her own enjoyment: "I

didn’t get to play, there were a lot of times where I logged in and just didn’t get to play at all."

Robin felt hurt when the guild fell apart during her month-long break. After all of her

hard work over many years, no one was committed enough to her or to the guild to hold things

together during her relatively short absence. Everything that she had worked to build and

maintain was in shambles when she returned. To make matters worse, a former guild member

had started a new guild and appropriated many of the guild’s members and even part of its name.

Because of the disappointment and bitterness associated with this betrayal, Robin has

deliberately avoided contact with anyone that she knew in GW1 ever since she made the switch

to GW2. She has also avoided leadership positions, preferring to remain as independent and free

of responsibility as possible.

Although Robin has leaned towards playing more independently since the launch of

GW2, she still chose to join a guild and socialize enough to make friends. In her experience, both

guilds and friendships have often proved to be transient. For instance, she said, “There’s one

person who I was really good friends with and she just sort of dropped off the face of the Earth

altogether so I don’t know, we don’t know what happened to her.” Robin also mentioned that the

first guild she joined in GW2 was going great until people achieved everything the game had to

offer at that point and started to leave the game. Things went downhill from there:

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So the guild died off, you know started to die off and then we had one guy come in, um,

who was basically put in charge—you know we had an awesome website, we had, you

know just a lot of good stuff and he came in and somebody put him in charge of fixing

the website, he ended up getting the forums hacked, he lost all the stuff that had been part

of the website and that got ruined, and everything fell apart and the leader was really

pissed off that he’d been given permission to do all this, and it just completely blew up.

In an email after the interview, she clarified that she didn’t blame this individual for the demise

of the guild—the website being hacked was merely the nail in the coffin. At the time of our

interview, her current guild seemed to be in the process of dying as well, in part due to

inconsistent availability of one of the co-leaders:

You could always count on her to be there, and it was good, and now, I guess she had

some health issue, or her husband was travelling and she was going to go along, just all

these things happened and she was away for a while and she was supposed to come back

and she came back for one day, and then she’s gone for a couple weeks, and then she

came back again! … For one day and then she’s gone for a couple weeks, so we don’t

know what the deal is.

When I followed up with Robin several months after the interview, she confirmed that the guild

had disbanded and that she and her daughter had migrated to a new guild. Robin’s attitude

towards the instability of friendships and guilds was that it is inevitable and she just takes it in

stride:

So we’ll go into another guild and it’ll be fun for a while too until it falls apart, so we’ll

go to another one … it happens, you know, it just happens. But, yeah you get used to that,

I mean it happens in life too, you know like, you go to college and you have friends, you

know what I mean, and then everybody sort of goes their own way because that’s what

they do, you know, life is change, so, I think you just, it just kinda mimics life, you know,

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you do what you can do with this group of people and then you move on to the next

thing, you know, and that’s just the way it is.

She noted that she was much more hurt when the guild that she led fell apart because she took it

personally.

Seeking independence and freedom. Apparent in the first two themes is the tension that

Robin felt between wanting to play socially and avoiding being burdened by the demands of

others. At several points, she spoke directly about how the demands of cooperative play conflict

with her more “independent nature” and how she avoided responsibility so that she could simply

enjoy the content of the game. For instance, “In GW2 I’ve decided no more, I don’t want to be an

officer, I don’t want any responsibility, I don’t want any anything.” At another point, she

mentioned that she wouldn’t join a guild that involved requirements of any kind. In the email she

sent me after reading the transcript, she reiterated the point, writing:

It is nice to make new friends and do things with others, but I am naturally very

independent in nature. I tend to group up when I have to, or when doing something with a

group is more fun than doing it alone. Otherwise, I quite enjoy being just off alone

solving a puzzle, or fighting some epic boss with a group of others who aren’t really

totally dependent on me, any more than I am on them.

There seemed to be a tension at play for Robin with regards to just how involved she wanted to

be with other players.

In addition to avoiding having her freedom to choose what to do limited by other

players, she also didn’t like how the design of the game itself required certain activities.

Thankfully, GW2 lent itself to greater flexibility and choice than GW1. She explained that GW1

was designed in such a way that players were often required to do certain activities. For example,

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in GW1, players were under pressure to earn “faction points” for their guild—as a result,

conflicts arose when players failed to meet their quota. Robin believed that GW2 is set up in such

a way that allows players to “pretty much do anything.” She provided more detail in the

following exchange:

Robin: You don’t really have to do anything, I mean you can just hang out, you know.

you can play at your own pace pretty much, and you can still get where you wanna go,

you may have to do it a different way next month if you change your mind about

something, but there’s always a way to do, you know whatever you want to do.

Jake: And a lot of those activities you mentioned are kind of activities that you would

group up with other guild members to do?

Robin: Yup, you can also do them solo, you know, a lot of them. Some things you have to

do with other people but there’s really a lot you can do by yourself.

At other points in the interview, she characterized GW2 as a game that offers various activities,

none of which are required. As a result, she felt free to choose whatever is most appealing to her

from an array of possibilities. She contrasted the sense of freedom she had in GW2 to her

impression of WoW as “grindy”: “You know, ‘get four of those, get six of these, kill 20 of those’

and that’s all it is.” The premium that Robin put on her independence and freedom factored

heavily into her choice of game and how she related to other players.

Enjoying the content of the game. At various points, Robin stated that, more than

anything else, she simply enjoyed, “the play of the game.” She reiterated this point in her follow-

up email by writing: “The big draw for me, playing these types of games is the game itself first.”

In accordance with this emphasis, she spoke a lot about the content of GW2 throughout the

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interview. She emphasized the fact that the game offers a wide range of activities, many of which

can be done either solo or with a group, such as questing, puzzles, crafting, dungeons, raids, PvP,

world vs. world, and daily events (“these big monsters that you kill for really good loot”). During

certain holidays, themed quests, puzzles, and items are temporarily added. There are also various

achievements and rewards to pursue, such as completing daily quests and crafting a legendary

weapon, which involves seeking out rare materials and recipes.

I got the impression that questing and puzzles—elements also featured by RPGs and

adventure games—were two mainstay activities for Robin. She liked the way the quests in GW2

were tied into an engaging storyline and didn’t feel chore-like. More recently, however, her go-to

activity had been Edge of the Mists, which involves two large teams of players battling for

strategic locations over a large territory. Each team has a leader, but communication and

cooperation are fairly minimal, since players essentially just need to stick together and fight as a

group. Robin said that she liked how she can play with a group that isn’t “really totally

dependent on me, any more than I am on them.” The daily events that involve fighting an “epic

boss” similarly involve being grouped up with other players who collectively pool their efforts

but don’t really need to communicate or cooperate. Robin characterized group events such as

these as “only a strength-in-numbers kind of thing,” since players aren’t expected to perform

specific functions and are thus are less dependent on one another. Robin did dungeons

sometimes, even though they require a higher degree of teamwork, since each of the five players

in the dungeon party each has a specific role to fulfill. However, Robin abstained from raids,

since they necessitate an ever-high degree of strategic coordination and individual performance.

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When I asked her of what a session on a typical night would consist, she replied that

lately she would most likely first play Edge of the Mists and then:

Once I get done with that, I get my daily, I check and recycle my stuff, or sell stuff that I

got, or use stuff that I got if it’s good enough and um, and then I’ll get on another

character and level that one or try to level it, but, and talking to people you know.

This is just a generalization, however—she emphasized that rather than having a set routine, she

spontaneously chose what to do each time that she played:

I usually don’t have anything in mind when I log in, I don’t really usually know what

I’m, you know, specifically going to do. And I’ve logged in having some kind of plan and

“Oh look, that’s going on!” you know, and, I’d rather do that or somebody will say, “Oh!

can you, we need one more to do this dungeon, you know, we had five and somebody just

left and just logged in so do you want to come do this with us?”

As the previous theme emphasized, Robin liked to feel free to do whatever she feels compelled

to do, rather than being required—by others or by the game—to do certain tasks. Thus, the wide

range of activities in GW2 suited her well.

Another thing that Robin particularly liked about GW2 is the fact that new content is

added every two to three weeks (a feature called Living World), which is a much more frequent

rate than that of most MMORPGs. Each update furthers the storyline of the game through new

quests and other content. She also mentioned that other elements of the game change from time

to time as well, such as combat mechanics and server structure. She said that regular change

“keeps the game fresh.” In relation to her appreciation of the ongoing updates, Robin mentioned

that she was always disappointed when she got to the end of a single-player RPG or adventure

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game, since it was painful to have invested so much in her character and then not have anything

to do with him or her anymore. In GW2, she is able to continually enjoy new content with the

character that she has devoted so much time to:

With this type of a game, it’s basically that adventure game, you’re questing and questing

and getting rewards and it just sort of never ends and it’s kind of nice, but you’re not

doing, it’s not like you’re just replaying the same game, like I said with the living story it

adds so much more content, and sometimes that content builds on something that’s

already in the game that you want to do more of.

She also mentioned that without the consistent updates, she probably wouldn’t keep playing

because eventually she would run out of things to do. Earlier on in the game’s existence, there

was a point where there wasn’t enough new content to keep players satisfied and many left the

game.

Being rewarded. When describing her enjoyment of the game’s content, Robin often

made reference to earning rewards. For instance, she described Edge of the Mists as “more about

collecting loot, and karma, and gold and stuff than anything else” and mentioned that daily

events yield “really good loot.” Part of the fun of each Living World update are the new “things

to earn, titles, armor, weapons, all sorts of things, skins, um, all all kinds of things.” She also

noted that the game included:

A series of things that you do daily to get like a daily reward and then there’s a series of

things that you do monthly to get a monthly reward, and then, you do so many of those

things over the course of the game you get yet another chest, you know every so often,

for so many points.

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Gold is required to repair items and to purchase the materials for crafting gear. Robin stated that

someday she hopes to acquire the exotic materials and recipes required to craft her character’s

“legendary weapon.” Other items can be upgraded throughout the game as well. For instance, I

inquired about the mechanical apparatus on her character’s back. She informed me that it was

called the Advanced Spinal Blades of Ruby, an item that improved her character’s overall power.

It is a piece of gear that can be progressively upgraded.

In addition to acquiring loot, Robin also mentioned that she endeavored to earn titles,

which are awarded for completing various challenges. She earned a particularly difficult one by

visiting every region in the entire game, including enemy territory where she could have easily

been killed. Upon completing the challenge, she felt “awesome” and now has a “little gold star

over [her] head” and the title “Been There, Done That.”

The importance of aesthetics. Robin emphasized how critical it is that she found the

aesthetics of her game pleasing. She explained that she is “really, really visual” and chose to play

GW1 over WoW largely because the graphics are “definitely prettier.” Of course, the graphics are

even better in GW2. During the play session, she panned the camera around at various points so I

could admire the richly detailed scenery. After we finished the interview and I had turned the

recorder off, Robin loaded up a few other characters because she wanted to show me the graphics

for more races and environments. The graphics, though they portrayed a fantastical world, were

highly realistic. I also appreciated how imaginative the architecture and other design elements

were. Her enthusiasm for showcasing the visual dimensions of GW2 throughout the interview

indicated how salient they were to her experience of play.

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Closing thoughts. The degree to which Robin emphasized having the freedom to do

whatever she desired in a given gaming session was a noteworthy aspect of how she played

GW2. Rather than logging on with a particular goal in mind, she expected that the game would

provide her with a possiblity that would attract her interest, such as new Living World content or

an event such as Edge of the Mists. Though Robin was still drawn to earning loot and other

markers of success, her orientation toward achievement was not at odds with her preference for

playing spontaneously, since in GW2 it was possible to earn rewards through any activity.

Across-Interview Analysis

After conducting, transcribing, and analyzing each interview, despite the significant

points of overlap and variations on shared themes, I was struck by the considerable differences in

the way the five participants played their respective MMORPGs. In order to capture the

similarities and differences in the interviews, the across-interview analysis section is divided into

three parts. In the first, I highlight the unique characteristics of each participant’s engagement

with their game of choice. In the next section, I present the most salient themes that are shared by

multiple participants. Finally, I describe the most prominent theme present across all of the

interviews—a single, broad theme that speaks to the way in which my participants engage with

their MMORPG.

Unique themes by participant. The following characterizations depict the unique

features of each participant’s account.

Ben. Out of all the participants, Ben was the only one who spoke about his game as an

arena within which he competed with other players. The Social Comparisons and Self-Image

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theme indicated the degree to which Ben was impacted by how well he compared to the skill and

success of other players and how he felt about himself—at least as a WoW player—as a result.

The Ranking theme revealed the degree to which Ben was invested in climbing the rankings,

which are a formal quantification of how he stacks up against others. Perhaps paradoxically in

light of his competitive attitude, Ben also seemed to be the participant who had developed the

deepest and longest lasting friendships in his game, as indicated in his Socializing theme. The

fact that Ben traveled to meet players in his guild and ended up having a long-term romantic

relationship with one of them indicated a degree of social engagement that went well beyond that

of my other participants. Finally, Ben was the only participant that raised concerns about the

negative stereotypes of MMORPG players. I suspect that this is because he identified strongly as

a MMORPG player, yet not with the stereotype. Jeff, by contrast, seemed to see his involvement

with WoW as an incidental activity, while the other three participants seemed to be more

comfortably identified with geek culture.

Jeff. In many regards, Jeff engaged with WoW similarly to Ben. They both raided with a

group of adept players and valued skill, teamwork, and progress. However, as compared to

Ben—and the other three participants—Jeff portrayed himself as more casually involved in his

game. He played on the most restricted schedule and didn’t seem to value the pursuit of playing

an MMORPG as intrinsically as the other participants did (“It’s just a game, I mean … it’s

nothing that I’m gaining any skills from that I can use outside of the game”). He was also alone

in emphasizing the importance of the harmony that WoW had with fitting into other aspects of his

life, suggesting that he wouldn’t prioritize it as much as the other participants would.

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Shawn. Shawn shared Ben and Jeff’s emphasis on achievement and skill, yet played in a

more solitary way. Since he didn’t belong to a raiding group or use voice chat, his typical

sessions weren’t collaborative, social engagements like Ben and Jeff’s raiding nights. Instead,

Shawn chipped away at his various in-game projects on his own or with anonymous pick up

groups. Shawn’s emphasis on efficiency, busy work, and convenience, along with FFXIV’s

inclusion of more trade skill-oriented content, made his style of striving for achievement feel

more like an entrepreneurial challenge than a team sport.

Crystal. Crystal took up her game with a different focus than the other participants: her

characters. She was the only participant who played a large number of avatars. She was also the

only one who crafted detailed personalities, back-stories, and outfits. For her, creating and

maintaining an authentic sense of character was more important than functional considerations

related to her avatars. While my other participants indicated that they didn’t role-play their

avatars (“When I’m playing, I’m not a priest, I’m just me playing” [Jeff]), or even had a sense of

their avatars as characters (“Considering on one character you can literally do everything … it

kind of loses the illusion … of being basically a mortal character” [Shawn]), Crystal indicated

that when she played, she got into the mindset of her characters and acted as they would. She

was also the only player who was on an RP server and participated in staged role-plays. Since

her characters were her primary source of engagement with her game, her priorities were vastly

different than those of the other participants, especially the more skill- and achievement-focused

men. Instead of raid progression, acquiring increasingly powerful gear, and other quantifiable

pursuits, her projects included leveling additional characters and seeking out gear for aesthetic

purposes. Crystal was also the only player who played with someone close to her in real-life at

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the time of the interview, though Robin had played with her son and daughter in the past and

planned to in the future.

Robin. Robin emphasized the content of the game in the way that other participants

didn’t, with statements like, “The big draw for me, playing these types of games is the game

itself first.” Of course, all of the participants really liked playing the game that they had

chosen—what was Robin uniquely emphasizing? One thing that seemed different about the way

Robin engaged her game was that she looked to the game to provide her with enjoyable content

on a session-by-session basis. By contrast, the rest of my participants were wrapped up in

ongoing, established projects: Ben and Jeff’s play was organized around raiding with their

respective groups, Shawn was working on leveling all of his professions and acquiring other

trappings of success, and Crystal was working towards leveling her characters and acquiring

mounts and gear for costumes. Robin didn’t have as clear of an orienting project as the rest.

Rather, she cited the wide and frequently growing array of activities in GW2 as the focal point of

what continued to draw her to the game. When she said that she disliked “grindy” games like

WoW, this suggests that she wasn’t particularly drawn to focusing her efforts on a limited range

of long-term endeavors. Robin was also the only player who emphasized the degree to which the

visual aesthetics of her game mattered to her.

Shared themes across participants. For the most part, each participant’s individual

themes don’t perfectly correspond to those of the other participants, even where there is an

overlap in content. Thus, in order to account for themes shared by multiple participants, I usually

had to create a theme with a broader meaning than the individual themes. When naming these

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broader themes, I either retained a theme title from an individual participant (if it was

representative of the new shared theme), or created a new one. For example, the Skill theme

below is comprised of Ben’s Striving to be a Skilled Player theme, Jeff’s Competence theme, and

Shawn’s Efficiency theme. Sometimes a shared theme included more than one theme from the

same player, such as the Narrative and Lore theme, which subsumes Shawn’s Plot Progression

and Feeling at Home themes. Though I arrived at the list of shared themes by comparing the

individual themes of the five participants, I also occasionally drew from relevant material from

the interviews that wasn’t accounted for by an individual theme.

Skill. Ben, Jeff, and Shawn each indicated that playing skillfully is important to them,

though each put a different emphasis on this topic. Ben discussed skillfulness the most frequently

of the three, indicating that improving his performance as a player was a driving force in his

engagement with WoW. He made frequent reference to the qualities of adept players and how he

compared to others in terms of skill. The narrative of his career was focused on him gaining

entry into increasingly competitive guilds. By contrast, Jeff talked about being competent enough

to fulfill his function within his raiding group, rather than being on a path to glory. Thus, he often

spoke about skill in the context of contributing to the group effort during raids. Whereas Ben and

Jeff mostly talked about their skill as raiders, Shawn mentioned skill in reference to a broader

range of game content. In addition to discussing the ins and outs of performing well in combat,

Shawn explained how he analyzed the mechanics behind various other endeavors in order to

discern the most efficient way to approach them. Shawn shared Jeff’s sense of responsibility

towards the players that he teamed up with for dungeons, even though they were not people that

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he knew. Shawn and Ben explicitly stated that they enjoyed the sense of pride and mastery that

comes with playing skillfully.

Instrumental interactions. For Ben, Jeff, and Shawn, instrumental interactions with other

players were a significant component to their experience of playing an MMORPG. For Ben and

Jeff, these interactions took place in the context of their raiding parties. These groups, oriented as

they are to overcoming challenging content, function like sports teams: Members formulate and

execute strategies that require timing, awareness, communication, and coordination. Fellow

raiders also support each other by sharing knowledge and resources. Shawn, whose guildmates

don’t play often, did dungeons with pick up groups, which put a different spin on his interactions

with his collaborators. Being paired up with subpar players was a regular source of frustration for

him, while he relished the occasions that he was grouped up with other competent players.

Crystal relied on pick up groups for dungeon runs as well, but she said little about the interactive

component of these groups.

Big numbers. Due to the pervasive quantification present in MMORPGs, progress is

largely constituted as increasing values that correspond to various elements of the game (e.g.,

attributes of avatars and gear, the damage caused by attacks, the value of items, etc.). Ben and

Shawn, who were achievement-oriented players, explicitly discussed the centrality of numbers to

their experiences of their respective games, especially the satisfaction of increasing them. Shawn

went so far as to claim that all in-game pursuits boiled down to “making big numbers bigger.” It

seems that the never-ending pursuit of bigger numbers is the alternative to a fixed endpoint in

MMORPG design—and a goal that players find compelling.

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Socializing. Ben, Jeff, and Robin all indicated that socializing was something that they

enjoyed about playing an MMORPG. They were also the three participants who used voice chat,

which allowed them to speak freely with others while they went about in-game activities. Jeff

and Ben primarily socialized with their raiding parties during the downtime between raid bosses,

while Robin, on account of her free-form sessions, could chat anytime during her play. Since a

great deal of MMORPG content requires minimal concentration and voice chat makes it possible

for players to converse easily without interrupting play, conditions are ideal for casual banter.

Ben, Jeff, and Robin all indicated that they have become intimately familiar with and befriended

many of their companions over time.

Negative social experiences. Robin and Crystal both spoke emphatically about negative

social experiences. At various points in their careers, they found that living up to the demands of

others could be stressful and unpleasant. They also indicated that although they enjoyed

cooperative play, it often wasn’t worth the seemingly inevitable conflicts. Additionally, they

shared the disappointing experience of having friendships end without warning or explanation.

Both have concluded that transience is a feature of online relationships and have adjusted their

expectations of and involvement with other players accordingly.

Freedom from. Robin and Crystal were also the only two players who described taking

measures to avoid the stress and responsibility that resulted from either other players or game

content. Both players had felt stressed and burdened by the social obligations in the past and thus

avoided the contexts in which those stressors arose: Robin shunned leadership positions and

guilds with membership requirements, whereas Crystal eschewed guilds entirely. Both also

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stated that it was important to them that they not spend their time on game content that they

didn’t feel compelled to play. Robin indicated that she managed exclusively to play content that

she found enjoyable by choosing a game that was designed to allow players a great deal of

flexibility. Crystal, on the other hand, simply did what she liked in WoW (level grinding,

costuming and accessorizing her characters, and role-playing) and avoided what she didn’t (gear-

grinding, raiding, and daily quests).

Immersion. Despite taking up WoW in significantly different ways, Ben and Crystal were

the only two participants that described feeling immersed when they play. Crystal described her

immersion in terms of entering into the experience of her characters, which involved seeing the

world through their eyes and making decisions from their perspectives. She also described taking

on the mood of her characters, especially her maniacal warlock. Ben had only a vague sense of

his avatars’ personalities, yet, like Crystal, described having different experiences when he

played different ones. Ben’s sense of inhabiting his character seemed more tied to his avatars’

abilities and their graphical representations, while Crystal’s was related to her characters’

personalities.

Narrative and lore. Shawn and Crystal were the two participants that spoke at length

about enjoying the lore and unfolding narratives of their respective games. In Shawn’s game,

FFXIV, various narratives are tightly woven into the content, which motivated him to progress

through it in order to see the plot lines unfold. In addition to enjoying the narratives of FFXIV, he

was also charmed by the many subtle references to previous Final Fantasy games, which were so

familiar to him. Crystal also enjoyed being intimately familiar with the Warcraft universe, and

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the lore served as a backdrop upon which she created her characters’ individual lives. Robin also

mentioned that she took pleasure in the lore of GW2, though added that it faded quickly from her

memory.

One theme to rule them all: investment. In addition to the themes that are shared by a

subset of the participants, my analysis also yielded one theme that emerged from the data in all

five cases. This theme is broader than those listed previously, in the sense that it composes a

structural dimension of their accounts. Additionally, this theme is pertinent to the orienting

question of my research: what is it about MMORPGs that engages players?

The theme is Investment. In their own particular way, each of the participants invested a

great deal of time and effort into their respective games. They experienced these investments as

worthwhile and intended to keep making them well into the future. Additionally, they all said

something about how their games provided worlds worth investing in. To summarize, the three

elements that the Investment theme is composed of are:

1. The investments themselves (e.g., work, time, passion)

2. The rewards (e.g., gear, levels, achievements, a satisfying sense of making progress)

3. The conditions in MMORPGs that make long-term investment possible and satisfying

Ben most pointedly articulated this theme when he described becoming and remaining

committed to playing WoW:

It became important enough to me to get stronger that I was willing to just go ahead and

okay, yes, I will do these quests, I will do this, I will kill this boar, I will run to this town,

and I just wanted to get stronger. I didn’t want to be weak, I didn’t want to be watching

stronger guys run around, I didn’t want to have to run away from this animal and it just, I

don’t know, it something about the game, at that instance saying “Hey, you can’t get

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stronger until you do this” and I did it and I was just like alright, now, now I’m invested

in it, now I have money in it, now I’m just going to get something out of this game, I’m

going to get stronger, I’m going to be something.

This passage describes Ben’s experience of becoming invested, which was located in an event

that he retrospectively identified. At another point, he described how difficult it is for him to take

a break from WoW, which suggests a sense of being invested:

Ahhh, I should be doing my dailies to get my tokens, I should be raiding right now, I’m

gonna fall behind on my gear, I don’t want to fall behind on my gear, cause then it’s a

pain to get caught up, I don’t want to fall behind on players, I don’t want to fall behind on

boss strategies, like uhhhh god it’s going to be so hard to get caught up again.

This passage indicates the degree to which he had invested in his ongoing projects in WoW and

how painful it was to let the competitive edge he had worked so hard to hone go dull. In the

following sections, I use material from all five participants to provide more illustrations of

investment, organized into the three elements outlined previously.

Investing. Prior to collecting data, I had the impression that MMORPGs involved a lot of

repetitive and time-consuming activities. My participants confirmed that this impression was

accurate. Crystal and Robin both used the word “grinding,” Ben used the word “farming,” and

Shawn used the phrase “busy work” to denote activities that are relatively easy, repetitive, and

not intrinsically rewarding. Instead, they are undertaken for a reward of some kind, such as

experience points, items, reputation, titles, and so on.

I don’t think an MMO would qualify as an MMO if there wasn’t just running back and

forth for quests like this. (Shawn)

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[When I level grind I] go straight into the dungeons, and that’s all I do ... I’ve done every

single dungeon hundreds of times. (Crystal)

There’s a series of things that you do daily to get like a daily reward and then there’s a

series of things that you do monthly to get a monthly reward, and then, you do so many

of those things over the course of the game you get yet another chest, you know. (Robin)

So [earning] that [achievement] took, just to get that map took months, so that was

frustrating, so you have to keep going in to see if you own that part of the map and or if

you don’t if it’s a good time of day to go and do that hahaha. (Robin)

There’s achievements and stuff that you can display in certain items that you can only get

by doing ... like legendary quests, like I have a legendary mount that you can only get by

completing legendary quests. And these legendary quests—it took me, uh, seven, eight

months to do this quest. (Ben)

Questing is you go out into the world and you find someone who says “do this for me”

and then you go run a stupid errand for them and then you come back and they give you

five valor points. (Jeff)

I will use the descriptor “work-like” to denote activities that participants characterized as not

intrinsically rewarding, yet carried out for some sort of reward. The issue of whether these

activities are in fact work (as opposed to play) is addressed in the discussion section.

More engaging activities like raiding were described as enjoyable for their own sake,

though they were often still time-consuming, repetitive, and undertaken for the sake of rewards

in addition to whatever pleasure they offered. Ben and Jeff highlighted the ways in which raid

progression involves hammering away at the same content over long periods of time:

We’ll spend hours trying to kill the same boss over and over and over, and then we’ll die,

and then we’re like “hey, maybe we should try this instead” and then we die and then it’s

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like, “hey, maybe don’t stand in that fire” and then we get past that part and then we die

on something else. (Jeff)

So for instance, going into to that heroic mode where it spawns two of them if you

weren’t expecting that , first of all, now you’re panicking cause you have no idea what’s

going on, so, and then, okay so you probably dies that time. Alright. Everyone rezes,

comes back into the raid. Alright, let’s do this again. Do it again. Now you’re expecting

there to be two of them, except that you don’t know that you have to split them apart.

Well, it might take you three or four more deaths to figure that out. So now that’s an hour

and a half of your time, just spent dying and coming back. (Ben)

Although they both enjoyed the challenge and intensity of fighting raid bosses, the only bosses

that provided a significant degree of excitement were those with a difficulty level that closely

matched the raiding party’s power. Once the party surpassed a given boss in power level, the

boss became just content to grind or farm for loot: “If you have a fight on farm, basically it’s so

easy that it’s just farming, all you’re doing is just the same motions, kinda grinding gear out”

(Ben). Raids, though challenging and exciting, do retain some of the work-like features of easier

content, and, as the group becomes more powerful, eventually become easy content. The Edge of

the Mists event that Robin played during her interview provides another example of content that

was undertaken for fun, yet also because it generated ample rewards: “[Edge of the Mists is]

more about collecting loot, and karma, and gold and stuff than anything else.”

Besides investing time and effort towards completing game content, participants invested

themselves in their games in other ways as well. Crystal, of course, had applied her imagination

to create her characters. Ben, Jeff, and Shawn all noted that they have spent time researching

their respective games in order to become knowledgeable about underlying mechanics and

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optimal strategies. The three men also made references to honing their skills, especially in terms

of becoming adept at playing one or more character classes in dungeons and raids. Forming and

maintaining relationships—for both social and instrumental reasons—are additional kinds of

investments that my participants discussed. Making friends involves time, self-disclosure,

negotiation of differences, reciprocity, and other efforts, while having a group of in-game friends

enriches the game. Ben and Jeff also invested in their raiding parties by being on time for raids,

sharing resources and knowledge, and striving to be team-players.

Progress and rewards. All of my participants emphasized that they enjoyed making

progress and earning rewards as they played through content:

There’s something relaxing to [collecting items for a quest], knowing that I

accomplishing a goal, in a manner of speaking. (Shawn)

To me it feels good because I see progression, I see that I’m working towards my goals.

If I see that little bar moving, then I’m happy. (Crystal)

When I log off I want to be, I want to have made progress during that time. (Jeff)

It’s a huge upgrade compared to my jankey 502...Well they just gave it to me, so I just

got a new cloak, so that’s cool. I like new cloaks, new cloaks make me happy. Heh heh.

(Ben)

I think I just like boppin’ around and doing different things, and getting rewarded.

(Robin)

So this quest is going to yield me 90,000 experience points, a new hatchet, and some

gear. (Shawn)

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Making progress and earning rewards tended to overlap in my participants’ accounts, since

almost all activities in MMORPGs earn the player something and most progress involves earning

and spending rewards. To play is to earn. To earn is to make progress towards goals that are

based on accumulating a certain amount of something. Often, small rewards add up gradually to

earn larger rewards, like accumulating enough experience points to level up or generating

enough currency to buy a piece of gear. Sometimes different projects chain together: One might

quest in order to earn gold, which is then used to purchase raw materials at the market, which is

then used to craft items, which generates experience points that go towards leveling a profession.

Most rewards, like gear and levels, make one’s avatar more powerful. Ben and Shawn both

talked about these kinds of quantified improvements in the simple terms of making numbers get

bigger. In some sense, making numbers bigger is, as Shawn later said, “a means to an end”—but

it also seems to be an end in itself in the context of a game that doesn’t have a traditional

endpoint.

My participants also discussed their ongoing and future projects, which often took the

form of rewards that they hoped to earn. Ben, Jeff, and Shawn each had a system to catalogue the

particular pieces of gear that they sought for their characters, along with information on how to

acquire them: Shawn maintained a chart of the gear he is seeking on a whiteboard; Jeff

referenced a website to help guide his future gear acquisitions; and Ben used addons that

displayed information about the loot that bosses drop. Crystal spoke about her ongoing endeavor

of obtaining the Headless Horseman’s Mount during the yearly Hallow’s End event. She also

had a pair of characters that she was in the process of leveling. Robin mentioned that she hoped

to eventually undergo the many tasks required to craft a legendary weapon—one of the highest

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achievements in GW2. Shawn ambitiously planned to eventually fully level all of the 33

professions in FFXIV. He was also looking forward to the possibility of purchasing and

furnishing housing that was rumored to be included in the next patch. All of these projects speak

to the idea that my participants imagined themselves continuing to be engaged in their games and

that it was their projects that pulled them into the future.

Just as my participants invested in their games in ways that went beyond simply playing

through game content, they also described less tangible rewards for their efforts. Ben relished the

sense of mastery that came with his years of practice and research. Crystal appreciated the

relaxation she felt when she set aside her own problems and entered into the world of one of the

various characters that she spent countless hours leveling and accessorizing. Shawn described

feeling a sense of pride when he worked out the most efficient approach to a facet of the game.

Compared to the literal rewards of MMORPGs, satisfying experiences like these are rewards in a

broader sense.

How MMORPGs facilitate investment. The cycle of investing and being satisfyingly

rewarded is at the heart of what has kept my participants engaged in their games over the years.

It seems that MMORPGs are worlds that are especially well-suited to facilitating long-term

investment. Some of my participants explained their understandings of why their games have

kept them playing for so long, as in the following example:

I love adventure games, you know, and even those there’s no replayability I still play

them ... and at the end of the game it was always “Wow I’m glad I beat all of that, and I

collected all of these things, and I did all of this,” but there was no reason to do it again

and with this type of a game, it’s basically that adventure game, you’re questing and

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questing and getting rewards and it just sort of never ends and it’s kind of nice, but you’re

not doing, it’s not like you’re just replaying the same game, like I said with the living

story it adds so much more content, and sometimes that content builds on something

that’s already in the game that you want to do more of, or you wanna, you know this back

piece was part of the um, the uh, living story stuff, and I can continue to gather more

materials to level it up some more, you know what I mean? And it just adds to my stats.

(Robin)

A lot of other games that I’ve played, Grand Theft Auto for example, there comes a point

in the game where you’re pretty much done, [whereas in games like this] you really don’t

get done, they kind of have so much stuff to them that you can do something different

from them all the time and benefit from it, and you know what I mean by benefit by now,

um, and that’s what this is too, cause you can keep doing different stuff. The fact that you

can’t win is good. By the time you’ve got to a point where you can’t get anything else,

the new expansion is coming out, and then things are just totally changing. (Jeff)

Both Robin and Jeff note that, unlike games from other genres, MMORPGs offer virtually

endless content by being composed of such a wide array of time-intensive activities and by being

updated periodically with patches and expansions that build on existing content.

You know how MMOs kind of cycle: “Okay here’s a new patch and a whole lot of

content,” and then roll roll roll, you get through that, [then the next patch is released and]

“Oh, here’s a whole bunch of new content.” (Shawn)

In the long run, I still want to experience the content, I wanna see where the story goes.

Even if it’s bad, even if I don’t approve of it, I’m still gonna play, because it’s not going

to stay that way forever you know, just because I might not enjoy certain things doesn’t

mean that it’s not going to change and they’re always going to come out with new

classes, new whatever, levels are going to go up you know, whatever have you, so there’s

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always going to be something that I’m going to want to do or experience, so I don’t ever

see myself stopping unless the game stops. (Crystal)

Robin noted that at a certain point, GW2 too slowly offered players enough to do and many

quit—there was no longer any way for them to invest themselves in the game:

People started, like finishing up with their characters and they were like “Okay, now

what?” You know, “Now what do we do?” and Living Story hadn’t really gotten a good

foothold yet and people got bored, like “I don’t want to just do this with another character

now, what’s the point?” You know. “I’ve got this, I’ve got that, there’s nothing more to

want.” And they stopped playing.

With nothing more to want and therefore nothing more to do, the game lost its appeal. Ben

indicated that not just any update will do, however—the content has to be compelling enough to

keep players invested. After a particularly lackluster patch, many players from his raiding party

decided to take a break from the game: “Essentially people logged, you know, like ‘Hey, I’ll

come back for the next expansion, but I’m not re-running this stupid boring raid every week, for

eight months.’ There’s no point.” He went on to describe how the raid bosses in this patch didn’t

require any interactive strategies, which is what makes raiding a compelling activity for high-

level players.

There was some indication that the presence of other players that are engaged in the same

pursuits had a significant impact on how my participants perceived the value of their investments

in their games. Ben was the most explicit about how the accomplishments and status of other

players spurred him to invest his time and energy in becoming more powerful himself:

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You want to be someone that people look at and say “Hey, wow, that’s like ... you know,

look at that guys gear, oh my god, he must be really good, you know, look at this, look at

that. Oh my god he killed that boss, that’s incredible, you know. I can’t do that.” I didn’t

want to be the person who said “I can’t do that,” I wanted to be the person people were

looking at like, “Holy crap, how did he do that?”

The other four participants made passing references to how their pursuits and accomplishments

compared to those of other players. Aside from the more obvious competitive dimension, I

suspect that the mere fact that players are brushing shoulders with others jockeying for the same

resources and achievements serves as an affirmation that the virtual world of the game is indeed

one worth the investment.

Summary of Results

Each participant’s individual themes portray the most salient dimensions of their

engagement with their MMORPG. Collectively, the individual themes indicate that each of my

participants engaged with his or her game in a multifaceted and distinctive way. The shared

themes, one the other hand, trace the commonalities across my participants. The Investment

theme was the most inclusive, reflecting a wide range of the data from all of the participants.

This theme also offered the most explanatory power with regards to the orienting question of this

research: “Why do players play MMORPGs?” In the following chapter, I will compare my

findings—with an emphasis on Investment—with the research detailed in the literature review

and attempt to draw out further implications.

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Chapter 6: Discussion

The centrality of work-like activities, captured by the Investment theme, is one of the

most striking features of my participants’ accounts. Common sense suggests that people would

not choose to work during their leisure time. As the Investment theme indicates however, work-

like activities are not merely tolerated by players—they are essential to the structure of being

engaged in an MMORPG. Other researchers and commentators also have directed their attention

to the prevalence of work in these games (Golumbia, 2009; Nardi, 2010; Poole, 2008; Rettberg,

2011; Rowlands, 2012; Yee, 2006). In this chapter, I integrate the contributions of these thinkers

with my own findings to consider the potential meanings and implications of the Investment

theme, since this aspect of MMORPG engagement is prominent in both my analysis and in the

literature. My intention is not to reduce all of my data to this dimension, but rather to highlight

and explore a vital thread. I also consider how other facets of my participants’ accounts relate to

this perspective on MMORPGs. Finally, I reflect on the limitations of this study and suggest

avenues for future research.

Work or Play?

Because MMORPGs are designated as video games, it is suggested that they are games

that people play. However, the ubiquity of prescribed, repetitive, time-consuming, utilitarian, and

frankly boring tasks in MMORPGs has led many researchers (Golumbia, 2009; Rettberg, 2011;

Rowlands, 2012) to conclude that the bulk of the activities in MMORPGs are better understood

as work rather than play. Furthermore, these authors contend that work in MMORPGs is

compelling to players because it allows them to participate in the worldview and practices of

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modernity (especially capitalism) in a satisfying way. Nardi (2010) is the notable exception to

this conclusion; she argues that MMORPGs offer a viable medium for play and that the work-

like activities that they involve allow players to “play with” unsatisfying real-life work

experiences.

The Investment theme is relevant to the question of whether or not MMORPGs are

principally play, since it directly addresses the work-like activities inherent in these games.

Investigating this theme in terms of its salience to play is relevant to my overarching inquiry

about what is it that engages MMORPG players. To further explore this line of thought in the

following section, I follow the lead of many aforementioned authors in utilizing Huizinga’s

(1950) framework on the nature of play. In addition to providing another perspective on my

findings, I hope to make a contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of MMORPGs.

The formal characteristics of play. Before attempting to situate my findings in terms of

work and play, I will restate the formal characteristics of play according to Huizinga (1950) in a

list adapted from Nardi (2010):

1. A subjective experience of freedom

2. An absence of social obligation or physical necessity

3. A subjective experience that is absorbing, compelling, or pleasurable

4. Occurrence in a separate realm sometimes referred to as the magic circle

5. Activation through cognitive and/or physical skill

6. Tension, contingency, chanciness

7. Order achieved by rules

8. Opportunities for limited perfection

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The list format suggests that these features are either present or absent in a straightforward,

binary way. However, Huizinga, along with other play theorists, indicate that the nature of play is

ambiguous, nuanced, and even paradoxical. As a result, rather than functioning like dichotomous

requisites to name something as play, these essential features serve as conceptual guide posts that

help one think about whether or not a given activity can be considered play.

Although Huizinga uses the word “game” throughout his analysis on play, he doesn’t

define it. Throughout his discussion, the concept of game appears to be undifferentiated from the

concept of play. In his usage, a game is just a manifestation of play: playing “pretend” is a game

just as much as a formalized, competitive instance of play, such as chess, is a game. Nardi makes

a distinction between play and game play, indicating that only game play is defined by tension,

order achieved by rules, and opportunities for limited perfection, whereas play, more broadly

defined, need not meet these criteria. She seems to indicate that the distinction between play and

game play is present in Huizinga’s analysis, but he clearly attributes tension, order achieved by

rules, and opportunities for limited perfection to all instances of play.

The nature of work. Huizinga (1950) doesn't define work (nor do Golumbia [2009],

Nardi [2010], Rettberg [2011], or Rowlands [2012]), though it is possible to articulate at least

some of its features by extrapolation from his definition of play. In contrast to play, work is an

activity that is undertaken for social obligation and material necessity—this is its defining

characteristic. On second thought, however, we might change “material necessity” to “material

gain,” since many people work to obtain more than the bare necessities of life. The prominence

of the American Dream is a testament to the fact that the desire to earn more in order to afford a

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more lavish lifestyle is a powerful cultural fantasy. Another way we might express this

characteristic of work is to define it as an activity that is undertaken for the sake of an end

(social, moral, or hedonistic), rather than for the experience of the activity itself, the means.

Nardi, borrowing from Dewey’s theory of active aesthetic experience, indicates that an activity

that is undertaken solely for the ends is the antithesis of active aesthetic experience and

commonly manifests in the situation of the modern workplace, where work is often repetitive

and unengaging. Thus, work at its worst is performed exclusively for pay, though this does not

characterize all work, since work can involve engaging activity that is undertaken for both the

ends and the means.

Another feature of work is that it occurs within the ordinary sphere for life, rather than in

an extra-ordinary realm that is set off from it. Thus, rather than becoming absorbed into an

alternate disposition and ordering of activity as in play, in work one remains in the “natural

attitude” (Rowlands, 2012). Work is practical and mundane; it is about achieving some kind of

“real” outcome in the world, such as manufacturing, selling, or transporting a product, providing

a certain kind of experience or a service, and so on. In play, on the other hand, the desired

outcome has to do with ending the tension of the game, which arises from the particular ordering

of the game world. The desire for the outcome, then, arises from the structure of the game and

exists within the magic circle of then game, rather than from practical considerations that belong

to everyday reality.

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Though the two characteristics just outlined do not provide an exhaustive definition of

work, they provide a framework for thinking about the nature of work and how it can be

differentiated from play.

A consideration of work-like activities. On a manifest level, many of the activities in

MMORPGs are structured in the same way as real-life labor. Golumbia (2009) points out how

productive activities in MMORPGs are hardly different than other computerized tasks such as

data entry, which are readily recognized as work. Additionally, in-game success takes the form of

earning something upon the completion of a task, just as one earns a paycheck for a job. Poole

(2008) described this arrangement as “working for the man” and dubbed it the “employment

paradigm” in video game design. He draws attention to the fact that virtual bosses that appear in

various guises direct players through games. In MMORPGs, jobs are typically assigned by the

inhabitants of towns—the butcher, the baker, and probably even the candlestick-maker are all

likely to have some errand for an aspiring warrior or rogue. These “quests,” however, are often

not the spiritual journeys upon which archetypal heroes embark; rather, they are menial errands,

usually carried out for prosaic reasons—jobs, to put it bluntly. These portrayals of MMORPG

activities as work-like are in accord with the experiences of my participants. As Jeff put it,

“Questing is you go out into the world and you find someone who says ‘Do this for me’ and then

you go run a stupid errand for them and then you come back and they give you five valor

points.” Ben’s description was similar: “You’re doing stupid quests, like ‘Go fetch me these

flowers. Oh, and for some reason they only, you can only get them by killing this monster, so go

kill 10 of this monster and get 10 flowers, and then come back to me.’”

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The flip side of earning is spending, and MMORPGs are just as saturated with items to

purchase as they are with jobs. Material items like gear, mounts, and crafting materials are, of

course, always for sale. Even things that one can’t buy in real life, such as skills, physical and

mental capacities, and a good reputation, are essentially purchased in MMORPGs with points

that are earned in the same way as money. For example, in WoW, a character’s reputation with a

given faction is earned by completing quests that award reputation points. When a character

accumulates a designated number of reputation points, certain privileges are granted, such as the

license to buy certain items or to access restricted territories. Thus, gaining the trust of a group in

an MMORPG functions in the same way as earning and spending. It is important to note,

however, that spending in MMORPGs is better equated with investing money in a business to

increase its future earning potential, rather than with consumer shopping. Items and attributes are

not purchased for consumption, but rather to increase the power of the avatar. Rowlands (2012)

points out that the attributes of an avatar, such as its level, gear, and so on, determine its value in

the world of an MMORPG, which he refers to as “avatar capital.” Increasing one’s avatar capital

is the pursuit around which earning and spending are oriented.

Rowlands, Rettberg, and Golumbia all consider the factors that render the buying and

spending embedded in MMORPGs attractive to players. Rettberg argues that because the values

of capitalism, including the Protestant work ethic, loom so large in our culture, working

productively is experienced as pleasurable and virtuous, whereas playing freely might feel like a

frivolous waste of time. Complementing Rettberg’s point, Golumbia evocatively describes the

pleasure of completing discrete, digital tasks. Additionally, Golumbia draws attention to the lust

for power that MMORPGs satisfy—all productive activities are in service of amassing power to

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one’s avatar. Rowlands describes the way a productivity-oriented approach to MMORPGs,

which he calls the dominant strategy, evolved over time. This dominant strategy is more than just

a set of activities, but also a taken-for-granted attitude about the world of the game. Like

Rettberg and Golumbia, he contends that this attitude is an extension of modernist, capitalist

ideology.

Nardi (2010) disputes the portrayals of MMORPGs as capitalist work platforms. Though

she acknowledges the preponderance of work-like activities, she argues that they occur within

the magic circle of play, at least in most circumstances. She contends that within the play-spaces

of these games, real-world experiences of toilsome work are “confronted and transformed in the

hospitable environs of a game world” (p. 115). The key difference, according to her analysis, is

that instead of yielding an inadequate reward for one’s efforts (which is what happens in real

life), MMORPGs provide an outcome that is “meaningful” and “exciting” (p. 113). She

considers these moments of attaining rewards to be instances of experiencing the limited

perfection that play fosters, according to Huizinga’s definition.

Does Nardi’s analysis, which construes repetitive activities as play, hold up in light of

what I learned from my participants? Or is this dimension of MMORPG engagement better

conceptualized as work? I next consider my findings in light of this debate, using Huizinga’s

structural elements of play as a conceptual framework.

A key claim of Nardi’s (2010) argument is the fact that activities in MMORPGs are not

undertaken out of social obligation or physical necessity, which Huizinga characterizes as an

essential feature of play. To illustrate her point, she notes that, in contrast to regular players,

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Chinese gold farmers (people, usually Chinese, who earn their living by selling WoW gold for

real money) subvert this arrangement since they are in fact using WoW to meet material needs—

thus, they are working rather than playing. Golumbia and Rowlands also take Chinese gold

farmers into account, though rather than seeing their activity as meaningfully different than that

of regular players, they argue that the approach Chinese gold farmers take to gold farming is the

same as the approach any player might take to farming resources. In both cases, the emphasis is

on efficiency and productivity—Chinese gold farmers and regular players are both invested in

earning as quickly as they can. This instrumental nature of this approach toward certain

MMORPG content forecloses spontaneous free play, which, contrary to Nardi’s position,

suggests that this mode of engagement is falls short of meeting the criteria for play and offers

some support for the position that repetitive economic activities are better understood as

instances of work.

Although my participants were playing voluntarily and not attempting to earn real money

like Chinese gold farmers, they indicated that farming, grinding, and questing are undertaken for

the sake of the outcome, rather than for the enjoyment of the activity per se. Shawn, in reference

to the laurel-gathering quest, stated “I wouldn’t really do it as an entertainment value, I do it

more as a means to an end.” Crystal described her attitude towards repeated dungeon-runs (the

mainstay of how she leveled her characters) in outcome-oriented terms as well: “Get it done, get

the experience, get the loot, get out of there, done.” Jeff, speaking more generally, stated “When

I log off I want to be, I want to have made progress during that time.” Thus, despite being

engaged in their games for enjoyment’s sake, my participants took up many activities for the

sake of the destination, not the journey. In line with this orientation, they usually took the most

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efficient route to earning rewards, which, in the context of MMORPGs, usually means

repetitively completing the most profitable activities. This approach leaves little room for

creativity or playful variation.

Additionally, repetitive activities such as grinding and farming involve little contingency

or chance—the essential characteristics of play that imbue it with tension. These reward-driven

undertakings are categorically low-risk, since high-risk activities aren’t suitable for efficiently

accumulating resources. Due to the absence of tension, the process is rote and undemanding.

Since players are not incited to strive for performative excellence, I find it difficult to imagine

how “limited perfection” could be achieved in the context of these activities. Nardi contends that

the satisfaction of earning a fulfilling reward lends limited perfection to repetitive activities, but I

fail to see how a pleasing outcome to an otherwise non-engaging activity is a moment of limited

perfection according to Huizinga’s construal; limited perfection is something achieved within the

process of play, not a product of it.

My participants indicated that because many tasks involve little contingency or chance,

they aren’t particularly riveting or demanding. To mitigate boredom, most of them described

engaging in complementary activities while playing repetitive content. Jeff watched TV with his

fiancée while he quested, since it only required a fraction of his attention. Shawn spoke about

how he liked to have Facebook, Hulu, or something else open on his laptop to entertain him

while he completes simple tasks in FFXIV. Robin and Ben enjoyed chatting with their friends

while completing undemanding content. These instances hardly constitute the engrossing,

uncertain attempts at attaining instances of limited perfection that constitute play. Additionally,

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the disengagement and participation in auxiliary activities while undertaking these tasks casts

doubt regarding whether a magic circle of play is established at all during repetitive economic

activities. Instead, players readily mesh certain MMORPG content with activities outside the

game.

At several points, my participants also indicated that they found repetitive yet productive

activities to be relaxing, in addition to experiencing them as undemanding and boring. For

instance, Shawn, in reference to gathering laurel, said, “There’s something relaxing to it,

knowing that I accomplishing a goal, in a manner of speaking.” In a similar vein, Crystal

indicated that running the dungeons that she had previously played hundreds of times felt

soothing due to their familiarity. At the same time, watching her character’s experience points

accumulate contributed a sense that she was “working towards [her] goals.” I had a similar

experience of feeling simultaneously relaxed and industrious while questing and grinding in Rift.

I wasn’t exerting myself physically or mentally, yet I was getting tangibly closer to the things I

had come to desire in the game, such as the next level-up or a new piece of gear. The pleasure

that accompanied progress was appreciable to the point that I would feel cheerful after a

particularly profitable night. It seems that the work in MMORPGs is often not experienced as

strenuous in the way that most work is, yet the structure of rewards leaves the satisfaction of its

completion intact, or even enhances it.

Although the work-like activities discussed here may be relatively mindless in and of

themselves, Shawn’s Efficiency theme draws attention to the fact that even this class of activity

calls for skills related to managing resources. Since these tasks are undertaken for the sake of

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gaining the most resources with the least time and effort, players strive to determine the most

efficient approach. Thus, in an MMORPG, the player is not only the laborer, but also the

manager that directs labor for optimal productivity. Can managing one’s digital labor be playful?

Nardi (2010) answers affirmatively, arguing that MMORPGs “play” with the way real-world

economies function by critiquing them: “The often disappointing results of sticking-with-it in

real-life are critiqued; a deflating end to long toil is eliminated, replaced with rewards that

delight, enhance, and create social cohesion—bright glowing things that move players forward in

the logic of the game” (p. 116). However, the “logic of the game” that she references seems to be

the very logic she claims the games are critiquing: the logic of turning labor into capital. Thus,

rather than allowing players to critique capitalist economics, these games appear to provide a

simulation, a chance to engage in a degree of resource management that is usually reserved for

businesses elites, government officials, and military commanders. The fact that MMORPGs

allow a typical player to become economically successful through the application of hard work

and efficiency is why Rettberg (2012) deems them “capitalist fairytale[s]” (p. 20).

Huizinga’s (1950) discussion casts further doubt on the proposition that engaging in

activities related to economic production can be done in the spirit of play. He indicates that there

has been a trend in Western culture toward more technical, less spontaneous manifestations of

play. He explains that the more systematized and regimentized games become, the more the “true

play spirit” (p. 197) diminishes, since spontaneity and carelessness are lost. He decries the “fatal

shift toward over-seriousness” in games where “calculation is everything” (p. 198). Any playful

activity, he contends, can be “raised to such a pitch of technical organization and scientific

thoroughness that the real play spirit is threatened with extinction” (p. 199). He cites the

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popularity of bridge during the mid-1900s as example of this phenomenon, stating that

“proficiency at bridge is a sterile excellence, sharpening the mental faculties very one-sidedly

without enriching the soul in any way” (p. 199). Huizinga’s critique of bridge sounds almost

identical to Rowlands’s (2012) critique of EverQuest: “Gaming in MMOs is clearly not

characterized by the same playful, improvisational make-believe games from our childhood.

Rather, it is systemic, repetitive, ritualized, and economic. It is institutional” (p. 74).

In light of the considerations I have discussed, repetitive economic activities, which are

prominent in MMORPGs, don’t qualify as play, at least on their own, according to Huizinga’s

definition. Is it possible that rather than being play in their own right, they are activities that

support other, more playful, activities such as raiding and role-playing? And if so, might this

qualify them as a component of an activity that is playful overall? After all, many instances of

play require some sort of work to make them possible, such as doing drills at sports practice,

setting up the components of a board game, or clearing an area to play with toys. On one level, it

appears to be the same with MMORPGs. All of the work that goes into leveling and gearing a

character is what makes it possible to participate in raids, for instance. Or, in the case of role-

playing, taking the time to gather a large collection of gear, mounts, and other accessories makes

it possible to personalize avatars in a satisfying way. Though this view seems compelling, on

further analysis it breaks down. For one, efforts undertaken to make play possible are not

necessarily part of the play itself; running laps, for instance, is not playing soccer, even though it

may be in the service of playing soccer. One can fully engage in soccer without ever running

laps—running laps is not part of the play experience. Another difference, noted by Nardi, is that

MMORPG designers do not have to include work-like activities in their games. It would be

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entirely possible to have a game composed of dungeons, raiding, role-playing, PvP matches, and

other activities without requiring players to spend months acquiring gear, levels, and resources.

Yet, as Shawn indicated, MMORPGs wouldn’t be the same if you didn’t have to work for the

trappings of success. Nardi, along with Castranova (2007, 2010), agree: The effort required to

improve one’s avatar is tightly woven into the fabric of MMORPGs. Thus, work-like activities

are not auxiliary to playing an MMORPG, they are an essential part of the experience.

Another question regarding work-like activities is whether or not they can be construed

as work. On the one hand, it is clear that players are undertaking these activities voluntarily and

not for any gain that exists outside the game. On the other hand, they are undertaken for gain

within the game. This leads to the question of whether there is something meaningfully different

about working in an MMORPG for an item in an MMORPG and working in the everyday world

for an item in the everyday world. Another way of asking this question is: Is the world of an

MMORPG set off from the rest of the world within a magic circle of play, or does it belong to

everyday reality? Chinese gold farmer’s show that, at the very least, these worlds can intersect:

They work in an MMORPG for a payoff in everyday reality, whereas the players who buy gold

from them work in everyday reality for gold in the MMORPG.

Shedding some light on why it may be difficult to neatly define repetitive economic

activities as either work or play, Huizinga (1950) postulates that that ever since the industrial

revolution, business has increasingly become more like a game. He attributes this development

to the inception of statistics and records of trade and production, which introduced an element of

competition both between and within companies. Thus, in Huzinga’s view, not only has play has

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become less playful but work has become more playful; as a result, the two have become less

readily distinguishable from one another. Rowlands (2012) contends that a division between

work and play has become a false dichotomy altogether and that activities in MMORPGs do not

represent a blurring of work and play. Instead, he argues that MMORPGs are better understood

as a medium into which the natural attitude of our culture is extended. Thus, players are not

engaged in a simulation of capitalism, but are simply practicing it in a different space—a space

which is not set off from the rest of reality in any meaningful way. Rettberg (2011) and

Golumbia (2009) also both conclude that MMORPGs are actual occurrences, rather than

simulations, of capitalistic practices.

In conclusion, it is difficult to make sense of the attraction that players have to farming,

grinding, and other economic activities in MMORPGs by conceptualizing them as play. Later in

this discussion, I provide an alternate interpretation of the appeal of these activities in light of

these conclusions. First, however, I consider whether some of the other ways that my participants

spent their time in MMORPGs can be characterized as play.

Raiding. Though farming and other repetitive economic tasks were prominent in my

participants’ accounts, they engaged in other activities as well. Raiding, for example, was the

primary focus for Ben and Jeff. Although raids are profitable (in fact, they are the source of the

best gear in the game), they also tend to be the most challenging content in MMORPGs,

requiring a great deal of individual skill and group coordination. Though other participants

mentioned the importance of performance in raids and other challenging content, Ben

emphasized it the most. He explained how qualities such as situational awareness, quick decision

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making, and knowledge of the game are essential to success in the unforgiving environment of a

raid boss fight. In addition to discussing the skill involved in raiding, he also described becoming

totally absorbed in the game during a fight and the intense satisfaction of beating a boss for the

first time.

Unlike farming and other repetitive, work-like activities, raiding clearly involves a high

degree of contingency and exceptional levels of challenge for even the most skilled players.

Nardi (2010) also draws attention to the performative aspects in raiding and argues that on

account of the tension and skillful engagement that they entail, raiding most certainly qualifies as

play. Indeed, raiding meets the criterion that it activates the skillfulness of players and absorbs

them completely in the world of the game. When everything coheres smoothly and the raid is

successful, a palpable sense of “limited perfection” is achieved. In light of these features, it

seems that raiding—along with engaging in other challenging game content—does meet

Huizinga’s (1950) criteria of play.

Rowalds (2012), however, argues that raids are not particularly playful events—instead,

they are “rote, mechanical encounters in which imagination and innovation actually work to the

detriment of the group” (p. 137). He provides a detailed description of his first raid in Everquest.

Within his party of over 40 players, his sole function was to heal the tank when it was his turn,

which would be announced in the chat box by the player in charge of managing the “heal chain.”

His function, along with that of everyone else, was pre-determined to the extent that he didn’t

have to think for himself. He was a cog in a machine that was structured so as to minimize risk:

“The entire point of developing a heal chain is to compensate for error. Likewise, multiple tanks,

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offtanks, and off-offtanks are assigned in case one or more falls in battle” (p. 107). In

Rowlands’s account, there was a high degree of performance required, but it was not the playful

sort.

I watched Ben, Jeff, and Shawn participate in raid content, and although I didn’t observe

the heights of mechanization that Rowlands describes, there were degrees of it. Ben and Jeff

indicated that they followed definitive strategies that were assigned by their leaders, rather than

improvising during fights. I was able to listen to how their respective raid leaders disseminated

instructions to the rest of the party before the encounters began. Additionally, both Ben and Jeff

noted that they were expected to study established strategies for each boss, which are available

online in the format of videos and written guides. Thus, players generally are expected to follow

pre-determined strategies rather than creatively and spontaneously devise their own tactics. This

fixed, technical approach to fighting raid bosses is undoubtedly related to the nature of software.

The bosses themselves are set routines—they behave the same each and every time they are

fought. Since they are entirely predictable and unchanging, beating a given boss is simply a

matter of properly executing an existing strategy. Once a raid fight becomes easy for a raiding

party and the element of tension is lost, the endeavor lapses into another instance of farming. It

seems that although fighting a raid boss does qualify as play, it is the variety of play that

Huizinga (1950) characterizes as having an emphasis on “technical organization and scientific

thoroughness” (p. 199) rather than spontaneity and carelessness.

Role-playing. Despite the inclusion of role-playing in the term MMORPG, Crystal was

the only participant who used her game for this purpose. She described herself as role-playing in

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two different ways. One was by participating in staged role-plays with other players in which

everyone would assume the identities of their characters and act out dramatic scenarios. This

mode of role-playing is, like acting and playing make-believe, play in the purest sense according

to Huizinga (1950). It is imaginative, spontaneous, set off from the rest of reality, and

engrossing. Crystal also role-played on her own by taking on the attitude and perspective of her

character while going about other activities in the game. In this way, she added an element of

play to otherwise dull activities such as level-grinding by imagining herself as her character.

Rowlands (2012) provides a historical perspective on the practice of role-playing in

MMORPGs. He notes that MMORPGs were influenced by both pen and paper RPGs, which

involve imaginative free-play, and single-player video games, which encourage an instrumental

orientation to beating the game. He contends that in the early days of EverQuest, players used the

space with a great deal of variation and role-playing was commonplace. However, the tendency

to treat the game as something to be mastered through the application of instrumental rationality

became increasingly prominent and eventually emerged as the dominant strategy. At present,

role-playing is still enjoyed by many MMORPG players, yet they have decidedly become the

minority—a state of affairs that Crystal decried during her interview.

Interactions with other players. All of my participants indicated that interacting with

other players was a significant aspect of playing an MMORPG. My analysis revealed that these

interactions could be categorized as either instrumental or social. Instrumental interactions were

those related to achieving in-game objectives and, though not play per se, could be part of a

playful activity such as raiding. By the same token, these interactions could also be involved

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with repetitive economic activities such as exchanging items or grinding group content (e.g.,

dungeons). In contrast, socializing didn’t serve a function within game content. Instead, social

interactions occurred alongside gameplay. Thus, although the social dimension was salient for

some of my participants, it was neither integral to playful activities nor play in its own right.

A variety of activities to consider. My participants engaged in a variety of activities in

the worlds of their games, some of which fell considerably short of being play, such as farming,

grinding, questing, leveling professions, and other repetitive tasks that were undertaken solely to

achieve an end. However, raiding, along with other difficult content, included the crucial element

of tension, which invited skillful engagement, absorption, and the possibility of attaining limited

perfection—attributes that qualify these activities as play, though perhaps play that is relatively

more technical and institutionalized. Role-playing, though uncommon, is certainly play, and is

comparably more spontaneous and imaginative than many other activities in a MMORPG.

Perhaps the fact that MMORPGs house such a variety of different activities indicates that they

are too multifaceted to be characterized solely as work spaces or play spaces. Maybe it is better

to think of them as spaces in which players can engage in a wide range of activities, some

playful, some not. This view seems to be congruent with Rowlands’s (2012) statement that an

MMORPG is not a “discreet, pocket universe within a magic circle” but instead provides

“everyday spaces for their users” into which they extend the same attitude they would apply to

any other “province of meaning” (p. 84). Since the appeal of MMORPGs can’t be solely ascribed

to the provision of playful experiences to users, and since players do seem to work in them to

some extent, the question of what is it that makes these particular spaces so compelling remains.

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As Rowlands, Rettberg (2011), and Golumbia (2009) suggest, the pleasure that these games

provide can only be understood in light of their cultural context.

An Underlying Ideology in MMORPGs

The vast array of content in MMORPGs suggests that they are virtual sandboxes,

allowing players to engage with them in any way they can imagine. While it is true that players

are free to choose between many different activities, they are actually quite limited in terms of

how they can interact with the game world through their avatars. By and large, the computer

code of an MMORPG allows a player to interact with the environment by extracting resources

from it in order to strengthen his or her avatar. For instance, the various beings that populate

these worlds can only be attacked and then looted—not only is that the only possible way of

interacting with them, but doing so is profitable. Of course, one could refrain from treating them

in this manner, but the game doesn’t allow for any alternative way to relate to them. The confines

of the programming are based on the logic according to which these games are designed. As

Rowlands (2012), Rettberg (2011), and Golumbia (2009) contend, the content of MMORPGs are

manifestations of the ideology of modernity, including capitalist economics, colonial attitudes

towards otherness, and instrumental rationality. In this section, I further interpret the findings of

the present study through this cultural lens.

One prominent tenant of modernity is that the human condition will improve indefinitely

into the future through progress in various forums. In capitalism, progress manifests as economic

growth. In a similar vein, MMORPGs are structured in such a way that they instill in players a

potent orientation to the future. This structure was revealed by the Investment theme—investing

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is future-oriented by definition. My participants were always in the process of working for

something that was on the future horizon: the next level-up, a better piece of gear, a new mount,

and so on. According to the structure of desire, it is only possible to desire that which one does

not already possess. MMORPGs capitalize on the nature of desire by regularly releasing new

items and achievements for which to strive. Robin told an instructive story about a time when

new content was being released too slowly in GW2:

People started, like finishing up with their characters and they were like “Okay, now

what?” you know, “Now what do we do?”... People got bored, like ... “What’s the point?”

You know. “I’ve got this, I’ve got that, there’s nothing more to want.” And they stopped

playing.

In this instance, the driving force of engagement—something to want—ceased to exist, and as a

result, engagement broke down. Thus, desiring something that one can obtain in the future is

essential to the structure of being engaged in an MMORPG.

In the fundamentally quantified world of MMORPGs, the allure of new items lies with

the higher values of their attributes. Ben and Shawn, both cutting right to the heart of the matter,

explained that seeking higher-level gear is in the service of increasing the numbers associated

with one’s avatar, thereby making it more powerful. Shawn emphatically stated that “bigger

numbers are better” and that this axiom is the “driving force” behind all activities in MMORPGs.

He added that when he fulfills this pursuit, he experiences a pleasurable “sense of increase.” Ben

echoed his sentiment, exclaiming “Big numbers—the bigger your gear, the better your gear gets,

the bigger your numbers are, and the happier you are because your numbers are huge.” In Ben’s

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statement, “bigger” numbers and “better” seemingly blur together, just as they do in the

capitalistic values of our culture.

The efforts players make towards acquiring gear and other items are ultimately in the

service of making their avatars more powerful, which is the underlying desire that pulls players

forward in the logic of an MMORPG. While in other games, players might endeavor to reach an

endpoint, in MMORPGs increasing the power of one’s avatar is the organizing pursuit.

Golumbia (2009) suggests that the pleasure that players experience as they accumulate and

optimize their avatars is a manifestation of Nietzsche’s will to power: “These games turn on an

almost pure lust for power: they repetitively enact the accrual of more and more power to a

central and perceiving subject, with the rest of the world reduced to objects to be killed or

consumed” (p. 189).

For some players, discovering the most efficient ways to make numbers become bigger

becomes a meaningful goal in itself. Shawn reflected that “Making big numbers bigger might

just be a means to an end, but sometimes analyzing the logic and mechanics behind the means—

and executing them most efficiently— is a goal unto itself.” In a sense, the means have become

the end. Shawn’s emphasis on the how rather than the why is a reflection of instrumental

rationality, which is endemic to modernity. Though Shawn articulated this manner of thinking the

most clearly, all of my participants expressed it at certain points in relation to their in-game

pursuits. Heidegger (1978) describes this emphasis on instrumentality as a particular ontological

mode of world disclosure called enframing. In this mode, the world appears to us as a stockpile

of resources: “[A] tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now

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reveals itself as a coal-mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit” (p. 296). Thus, in this mode

we set upon nature in order to efficiently extract what we can use from it. Resources are ordered

so as to be immediately on hand, a state that Heidegger calls standing-reserve. In MMORPGs,

virtually everything that one can interact with—monsters, humanoid races, plants, and even

magical substances—can be readily put to use or sold. Thus, MMORPGs are worlds that are pre-

organized into standing-reserve. Even one’s own avatar can be taken up as nothing more than a

resource to be optimized.

Rowlands (2012) points out that MMORPGs are such potent expressions of modernist

ideology because this world-view, shared by designers, players, and the culture at large, is reified

in the programming of the game: “[This] view of the world doesn’t simply become the way

things are done. It becomes the world itself” (p. 148). In a similar vein, Golumbia (2009) states:

“The world presented by WoW is not precisely our world, but, in certain ways, it mimics exactly

the wish that capital and globalization encode for us” (p. 201). Rettberg (2011) agrees, succinctly

stating that MMORPGs provide a “capitalist fairytale” (p. 20). It follows that these worlds are

engaging to players insofar as they are particularly satisfying places in which to participate in

modernist undertakings. As Rowlands puts it, they are worlds ripe for us to “seamlessly extend

our labor and with it our instrumentality and emphasis on efficiency, optimization, and

technique” (p. 17). Moreover, they are designed precisely for this purpose.

The view that MMORPGs provide satisfying experiences of modernist pursuits accounts

for the preponderance of work-like activities. They are spaces that lend themselves to certain

ways of engaging with the world because they are structured according to those very same ways

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of viewing the world. They are programmed according to the modernist perspective, and thus

modernist ways of seeing and doing are amplified within them. MMORPGS are worlds of

quantification and causal certainty. They are worlds of earning and buying, of striving for more.

They are worlds of endless new lands brimming with resources to be harvested. They are worlds

without death, where progress and self-improvement unfurl so long as new expansions are

released. Thus, they are worlds that offer that which we are all taught to desire. They work the

way the rest of the world is supposed to work. They reward players for putting in the time, effort,

and acumen to succeed. In MMORPGs, the natural attitude of our culture has found “hospitable

environs” (Nardi, 2010, p. 115) in which it can be optimally enjoyed.

A Final Look at the Data

The interpretation that MMORPGs are engaging because they offer players an optimal

environment for the pursuit of modernist projects is compelling and was supported by my data

and analysis. This interpretation highlights the way taken-for-granted cultural values shape the

MMORPG experience. However, these cultural values do not manifest uniformly across

individual instances of engagement, which is evident in my findings. Each participant took up his

or her MMORPG in a unique way. Their particular approaches were influenced by past

experiences, present circumstances, and other values and priorities. Thus, manifestations of

modernist ways of seeing and doing were constituted in a unique matrix of other factors in each

case. In this section, I return to the individual accounts of my participants in order to ground the

cultural interpretation in particular instances of lived experience, thereby continuing to explore

the question of how it is that players become so deeply engaged in MMORPGs.

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Returning to my participants’ accounts also serves an important function with regards to

reflexivity. Since I had familiarized myself with the literature on MMORPGs prior to conducting

this study, I was already acquainted with the conceptualization of these games as reflections of

modernist ideologies while collecting and analyzing my data. Inevitably, this perspective had an

impact on the way I came to understand the accounts of my participants. This fact does not

render the analysis invalid, yet it does indicate that special care is required to account for data

that does not fit this interpretation. Thus, this final reflection on my findings serves as a chance

to consider how well the interpretation discussed in this chapter fits the data of each participant

on an individual basis. I will especially consider the Investment theme, since this theme is the

most prominent finding of the analysis and is particularly relevant to the question of what it is

that engages in MMORPGs. Although this theme provides support for the interpretation that

engagement in MMORPGs follows the contours of modernist ideologies, I will also account for

meanings that exceed this interpretation.

Ben. Attaining the best gear, “big numbers,” and other markers of success was a highly

motivating enterprise for Ben. Several of the key moments in his gaming career were instances

when he consciously invested himself in the project of becoming more powerful in the scheme of

the game, which involved dedicating vast amounts of time to earning gear and other resources.

This undertaking involved acquiring knowledge and skills in order to optimize his approach to

the challenges of WoW. Ben’s focus on accruing power through an instrumental approach to the

game certainly resonates with the interpretation that MMORPGs foster modernist pursuits. Ben

especially embodied the Nietzschean lust for power that Golumbia (2009) associates with the

structure of these games.

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For Ben, striving to become a better player with a more powerful avatar, however, was

about more than just earning achievements and making his numbers bigger—it was about

attaining a sense of mastery. Ben spoke directly to this point: “I think the desire to be part of a

group and the desire to be good at something is, I think that’s fairly universal. It just happened to

be that [for me] this thing was something that was in a game.” He emphasized that raids in WoW

are extremely challenging endeavors, requiring the capacity to rapidly process information in

order to make optimal decisions on a second-by-second basis. Ben described becoming intensely

focused and absorbed during boss fights and stated that it was immensely satisfying to beat a

boss for the first time. He also relished the competitive dimensions of striving for excellence:

WoW served as a proving-ground where he tested himself against other highly invested and

skilled players. It was a point of pride for Ben that he brushed virtual shoulders with medical

doctors, engineers, and other intelligent, successful people.

Thus, Ben was highly invested in WoW not only on account of the characters he had

leveled and the gear he had earned, but also because the knowledge and skills that he had

cultivated over many years provided him with a satisfying sense of mastery. The considerable

social dimension of Ben’s investment in WoW also stands outside the cultural interpretation. He

was not a master of WoW in isolation, but rather shared his passion for the game with other

enthusiasts.

Jeff. Jeff found the structure of earning rewards motivating and engaging. He stated that

that a satisfying session was one in which he made “progress,” which meant making it further in

a raid or acquiring better gear for his character. Jeff spent the bulk of his time in WoW raiding,

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which was an activity that required his full attention and effort. For Jeff, formulating and

executing strategies to defeat raid bosses was a difficult and engaging challenge. He preferred

the technical side of the endeavor, largely ignoring the thematic dimension of raids and of the

game in general. Thus, Jeff’s approach to WoW followed the logic of modernism insofar as he

was oriented to making progress, earning rewards, and attaining technical aptitude.

These modernist pursuits all occurred in a highly social and collaborative context for Jeff:

His raiding group was at the center of his WoW experience. He stated that raiding with his nine

companions was similar to spending time with real-life friends in the sense that he enjoyed their

company. In addition to socializing, however, they were engaged in the project of improving

their performance as a unit, which entailed devising strategies and coordinating their attacks

through collaborative problem-solving, communication, and practice. He noted that he highly

valued the stability and adeptness of his group. Consequently, he actively worked to maintain it

by reliably attending raid nights, performing to the best of his ability, and sharing resources.

Thus, Jeff was invested in his raiding party not only in the service of pursing the markers of

success in WoW, but for the sake of the group itself.

Shawn. Shawn’s account most clearly reflected the interpretation that MMORPGs foster

modernist ways of engaging with the world, since he was particularly oriented to the economic

and technical dimensions of his game. He characterized himself as an achievement-oriented

player, seeking to earn levels, gear, and resources as efficiently as possible. He construed all

pursuits in MMORPGs are essentially the same: making numbers bigger. In the service of

making numbers bigger as efficiently as possible, Shawn analyzed the underlying mechanics of

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various aspects of the game in order to determine the optimal approach. The process of working

out how to most efficiently tackle game content was at the heart of his engagement in FFXIV.

Shawn’s motivation to earn, tendency to quantify, and emphasis on the means over the ends all

reflect modernist ways of seeing and doing.

Shawn’s instrumental approach did not, however, entirely eclipse the thematic

dimensions of FFXIV. He found the many unfolding plots in the game compelling and

entertaining. Furthermore, Shawn was consistently charmed by the humor that was cleverly

woven into game content at every turn, especially since it referenced familiar touchstones from

other Final Fantasy games. Thus, Shawn wasn’t investing in a world devoid of meaning as his

statements about big numbers might suggest, but rather in a world that he cherished.

Crystal. In many ways, Crystal defied the characterization of MMORPG engagement as

being driven by modernist values. Rather than pursuing designated achievements such as earning

powerful gear and progressing through increasingly difficult content, she used the space of WoW

to create a cast of richly imagined characters. She found the lore of WoW—including the history

of the world, the various races, the spirit of her faction, and the ongoing narratives—to be a

compelling backdrop upon which to situate the lives of her creations. Additionally, the multitude

of gear, mounts, and other items in WoW served as a virtually endless supply of material to use

for outfits and accessories. When she played one of her characters, she experienced a sense of

immersion, leaving her habitual self behind and engaging with the world of the game as though

she were the avatar. She would also sometimes role-play with other players. Crystal’s focus on

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the creating and maintaining a coherent sense of character trumped the capitalistic and

instrumental values that permeate MMORPGs.

Although Crystal’s chief project of developing her characters does not reflect modernist

values, she engaged in modernist ways of approaching the content of WoW in order to pursue it.

Although Crystal could freely imagine the personalities and backgrounds of her avatars, she had

to work within the structures of the game in order to fully level and outfit them, which was

something she found worthwhile and motivating. In service of this aim, a great deal of Crystal’s

time was spent repetitively running dungeons in order to efficiently earn experience and

resources. Although Crystal indicated that she couldn’t bear to complete daily quests in order to

earn high-end gear, she was quite content level grinding and felt a sense of satisfaction as she

made progress. Thus, although Crystal’s emphasis on character development transcended

modernist values, she readily engaged in instrumental and capitalist practices in order to realize

her characters in the world of the game.

Robin. Robin had an ambiguous relationship with the modernist dimensions of

MMORPGs. On the one hand, she indicated that she was motivated to earn the various rewards

and achievements in GW2, such as new items and titles. On the other hand, she balked at the

notion of obligatory activities and turned up her nose at the repetitive, work-like quality of

questing in other MMORPGs. Thus, it seemed that although Robin was motivated to earn, she

certainly didn’t want it to feel like work was being imposed upon her! Instead, she expected to be

entertained by the activities in GW2 and therefore compelled to do them on account of her own

desire rather than as a means to an end. Thus, although she enjoyed earning, she generally wasn’t

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willing to invest her time in work-like activities, making her only partially amenable to the

capitalistic structure of turning labor into capital. Likewise, she didn’t seem to be particularly

committed to pursuing a technical mastery of the game content since she rarely discussed the

strategic dimensions of her undertakings. The premium she placed on the aesthetics of the game

world and her enjoyment of the narratives also suggest that she related to world of GW2 from

more than an instrumental perspective.

Closing thoughts. These final considerations indicate that some of the ways my

participants invested in their games reflected modernist ideologies, while others transcended this

value system, such as forming friendships, cooperating with teammates, mastering skills,

creating characters, learning lore, and attending to unfolding narratives. As my participants

invested in their games in the various ways I have described, they became increasingly invested

in them: over the course of, and as a result of, their engagement, the worlds of their games had

become increasingly familiar and personally meaningful. MMORPGs are games that are

particularly well-suited for long-term investment on account of their vast amounts of content,

regular expansions, and high ceilings of difficulty—players know that there will always be more

to do with what they have earned and created. Thus, there is a positive feedback loop that fuels

the long-term, intensive engagement of MMORPG players: the longer one can play, the more

one invests; the more one invests, the more reason one has to play for longer.

Limitations of This Research

I conclude by considering some of the limitations of this study. It goes without saying

that this contribution is but one of many possible lines of inquiry into the multifaceted

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phenomenon of playing an MMORPG. I set out to explore a particular question: What is

engaging about MMORPGs? This question originated from my personal curiosity and it shaped

my approach to the research at all stages. The methods I selected, the questions I posed during

the interviews, the content that stood out to me during the analysis, and the emphasis I put on my

findings are inextricable from the particular perspective that I brought to the work. Thus, what I

discovered is limited in the sense that it is a view from one particular vantage point. I will

attempt to account for some of the specific ways in which my study was limited by the choices I

made.

The method chosen for data collection, interviewing several long-time players, had

certain implications for my findings. While this approach allowed me to consider a range of

experiences, it also introduced some limitations. For one, I was only able to learn so much about

the experiences of each of my participants over the course of a two-hour interview. They had all

played extensively for years, often with careers that spanned multiple games and different eras of

their lives. Inevitably, they described their experiences in terms of what they felt was most

salient and representative, leaving much unsaid. The questions I asked, and, more subtly, the

topics I responded to with the most interest, also shaped the content that was covered. Thus,

although the interview transcripts are the “raw” data of this study, they were already filtered,

abstracted snapshots of many years of experiences. Although interviewing multiple participants

gave my data more breadth by featuring several players, it didn’t allow me to dwell in the

particular of MMORPG worlds to the degree that other means of collecting data might have,

such as the participant-observer approach that Rowlands (2012) and Nardi (2010) utilized.

211

The gaming sessions granted me more direct access to the ways that my participants

engaged with their games, yet they were only a brief glimpses. I had the strong sense that my

participants had much more to show me than they were able to fit into the hour of allotted time.

Circumstantial factors also played a role in determining what I saw during these sessions. For

instance, Shawn was only able to play a dungeon using a character class that he didn’t normally

use; as a result, I got the chance to watch him figure out how employ an unfamiliar set of

abilities. However, if he had he used a character class he was adept with, I would have seen

something else. Another difficulty related to the gaming sessions was the inability to clearly

capture the play observation in my transcripts. With only an audio-recording, it wasn’t possible

for me to describe what was happening onscreen in detail—an undertaking that have been

unwieldy even with a video-recording. Thus, although the gaming sessions compensated for

some of the shortcomings of interview data, they had their own limitations.

While my interview data only skimmed the surface of my participants’ experiences in

MMORPGs, I nevertheless often found it difficult to account for all the data that I had collected.

Not only was there a great deal of variety between participants, but even within each individual

account there were tensions and nuances as well. Since the method of analysis that I used, IPA,

involves identifying patterns in the data, it was inevitable that some complexities were smoothed

over in the process of developing themes. Though it was at times painful to realize that I couldn’t

account for everything that each participant had said, it was necessary to use my own

understandings to tease out the most meaningful threads in their accounts.

212

Finally, in the discussion, I put a great deal of emphasis on the riddle of work and play in

MMORPGs, which is a prominent topic in the literature. It was also a feature of MMORPG

engagement that I found striking prior to beginning my research. My data certainly supported the

significance of this focus, but it was hardly the only one that could have been explored. I chose

this path because it seemed to be a particularly salient one that is highly relevant to the question

of why people spend so much time in MMORPGs. I also arrived at a primarily cultural

understanding of what players find engaging about MMORPGs. Though valuable, this

interpretative angle hardly yields a comprehensive analysis. There is clearly more at work—and

at play—in MMORPGs.

Directions for Future Research

The cultural interpretation discussed in the MMORPG literature and my discussion

tacitly assumes that the MMORPG players have a Western background, yet these games are

played globally and are just as popular in Asia as they are in North America and Europe (Nardi,

2010). Does the interpretation that engagement in MMORPGs is structured according to Western

modernist ideologies apply to players from other cultures? Or is there an alternative set of

cultural values that shape the way players from non-Western countries approach the content of

these games? Research exploring these questions would shed additional light on the relationship

between MMORPGs and modernist values.

Another promising avenue for future research would be investigating how MMORPG

play is situated in the context of players’ lives and personalities. Since this study was designed to

collect and analyze data about engagement in MMORPGs per se, I only considered life outside

the game when a participant happened to bring it up during his or her interview. However, I

213

caught many glimmers of potentially significant ways in which my participants’ games served

functions that can only be understood in the context of their lives as wholes. For instance, might

Robin, physically limited as she was by her medical conditions, have been especially attracted to

the freedom of movement and readily accessible forum for socializing that GW2 provided?

Along the same lines, the meanings of the themes that I developed could have been related to life

outside of the game. For example, what was the importance of big numbers to Ben and Shawn on

a personal, rather than a cultural, level? Did attaining big numbers provide narcissistic

gratification? Compensate for something else? Uphold a cherished view of the self?

Symbolically represent something related to a key concern or conflict? I couldn’t explore such

questions with the data I collected, since I did not systematically investigate my participants’

personalities and lives outside of their games. However, it is feasible to design a study to explore

the links between MMORPG engagement, personality, and the life as whole by collecting

adequate data and orienting the analysis accordingly.

214

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Appendix 1: Flyer

Play an MMORPG?

Want to participate in research?

Receive a $20 Gift Card of your choice for

your time.

My name is Jake Rusczek, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in Duquesne’s clinical psychology

program. I have chosen to research the daily experiences of playing a MMORPG for my

dissertation. I am curious to learn more about what players are doing while they play and what

they find engaging about it.

If you choose to participate, I will interview you about your experiences and watch you play.

The interview would take place where you normally play and be audio-recorded. Your identity

would remain confidential.

To be eligible to participate, you must:

1) Be at least 18 years old

2) Live in the greater Pittsburgh area

3) Currently play a prototypical MMORPG (

WoW, EverQuest, Rift, Guild Wars 2,

etc.) regularly

(15+ hours a week) for at least the past year

If you are not sure if you meet these criteria, feel free to contact me.

If you are at all interested, please contact me via email (rusczekj@duq.edu) or by phone (413-

265-3738). I can go over the specifics of what participating in my study would entail and you

can then decide if you are interested in participating.

219

Appendix 2: Posting on Reddit

Hello Pgh. Reddit,

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Duquesne’s clinical psychology program. I have chosen to research the

daily experiences of playing a MMORPG for my dissertation. I am curious to learn more about

what players are doing while they play and what they find engaging about it.

If you choose to participate, I will interview you about your experiences and watch you play. The

interview would ideally take place where you normally play and be audio-recorded. Your

identity would remain confidential. Compensation is a $20 gift card of your choice. I also hope

that having the chance to talk about what you enjoy would be rewarding!

To be eligible to participate, you must: 1) Be at least 18 years old 2) Live in the greater

Pittsburgh area 3) Currently play a prototypical MMORPG (WoW, EverQuest, Rift, Guild Wars

2, etc.) regularly (15+ hours a week) for at least the past year

If you are not sure if you meet these criteria, feel free to contact me. If you are at all interested,

please send me a message (on Reddit). I can go over the specifics of what participating in my

study would entail and you can then decide if you are interested in participating.

Also, please pass this opportunity along to anyone you think might be interested—I would really

appreciate it!! Thanks :)

220

Appendix 3: Consent Form

DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY

600 FORBES AVENUE  PITTSBURGH, PA 15282

CONSENT TO PARTICIPATE IN A RESEARCH STUDY

TITLE: Experiences of Playing Massively Multiplayer Online

Role-Playing Games: A Phenomenological Exploration

INVESTIGATOR: Jacob Rusczek, M.A.

ADVISOR: Eva Simms, Ph.D.

Advisor's Department of School: Psychology Department

Advisor’s Phone Number: 412.396.6515

SOURCE OF SUPPORT: This study is being performed as partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the doctoral degree in psychology at

Duquesne University.

PURPOSE: You are being asked to participate in a research project

that seeks to investigate the experiences of playing a

MMORPG. You will be asked to allow me to interview you

and observe you playing an MMORPG. The interviews will

be audio-recorded and transcribed.

These are the only requests that will be made of you.

RISKS AND BENEFITS: There are no risks greater than those encountered in

everyday life involved in participating. You may find it

enriching to reflect on and share your experience.

COMPENSATION: You will be compensated for participation with a $20 gift

card of your choice.

221

CONFIDENTIALITY: Your name will never appear in any of the written records

related to the study (with the exception of this form!),

including the transcripts and final report. Instead, a

pseudonym will be used. Additionally, any personal

information that would make identifying you possible will

be altered. Consent forms will be stored in a locked file in

the researcher's home. The recording of the interview will

be stored on an encrypted, password-protected drive for

five years following the study, then deleted.

RIGHT TO WITHDRAW: You are under no obligation to participate in this study.

You are free to withdraw your consent to participate at

any time.

SUMMARY OF RESULTS: A summary of the results of this research will be supplied

to you, at no cost, upon request.

VOLUNTARY CONSENT: I have read the above statements and understand what is

being requested of me. I also understand that my

participation is voluntary and that I am free to withdraw

my consent at any time, for any reason. On these terms, I

certify that I am willing to participate in this research

project.

I understand that should I have any further questions

about my participation in this study, I may call Jake

Rusczek, principal investigator 413-265-3738, Eva Simms,

dissertation director 412-396-6515 and Dr. Joseph Kush,

Chair of the Duquesne University Institutional Review

Board 412-396-6326.

_________________________________________ __________________

Participant's Signature Date

_________________________________________ __________________

Researcher's Signature Date

222

Appendix 4: Ben’s Interview Transcript

Ben: I’m curious what kind of games the people you have talked to so far have played, have you,

mostly WoW players?

Jake: Mostly, and then one Final Fantasy 14

Ben: Okay. For such a, for a 9 year old game there’s still an absolutely enormous amount of

people that still play it

Jake: Yeah

Ben: I’d be surprised if, you’re probably going to get different experiences from everyone of the

WoW players, which might seem odd considering they’re playing the same game, but it’s such a

huge, diverse game .

Jake: Yeah

Ben: I’m going to get some water for myself. *long pause* I need to get a nicer phone, every

time I see someone with a nicer phone [haha] it reminds me that my phone sucks

Jake: I’m sorry, I’m having trouble figuring out—okay it’s going now. Alright, so do you want

to tell you a little bit about your life, just very basic details

Ben: outside of

Jake: Yeah, just kind of the

Ben: Okay, well I’m a 22 year old engineering student, mechanical engineering, I just graduated

top of my class, like 3.96 summa cumalde, all that stuff . [wow] Um, pretty much, just, I’ve

always had pretty much two interests—it’s either cars or videogames [mhmm] I think my first

video game was like Dr Mario on the Super Nintendo or something and [yeah] I’ve kind of

always played around with em. Um, I’d say I’m pretty typical as far as friends and everything

goes, um, I’m in a fraternity, got my normal group of friends, always had girlfriends since 15

years old. Nothing, anything really particularly special or interesting about my life.

Jake: Do you have a girlfriend right now?

Ben: Do not, but that’s just, um

All identifying information has been altered or removed from the transcripts, including the names of avatars and

guilds.

223

Jake: Just in between girlfriends

Ben: Yeah, circumstantial [haha] hehe it’s not exactly a trend

Jake: Yep. And you’re living?

Ben: Currently I’m living, um, I’m in between residences, I just signed a lease for an apartment

near where I’ll be working [mhmm] but as of this moment I’m obviously in my parents’ house

[yeah] and this is kind of like been my home base for the last, though college and everything,

cause I went to school in out of state [okay] live, obviously, have my home in Pittsburgh, so right

now I’m kind of between residences

Jake: So you just graduated last semester?

Ben: Just graduated, yeah. I have an interesting school system that goes three months of work

and then three months of school. Like a work the work is part of school [okay] So my term

actually only ended in December [mhmm] and that was when I finished graduate, and it’s a four

and a half year program, so I graduated on time at the end of December, just starting work next

week, which is my first real career, so.

Jake: What’s the job?

Ben: Um, mechanical engineer

Jake: Oh cool. Congratulations.

Ben: Thank you very much. Since it was a job in my field and everything. That was the nice

thing about the work, was the work for school was related to school, it was related to your major,

so I’ve been doing engineering work for four and a half years now [yeah] Now I just get paid

full-time

Jake: Yeah, so you’re just doing the same thing and

Ben: I can take a day off now, which is awesome, cause I didn’t have days off as a student

Jake: Yeah, so it will actually be potentially easier

Ben: It should probably honestly be easier, [hahaha] because now people won’t bother me for

menial tasks, I can say “Hey, I’m a full time employee with my own jobs and duties, go find the

student!” hehehe. Whereas before I was the student and kind of a full time employee, so I had

[right] I had my work and everyone else’s, so, actually yeah, it probably will be easier *both

laugh*

Jake: Yeah, that’s great. So you’re in a pretty prosperous part of your life

224

Ben: Yeah, no like

Jake: Finishing school, getting a job

Ben: Yeah, considering, I mean it was a top three engineering school and um, I was top of my

class going into my field and everything, so, um, no real issues so far. I’ll be going for my

graduate degree. My company will pay for up to one or two classes a term for free so, slowly get

my graduate degree, I have a lot of professors kind of insisting that I got for my doctorate

eventually [yeah] It may or may not be on the list, I haven’t really decided yet but [yeah] we’ll

see how it goes. I’ve already had six graduate-level classes and gotten A’s in all of them so I’m

not too worried about continuing school [yeah] so no big deal

Jake: So what’s the story of how you started playing World of Warcraft?

Ben: That’s ha

Jake: haha, is that the first MMO you have played?

Ben: Um, as far as your traditional like, um, the actual MMOs, which is stuff that you’ll consider

like EVE, World of Warcraft, Guildwars, those sort of MMOs [mhmm], yes, this is the first. Um,

actually there was one that was free to play that played for a week, but it was awful because it

was free and free to play and had not support and it was terrible [yeah] but um, this was the first

actual, real, name-brand MMO I’ve played . Um, I did play online gaming before that, which

was based, um, first on StarCraft, and StarCraft Broodwar [uh huh] and I played that obsessively,

way more than I should have. And then, with WarCraft III and WarCraft III The Frozen Throne

um I played that also very obsessively, particularly a game called DOTA, which now has DOTA

II which is actually something that’s on my desktop and I play quite a lot now that it’s a stand-

alone game. But, as far as traditional MMOs go, um, yes WoW was my first one [mhm]. The

interesting story behind that is basically um, when it came out I had been playing WarCraft III,

so I knew the WarCraft universe, liked, had a lot of faith in the WarCraft universe and Blizzard,

the company that makes it, [mhmm] but uh, I actually avoided it for the same reason that I have

been playing it for 374 days played *both laugh* I knew what it was!

Jake: You knew you were in danger!

Ben: Yeah, exactly, like I already play video games way too much, um, considering, you know, I

was talking, I’d be talking to people on the football team and the cheerleading group, you know,

I’m like, “okay, if the cheerleaders and the football players are playing this thing obsessively it’s

a bad thing. I’m not going to get involved” [*laughter* yeah] Stayed away until one of my

girlfriends decided it would be an excellent idea to buy it for me for my birthday [uh huh] at

which point I was like “well I’m not gonna, you know, ask her to talk it back or anything, so I

mean I’ll give it a try, hopefully I won’t get too stuck on it” but that was, the game has long

225

outlasted the girlfriend so *both laugh* which is probably a good thing honestly, between the

two, the game is the less dangerous *both laugh*

Jake: So, when was that, what year was that?

Ben: God, what year was that. Probably 2009 I would say, so I’ve been playing for five years .

*briefly interrupted by mom*

Ben: So yeah, 2009, 2009 was what I started, probably February of ‘09, so yeah, it’s been about

five years. [okay] And uh, yeah, it’s been downhill completely from then. Um, it was kind of a

slow start um cause, it’s , it’s not imme—I mean I’m gonna go, WoW is an addicting thing, it

absolutely is, there’s no question in my mind that it has addictive properties , you know, it might

not, I’m not sure what the basis for that is, but, it started slow as far as, when you’re at early

levels you, I would say, it’s not as gripping, you know you’re killing level 1 boar mwhha I mean

I don’t know if you’ve seen the South Park before

Jake: Yeah, I have

Ben: Literally, that’s, in the forest, killing boars [haha]. You know, you’re doing stupid quests,

like “go fetch me these flowers. Oh, and for some reason they only, you can only get them by

killing this monster, so go kill 10 of this monster and get 10 flowers, and then come back to me”

[mhmm] which, wasn’t the most interesting things, you only have, I don’t know if anyone has

showed you a new character, I’ll just pick any random realm. And so when you start, you’re only

going to have two or three abilities[mhmm] and they’re not real flashy, they’re pretty

straightforward, it’s like a Heroic Strike, or it’s like a level one little flash of light that does

damage. It’s not, it’s not so interesting. So you’re not doing anything cool, you’re not really

killing anything cool, it started really slow [mhmm] but as I got more into it, uh, I eventually—

oh god, my addons are freaking out. So, here, I only start one ability really, it’s an Arcane Shot

and it’s fairly simple, there’s nothing flashy, there’s nothing too interesting about it [mhmm] but

as you get going forward you’re gonna end up with full bars and things that are much flashier,

things that are much cooler [mhmm] and that was when it really hooked me in. Cause I

remember, I got to level 20...I got to level 20 on a trial version, because before I opened the

game, I was like “okay, I’m gonna try this, at least to she sees me playing, but maybe if it’s not

for me I’ll just not play it” [yeah] and I got to level 20 and I was so frustrated because it

wouldn’t let me go above level 20, and I didn’t realize that the level cap on the trail was 20 [yeah

haha] I was so upset, and I was like—and that was the point where I was like “alright, where’s

the game” got the game out, opened the game, put it in, 30 days, good, alright, let’s go haha

[haha] yes! 21! Now we’re going forward

Jake: So did it kind of take off from there?

Ben: Yeah

226

Jake: That was when it started

Ben: Yeah, like that first trial, I think it was 10 days, so, 10 days to 20 honestly is um, nowadays

I can probably get to level 20 in two or three hours, [wow] so it’s not, you know, I didn’t play it

that much, but I was sitting there , and I was stuck, and I was frustrated, I was like “I’m only

level 20” and I was like, there’s people that are running around that are like level 50 and I so

upset [haha] that I got the game, put it in, got the, cause there’s a free month when you buy the

original, the vanilla, the original core game [yeah] got the free month, got to level 21, and it just

went from there. I did everything on my way up, um, I still actually have my original character is

the one I was logged into before, and he’s kinda in bad gear so he looks like ass but [hmhm] but

from there on I just leveled all the way up, I leveled all my professions, I did all the quests, I, I

had no idea what I was doing.

Jake: So what was that transition—it seems like there was a real transition point

Ben: There was

Jake: from, from, being kinda underwhelmed to suddenly just being...

Ben: yeah

Jake: So what was it that grabbed you?

Ben: It’s...I’d really...it was something to do with the leveling and then just getting stronger .

like, it was right there, like all I have to, and, even nowadays, you see like, you have a goal: “I

want to be stronger.” Okay, simple goal. I’m sitting here, I’m stuck at level 20. All I need to do

to get to level 21 is put this game in the computer and hit the I agree button and okay, [yeah] and

now I kill another animal and I’m level 21. [uh huh] Okay now I’m level 21, I want to get

stronger. All I need to get to 22 is do these 20 quests. All I need to do these 20 quests, I just need

to kill 15 boars, and go talk to this guy, and it just, it seems like that was the point where it

became important enough to me to get stronger that I was willing to just go ahead and okay, yes,

I will do these quest, I will do this, I will kill this boar, I will run to this town, and I just wanted

to get stronger. I didn’t want to be weak, I didn’t want to be watching stronger guys run around ,

I didn’t want to have to run away from this animal [mhmm] and it just, I don’t know, it

something about the game, at that instance saying “hey, you can’t get stronger until you do this”

and I did it and I was just like alright, now, now I’m invested in it, now I have money in it, now

I’m just going to get something out of this game, I’m going to get stronger, I’m going to be

something , [mhmm] um, you know, like nowadays I am a desired quantity as far as being a

stronger player because I’d been gone for the last three months and the first thing I see when I

available Wednesday, because we need you...now” *laughs* yeah. Um, yeah and I think the

desire to be part of a group and the desire to be good at something is, I think that’s fairly

universal. It just happened to be that this thing was something that was in a game [yeah] And to

that point, you know, it’s probably no different that, you know, someone who’s working out:

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okay, I ran a mile, tomorrow I’m going to run a mile-one, you know [yeah] a mile-two —it’s

just, take those steps, you want to get better, you want to be stronger, you want to be someone

that people look at and say “hey, wow, that’s like...you know, look at that guys gear, oh my god,

he must be really good, you know, look at this, look at that. [mhmm] Oh my god he killed that

boss, that’s incredible, you know. I can’t do that.” [yeah] I didn’t want to be the person who said

“I can’t do that” I wanted to be the person people were looking at like “holy crap how did he do

that?” [uh huh]

Jake: It seems like there is a lot of awareness of what other players see when see you as a player

in the game

Ben: Probably, because obviously you can look around in the game and see, um, it’s not so

prevalent now because there’s new, there’s a thing that’s in this expansion that lets you change

the way gear looks [uh huh] um, but especially, and actually I’ve wondered if that’s had some

correlation to the decrease in subscribers [hm] um, because, obviously you want to look good

[yeah] but just like I was saying, like okay, this item level on this gear, which looks fairly

good—reasonably good—it’s got a few little flaws in it, but, this is 507 gear. [okay] The gear

that I said earlier that I was actually kind of embarrassed to show you, because it’s all

mismatched and ugly is only 483 , [okay] so it used to be before you could change the way your

gear looked, how good your character looked was directly tied to how good your gear was

[mhmm] and you could look at a character as say “ oh he’s wearing tier 5 shoulders, so he’s

only—you know, if the current tier, if the newest tier is tier 7 [uh huh] and he only is wearing tier

5, which—I should have mention it builds up, so like the current tier I think is tier 15 [okay] so,

um, tier 7, if I’m wearing tier 7 and he’s wearing tier 5, therefore, I’m a better player [yeah] and

it was obvious because anyone who played the game, you knew what you were fighting for, you

knew what gear you were in [yeah] you knew that right at that point in time you’d only been able

to kill up to a tie 5 boss and you were wearing tier 5 gear [uh huh] but you kinda dream, you had

that vision in your mind of your character all beefy and at tier 7 [uh huh] so when you see

someone run by with tier 7, you’re like “oh man”

Jake: It’s that goal right in front of you

Ben: Yeah, you’re like “look at that guy, he’s killed, you know, he’s killed Arthas, he’s killed,

you know, any number of bosses,” and it’s, you’re like “ugh! look how cool he looks!” [yeah]

“alright, I gotta, you know” *demonstrated playing hard* *both laugh*um, and that’s kind of the

drive . My highest level character is the one that looks best, I think, and that’s, that’s a common

um common thing, even now, there’s achievements and stuff that you can display in certain

items that you can only get by doing...like legendary quests, like I have a legendary mount that

you can only get by completing legendary quests. And these legendary quests—it took me, uh,

seven eight months to do this quest [wow] so, and at the time, and I did it while it was relevant

content, so, um, and the achievements are all dated, so I can show my achievement for it,

showing that I did it when it was relevant , when it was current, when it meant something, uh,

and at the time when it meant something, there were probably only um...you can see here this is

my character in the most up to date gear, this is 542 gear so you can see he all matches [yeah]

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because all the gear is up to date, it all’s from the same tier, it all matches [yeah yeah] um, it

glows because it’s enchanted with the highest level enchants,

Jake: So it’s pretty impressive

Ben: So if someone sees me running around in this, there gonna say “wow, he’s pretty good,

like, with that”

Jake: Yeah, so there’s really clear markers of achievement

Ben: exactly, yeah, and um that was muddled a little bit when they added what’s called

“Transmog” um, that allows you to transform an item to look like any other item that you have,

um , so the current level of tier—because you have to have the item to be able to transmog into

it, [yeah] most people who still have the current level of gear like I do normally wear it, [yeah]

because it’s still a signifier of, um, of, you know how powerful you are, but if somebody’s

wearing something from five years ago, you have to actually look and see what they’re wearing

cause you don’t know

Jake: uh huh, so you can actually click on another character [yeah] and see what all their gear is

Ben: Yeah um, so I’m gonna click on this Death—actually this Death Knight’s in my guild, so,

that’s interesting, oh I remember him, so I’m looking at him right now and I can see everything

Jake: you can see everything, okay

Ben: yeah, so he’s wearing—and I have an addon that will show me—so he’s probably an

average level of 560 [uh huh] so, um, he’s probably, he’s fairly geared, and you can see all his

armor matches as well [yeah] he’s not wearing his headpiece—I don’t really know why haha uh,

[haha] you can see the headslot is blank

Jake: hm, comfort?

Ben: uh, haha, he’s not wearing it, so whatever, not my fault [yup] um, but yeah, so I can, if

somebody has their armor transmoged so that you, so that it’s different, you actually have to

inspect them and see what’s going on. And my friend just asked why my sister unfriended him

on Facebook, cause he wanted to be my brother in law [hahaha] hehehea, but

Jake: So, since you started playing, um,

Ben: Well, I just, AFKing is a staple of WoW, I don’t know if anyone else—I play in windows

mode specifically so I can, kinda

Jake: oh no no no, I was asking, um, like, since when you began playing

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Ben: oh, I thought you meant because I was playing

Jake: Yeah, I didn’t mean um

Ben: No problem

Jake: that. Uh, so what been your pattern—I mean I’m sure you played different amounts a

different points, obviously [oh yeah] have you played, like, straight through the five years, have

you gone through periods of playing a lot

Ben: There’s probably about 9 months that I haven’t played in the last five years, it’s mostly, it’s

school-related, I’ll stop for school [yeah] um, graduating summa cumlade I probably couldn’t

have done that with WoW hahahah I’m being honest [yeah yeah] um, but, it really kind of

evolved, um, when I first leveled. You know, in every character you can typed “played” and it

will show you how long you’ve played that character, so total time played on this character, so

total time played on this character is 40 days—and this is real time

Jake: yeah, 40 24 hour days

Ben: how long I’ve been logged in, yeah, and then time played at this level. So my first time to

level my warrior, I took it slow, I adventured, I saw the world of Warcraft, I did all the quests,

and I talked to people, and I read the quests [oh yeah] and I was invested in the lore and

everything else, and that probably took, I would say like 11 or 12 days played, to get to the

maximum level at that point, which was 80, this was during Wrath of the Liche King

Jake: Okay, 11 or 12 days—over how much time did that take?

Ben: Three months, four months, um

Jake: Okay

Ben: And, it was, but it was and experience and it was fun, and, I was in a guild, and I remember

I was level 56—how I remember this 5 years ago knows, god. [haha] I mean, I guess it must

have been psychologically important to me, I’m guessing haha, the fact that I even remember

[yeah] Cause I was in Molten Core, I remember exactly where I was and I was talking to um a

person who ended up being my guildmate and now real life friend, um, Birdsy , who’s actually

on my Facebook, Brad Birdsy, [mhmm] um, and I was talking to him and he’s just someone I

had met while questing and he was like “hey, join the guild” and I hadn’t been in a guild at that

point, and I was like, “okay, sure, whatever” and through that guild I met a lot of people, people

who, a lot of them I have on Facebook now , and I would, and I played with them and we were

all leveling [yeah] but it was, it was um, what would be called now a casual guild where we just,

we leveled, we had fun, we did old content that wasn’t relevant anymore, we just had a lot of

talking, we even, we even did things like play hide-and-seek in World of Warcraft [uh huh] um,

which was actually a lot of fun *both laugh* um, there’s a lot of places to hide, if you can

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imagine, um, and we knew each other’s real lives, we knew each other’s personal problems, we

helped each other with our person problems, blah blah blah blah

Jake: So you knew about each other’s real lives [oh yeah] but had you met in real life?

Ben: Um, of these people I’ve only met, as of now I’ve only met three of them in real life [okay]

but there probably, but we knew, we knew all about

Jake: You talked about to each other about

Ben: Oh yeah. Because we played together for probably a year and a half, and we played a lot

together and we did things together, and it really, one thing about WoW is it’s not unusual I

think, to know something about your guildmate. Now, you’re random stranger that you meet in

party, you not going to [yeah] the most intimate thing you probably know is “hold on, the oven’s

beeping” *both laugh* you know? That’s the most intimate thing details you know about their

real life. But as far as being in your guild, once you’re in a guild um

Jake: And do you guys use the voice chat?

Ben: Yeah, actually in fact I have it pulled up right now, um

Jake: okay

Ben: Ventrillo

Jake: oh, okay

Ben: So

Jake: So you guys were just chatting all along while you were doing things

Ben: Yeah, just talking, chatting, doing things, laughing, having fun. Um, normally the more

relaxed you are with the content, the more the topic strays towards real life, it strays towards

actual, you know, you might as well picture a group of people sitting in a room just, you know,

having a couple beers, chatting, because that’s really what it is. In fact, some of them were

having a couple beers *both laugh* ummm, I mean we would even have parties, because, um , it

actually ended up that the guild leader and one of the officers—they had known each other in

real life—and they ended up getting married. And they had their real life marriage [uh huh] and

then we had an in-game marriage, and we actually went to one of the chapels and [yeah] and

people would trade out virtual alcohol and stuff, which actually makes your screen blurry

hahahaha [haha cool] and we sat up till like 3 in the morning . [wow] you know, they were

happy, obviously, they had just gotten married and everyone who knew them in the game was

laughing and happy and [wow] and it was a casual guild

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Jake: That seems like a really happy memory

Ben: Oh yeah, it’s great, and, but, um, I’ll say after probably about a year and a half of that—and

I can talk more about each, any of these in depth later on if you have any specific questions about

them—but as far as my playing history goes, probably after about a year and a half of being with

them, um, we had been playing with one of the top 2 or 3 rated players of the server, [mhmm]

um, whenever he wasn’t raiding, he would come and he would chill with us. Now, he stayed in

his guild, but we knew him familiar because he would come and then talk and then—we were

honestly, it was, to me, and to two, well really three other players in the guild, um , the casual

guild—the Raiders of Renownwas the name, um, it was kind of embarrassing to play with him ,

because we would do a dungeon with him which was, a five-man, and he would do it all himself,

could do it all himself. He would do—um there’s and addon here, Recount, which shows your

amount of damage done, and he would do, you know, 7000 damage, 7000 DPS, damage per

second, uh, and us, we were, even when we were in our DPS specs, specs that were designed to

do damage, would do 1000, 2000 maybe, and would have no idea why he was doing, you know,

3, 4 times what we were doing. To a couple of us that was very irritating haha [yeah] um, “hey,

you know, I’d like to consider myself good at this game, why is he so much better? [yeah] What

is going on here” [yeah] and that is the point it went from, for some of us, I guess four of us in

particular, and those four people are kind of a mainstay in my play in WoW [mhmm] um, four of

us in Raiders of Renownkinda started getting irritated, you know, “we don’t want be that bad, we

don’t want to get shown up by this guy.” And he wasn’t mean about it, [yeah] it was just that we

knew, we knew he was that much better. Why? What were we going to do. Now we start paying

attention to the damage meters, now we start paying attention to what abilities we are using,

whether or not we were optimizing our rotations, which, I don’t know if anyone’s covered that

with you, is basically what order of skill usage will do the most damage [yeah] started paying

attention to that, started paying attention to whether we had the rights stats on our gear, like

“agility’s good but strength is better, okay, so I need to make sure I have as much strength as

possible on this guy”, started paying attention to that . And that is when it went from logging on

every day to have fun with my friends and...be better, but only, I only had to be good enough to

do what they were doing, which wasn’t really anything serious , um, to now, “okay, I gotta make

sure this gear’s right, I gotta make sure my rotation’s right, I gotta make sure damage is up, why

is my damage low? what can I do to make it better, um, Googling online, you know: hey, how do

I warrior DPS? What am I doing wrong? [yeah] How is, you know, I see, okay I was doing this

and I should be doing this. Building up gear and it, it kinda led to a, a little bit of dissent in the

guild, because for four of us it became important that we were doing well, and doing high

numbers, and for the rest of the guild, it was still very unimportant , [yeah] so when we did

things together now you started to see a disparity between the four of us [yeah] and the rest of

the guild, and it started to cause a little bit of a rift as far as, we wanted to do good and we started

to want them to want to do good. Like, the one girl, the guild leader, “Sonya” was her character

name, uh, and, it was like “Sonya, come on, you’re only doing like 1000 DPS, you should be

doing like 2000 with that gear, come on.” But she didn’t care, it wasn’t what she was interested

in [yeah] and it started to cause a problem, so what ended up happening after about two months

of the rift starting to form, is um, we ended up, the four of us, while we were still very good

friends, we were like “alright, look, we want to be friends, we can stay friends, when we play

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casually, we’ll play with you guys, but for now, we need to, we’re going to move up, we’re

going to move into higher ranking guilds” [yeah] um, three of them went to a guild to a guild

called Myrmidons, I personally went to a guild called Goof Troop, [okay] *both laugh* um,

reason being, I had played, I had done some raiding, a pick up group, basically they needed

another player and I was like “hey I’ll go with you” and I went with them, so I knew them a little

bit [yeah]. So I went with them the other three went into Myrmidons [okay]. Myrmidons, I didn’t

know it at the time, because I wasn’t aware of how to actually research the literal guild rankings,

because there are actual statistical guild rankings, mhmm, I didn’t know that. Myrmidons was a

higher ranking guild, but I went to the Goof Troop and kinda started off an average Goof Troop

player, but quickly, once I got some gear, because I was very badly under-geared then when I

went from being a more casual player , um, the thing you’ll find is that to be able to raid you

need to be in a guild and you need to be in a guild that’s raiding, [okay] otherwise you’re never

going to get anywhere fast, you’re going to be a tier or two behind no matter what [m hmm] So

now I got into a guild that was kinda raiding current tier, and they weren’t very good, but they

were still killing stuff that mattered, like newer things [yeah] So I got some gear, and, cause I

had showed promise, cause I was doing very good damage for my gear, so they gave me gear,

and I shot up quickly to the top DPS in the guild , at which point they made me an officer. Well,

now I’m really invested, because now I’m an officer, now I’m in control of talking to people and

doing things with people [uh huh] and uh, I stayed an officer in that guild for probably six to

seven months [mhmm] and uh, the issue was that I knew I could do better, because I was, by this

point, far and beyond the top damage dealer in the guild and um, a few people I had ended up

kicking out of the guild for bad attitudes had went on to higher ranking guilds than Goof Troop

[yeah] and succeeded [yeah] when I’m like “hey, I know I’m a better player than them” [right] I

know I’m so much of a better player than them I kicked them out *laughs*

Jake: Right, right *laughs*

Ben: So, now I see them in the city, and they’re wearing better gear than I am

Jake: Right, so what impact did that have?

Ben: Yeah, it was frustrating, it was very frustrating, because I knew they were not a nice person

and not a good player *both laugh*

Jake: And they had better gear

Ben: And they had better gear than I did

Jake: Yeah

Ben: So a stranger walking around, they’re going to look at him and be envious of, more envious

of him than of me, and I mean it was just like, it was grating. [hm] Um, and that was actually

when I ended up taking my first break for school. That was when I started um, you know I really

needed some time for school , so I took that break [mhmm] and uh, came back, and was like

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“hey,” I told the guild leader, “hey, I’ve already been gone for three months, so my gear was

behind, because it had been three months where everyone else was getting gear and I hadn’t

been, um, my gear’s behind, but at the same time, I know you still want me to be an officer, but I

think I’m going to try to shoot for something higher, because you lived for three months without

me, you know it’s not going to be the end of the world if I move on ,” [ yeah] and at that point I

had contacted the four people, the, or the three who had moved into Myrmidons, which was um,

their character names were Birdsy, Grimberg, and MamaPajama, [mhmm], their real names are

Brad, Matt, and Cassandra, but anyways, they moved on to Myrmidons, and I was like “hey, I

want to move up, I know Myrmidons is higher” Myrmidons I think was like a number 4 rank on

the server [mhmm] and Goof Troop was like 17th , so it was a big jump up, but I’m like “hey,

look, I want to move up, we played together for a year and a half, you guys know me” All three

of them vouched for me , so all four of us were together again [uh huh] And uh, I joined the

guild, and like two minutes later, they’re like, “hey, look, we’re going to test you out, put on

your gear, we’re going into Icy Sea,” which was, at the point, the current raid tier, like *smacks

hands together*that was the current thing, that was the hardest, that was what everyone was good

was doing, and they threw me in there [*haha*] to a boss I had never done and then they made

me tank, so I was on the front line , [oh yeah haha] and I was completely confused, I had no idea

what I was doing, but we killed the boss in one shot, and they gave me gear, and I was like “well

I guess I’m here now” hahahaha [yeah] They were like “no, you did alright for your gear, so

here, take these bracers, we’re going to get you geared up, we’ll see how you do.” And I stayed

with them all the way up through the end of um, Wrath of the Liche King [mhmm] which was

another couple months, and uh, through them I quickly geared up, um, I started the legendary

quest where I got that legendary mount I mentioned, [mhmm] um, I became probably the third

ranking tank , which is—um, at the point there were two different raid difficulties, there were 10-

man and 25-man [mhmm] uh, 10-mean you needed two tanks per 10-man group, 25-mean you

wanted three tanks total. So, I would tank, I would main tank one of the 10-man’s and then I

would be the third tank in the 25-man, and I was also one of the top three or four DPS, when I

would switch, because I would either do, because there wasn’t always a third tank required, so

sometimes I would switch to DPS on the fights where only two tanks were required [mhmm] So

I was one of the top tanks and one of the top DPS, but not the top [okay] which um, I thought

was important because I whenever, I kind of figured out after playing that when you’re the

absolute top in your guild, that’s, when you’re top one or two, that’s when the pressure to move

up a step really starts to show, cause you feel like you’re kinda carrying people through things,

you’re like “ugh, look at these guys, they’re doing terrible, like, oh my god, I wish I was with

players that could keep up with me” [mhmm] And eventually that grates on you enough that you

bounce, and you go with players that can keep up with you. Um, but that wasn’t happening

[mhmm] cause you know , there were a few players, there were a lot of players I was better than,

but there were a few that were very good in my guild and we kinda stayed with each other,

including, um, the three players that had moved up from . And, you know, we had fun, we got

through some heroic content. I remember that I got very badly yelled at by one of my neighbors

when we killed the final boss in the expansion, [uh huh] because we killed the final boss in the

expansion [haha], because it was like two in the morning and we had been working on it for like

two months, and, actually, I might, I have a picture of it, I think it’s on facebook actually, maybe

not though, but there’s a picture of us on the internet having killed that boss, we did a group

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picture, [mhmm] we were like “hey, group up, let’s get around this body, of this dead boss and

take a picture,” and we were so happy, it was like, it was really fun.

Jake: so two months of work

Ben: yeah

Jake: so what does that work consist of? what are you doing the whole time?

Ben: Dying. Dying, wiping.

Jake: So you’re running that same [yup] instance

Ben: Every week, every Tuesday it resets. Every Tuesday it reset, and we come back in there and

we’d kill the same bosses we did before to get the gear to help gear up, cause, there’s loot tables .

[mhmm] I wish I knew how skilled the other players you were talking to, so I wouldn’t cover

things three times for you but

Jake: No, it’s okay, it’s actually, I think hearing stuff again is still helpful even if I have some

idea of what you’re talking about

Ben: Okay, so this is an addon called Atlas Loot, it’s an addon that I downloaded that helps tell

me all the loot that every boss drops

Jake: So, when you say it resets, that means, you can [every boss] do each boss again [yes] so

you can only do each boss once a week [once a week, yes] So every week you would go through

[yes] and do all the bosses [yup]

Ben: In fact I’m going to pull it up right now, so, this was Wrath of the Liche King, so, I came in

during the very beginning of Wrath of the Liche King, and Wrath of Liche King was I think a

three year expansion [okay] and then there was Cataclysm, and then the expansion that’s ending

right now is Mists of Pandaria [mhm] So this was at the very end of Wrath of the Liche King,

and the raid that I’m talking about was Ice Crown Citadel, ICC, so, this is the list of bosses from

ICC, Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, blah blah blah blah blah, there’s 12 of them [okay]

So, the Liche King is the final boss, and this is his loot table, but you can see the loot tables for

all of these bosses is fairly extensive [yup] um, some of them have more, some of them have less

[mhmm] but um, the thing is only 2 items on ten-man and four items on 25-man would drop, so

Jake: For everyone to share

Ben: Yes, so here’s your loot table, well only these four items dropped this week [uh huh] oh,

and don’t forget, this cloak, there’s six people who need it, so hahaha

Jake: So you need to

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Ben: Do it, a lot

Jake: Yeah several times

Ben: As many bosses as you can every week that you can. [mhmm] the thing is, these bosses are

hard [yeah]. Now the world firsts guilds, they’ll clear the whole raid on normal mode. The,

there’s, there’s four modes now, but back then there was normal and heroic. They would clear

the whole normal mode in a week or two [mhmm]. Normally the top hardcore guilds in the world

would clear it in one week. But then heroic is significantly harder, and that’s when they might

only kill one heroic boss in a week

Jake: So what is actually different in heroic

Ben: There’s added abilities, the hit point pools increase, damage done increases. And those are

the main ones, but the added ability, there’s normally one very difficult to execute um, added

ability, so

Jake: Meaning the boss has an ability

Ben: that he didn’t have before

Jake: That he didn’t have before, and

Ben: Exactly, so a good example would be, Dragonsoul. Okay, so the first boss here is Morcock,

he’s a big giant golem dude [mhmm] and he has 4 abilities, nothing, 4-5 abilities, nothing too

difficult to deal with, um, this is another addon that I have that explains each of the boss’s

abilities , so, um, here’s a picture of Morcock, just a big golum dude [yup] uh, he’s got a

reasonably sized loot table, and he’s got these abilities. He’s got a stomp, um, he puts a debuff on

the tank that basically makes the tank take more damage, so you have to swap tanks [oh okay]

because the debuff is specific to him, he’s gonna do, after like three stacks you’re taking 30%

more damage, the healers have to work 30% harder, so you switch and the debuff might have a

24 second timer, [okay] so after 24 seconds it falls off, yeah, the other guy probably has three

stacks at this point so you switch back [uh huh] Not too hard to deal with, all it requires is a

taunt, which is to change the bosses attention from one tank to the other [okay] uh, Resontating

Crystal, so he drops a crystal on the ground, um that explodes after 12 seconds doing massive

shadow damage, and it’s split between three random players, but if there’s no players there, it

hits everyone, so what you do is you’ll put three players in there and put a shield on them, and

they’ll tank that damage, [okay] it’ll hit them hard but it won’t kill them, mhmm, meanwhile like

say if those three players weren’t there it might kill everyone hahaha [yeah] so you specify, “you

three people go over here, you three people go over here, grab these crystals” all good. Um,

Furious, just at 20% remaining health he gets stronger [mhmm] and uh he does like an

earthquake thing every 25 seconds, which you have to run away from him because he’s going to

stomp on the ground and do big earthquake damage. That’s normal mode. [okay] Heroic mode,

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after, at 90% health, so after you’ve done 10% of his health in damage, he splits into two [haha]

which do exactly the same thing as normal mode, so now you have to do the normal mode fight

twice at the same time [oh man] which requires the tanks switching with each other without

getting them too close, because if they got too close, they would do a large amount of additional

damage because they were close together [mhmm] so you had to spread each other out so far that

the healers could barely heal both groups, so you had to split the healers too [okay] and then, so

you’d have five men on this guy, five men on this guy, and then they would have to switch,

which you could imagine would cause some problems [yeah, yeah] that’s the, that’s the

difference between normal and heroic mode [yeah] and they all do more damage and have higher

health pools. [right] So it’s a lot harder. [a lot harder, yeah]. Now, do that for every single boss in

the raid. Some bosses even have completely additional modes, like the final boss especially in

the one raid, you would do the fight, the heroic version of the fight had two additional abilities

during the fight, and then when you killed it, he came back haha, [yeah] as a completely different

fight with like 6 new abilities [whoa] So heroic is significantly harder [yeah] so you might go

through your normal mode and kill all 12 bosses, but on heroic, that takes some time, you know.

some people have this misconception that if you go into WoW you can pretty much just kill

whatever’s in there once you get like, “oh, you’re level 90? okay now you can kill everything

that’s level 90” Even with an extremely coordinated group of extremely skilled people, your

chance of success is fairly low hahaha [yeah] until you really know what you’re doing, until

you’ve memorized every aspect of the boss’s abilities, until you’ve memorized every way you

have to deal with the boss’s abilities [mhmm] so for instance, going into to that heroic mode

where it spawns two of them if you weren’t expecting that , first of all, now you’re panicking

cause you have no idea what’s going on [yeah. right] so, and then, okay so you probably dies that

time. Alright. Everyone rezes, comes back into the raid. Alright, let’s do this again. Do it again.

Now you’re expecting there to be two of them [yeah] except that you don’t know that you have

to split them apart. Well, it might take you three or four more deaths to figure that out. So now

that’s an hour and a half of your time [mhmm] just spent dying and coming back [mhmm].

Alright, now you figure out that you have to spread them apart, oh got they still have all the same

abilities, [mhmm] and then you start dying to this or dying to that, because oh wait, now this

healer can’t keep up with five people at once, how do we deal with that? hahaha

Jake: Yeah, so it’s kind of like a problem solving [it is], awareness

Ben: Which is why, I think the biggest misconception is that a lot of people who play WoW are

the nerds that are hiding in their closet, and there are a ton of people who fit that description that

play WoW, but as far as your high ranking players go. *dad walks though* what’s up dad? *dad

says hello* As far as your high ranking players go, you’ll find they’re not those people. The most

successful group I was ever with had two doctors—like medical doctors—three engineers, a

dentist, um , a war vet who was an engineer in the military. You know, these are intelligent

people [yeah] because in order to figure out these strategies and to execute them repeatedly,

you’re not going to find your twelve-year-old kids—they’re not going to be able to do it. Your

highest ranking guilds are extremely intelligent people who are skilled in real life and out, and

they have careers that, you know they make good money, [yeah] this happens to be their hobby

ha [yeah] and they’re very good at it. yeah so that’s what you’ll find with the heroic bosses,

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they’re difficult, they a lot of strategy, a lot of coordination, you will not find a raiding guild that

is not using some type of voice over internet protocol type thing [mhmm]

Jake: Cause you just need that

Ben: You need it, if you can’t talk to somebody, you’re dead. [yeah]. Even the highest ranking

guilds in the world, they cannot do a fight without being able to talk. [yeah] For stuff like, like

the tank debuffs I was taking about, he’s going to get hit, you know after he gets three stacks he

needs to call, he says, “Hey! taunt, I need to get out of here” Okay, not the other tank knows he

has to taunt and he comes in [yeah]. Especially when things go wrong —if things are going, if

everything’s going right, everything’s going as planned, you can kind of, you can of half-ass

your way through it without talking [yeah] but if you’re doing a new fight, or you’re doing

something where things can go wrong really quickly you can not do it without being able to talk

to everyone in the raid.

Jake: Yeah. So when you’re in a raid like that and all that’s going on, what does it feel like?

Ben: It’s really intense, because these fights-that’s another thing—these fights, the longest one’s

with go 15-16 minuets [yeah] and you’re a hundred percent concentrated [yeah] for those 15-16

minutes , you cannot think of anything other than spell, spell, spell, do this, do this, do that, oh

go this is happening, okay next part of the fight, now I’ve gotta go over here, um, absolutely

insane [mhm] having to focus on everything that you’re doing, making sure you’re using the

right spells for the right situation, and this point, a lot of people consider that damage dealing is

the easiest of the professions, or of the roles, there’s tanking, healing, and damage dealing or

damage per second, DPS. DPS is the easiest because you have a set rotation: do these abilities in

this order, repeat. [yeah]. Um *starts typing* sorry they are yelling at me. [oh] haha. Do these

abilities in this order, repeat. [yeah] And how good you are as a DPS is purely based on how well

you repeat that list of abilities when things are going crazy around you. [yeah] The people

assigned to deal with the crazy stuff are generally the tanks, who have to control the MOBs that

are running around, and the healers who have to make sure nobody dies from it [right] um,

hahaha, so yeah, that’s

Jake: So you’ve done tanking and DPS?

Ben: I’ve done all three of them. I’ve actually done all three of them at a high level [okay] That’s

what I was saying to you, like if you need to talk to someone about pretty much anything in

WoW, I’m probably your guy.

Jake: You’ve seen all the angles.

Ben: I’ve played every class to a high level on a high level basis, and I’ve done every role on a

high level basis, because healing for a priest and healing for a paladin are totally different. [huh].

No spells are the same. [uh huh] So you have to play them completely differently. That’s why

I’m such a good player and why I personally am in high demand because all the best players

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have played all the classes [mm] have played all the roles, which means, and they’ve also done

PvE and PvP—I’ve only talked to you about PvE which is players versus environment, is verse a

pre-programmed fight, [right] PvP, player verse player *makes gesture*

Jake: It’s like a whole other game?

Ben: Oh yeah. There’s strategy involved, but it’s not a repetitive, predictable strategy, it’s not

like you can go “okay what is the boss going to do when we do this.” [yeah] “K, now I know

what I do and don’t do” [right] PvP, what is player going to do when I do this? It’s *put’s hands

in air in gesture of not-knowing*

Jake: You don’t know

Ben: I have no idea hahahaha

J Right, yeah, it’s very different.

Ben: It’s completely different. So I’ve done every role, every class, both PvP and PvE. [mhmm]

To do that at a maximum level is going to take, probably *voices of party members start coming

through his headphones (?)*I suppose I can set this so that, well no, I won’t, actually I’ll avoid

setting this to my speakers cause right now they’re probably all just going to jump on and troll

me. [okay] But , eventually I will. So, to do all that, you’re looking at at least probably 200 days

played [mhmm] so, someone has to play five thousand hours of WoW minimum, to be that good

[mhmm] hahaha

Jake: That’s a lot yeah

Ben: So, if you can say that you’ve done that, now you’re in high demand, cause people know

that no matter what role they put you in, whatever situation they put you in, your gear maybe

might not be quite up to spec

Jake: but you know what to do

Ben: But you’re gonna know what to do, you’re going to be able to pick up fights, you’re going

to be able to pick up strategies, pick up roles, [mhmm] and run with it [yeah] So, that’s kinda

where that all comes in [yeah] and uh, it’s just, haha, I dunno, it’s a lot of fun, but when you’re in

there with that fight, and honestly on this character I have 12, 24, 36, 48, probably 50 useful

abilities [wow] so any moment in a fight, I have to know which one of these 50 things *laughing

while he says this* [wow] is the best one for that moment, [yeah] Now as a DPS, it’s probably

limited to we’ll say...depending on your class. A lot of arcane mages get a lot of shit, their

rotation’ s only three abilities, it only takes three buttons to do the best damage as a mage. [mhm]

My warrior has a 38 priority, list, a 38 step priority list

Jake: Wow, so you would go through all

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Ben: Yeah, it’s not even, and because I say priority

Jake: It’s not just an order, it’s depending on

Ben: It’s depending on the situation, it’s depending on whether this has proc’d, its depending on

whether I have this buff or not, I have to do this, I have to do this, there’s thirty eight different

situations I could be in hahahaha.

Jake: Yeah, so you’re keeping track of—

Ben: Yeah, I have to keep track of them. And the global cooldown is, you know, say a second

long, it’s actually a second and a half but with haste it’ll decrease the global cooldown down to a

minimum of a second, so if you have a lot of haste, you have to analyze the situation, read your

buffs, read your debuffs, read what you’re doing, and then use the right ability every second.

[mhmm] Once a second.

Jake: So once a second you are making a decision.

Ben: Yeah. Okay, so I’m reading it, alright I got this buff up, I got, you know a Raging Blow

proc, and I have Colossal Smash debuff on the boss. [uh huh]. Raging Blow just came off

cooldown, okay, this oh, and I’m rolling, I have three buffs up that are increasing my strength, so

I really, this is a great time, I’m going to use Raging Blow, it’s a hard hitting ability, I’m going to

use it right now. K, Raging Blow, good, okay, but that used one of my buffs, and now two of my

debuffs are running out, should I use, I have, should I use Raging Blow again because I still have

one more proc of it, or should I wait until I can get Colossal Smash back up and use Blood Thirst

to build my rage so that I can use Raging Blow, because Raging Blow takes 10 rage to use. So

should I pool my resources and wait until I have a better time that’s going to do more damage, or

should I just go ahead and dump it all into this next attack and then hope that before I have full

resources I can get another Raging Blow proc and use it again. So basically is it best to use it

right now, is the situation optimal? The first Raging Blow proc situation was optimal, absolutely,

very clear [yeah] I needed to use it. Second one I can use it, the situation is not optimal [okay].

So the question is whether I wait for an optimal situation, or I use it and hope that it comes back

up before the next optimal situation [mhmm] hahahahaha

Jake: And you make that decision in a second

Ben: And I have one second to make that decision [yeah] across eight abilities [yeah]. Every

single one of those abilities I have to decide whether that’s the right one to use for that situation

or not , and I only have a second to do that decision in total haha

Jake: Uh huh, so you’re just making decision after decision

Ben: Yeah, decision, decision for 16 minutes. Once a second for 16 minutes

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Jake: wow

Ben: hahahahaha So, and that’s why I hate people who think that you can just come in here and

Jake: mash keys

Ben: Because to be good, you have to be, you have to have a very quick, very quick thinking,

think quick on your feet, you have to know what’s going on, you have to understand the fight ,

[mhmm]. Um, so for instance, I might, cause not only do I have all the abilities to worry about.

Same exact situation: first hit’s optimal, second hit’s not optimal...but I know that there’s going

to be a 10 second down period in the fight, in the next second or two, [mhmm] like the boss is

either going to run to this side of the room or something else is going to happen that I have to go

take care of, [yeah] like some adds might spawn and I might have to go kill those before I get

back on the boss [mhm] um, so it’s going to be, the whole, for doing damage I know the next 10

seconds are not going to be optimal. Even if I know that if I could have stayed on the boss it was

a bad idea to use raging blow because it’s not optimal, now it’s a good idea to use it because I’m

not going to have any chance to use it for the next ten seconds

Jake: Yeah, okay.

Ben: So, use it, again.

Jake: And that’s the awareness of what’s happening.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. So you have to have awareness of all your abilities, awareness of all your

buffs, awareness of all your debuffs, awareness of what the boss is doing, [mhmm] awareness of

what people around you are doing, because other people can cast buffs on you or debuff the boss

[right] heh heh heh [right] And again, spread it over eight abilities once a second

Jake: And spread over a 16 minute fight, that’s going to be the difference between someone with

a high DPS and someone with a lower DPS, [exactly] is the person who’s making really optimal

decisions every time [yep] versus someone who’s sometimes making the best decisions

sometimes making substandard decisions

Ben: And you’ll see that, it is huge *starts typing * They’re asking me, I’ll kind of read it so you

can hear,

Jake: sure

Ben: they’re asking me if I can tank this, basically, this is not my main character, at least it

wasn’t, it’s going to be now, um, they’re asking me if I can tank it, my basic answer is: no.

There’s no way. Regardless of skill, I do not have a gear level that will make me capable of

tanking this content . The boss will hit me way too hard [uh huh]. So basically what I told them

is “no, there’s no way I can tank it, um I can DPS it and you guys can carry me because my gear

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is still way too low” [yeah] but they have enough DPS to overcome my lacking DPS [yeah] that

way, I’ll be able to be in the raid, and I’ll get experience with the bosses, and I’ll get gear that

drops form the bosses, but I’m telling them, if they try to make me tank, we’re not going to be

able to kill bosses hahahaha

Jake: Yeah. So are you still in the Myrmidons now?

Ben: No, this, at the end of, at the end of Wrath, we started up in Cataclysm, and Myrmidons

was, we had *typing to guild* they’re being dicks right now haha. Um, we lost our raid leader,

real name Johnny, um, in fact I still have him on here, he was online just a half hour ago. Um, 38

minutes ago he was online. Oh my god stop asking me questions *typing* You need to ask me

not them haha

Jake: *laughs*

Ben: Um, he left. He went to uh this server that I’m on right now. He left because the server was

not very high ranking [mhmm] You kinda have your guild that are high ranking or not high

ranking, and then your servers which are high ranking or not high ranking. Your high ranking

servers have on average a higher skilled player base. So he said “Look, this isn’t, this isn’t gonna

work” [mhmm] *typing* “This isn’t going to work because I’m not going to be able to reach the

skill level that I want to reach without, um, moving to a different server, so I’m going to move to

a different server, and sorry guys, but uh,” Dude I know more than you about this game, stop

telling me what to do” *types* haha, um. He’s telling me to change from fury to arms, ever class

has three specs, they can be arms, fury—for warrior it’s arms, fury, or prot, arms is DPS, fury is

DPS, protection is tanking. Right now I’m fury which does well at higher gear levels but does

poorly at low gear levels. He’s telling me that my gear level is too low to do fury, and that I

should back arms to do more DPS. I’m telling him that I know what I’m doing, and that right

now I know my gear level’s right on the edge, and I could pick either or, [mhmm] knowing that

as I get higher gear fury is going to become better, I want to, if I’m going to get back in the

groove, I’m going to get back in the groove with the spec that’s going to be what

Jake: what you’re going to use

Ben: What I’m going to be using. So I’m telling him to shut up and let me do what I’m doing

hahah [yeah] Because he doesn’t know nearly as much as I do about warriors. [uh huh].

Anyways, so he left, he was what held, he was a very skilled player both PvP and PvE, the thing

was, even if you were kind of equal to someone in PvP, it’s hard for you to be, to have that

feeling I talked about, like “I’m better than these guys, I want to move forward”. Very hard to

have that around with him, because if you dueled him, he would wipe the floor with you haha, so

you knew that in at least some regard that he was better than you and that it was probably still a

good idea to follow this guy, into battle kind of [yeah]. But he left, he changed servers. With him

gone, the guild leader tried to become the raid leader-normally those are different people. The

guild leader might take care of guild affairs, but the raid leader is the guy who’s talking and

telling people what to do during a fight [okay]. He comes up with the strategies, he comes up and

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says okay—like when I was telling you that crystal, you need three people to stack there—he’s

going to make the decision, the raid leader will make the decision which three people [okay]

Guild leader is probably just one of the people . [yeah] Um, yeah, so raid leader left, we started

trying to do the early Cataclysm raids, the first level of raids in Cataclysm, couldn’t do it [mm]

having a lot of problems, weren’t able to do damage, you know enough damage, our healing it

was just...another thing that you’ll find with WoW is that when things just aren’t working, it’s

very hard to put a finger on what’s not working, it just doesn’t, it just doesn’t, you don’t know

why, it just doesn’t. [huh]. And you could do it again with different people, and all of the

numbers will look the same, but for some reason this time it worked [hm] hahahah

Jake: That’s interesting

Ben: And I haven’t been able to figure it out. And this guy’s playing a guitar. now this is

interesting. This guitar was only available—sorry to go off track

Jake: That’s okay

Ben: That guitar that he was playing there was only available for people who played Burning

Crusade, so that tells me that he’s been playing at least 6 years. [mm] You can’t get it anymore.

You couldn’t get it five years ago. So, like, that’s, like I was talking to you about gear

Jake: yeah, as little markers of

Ben: Yeah, that, as soon as I heard that noise and saw it I was like “oh, okay, this guy’s been

playing for six years, so he’s probably pretty good” hahaha

Jake: Yeah, interesting

Ben: Little markers like that.

Jake: Yeah

Ben: hahaha, [haha] anyways, so it wasn’t falling apart, so what ended up happening was the few

people that were in that guild Myrmidons that were keeping up with me, really. Think of it kind

of like cream of the crop, we, like the top ten or so of us who had decided, who had always kind

of stayed in Myrmidons because the raid leader was there and the raid leader was really good

[mhmm] ended up saying look, this isn’t working, we’re gonna follow him, [yeah]. We followed

him, we made our own guild, he was the raid leader and the guild leader, [uh huh] and I played

with that guild all the way through Cataclysm. That guild, we had very skilled players, we had

the top 10 players from Myrmidons, we ended up being a 10 man guild, so we didn’t do 25-

mans, which hurt us because it meant we couldn’t get the extra gear, [mhmm] but still we were

very good players, we were top 2 or 3 on the server, um top 1% of the player base.

Jake: How are players ranked? Like how do you know who’s the top

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Ben: Um mostly it’s

Jake: Does the game it’s self calculate that?

Ben: No, but mostly you go to WoW progress .com . *he pulls up the site* So you can see that

the top guild in the world right now is Method, and uh, and actually this is the top guild on my

current server, 16, Whatever We’re Awesome [yeah]. But they were actually, they were top 3

really, they’re top three in the U.S. they’re top 16 in the world.

Jake: Okay, so how is this list compiled? Like who does it and what is it based on?

Ben: You submit it, and trust me, all of the high ranking guilds in the world, any guild who

actually does serious raiding is gonna submit their information and they’re gonna, cause they

want the credit, they want to attract players

Jake: So they are kinda submitting raw data that is then kinda

Ben: Pretty much, um, think of it almost like a uh, a resume. Like, he look at all these bosses we

killed, and here’s the time that, look, see, this is the top guild in the world, they have videos of

every one of their kills, [mhmm] um rankings, so they were first in the West, first in the EU, first

in the Realm

Jake: Okay, so you’re sort of, everyone’s making a submission and then someone else is

basically looking at all the information and ranking them

Ben: Yeah, it’s all automated, but yeah, it all looks at it and ranks it, so, um, so the thing was

realms. Okay, so here’s some of the realms I play on. I play on Bleeding Hollow, second ranked

in the world, I play on Tichondrius, 19th ranked in the world, top in PvP though, and

Magtheridon 22nd ranked in the world. Um, the reason I play on these guilds is because they’re

in the top 25 in the world and they fit my timezone , so I’m not going to have people asking if I

can raid at like two in the morning [yeah] you know if that’s a California server that’s a problem.

Jake: So wait a realm is a server or a guild?

Ben: Realm is a server [okay] so these are all different servers [okay] um, the server that I used

to play on, it has been coming up on rankings, 77, [mhmm] but when I played on it, this was my

first server, when I played on it was like 200 something in ranking, yeah, so it was bad [yeah]

there were not good players on there, it did not have a good reputation, [ye ah] so we all server

transferred to a new server that had a good reputation, good players, good guilds, and we were

one of the top, um, so Magtheridon is 22nd ranked, and see even right now, the guild I’m in right

now, even without me they’re still 6th ranked on the server, [yeah] so they’re 6th ranked on a

22nd ranked server, honestly that pretty much means they’re probably, they’re about top 2%

[mm] but when I was with that guild of players in Cataclysm, which included the three players

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that left for Raiders of Renown with me, all three of them we with that 10-man that sectioned off

[yeah] we were top 2 or 3 on the server and we were, basically we had, not only, we had credit,

we didn’t have to recruit, we had people, like if we needed one spot, like a guy had to quit for

school or something, we would have people come to us [yeah] people would come to our— and

also all these high ranking guilds also have websites, um even Ecstatic Strike has a website

[yeah] um, so they would come to us, they would email us, they’d say “hey, I’m looking to

transfer—I will transfer servers, I will pay $25 [mhm] for the right to be with your guild and kill

bosses with you” hahaha [right, right]. Um, cause we were high ranking, and, but we were

friends too. We had, most guilds have a loot system, which is some kind of system for who gets

what loot [right]. We didn’t have one. We were all friends, we played with each other for a long,

at this point, by the end of Cataclysm we had played with each other somewhere between 3, or

like 2 and 3 years. We just talked about it “oh look, this stuff dropped, did you need that? Did

you need that? Okay here” [yeah] you know, and um, that worked all the way through Cataclysm

. Unfortunately the last raid in Cataclysm was very bland. [mm] It was boring, it wasn’t that

interesting, it was hard just for the sake of being hard. Like it wasn’t, um—there’s two kinds of

difficult bosses in WoW. There’s bosses that are difficult because they’re difficult to do right

[mhmm] and there’s bosses that are difficult because their numbers are so big [yeah] they hit you

so hard, [yeah] they have such high health [uh huh], they’re boring [yeah] but still hard just

because of raw numbers [right]. Most of that raid was boring because of raw numbers haha

[okay] And it was the last raid in the expansion, and the last raid in an expansion normally has to

last the longest. So there’s patches throughout an expansion, [mhmm] probably somewhere in

the neighborhood of ten to a dozen patches, we’ll say somewhere between 3 and 5 content

patches which introduce new raids [okay] the last patch in an expansion has to be good, because

the, the difference between the last patch and then the next expansion is usually a substantial

amount of time, somewhere in the neighborhood of

Jake: Because they stop coming out with

Ben: Yeah, somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 months to a year [okay]. Eight months of a

boring raid—it didn’t happen, [yeah]to be frank. Um, essentially people logged, you know, like

“hey, I’ll come back for the next expansion, but I’m not re-running this stupid boring raid every

week, for 8 months [right haha] There’s no point [yeah] We’d already beat it [yeah] uh, we hit a

wall on a fight that was badly done, we had already done all the normal content and we’d got

through most of the heroic content, there were two fights left. The one that we were stuck on was

one that um, in its original form, was literally mathematically impossible[hm] was proven to be

mathematically impossible

Jake: Wow, haha

Ben: You’d think that testing would prevent something like this, but you have to realize that

Blizzard doesn’t have players good enough [uh huh] to beat the highest level heroic content

[yeah]. The only people who are good enough to beat it are the top guilds in the world [right] So,

and that’s another thing—WoW is hard at the highest levels hahaha so they can’t test it. It, the

original version of it was proven to be mathematically impossible. [hm] You could not ,

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theoretically, beat that fight. So they nerfed it and re-tuned it a little bit, but it still required you

to have a very very specific group of classes because the issue you’ll see—there’s balance, which

um, every, um, every class, you can’t get the balance on the damage to be absolutely perfect,

you’re going to have classes that do more and less damage [mm] so like right now the current

DPS rankings, *shows a graph online* maximum DPS rankings, so you can see the highest:

Frost Mage does the most DPS in the game right now. Theoretically their highest DPS would be

um, 456,000 [mhmm]. Unholy does the least, their theoretical highest DPS would be 360,000.

So, even with the nerf, even with the changes, [mhmm] you might have had to, if you were going

to beat that fight, you might have only been able to take the top five or six specs [uh huh] If you

didn’t have those, you couldn’t beat the fight,

Jake: You just wouldn’t

Ben: it wasn’t possible [mhmm] We didn’t have em, because we were just 10 guys who were

friends, [yeah] so we basically said “Well, I’ll see you next expansion guys [hahaha] it’s time for

a break, because this isn’t happening” [yeah] and most of the guys didn’t come back [mm] so,

that was when I changed to my guild that I’m currently in . This expansion I’ve been very hit or

miss. I’ve taken off for school

Jake: So is, so Mists of Pandaria is the new expansion. So that was

Ben: yeah, Mists of Pandaeria

Jake: So people stopped playing, and when this came out you started playing again

Ben: I started playing

Jake: A lot of other people didn’t

Ben: A lot of other people didn’t

Jake: Okay. And it’s been more on and off you said?

Ben: For me it’s been more on and off because I’ve been kind of searching for a group that, you

know, finding and being with a guild, and spending, you know, you’re spending, if you’re

raiding with someone between 12 and I’ve seen people raid up to 40 hours a week, so you’re

spending a lot of time with these people

Jake: How much time have you spent a different points in your

Ben: Um, I’ve spent between 9 and 24 hours a week *starts talking to someone over voice chat*

Ben: This is, that’s Grimberg¸as you might remember, is the only remaining of the 4 of us who

came out to play [okay] So, in fact he’s in my group right now.

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Jake: So are you guys getting ready to do a

Ben: Yeah, the problem we’re running into right now is we’re missing a lot of people

Jake: Okay

Ben: But we have 9, we need one more. So they’re talking about boss stuff [mhmm] They’re

talking about one of the fights that’s a little bit difficult hahaha um, as you can see hahah

Jake: yeah yeah hahah

Ben: He’s a tank, so he gets hit especially hard

Jake: So he gets the most fun, yeah

Ben: hahaha um, but yeah, so, I’ve been on and off, I would quit for three months for school, I’d

come back, I kinda like mrrrr, I’d half ass it, but [yeah] but really it wasn’t until, uh, oh actually

this expansion 2 years old, that’s right, because I started dating Beth two years ago

hruuuh...okay, um...hahahaha

Jake: Mists of Pandaria’s two years old?

Ben: And there’s a new expansion coming out.

Jake: Okay

Ben: It should be two years old

Jake: So for the last two years you really haven’t gotten in a groove, like a guild that’s really

been

Ben: Not until, not until the last um, after, over the summer, I got with this group, which is

Ecstatic Strike, [okay] and I quickly, I was healing actually, on my paladin for that, and I quickly

became one of their high ranking people , and there are people who are in this guild who are

better than me. Honestly, uh, two or three of the top ranking players in this guild are uh world

first quality players, like they’re absolutely insane, they’re doing retarded amounts of damage

that I cannot fathom how they manage to do haha, [okay] but because of that, I am comfortable

in this guild [yeah], because there’s that

Jake: You don’t have an itch to get into a better guild

Ben: Yeah, because I know there are players here who are better than me [yeah] um, so basically

this is where I’ve been, and I feel bad, really bad, because they relied on me really heavily as a

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healer, but I had to quit for school [yeah haha] haha, ummm, soooo I’m just coming back now

after schools over and...yeaaaah I feel really bad heh heh heh [haha] but, they’ll deal with it

heheeh [yeah]

Jake: So it seems like you, you tend to have a pretty comfortable, clear sense of when you need

to stop for school [oh yeah] and when you can play, and it just doesn’t seem like that has been a

conflict for you.

Ben: No, and I can see it being a conflict for other people haha I don’t know if you’ve run into

that or not but, in your, all I’m doing right now is clearing out my inventory a little bit

Jake: You mentioned right at the beginning that you said that you thought that this game has

addicting qualities and I was wondering what you meant by that, or what qualities you were

referring to.

Ben: When you first log on, um, you kinda, you don’t really know what to do [mm]. Well, I

could do daily quests, but, those are boring, [mm] you know. Yeah you get gold for em, you get

little tokens, but the reality is you don’t really need them, gold’s pretty easy to get [yeah] so, naw

that sounds boring, I don’t want to do that. We’ll I could PvP, but my gear sucks, so I don’t want

to PvP I’ll just get my butt kicked. [mhmm] I can’t really raid because I’m not in a guild or

because my gear sucks, and blah ba blah blah blah. But once you get into it, you’re like, you’re

there, you’re there every day, you’re, um, hah, you’re spending money, you’re getting your

character ready for raid and um, you know you’ll spend a couple hours getting ready for raid.

Because I’ve been talking to you I’m now behind hahah because I need to go buy these flasks for

raid

Jake: So what else getting ready for raid involve?

Ben: Um, mostly just buying things that are temporary buffs. Like right now I am buying flasks,

they are 62, 68 each [yup]

Jake: So these are sold by other players?

Ben: Yup. Sold by, I’m buying right now Braystil’s flacks hahaha [okay haha] so he’s gonna get

this gold [yup] don’t really care because I have a ridiculously absolutely asinine amount of gold

so I’m just going to buy these from him, and I’ll buy enough for a couple days to that I don’t

have to heal with it hahahah *yells “I said nothing* to family members talking in the other

room* I’m about to get blamed for something

Jake: You’re aware of so many things at once

Ben: You have to. It’s, that’s actually, remember how we were talking about awareness?

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Jake: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I was referring to haha. So you said, that, you were just making a

comparison, like when you just started playing

Ben: Look, the whole guild, everyone who was in the raid just got owned *points to screen

where party member portraits are displayed*

Jake: Oh no haha

Ben: haha Don’t really know what they did, but it was a bad idea hahaha

Jake: So you just said something about when you start playing there’s not much you can do an

it’s a lot of choices aren’t that exciting

Ben: Well, when you log onto a level 90 character, a max level character [yeah] the choices are

basically raid or PvP . If your gear sucks, neither one of those is that enticing, cause you either

aren’t going to be able to raid or you’re going to get your butt kicked in PvP [mm] If you’re

leveling, that’s fun, because you get the excitement of leveling up but um, you know with me,

someone who has mostly max level characters, and I’ve leveled so many characters, so I’m not

really interested in leveling another one , immediately, uh, it can be very boring when you just

log on , but once you start raiding, you’ll all a sudden find, like, not only are you getting ready

for raid, but you’re also on four hours before raid doing dailys, doing this, doing that, doing

EVERYTHING for no reason other than, heh, um, that, you know, you’re now invested in the

game again , and you just get stuck in that , and even, once you’re raiding hardcore and things,

you find that even if your raid group, you know even if your raid groups stops you’ll go find

another one [yeah] rather than quitting [yeah] haha . And it’s just, you know, it’s hard not to say

that it has addictive qualities when you consider how much I’ve played, I mean , I’ve played and

absolutely insane amount of time, you know, a quarter of my life, when I have WoW available to

me I spend about a quarter of my life playing it, so [mhm] I mean I would think, I’m not sure

what the clinical definition of addictive is, but I would say that’s haha

Jake: There’s no agreement on it so haha

Ben: I would that’s, that’s following in the realm of it

Jake: Well one thing, one sort of um, uh, criterion that sometimes people include in the list is that

you know, distress when you stop playing—it sounds like—does that happen to you?

Ben: Oh it’s very stressful.

Jake: It is.

Ben: at first, at first, for like two weeks, [okay] then you’re like “oh wait, I have real life to deal

with” hahah

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Jake: What does the distress feel like?

Ben: Just like, “Ahhh, I should be doing my dailys to get my tokens, I should be raiding right

now, I’m gonna fall behind on my gear, I don’t want to fall behind on my gear, cause then it’s a

pain to get caught up, I don’t want to fall behind on players, I don’t want to fall behind on boss

strategies, like uhhhh god it’s going to be so hard to get caught up again “ I’m getting my butt

kicked right now. Please stop killing me. Oh I’m dead. *sigh* well I died *both laugh* It’s just

the urge to stay caught up on everything [yeah] is really important . [mhmm]. I don’t know,

that’s what I would say is probably the most addicting, the most, at least if you’re looking at it

like that, that’s probably the most obvious sign of addiction I would say, that the game presents

[mhmm]. Oh god, die die, people, die. And my screen, I guarantee, looks different than the other

screens you’ve seen, [mhmm] because of my addons that are installed, and it’s going to be like

that for every person, every single person is going to have a different [yeah] they have a

different feel, different things that they are comfortable with. I’m fairly comfortable with having

a lot of things on my screen [mhm] probably a leftover of um being a tank, which required the

highest amount of awareness [yeah] so after tanking I’m, you know, fairly comfortable with my

raid awareness and comfortable with having lots of things on my screen [mhmm] at the same

time. So right here I have my incoming heals, so I can see Call of Nature is healing me right now

Jake: So are you doing, are you doing the raid right now?

Ben: Yup, no I’m doing

Jake: Not just doing stuff to prepare

Ben: No, it’s kind of um, well, it depends if you want to call it preparing, it’s probably not a bad

idea to call it preparing, because what we’re doing right now is clearing out the, trash MOBs is

what they’re called, [mm mhmm] basically just clearing out all the little guys that hand around

the boss [mhmm] and almost every boss is going to have these [okay] Okay so they got up to

Dark Shaman, so this is the trash before Dark Shaman, so they killed a couple bosses last night

without me, which I expected [mhmm] Oh god, I’m getting raped, I’m dying, I’m dying, don’t

die, alright we’re good. Safety has been achieved. [haha] But yeah , this, this is kinda getting

ready. We gotta clear that side of the room, basically all this garbage we’ve got to kill. And I say

garbage, um, they can still easily kill you alone [mhmm] but because I’m in the group of right

now 9, it’s supposed to be 10 haha people, [yeah] I’m fairly secure in my ability to just go ahead

and go balls out on these guys [yeah] And you can see, you’ll see actually on the DPS meter,

which I have right up, right over here, that, this is me right here, this character, [mhmm] um, the

effects of having poor gear. [mm] It’s really, it’s really hard to explain to someone who hasn’t

played it how bad it is having poor gear. I’m, I have gear which is actually on, up to date with

this patch, it’s just not up to date, I just don’t have any gear from this patch, so I have gear from

the last patch, up to date, so far, and still, you can see this guy is doing um an enor—he’s doing 5

times my damage [yeah] because he has gear from this patch.

Jake: so as soon as you drop behind the curve a little bit you’re not even close to

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Ben: Not even remotely close to being able to keep up [uh huh] So the fact that they’re bringing

me along right now, I’m probably not going to do the whole raid with them, because eventually

my gear is going to become an issue regardless of how well I do in mechanics [yeah] so in this

carry situation, if you’re carrying someone who knows the fights, but has very low DPS, you’ll

normally assign them to do , to do the parts of the fights that require, um, some people will call

them “warm body” basically—”just run over there, go hit that lever, go do this stupid this over

here” not something that necessarily requires any damage, it just requires somebody to go over

and do it [right] so this way I won’t hurt their damage much because instead of sending someone

who does 130,00 or 330,000 DPS over there they’re going to send somebody that does 100,000

[right] and uh, you know , that doesn’t cause them any problems [right, right] but eventually

they’re just not going to be able to deal with it, they’re going to have to have somebody who

does more damage than me [mhmm] so

Jake: So I want to go back to something you said a minute ago, you were talking about like once

you start raiding, you get engaged, there’s a point where you cross over into some, some

different level of engagement, and you’re, you’re doing your 4 hours of prep, and um, I

wondering what that shift is, like what that’s about

Ben: It’s about keeping up. Like I said, you fall behind so quickly. [mhmm] So as soon as you

are caught up, so as soon as you are caught up, you have that desire not only to stay caught up

but get to the very bleeding edge [mm]. *starts concentrating on the game* um

Jake: Yeah, tell me if there are hairy moments where you need to just stop , or just stop talking,

don’t

Ben: No, honestly, the issue, the biggest issue that I have right now is that I have the event chat

muted, [okay] so... *turns on voice chat, starts talking to party, tells them he has to mute his mic*

So, um, basically, that’s, you’ll hear all kinds of shenanigans, [yeah] but I want to answer as

many questions as possible for you before I actually have to talk to them

Jake: Okay, well let me see, I’m just going to look over my, you’ve told me a lot of stuff so

Ben: there’s just trash between the bosses, it’s really only on the bosses that I’m going to need to

Jake: Yeah that’s fine, no problem. So which character are you playing right now?

Ben: Luka, it’s a warrior, yeah. typically, apparently there’s all kinds of studies on gender and

age and stuff of who...ooooh my god I will totally take that cloak. *typing to party* hahaha

alright hold on. Yeah I guess if I’m going to be tanking that’s off spec, but I can totally use it as

main spec to because it’s got mastery on it. But it’s a huge upgrade compared to my jankey 502.

Although did roll an 8. *long pause*Well they just gave it to me, so I just got a new cloak, so

that’s cool. I like new cloaks, new cloaks make me happy. heh heh. So they gave me a new cloak

over a guy, a guy rolled higher than me, but because they expect me to play more often they

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game it to me. [mhmm] They’re talking about getting rid of me so they don’t have to stop later

hehe [hahaha]

Jake: so what race is your character?

Ben: Undead.

Jake: Undead, okay.

Ben: You can see it better up here *displays character on screen*

Jake: Oh yeah okay

Ben: He’s wearing a mohawk right now. I’ve always wanted a Mohawk not really sure why

[hmhm]

Jake: So do you have a sense of your character as having a story or a personality or is it really

just you’re playing the game through that character strategiacally

Ben: Kind of, a little bit, not as much, in fact actually can I move these over here *wants to move

recorders*

Jake: oh yeah move them wherever you want, that’s your movement area

Ben: yeah

Jake: want me to move this up here

Ben: let me bundle my cables. If you can’t tell, I have one side of the desk clear but not the other

*there are stacks of items on the left side of the desk* hahah

Jake: yeah

Ben: yeah, he kinda does. I mean not as much as, um, people who are on RP servers, I don’t

know if you’ve talked to anyone who’s on an RP server

Jake: I haven’t

Ben: Um, they’re obviously, they’re going to have their, their answer to that question is going to

be yes, haha, you know? [right] that’s the whole reason that they’re on that server is that they

have a, their character has an identity [mm] *pause* I would say yes he does, but it’s, um, it’s

hard to explain it. I just, you kind of, I think you play a little differently depending on who

you’re, what character you’re on, just because, um, maybe something about how you as a person

developed while you were playing that character, I’m not really sure, but [hm] I’d say I do play

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all my characters a little differently, I might be a little more snarky on this character or

something haha but [huh] um it’s kind of hard to put a finger on exactly why

Jake: Huh, but, you have a, you have an experience of being a little different when you’re on

different characters

Ben: Yeah, because there’s, there’s really no tangible reason why I might like one character over

another sometimes [mm] but I find that I do [mhm] . I really enjoy—and it’s a combination I

found a lot of race and class and everything, and sometimes it just feels right. I had a mage that I

got all the way to level 90, so I had a max level mage [mhm] and uh, I hated it, and I kept

playing it thinking I was going to enjoy it, and I was gonna have fun, cause it was a really

combination as far as, it was going to do a lot of damage because goblins have a racial bonus,

and, um, you know I thought it was going to be a lot of fun and I, I just, I finally had to change it,

I paid twenty dollars to change it to undead [yeah] and uh, now I love it, that’s one of my

favorites [huh] just the race change, it totally—well I did a name change with the race change, so

I changed the name, changed the race, [mhmm] and it went from one of my, probably my least

favorite character to pry my favorite character, almost overnight [yeah] just cause it just felt right

[huh] and I don’t know why [yeah] umm, but, just something to do with the animations, cause

every race has different animations, and something to do just how the character played out. I had

a lot more fun [hm] so, hahaha.

Jake: Interesting

Ben: I don’t know

Jake: So what’s your experience of this character? Like how would you characterize what it feels

like to play this one?

Ben: Um, it’s intense, it’s my, I mean warriors are always melee, they’re always up in the fight,

so it’s, I think I probably get the most intense, as far as really pumped up playing this character,

because warriors, um, they have abilities called charge, so you literally charge across the

battlefield really quickly, and all their abilities are physical, they have no magical abilities, so I

just, I kinda get this feeling/image that when you’re in a fight, when you’re doing a boss, when

you’re doing really well. And for some reason knowing that you’re not doing a lot of damage

kind of nullifies that, like I don’t really feel very [hm] I don’t feel it as strongly. But when I’m

top DPS and I’m banging things out [hahaha] and I’m, you know, I’m on top of my game, and,

you know, a new add spawns and I’ll turn and charge, and hit a Raging Blow, and it crits, and it

completely destroys his health [mhm] and you just get really, really into it, and you feel really,

you know, an intense kind of satisfaction and it’s very visceral when I’m on this character doing

damage or as a tank really, because you can still, you still do damage as a tank just not as much

[yeah] um. It’s really just a strong, visceral feeling. It really kinda pumps you up. But it’s

completely different on my healer, because at that point my focus is on what abilities I’m using.

Like I was telling you, that priority system, like should I use it now, should I use it, [mhm]

when’s my dead time, blah blah blah blah. Totally different on healer [mm] because a healer,

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you have to save people. I’m watching, on a healer I’d be more watching this little box with

everyone’s life, and these colors, the reason they’re colored is because I have them colored by

class, so I know he’s a warrior, warlock, warrior, mage, hunter, death knight, paladin, paladin,

monk, and a druid, but those, you’ll see them go up and down during a fight, [mm] and that’s

their health, so, I’m watching these real intense, I know, by muscle memory, you pry haven’t

seen this, *holds up mouse to show other side, which has 12 thumb buttons*

Jake: oh, no

Ben: So I have 12 abilities macroed straight to my thumb [okay] so, I know by feel what I’m

doing for healing [yeah] *refers to each button* Holy Light, Divine Light, Holy Shock, you

know, I can name it all out for you. So I know what I’m doing for healing, so instead I’m

looking, and I’m analyzing, okay, he’s not missing a lot, or it’s not a dangerous part of the fight,

so I’m going to use a smaller, slower heal, kinda save some mana, save some magic power

[yeah], or you know, “oh my god, he’s gonna die!” and this is a really bad time for him to be low

on health, so now I have to use a cooldown and I have to heal him very quickly [uh huh] but at

that point, as a damage dealer, I’m not responsible for my health, other than not doing anything

immediately stupid [right] um, so it’s not a big, not a big deal for me. But as a healer, it’s almost

more panicked, kind of, like oh my god [hahah],like. holy crap, I have to save this guy, what is

going on with my life [yeah] so I just popped all my cooldowns, and popped my Blade Storm,

and my

Jake: So is this the actual boss?

Ben: This is the actual boss, yes, so we wanted to kill DarkFang first, and he was marked with an

X, and we did, we successfully killed him, so now I’m going to go ahead and go on —my mouse

is bugging out, there we go— go on BloodClaw here. And we’re going to kill him and get him

dead. And you can see again, I’m so far behind in DPS compared to these guys.

Jake: So the guys behind you are like the tank and the healers?

Ben: Yeah

Jake: Okay *both start laughing*

Ben: All the people that you definitely want to be in front of [haha yeah]. If you’re getting

passed up by them, you’re probably, you’re no longer getting carried, you might as well just be,

not even there heh. [yup] So there, they used on of their first abilities, there’s a big cloud of

poison on the ground. Obviously not something you want to stand on [mhmm] Um, so right now

some of my cooldowns are coming off, so I’m going to use them and then I’m going to pop

another one of my DPS cooldowns to try and buff my damage up as much as I can. It’s really,

it’s pretty, oh god, I really messed that up, heh heh, they’ve been playing so long, I feel so bad

[haha] Um, really just trying to do my best, so I backed off, used my charge, to get in close,

charge will give me rage, which lets me use more abilities, so it was important for me there to,

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see right here I coulda, I shoulda used this right as it came off, well I could have used it right as it

came off, but I waited 2 seconds for one of my other abilities to come off cooldown, so it would

combine to do more damage. [mm hmm] And this is um, Kor’kron Dark Shaman, so if you end

up looking it up. I can’t, I personally can’t go over and attack those, because they do a large AoE

explosion [mhmm] when they die, so if I try and go over there and deal with those, what’s going

to happen is I’m going to get, I’m going to hurt myself, I’m going to probably die [mhmm] so

instead I’m going to stay over here and just go ahead and do damage to these guys. Um, probably

what I’ll do next time, now that I think about it, is I’ll probably go ahead over and...yeah, I’m

going to go ahead and do it...oh god no there’s an Ash ooze in the way don’t actually do it! Get

out of the way, die, okay, because now the ranged DPS should have had enough time to get the

attention of the oozes, I’m going to go over here and use my Blade Storm on them and do some

AoE damage, um, that’s, um, I did that as much because of, I did that for two reasons. First, it

will help kill the oozes, which is an important thing, they melee very hard, they hit you very very

very hard. And the second reason is to buff my damage so I don’t look so useless *both laugh*

because right now that’s extremely important to me staying in this raid and getting gear [yeah

haha]

Jake: So you are hoping to good enough to not kicked out any sooner than you have to

Ben: Yeah, because I need to, I need this gear, and this is going to be, they’re helping me by

doing this, I could do it the hard way [yeah] and the hard way, um, heh, the less favorable way, is

to go ahead and actually build up from where I left off and kill those raids, and go through the

easier levels of this raid. The easier levels drop less good gear [right] um, it drops gear of lower

quality, so I might be able to level my to do those levels, but um, of course the gear that I get

would be not as good as—oh god, I’m dead! See what I told you about not attacking the them

haha [yeah].

Jake: So it would be a really gradual build up instead of

Ben: yeah, instead of right now I’m saying “hey, plunge me into this”

Jake: yeah

Ben: So, slimes, they really, they kinda hurt [yup]

Jake: So are you going to be dead for a while?

Ben: I’m going to be dead until

Jake: Until they kill the boss and then they can

Ben: yeah, so right now the boss is at 13%, there’s a, 12%, there’s the boss right here. So, there’s

also battle rez’s in the middle of the fight, but what you, normally you can’t rez in the middle of

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combat...so, what they just said, “get him up”, was basically someone who is worthy of the battle

rez died, so they said get him up [yeah] cause you can only rez one person per fight

Jake: And they didn’t choose you?

Ben: No they didn’t choose me *both laugh* There, now everyone died.

Jake: So when you play nowadays, is your typical gaming session sort of like this, where you log

on, prepare for raids, do raids with people you know, is that kind of your standard

Ben: I always raid with people I know *turns up volume on party chat* they’re talking about

why they wiped. [yeah] Basically, it’s, I guess there was a tank issue, and he dropped an Ashen

Wall, which, the, one of the bosses will drop an Ashen Wall, it’s a wall of elemental guys that do

an enormous amount of damage if you get near them [mhmm] apparently, so, here’s you tank,

and your boss is facing the tank, he’ll drop the wall parallel, well, perpendicular, to him [okay]

across a line where the tank is standing, so they’re saying that the tank um, dropped that wall in a

bad spot, and, so, assuming, say that’s the raid over there doing damage, so if he faces it this way

there’s no issue, but if he for some reason turns, [yeah]

Jake: He’ll split up the group

Ben: The wall will run right through the group and it can kill them in one or two shots, so that

was the issue that they’re talking about

Jake: Okay

Ben: But yeah, normally I’d say that’s fairly accurate as to what I do. I’ll come on and I’ll get

ready but, it probably only takes about half an hour to get ready for raid. I’ll do stuff for dailies

though, and that’s unrelated. *father needed his help for something, he briefly leaves to help

him* “BRB pouring Coke” “BRB snorting coke” [hahaha] no you’re not, Papi you’re not

allowed to raid high, I’m sorry. Oh I might be getting ejected. *jokes with group on chat about

group member getting high* So we have two older guys in the raid, one, Grimberg, known as

Papi, he’s who I was saying was one of the three guys, and he’s probably 68, 69

Jake: Oh wow

Ben: He’s old. So he always says things that none of us understand *both laugh* Papi what are

you talking about dude? But yeah.

Jake: so what parts do you enjoy the least about playing. Like are there things about it that you

don’t enjoy?

Ben: Yeah, wiping.

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Jake: wiping haha

Ben: Which is what we just did.

Jake: Yeah

Ben: It’s not fun. Not a favorite, not a fan man, not a fan.

Jake: That sounds like it’s a pretty big part of it

Ben: I don’t, I shouldn’t say that. I don’t like wiping when it’s not my fault. Um, at that point I

could attribute that at least partially to my fault because if I had been doing the damage level that

I should have been doing, then it’s possible that we could have killed it [mhmm] *says

something to party* They’re summoning in the ?? guy, I don’t know who we dropped, we

dropped the other paladin. Oh heck yeah, okay, I didn’t get dropped, because there was a guy

doing even lower DPS than me [oh wow]. If it’s set on damage done, set it to DPS, see the

Sideway guy? [yeah] that’s the guy who got dropped [haha]. That’s a ret paladin, oh yeah that’s

definitely a ret paladin . So, now, because I want to stroke my ego, I want to see what kind of,

what kind of gear he was in *both laugh* to see if

Jake: To see if he had better gear but was doing worse?

Ben: Yeah hahaha

Jake: Well if nothing else you know he wasn’t in the middle of an interview.

Ben: Oh yeah! He’s got way better gear, he’s 531.

Jake: Oh, so you can look up just a player online

Ben: oh yeah, yup

Jake: Is that through Blizzard?

Ben: Yup

Jake: Oh, okay, so that’s, you can actually, that’s cool

Ben: So he had 20 more ilevel than me, so he should have been doing somewhere in the

neighborhood, given his gear he should have been doing about 200,000 DPS [mhmm] and he

was only doing 83. [wow] So *both laugh* he is a worse player that I am [yeah] Me, here, this is

what I’m talking about with a good player, um, the top theoretical DPS for me right now is about

130, and I was doing 100. [okay] So this is theoretical, perfect [yeah] like you’re standing there,

not moving, doing everything absolutely perfect, and then realistic, even, this is still, standing

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there, not moving, doing absolutely everything perfect, they’re saying, a human, the highest you

could maybe get as a human is about 120, and I was doing 100 [yeah] while not having played in

three months, I’m missing, I’m missing some gems and enchants, so [right] given that

information, I’d say I’m pretty much on track. [yeah] But he was [way way] waaaaay off track

yeah hahahaha

Jake: definitely haha

Ben: So, that tells me, okay, yeah, I need to fix my gear up a little bit, [mhm] and I need to

maybe work on my rotation a little bit, which is expectable, expected, because it’s been three

months [right] but on the whole, that tells me that my problem is gear related [yeah] get the gear,

I should do pretty close to what I am expected to do, which, with the best gear right now is

400,000. [mhmm] so there’s 300,000 I’m going to multiply my DPS by four times

Jake: when you get gear

Ben: when I get gear

Jake: wow. so right now is everyone just getting reorganized

Ben: yeah, cause they kicked someone out of the raid and they’re trying to figure out, everything

out. Actually though, *asks party who they are waiting for*

Jake: so it seems like, does the game tend to go through like, there’s the intense concentration

you described during a raid, and then there’s sort of this down time where people are chatting

and waiting and [mhmm, yeah] so is that kind of the way it cycles?

Ben: mhmm, you’ll normally chat and BS and just, whatever goes on during the trash fights, and

it’s not super, you know every once and a while you have people doing a ton of damage during

trash just to kind of show off [yeah] but the reality is that it really doesn’t mean anything [yeah]

and then people will be more serious in the boss fights, although if you have a fight on farm,

basically it’s so easy that it’s just farming, all you’re doing is just the same motions, kinda

grinding gear out [yeah] um, you’ll get the BS, and the joking, and the playing around during the

fight too

Jake: Cause everyone, it’s just so easy

Ben: Yeah, but on a fight that actually takes some um, takes some time, or on a fight that actually

takes some effort, it’s better to just stay straight-faced about it [yeah] Okay so right now we’re

raiding. So he just ran a ready check, so he’s just trying to make sure everyone’s here, there’s

two people missing right now, uh, a mage and a rouge, [mm] so yeah, go ahead, we still have a

little time.

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Jake: Yeah, I’m just sort of, you’ve told me so much, that I’m sort of looking through my

questions and seeing that most of them have been answered so I’m just checking through to

Ben: Well there’s still so much I haven’t even told you

Jake: Yeah, I mean I have that sense that haha

Ben: For instance one thing that you might be interested in psychologically is, for a year I

actually dated a girl that I met in WoW , [mhmm ] um, I can’t believe how it ended, it ended

absolutely ridiculous, but, um, basically it ended due to a misconception on her part and by the

time she realized it was too late, but that was us, so.

Jake: Mm, so you met her in WoW but she was in the area?

Ben: No, she was in Texas haha

Jake: Okay, so you were just sort of long distance

Ben: No, she moved here hahah

Jake: Oh wow

Ben: Um, again, dispelling the notion that if a girl plays WoW she’s unattractive , um, *pulls up

pictures of her on Facebook* I personally at least would not say she’s unattractive haha

Jake: haha yeah. I’d agree. So how long did you know each other before she moved?

Ben: Three years. We knew each other for three years. and then we started dating when I went

down to Texas to meet my guild. I actually flew to Texas to meet my guild and we just hit it off

really well [yeah] and we started dating, after a couple months of us dating she moved up here

because she had an aunt in the area anyways and was trying, it was a combination of me and also

her trying to get out of Texas [mhmm] but, yeah. But that, and another girl that I dated played

WoW, not necessarily, Beth I met on WoW, Jess I did not meet on WoW, I met her and then

found out she played WoW, and we played WoW together, so [yeah]

Jake: So the one that you, sorry what was the one from Texas’s name?

Ben: The one from Texas, that’s Beth

Jake: Okay, so what was it like shifting relationships, like going from being in-game friends to

meeting her in real life?

Ben: Absolutely no effort

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Jake: So just transitioned really

Ben: Cause we played together, raided together for three years, knew each other, talked, knew of

each other’s personal problems, bla bla blah, and that was kind of how we started progressing

from just friends to more than friends was that she had just broken up with her boyfriend and for

like two months, and I kind of like helped her right after that and then after that we talked more

personally for like a month and a half, but as far as knowing each other, knowing our personal

lives, we’d known that for like, [yeah] you know same thing as any friend you might know, but

that was when it transitioned from being friends to being more than friends [mhmm] was because

we were already friends, we were helping each other out with problems in our lives [yeah] and

getting closer, but it was super effortless, there was no effort, I mean I met her and that was the

first time I had seen her in real life, but as far as talking to her it was, just picking up, it was just

another day, [huh] it just happened to be that we saw each other in person this time [wow] so

Jake: That’s interesting

Ben: There’s was no, I mean, I think we...yeah. She pulled up, cause she actually game me a ride

from the one guy’s house that I had been staying with that was the guild leader [mhmm] and

literally the first thing I think I did was make fun of her after I saw her. [hahaha] But it was cool,

because we were friends, like [yeah] I think I made some joke about her being a typical Cali girl

because she pulled up in this bright yellow car and these huge sunglasses [hahahaha] and was

fiddling around with her iPod and I’m like, with you know her blonde hair, and was like...[haha]

Just making fun of her, but because we felt so comfortable with each other you know [yeah]. I

think the first thing she said to me in real life was “oh shut the fuck up” heh [hahahaha] hahaha

now that I think about it heh heh heh

Jake: So did you two continue to like play in the same guild together once you were, she was

here and you were dating

Ben: Yeah, oh yeah we did. Definitely.

Jake: And what about when it ended?

Ben: Nope, I quit WoW, I couldn’t play WoW anymore after that ended . It was really, it was a

terrible misconception, because of, basically because of how everything went down it was weird

[hm] um heh. She had basically thought that I didn’t care for her for some reason, but I, because

of that she ended the relationship and moved on, [mhmm] and nothing was further from the truth,

I was actually already starting to think about possibly marrying her, so like, it was a really good

relationship , it was actually by far the best relationship I’ve ever been in [mm] which is, um,

odd to say maybe, because I’ve been in five relationships that all lasted more than a year, so I’m

not unfamiliar with relationships, it’s not like I latched onto the first person that I met. [yeah] No,

like I’ve been in relationships before that, I’ve been in relationships after that [mhmm] easily the

best relationship I’ve ever been with was the girl who I met on WoW hahaha

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Jake: Yeah, you’re just breaking all the misconceptions tonight

Ben: I’m trying. [haha] But that’s because I, I , that’s why I hate them so much, because they’re

not true of everyone [yeah] um, and like I said, I don’t know the quality, I don’t know the kind of

people that you’ve um done any kind of research with so far but I would say, I’d be surprised if

they might have fit all of what you thought going into it because what I’ve found, at least in the

high ranking players, you find a lot of girls, [mhmm], you find a lot of attractive women, you

find a lot of intelligent men, a lot of intelligent women, a lot of successful people who just

happen to play WoW [mhmm] hahaha [yeah] um, and there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s

nothing weird about that, until you go and tell somebody haha that [yeah] that that’s what you

happen to do in your free time [yeah] um

Jake: So when you said you couldn’t play WoW anymore it was just too upsetting to be

Ben: Because that was the world that I met her in and that was the world that everything like,

you know where I first spent all those years of my time with her was in this game [uh huh] and I

couldn’t, I couldn’t play, I quit for a while. When I came back it was different. It’s actually been

different ever since then, um , that was right at the beginning of—well it was part of the way

through um Mists of Pandaria [mm] so, every since then I’ve been kind of hit and miss on

whether or not I play a lot [mhmm]

Jake: So does it still have a sense of feeling different since then?

Ben: It’s been, pretty—oop, that’s what I was talking about with that Ashen Wall. That Ashen

Wall hit me, it hit me for 440,000 [oh yeah] Absolutely wiped the floor with me. See that time,

with a little bit of practice I was doing better, I was doing 107,000 instead of 100, so getting

closer [mhmm] Um, *sigh* where was I. Yeah it’s, it’s been tied really closely to how I felt

about her [mhmm] um, I don’t know much you know, psychologically with relationships , but

basically it hit me reaaally hard, it was a very very difficult relationship to get over [mhmm] I

would say my...from how I felt about WoW before her to how I felt about WoW after her the

longer, the better I felt about my current relationships that is, and the more over her I was, the

closer it got back towards feeling [mmm] um, just like another day playing WoW hahaha [yeah]

but for a while there, no it was pretty [mhmm] why is he? Does anyone else know why Disney

gave Hercules red hair? *starts typing* To appeal to the gingers haha [haha] ummm haha. But

yeah, no, that, I’d say that’s pretty much how it worked as far as [mhmm] as far as my feelings

for that went [yeah] But it’s been a long road. And it, on a, for a long time there I’d actually play

DotA more than WoW. WoW is something, DotA I could play a little more on my own. If you

want to do anything at an advanced level in WoW you need at least 5 people, more like 10 to 25

people [mhmm] so, it’s definitely a social game, it’s something that you need to rely on people

for

Jake: Yeah. So what, at this point what are your kind of, when you look to the future in WoW,

what are you hoping for, do you see yourself getting caught back up, do you see yourself

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wanting to get really involved with a guild again, I mean what’s your sense of what you want in

the future?

Ben: Um, I’m kind of, I don’t want to get as caught up in it as I was [mhmm] um, for multiple

reasons . Oh god that’s the staff I wanted...noooo, and I would have got it too if it weren’t for ?

Heck yeah that’s a huge upgrade. *someone asks if a item is needed* I do, I’m only wearing a

496. *talks to group about item, why he needs it, how he’ll use it* *turns to me and whispers*

Just give it to me *both laugh* I understand, I already know what you’re saying, just give me the

item. *continues to talk to group about getting the item and his performance* So they’re asking

the other warrior if he needs it [mhmm] *continues talking to group* Finally, finally got the belt

[haha] Oh, god, instantly equip that. Even without, you see these sockets, they’re sockets to put

gems in it to make it stronger, and you can also enchant it, [mhm] even without gemming it and

enchanting it, it’s so much better that, just put it on [yea h haha] hahaha

Jake: So if you just got a slightly better piece you pry have to, [you would not put it on] you

would not put it on right away because you’d have to

Ben: You’d have to gem it and enchant it

Jake: Yeah, okay

Ben: But, that was an enormous upgrade [okay] That alone is probably going to make, maybe not

in a specific fight, but, it would make a noticeable upgrade [mhmm ] you know, it I did a, what

they like to do is if you’re checking your damage to check upgrades you’ll do something called a

parse, um, it’s basically a DPS parse, you’ll run you’re um, you’ll go up to a training dummy,

[mhmm] and you’ll say you’ll do a six minute parse, you’ll fight a training dummy that doesn’t

do anything, it just sits there on a post, for six minutes, to check your DPS increases, so you, if I

was, you know, in a fight, it’s hard to check those little DPS increases, but I could run, if I ran a

couple parses

Jake: You’d see the difference

Ben: I would definitely see a noticeable difference with that upgrade [yeah] no question , um

RNG, which is random number generator, kind of like luck, [yeah] a lot of people blame the

RNG gods if they’re having terrible luck [uh huh] hahahah. Um, RNG won’t make that

difference, that’s a huge noticeable difference.

Jake: Because different attacks have a range of possible damage they could do, so there’s a

random

Ben: Kind of. Um, so say, like the Mortal Strike here, it’s a, it says “mighty blow that does 228%

weapon damage from both melee weapons” uh, so it’s base is to do 228% of your weapon

damage, so upgrading your weapon damage is going to give you a huge increase in DPS. As a

melee, that’s the absolute best way to increase your damage, as you might expect. [yeah].

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Changing the thing that you’re hitting things with, [yeah] is a really good way to hit them harder

haahaha [haha]. Um, but, with um, with every single item , really, really, really?

Jake: What happened?

Ben: I just got Mindspiked for, I only got one shot. *to party* It’s not my fault if he one shots

me, like, blame the gear bro. I could *sigh* you know what, I’m not dealing with you people

right now, I’m undergeared, I’m just going to shut up and be the kid in the back of the classroom.

*comments from party* So what were we talking about? Oh yeah, so, every ability, like strength,

you see all these items have strength on it, [mhmm] and they also have crit and haste. Haste

improves how quickly your melee attacks hit, so you’ll get more melee attacks [mhmm]. Crit

improves your percentage chance to—so these are all my stats—so crit improves my percentage

chance to do double damage on the attack. Hit improves your hit chance, blah bla bla bla balh,

you know it makes, it’s pretty logical [yeah] but um, so that item had a lot of hit and a lot of

mastery, so my attacks are going to have a higher chance to hit things and the mastery for a fury

warrior gives me a higher chance to become enraged which increases my damage by 50% so I’m

going to have a higher change to become enraged and I’m going to have a higher chance to hit

things, as well, with the strength increases something called attack power, [yeah] which, there’s

an attack power—basically it adds onto the damage of every weapon [okay] so I got such a huge

strength increase from that weapon, from that belt that it’s going to noticeably increase the

damage that every single one of my attacks does. *long pause* See this is trash for the next boss,

which is maybe not to you, because I don’t know if you’ve ever played any game like this, but

this is significantly noticeably different kind of creatures. Normally the trash leading up to a boss

is um related to the boss [uh huh] so it might share some abilities, and it, they do that in order to

help people um get an idea of what is going to be coming up [mm hmm] Ahh, that was my glit

ah, he got killed, that’s so cute. So, um, see, he had more haste, so he got the rouge off before

me. So that my heroic leap, you’ll see Intervene right here, so I’m standing here and I’m going to

use intervene and it’s gonna shoot me over to that character. That’s a protective spell, I intercept

the next melee or ranged attack within ten seconds [mhmm] so, that’s something you’ll use a lot

as a tank but not so much as DPS [right]. This next fight, like even this trash, trash has specific

strategies at times too, um these shamans they do a healing ability, so you have to separate them,

otherwise the heal will bounce around and it will be impossible to kill them [mhmm]. *banters

with party* They’re trying to basically say that I have no idea what I’m doing by saying that I

never got past the last fight, which I definitely did [hmhm] *continues bantering with party* so

what I just did there, the reason they said I couldn’t go Bladestorm, there’s a very specific

reason, mostly it’s because they’re doing Bladestorms right now [mhmm] and they would kill me

but what I did was I popped Die by the Sword which increases my parry chance by 100%, so

basically any physical attacks, I’m going to reflect them [mhmm] for 8 seconds, and then the

next thing I did was um pop Bladestorm. So basically I made myself invulnerable to their attacks

and then used my attack. [yeah] That’s the kind of stuff, that you’re gonna have to think though

[yeah] like, how can I, like normally I wouldn’t be able to go in there and fight those, so what am

I gonna do to change that [mhmm] . PvP is all about those kind of decisions—how am I gonna

wreck this guy [yeah]. I gotta use 7 different abilities in this perfect combinations . This is the

next boss, General Naszgrim. Fairly easy fight, it’s reliant on people killing adds in the back,

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including the War Shamans that we just saw that do healing, they can heal the boss for an

absolutely insurmountable amount so you have to kill them before they get the heal off [okay].

That’s the main thing in this one. Can I have stats and master please? There’s mastery, where’s

stats—come on druid. Why? He said no, he’s not going to buff me. [hahaha] Basically I’m

asking for buffs here, these are all different buffs —there we go, now I got it. *listens to party

discuss fight* I was talking to stacks on bosses, so he was saying make sure it goes to four but

don’t taunt too early otherwise it’s a wipe because if you taunt too early and your stacks get

refreshed, now both tanks have to stack, and neither one of them can

Jake: So what is a stack?

Ben: Oh, a stack is a debuff, so if I say a stack, it’s literally, it’s a debuff that will stack or build

up [okay] so you could say every 10 seconds he’s going to do a heroic strike that decreases your

armor by 10% for 20 seconds. So every 10 seconds he does that, and it lasts for 20 seconds.

[yeah] So at the 10 second mark he’s going to do it again, and now you’re going to have 2 stacks,

now your armor’s going to be decreased by 20% [okay] and then 30%. So you have to step out

and let another guy tank for 20 seconds [ah okay] until it falls off. But if you jump back in too

quickly, if you have like 2 seconds left,

Jake: Then it’ll be at 20

Ben: Yeah, then it’ll go, it’s still at 20, now it’s going to jump to 30 [okay] Now you have 30 and

he has 20, now you’re both

Jake: It’s going downhill

Ben: Yeah, that’s what I was saying, you knew you need to be on Vent to be able to

communicate and like if that happens , it’s not, it’s not absolutely a wipe, because you could

have a paladin put Hand of Protection on him and it’ll wipe the stacks off [mhmm] but that’s

what the difference is between a decent raid group and a good raid group and a great raid group

is how can you handle stuff not going right. How do you handle, “oh god, something that I didn’t

expect to happen just happened” [yeah] “what do I do” hahaha

Jake: Yeah, it’s how quickly everyone can come up with a new plan [yeah] and carry it out

Ben: Because a great paladin, a really good paladin is going to notice that, hand of protection,

right away and fix the problem before it becomes a problem [yeah] and then you go on your

merry way [mhmm] an okay paladin, you’ll have to ask him to do that [mhmm] and if you don’t

have voice chat you’ll never be able to ask him [right] assuming anyone thinks of that. That’s

another thing that I was saying. That’s a paladin ability, I’m playing a warrior, how do I know

that a paladin can do that and that it’ll wipe the stack? Because I’ve played a paladin. So, playing

all ten, or now all 11 classes

Jake: You sort of know all the tools that are available across the whole group

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Ben: Which is why I became a valuable player. He’s going to pull this boss in 10 seconds. So

I’m going to stack all damage all on the front end to do as much damage as I can right away. And

they’re going to do the same thing. Okay, so that’s stuff on the ground, I’ve gotta avoid that.

Otherwise I would probably wash out, so, I avoided that successfully. Switch targets to this??

Warbanner because that’s going to buff the boss if I leave it up. See, big crits, I have my crits

show up down here with the amount of damage they do and that’s kind of—oh, I’m going to

show you a video! Hahaha. I just had a great idea, remind me to show you a video

Jake: Okay

Ben: It’s a couple minutes long, but it’s a PvP video from Wrath of the Licheking and I think it’ll

fairly perfectly capture what PvP as a warrior feels like, [okay] and it also makes me laugh

hysterically because it reminds me of PvP as a warrior [yeah] But anyways, oh god, okay,

dodged that one, no big deal, nothing too complicated going on, boss is at 62%. He hasn’t started

doing anything too scary yet. [mhmm] Oh god, I just got absolutely destroyed by something,

Warsong, so this is a problem. So, I just used a defensive spell because I knew that Warsong—

knowing the fight, I know that when he does that Warsong, what it’s going to do is it’s going to

um create a major shockwave of sorts [mhmm] and um, it could kill me if I wasn’t prepared for

it, especially with my low life, because increased gear not only increases your strength on all of

your abilities but it also increases the amount of stamina you have on all of your abilities, so I

have, that’s why he was saying “you get killed too quickly” [yeah] was because my gear is so

bad I only have, we’ll say two thirds of the health of someone who should be in this raid [yeah]

so something that won’t kill them will kill me, so what I had to do when I saw that that Warsong

was going off, is I had about half a second to pop something to save my life, and since I’m still

alive [yeah haha] you can go ahead and say that I definitely did that. Big crit! I just hit that guy

for a million damage. Big crits, big crits! Um, big numbers, that is actually what reminded me of

the video, is me thinking “big numbers”, um [yeah] because big number make me happy, [yhea]

they make everyone happy [haha]. Big numbers—the bigger your gear, the better your gear gets,

the are, and the happier you are because your numbers are huge .

Jake: Hahah, so why, why is that?

Ben: It’s the same thing I was saying. The numbers, it’s just, the, a print out kind of version of

the amount of damage you’re doing, so if I do, um, big numbers basically means that I am doing

a lot of damage, so as my gear gets better, as I was saying before, you’re going to do more

damage per hit and your numbers are going to get bigger. [mhmm] So say originally, before a

big gear upgrade I might have been doing 200 damage a hit, now I got a nice big gear upgrade,

so I’m doing 400 damage a hit [mhmm] Well, a crit is double damage, so originally my crit was

400, now my crit is 800 [yeah] when I crit, so, it really makes you feel good, like “aw heck yeah

I just did 800 damage to that dude” [yeah]

Jake: So as the game goes along, and goes through patches, and goes through expansions, like,

there’s just, numbers are climbing and climbing and climbing

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Ben: In fact, there’s something that’s happening next expansion that uh has never happened

before, which is that they’re resetting all of the gear numbers above a certain level because

things are getting too insane [yeah] you have bosses with a billion health haha [yeah] and um,

you’re, you know, like I said that ability hit for 1.2 million [mhmm] so basically what they’re

going to do is take everything down by a factor of just like, we’ll say like [mhmm] and that’s

going to allow everything to go much more smoothly

Jake: Yeah. Is it going to feel weird to see all these much smaller numbers?

Ben: Oh yeah [haha] It’s gonna make me really sad. Okay, some I’m trying to get away from this

guy who blade stormed me but I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it. Alright, someone

stunned him so I got away. Alright, so the boss is now getting low on health. So what I did was

come out here to deal with this Dark Shaman, or I mean Archweaver, so he’s casting spells, so

I’m going to use abilities that can stop him from casting his spells [mhmm] Same thing I just did

there, I saw that he was casting, even though I wasn’t close to him [mhmm] I had the

wherewithal—and this is, again, something a lesser player wouldn’t do—to charge over to him

an interrupt him before he can do anything [mhmm] It’s also really important—a lot of players

will eventually kind of devolve into just spamming there highest hardest-hitting ability when you

get really low, to, when a player gets really low on health . *lots of yelling over chat*So we just

died at 1%

Jake: Oh man

Ben: So Papi died to *references log*

Jake: Is this a log of what happened?

Ben: Yeah. Papi died to Bonecracker, actually. Uh, they just, they really messed up, they

basically just let him slowly die hahahaha.

Jake: Was he the tank?

Ben: No. *to group* Yeah, Grimberg did get hit with Aftershock, um, about 2.7 seconds before

he died. I’m sorry, 1.7 seconds before he died . *to me* Basically he messed up. Remember the

thing that I said I had to make sure not to stand in?

Jake: Yeah

Ben: He stood in it and got killed hahaha

Jake: That’s all it takes, huh, for the whole raid to fall apart

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Ben: Right now he’s telling me to tell the paladin how to heal better because they know that I’m

a good paladin healer, but there’s not a whole lot I can tell him because unfortunately this is a

bad fight for paladin healers to begin with [yeah] and the other thing is, the little things that like,

the little things like recharging over there, that take a half second, you have a half second to

decide, you know I saved myself, I saved myself twice that fight [mhmm] and saved the fight

from collapsing three times doing little things that they’re never going to notice, other than the

fact that the right keeps going [yeah] I can’t teach him those things [yeah] haha like, I can tell

him kind of what to do

Jake: yeah, those little moments of situational awareness

Ben: Yeah, I can’t tell him, “in this exact situation when you have a half second to decide do

this. Oh but if you have a second to decide to this” like, it’s trying to tell someone how to live

there life kind of thing [you just can’t] like, “man you’re so successful, what should I do?”

[right] well, I spent, I can’t give you a guide on how to be a good engineer, I can give you some

tips but [yeah] the little things I do to make me a good engineer are little stuff that you kind of

just have to do and feel, it’s the same way on the game [mhmm] That’s why I’m trying to put

emphasis on the fact that the top rated players are intelligent, sophisticated, strategic, capable

people [mhmm] because the little tiny things that make you a top rated player are not things that

you can just learn from a guide [yeah]. They’re ready to go. So this guy, that’s not—he’s doing

more DPS than me but not a ton more. I’ say his average I-level is probably 540, so he should be

doing more damage than me . I’m gonna pop my cooldowns, hit him as hard as I can in the face.

Do my bladestorm, I don’t really know why , probably just because I felt like it. Oh god, death

on the ground, death on the ground. And that’s, I’d say more mechanics in WoW come down to

two or three things, It’s either something on the ground, an add, or something, well really it just

comes down to that, something on the ground or an add.

Jake: An add is an additional monster?

Ben: So, let’s just click on this one. So, yeah, you just hear him call add, cause there’s adds in

the back. So that’s an add. Um, it’s something that’s added to the fight [mhmm] And it refers to,

um, people..uhh...it refers to creatures, not necessarily spells, so if he starts throwing out an

additional spell you’re not going to call adds [yeah]. It’s pretty simple, I’m just running through

my rotation here. Skull Banner comes out, and it’s easiest for melee’s to switch over to it cause

they’re already standing right there, so I’ll switch over to that and kill it. Um, the priority system,

like the 38-step priority system is not difficult for me because I, it’s almost like studying for a

test, if you study a lot it’s not, you don’t find the test difficult [mhmm]

Jake: So you are just going through all these things and it’s just a natural flow for you almost?

Ben: Yeah, cause I’ve played so much. So, I’m watching all my buffs up here. So there goes the

Warsong so I’ve just saved myself again. *long pause* Just saved myself again by popping

Shield Wall . *long pause* *to party* that was my bad I was talking to someone, sorry about that

*long pause* So, I messed up because during defensive stance you shouldn’t attack the boss, it

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gives him more rage [uh huh] this particular fight, it gives him more rage, and that will make him

do more dangerous spells [uh huh] I got distracted and attacked him when I shouldn’t have, and

he got off two Warsongs, which is why I needed to save myself twice. Okay, defensive stance

ended so I’m going to run back in here and start attacking. So he was just talking about

outgearing this boss, the gear that they have, and this is true, the gear that they have is

unnecessary to do the amount of damage required to kill this boss. Their peak damage is

significantly higher than this boss was tuned to do [mhmm] um, so with that in mind you could

say that’s why they’re able to carry me, someone who has less gear than the boss was tuned for

[yeah] but that’s also why, every single boss in a raid gets progressively harder, so the next boss,

they’re going to be less overgeared for, and the fact that I’m in the raid will be more of a

hindrance, until eventually they have to kick me out hahaha [yeah haha]. Although occasionally

you’ll have bosses that are referred to as “loot piñatas” um which is that for some reason they are

very undertuned, they are tuned very easy [yeah] um whether that’s because of a lack of testing

or whatever—Blizzard is always really hesitant to ever increase the difficulty of a fight, they

very rarely increase the difficulty of a fight, so you’ll end up with specific fights that are loot

piñatas basically, you just hit it till it gives you gear haha [yeah] um, one of those was, on of the

most well know of those is um known as the loot ship, because it’s a boat fight, where you have

to kill the other, the Alliance things—cause I’m on Horde, what’s called the Horde

Jake: Yeah I know about the WoW kind of mythology

Ben: Okay, so I’m on Horde. If you’re on alliance you kill the Horde ship and if you’re on Horde

you kill the Alliance ship[mhmm] so it was one of the most infamous, because you literally

could go in there, it didn’t matter what kind of gear you had, you were fully capable to killing

that boss, so it was known as the loot ship [haha]. It was basically just a ship that brought you

gear haha [haha]. I love the loot ship, the loot ship made me happy

Jake: Yeah, good memories of the loot ship?

Ben: good memories of the loot ship. Cause it was such—again, I was saying about easy fights,

is um typically an easy fight will be a much more relaxed fight [yeah] so it was fun for me, you

know, it’s fun for everyone, cause you’re just sitting there like “haha, your mom’s fat” kinda

like, as you, and then loot rains down from the sky and everyone’s happy hahaha [right hahaha].

Okay, so he just called—basically you can’t attack him during defensive stance, and we’re near

the end of the fight and he does this thing at 10% that will basically make it so he will, will being

to wipe the raid by, he just summons add after add after add, including the healing adds, so

basically the issue is at 10% you have to burn it, that’s why he’s asking if we’re ready. So at

10%, he just did something called a Bloodlust, so we’re all gonna pop all of our cooldowns, like

you just saw me go ahead and click through all of my cooldowns, and we’re just going to try to

do as much damage as possible, we’re gonna try to blow him up before he can do anything too

dangerous. So I just popped my defensive cooldown to save myself from Warsong, um, popping

all of our offensive cooldowns and the boss is dead

Jake: Sweet

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Ben: So, it dropped tier gear, and mail feet, so this is nothing that I can use so I’m just going to

pass on it [mhmm] but they’re obviously pretty happy about it. [yeah]. But I’m going to use my

bonus roll here and I didn’t get anything. *joking and discussion with party, including possibility

of him playing a paladin, leader wants to see who else is available* Right now we have 21

people online in the guild [mhm] We’re all in the Siege of Orgrimmar which is the current raid

[okay] and the guild has 213 people in it.

Jake: How well do you know

Ben: Depends on the person

Jake: Yeah

Ben: some of them I know very well, some of them I do not know at all. [yeah] And that’s

mostly because of the three month break I took, so, before the three month break, I knew

everyone very well or at least as well as anyone in the guild knew them. [mhmm] Grimberg I

obviously know very well because he’s the guy that I’ve been playing with for four or 5 years.

But we’re going to have some downtime here, so I don’t know

Jake: Yeah, well, I think we’ve kind of gone through most of the topic areas

Ben: Yeah I figured that

Jake: Is there anything else that you feel like is important for me to know that you haven’t [um]

talked about

Ben: You know I’ve tried to cover most of the stuff. I think the most important, the biggest part

of MMO gaming that I haven’t really covered is the research, and I don’t, if you’re doing a raid,

a hardcore raid especially, [yeah] um, you’re going to research fights, strategies, you’re going to

research your gear, you’re going to—I know—not right now, but right before I quit I knew every

single upgrade I wanted for my paladin, I knew where it dropped from, I know what it’s drop

chance was, I knew everything about the gear that I needed [mhmm] I knew everything about the

bosses, I looked up the bosses, I watched videos on the bosses, I watched other people fight the

bosses, I did everything that I could possibly do so that when I got there, it was less strenuous. I

talk about learning the fights, and you do have to learn, there’s a little bit to learn as far as just

being there, but as far as actually becoming familiar with the strategy, that’s something a high

level of raiding that you’re expected to know before the fight, before you even get there.

Jake: Yeah, but you’ve already watched video, you know what it will look like

Ben: Yup, and that’s something that a lot of players, that, any lower-lever players are not going

to do, they’re not going to research it, they’re not going to know, um it’s only the higher level

players that are going to do that [mhmm] oh god the tank died and I just died right after. So he

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just ran ahead with one healer and got absolutely annihilated. Oh, here’s another MMO, I got

invited to come do the Beta testing. But, yeah, there’s not really a whole lot that I can think of

that I haven’t at least touched on.

Jake: Yeah, yeah I feel like we’ve gone through a lot, so

Ben: The, daily quests were a big point of contention because—oh! I know!

Jake: oh the video?

Ben: Yeah. Um, gearbreaker. *starts video, some commentary during video* So, obviously, I’m

not gonna watch the whole thing, but the whole concept is just very energetic, very like,

especially as a warrior you feel that, just screw it, numbers everywhere, like I love playing fury

because it just feels so awesome to charge around the battlefield you know busting people’s

faces up [yeah] and obviously that’s not anything like anything that you could ever do in real life

hahaha [haha certainly not] But PvP, as you can see there PvP’s totally different, it’s hectic, just

running in circles,

Jake: yeah more of a free for all sort of feeling

Ben: Yeah, exactly, and there’s, battlegrounds go anywhere from 10 people up to 40 people, so

[yeah] but, anyway, there’s not a whole lot more to cover I mean

Jake: Yeah, I mean, I’m getting tired for one but I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground too so

Ben: Like I said, if you have any questions to get a hold of me, you have my phone number, so

Jake: Yeah, I appreciate that, and I really appreciate the interview.

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Appendix 5: Jeff’s Interview Transcript

Jake: The first thing I want to ask, is, just to get a general sense of your life in general, and just

who you are, what else you do, and then get into how gaming fits into the larger picture

Jeff: anything Specific?

Jake: Just, you know, your work life, your social life, your background, whatever...

Jeff: Um, I’m 28 years old, I’m originally from the midwest. where I went to college for a little

bit, focusing in computer animation and then transferred to a different school to do video

production. Graduated from there in 2008. Um, then moved to NY for the next five years. I got a

job after a while working at a TV network, and [pause] did that for a while, and then in January

moved to Pittsburgh to get out of NY...it’s a very weird place, just moved back to Pittsburgh,

closer to family, and, you know, it’s not New York so it’s automatically better. And I work full

time now, when I first moved I was freelance for a while, but I work fulltime now and still do

freelance stuff, so I work a lot...

Jake: Yeah, so, how much do you work?

Jeff: Um, well for a long time I was working 6:00 in the morning to 5:00 at night on M-Th, and

then I would come home and, work at home until about 10:00, you know, have dinner, hang out

for a little bit, till 10 or 11, and then, you know, do that 4 days a week, and then on Fridays—I

work 4 10-hour days instead of 5 8-hour days—so Friday is the day I didn’t have to go to my full

time job, I was just working here all day, so Friday nights I would just hang out with my fiancée

or some friends, or go out and do some stuff, whatever. And sometimes work a few hours on the

weekends too, some video editing stuff. But now the video editing stuff is winding down,

because it is no longer the busy season for weddings [oh right]. So, I’ve had more free time, but

I’m still working on stuff. When you came in here, that’s what was on the screen.

Jake: So you are still doing the 4 10-hour days, but there is less of the nightly work and stuff.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s manageable to just Fridays now. I can do that during the day on Fridays now and

have a pretty normal evening, weekday/evening life, with relaxing and doing whatever.

Jake: So the wedding season has been going since the spring?

Jeff: Yeah I started doing the wedding stuff since the end of June, which is the same time I

accepted the full-time job, so I went from doing freelance stuff maybe three times a month doing

a different project here and there for different people to working 80 hours a week non-stop [wow

yeah] since the end of June.

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Jake: So that must have been a pretty big shift haha

Jeff: That was nuts

Jake: And you have been engaged for how long?

Jeff: Since last Christmas. [okay] Christmas day, so we’re getting married in May

Jake: Great. So any other big life things going on?

Jeff: That’s, that’s about it, we’ve been together for 8...7...I don’t want to say it too loud because

she’s over there *both laugh*

Jake: Great, well that’s, congratulations.

Jeff: Thanks

Jake: So, tell me the story of how you, you got engaged with playing, uh, it’s WoW that you

play, right? [Yeah] So tell me the story of how that started.

Jeff: Um, I’ve never been too too much into video games, but when I did get into them, I realized

that I would just play one game a lot all the time. When I was younger me and my friends would

play this MUD game—text based, no images—[yeah] it was based on Lord of the Rings, pretty

much the nerdiest thing you could ever do

Jake: haha what was it called?

Jeff: The Two Towers. [okay] So we would play that all the time, and we would just go over to

my friends house and sleep over and we would just like stay up all night and just play, I mean it

was pretty fun. but then that just faded off after a while.

Jake: So you were how old?

Jeff: Oh god, this was, I was like in 7th grade, eight grade, something like that. Um, so we

played that game a lot and then other games here and there, anything my friends were playing I

would play [mhmm] and then when I first moved to Columbus to go to Ohio State I lived by

myself in a studio apartment, and I was work...taking classes from 8 in the morning to 3 in the

afternoon and then working from 3-11, so I was just as busy then as I am now, [yeah] but in my

free time there too I did play that game quite a bit, and like some other games here and there and

this and stuff like that. But when I moved to NY I didn’t really do either of those, too much.

Until, we moved, we lived in two apartments when we were in NY. The first one we lived in had

the computer in the bedroom because the is the only place where it would fit, because NY

apartments are tiny. [right] Um, but then when we moved to our apartment in Estoria, in Queens,

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the computer was out in the living room, so I could be on the computer and still be around her, so

that’s when I started playing WoW. My friends used to play it and they all stopped by then, but I

never played, I never got into it, just thought I’d try it out, and it was fun and I like it, and I think

I’m pretty good at it [yeah], so

Jake: so you knew about it for a while [yeah I knew about it for a while] but you started playing

at that point

Jeff: Yeah I had tried playing it before when I lived by myself in Columbus, but I just didn’t get

into it [hm] Um, but then when I moved, I got into it on my own...I had a couple friends who

played, but they don’t play as often as they used to [yeah]

Jake: Do you have a sense of what it was that grabbed you that, when you did get into it? That

worked?

Jeff: I think, there was, well one thing was that it was on the computer because she would be

watching some stupid TV show, you know, Bachelor and Teen Mom, whatever, that I just wasn’t

into, so I wouldn’t want to sit on the couch and watch that with her, and she never wanted to

watch the same kind of TV shows that I would want to watch, [mhmm] so I was able to be at the

computer and still be engaged, you know, in talking to her and half-watching this show, and she

would be like “oh my god can you believe that just happened?” [yeah] and I can, you know, I

know what’s going on [yeah] in these shows, but at the same time I’m not really watching them,

so I was able to focus on that, which is better than a consol game because she can still watch TV

while I was on the computer [mhmm] and I would just sit there, you know, for a while and just

play it, and you can kind go at your own pace, it wasn’t like , you know Call of Duty or

something like that where you have to be fully invested for these few minutes [right] at a time. I

mean that’s kind of what it is now if you’re raiding but, you know, it’s a little bit different...at

least, I think it is [mhmm]

Jake: So, it really just fit into your life [yeah] even, even the concrete things like your living

room setup and where the TV was and

Jeff: I mean it was really easy to, cause I mean, I’m sitting here like this—this is the same desk

that I had—but the TV was like right there *points* [mhmm] you know [yeah] So, it was just

easy to sit here, if I was like going like doing some kind of questing in the game or something

like that by myself I could just stop playing and it’s not, you know nothing happens [right] it’s

totally fine [yeah] so, it just was easy to do and fun, and there was a ton of stuff to do so I could

do it often without it being too repetitive or too boring, even though sometimes it can be

repetitive, but

Jake: yeah , what were all of the different things to do?

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Jeff: Just different things within the game, if you wanted to make a different character and play

as a different class you could go and do that [mhmm] play different things out, and do, and do

different dungeons, and do different things that they have in the game, like seasonal things, and

stuff like that...”oh it’s Halloween, let’s go do all those fun, different Halloween things they put

in the game” you know [yeah] and stuff like that, so, that’s just the kind of stuff I would do, half

involved in that and half involved in whatever else was going on

Jake: So it was a nice way for you to, to kinda be in two worlds at once [yeah] and have two

kinds of

Jeff: Yeah, we always called it separate but together time [yeah laughter] because we’re doing

two different things but we’re right there you know [yeah] so...it made sense [uh huh]. But then

when we moved here, a two-bedroom apartment for less than we were playing for a tiny one-

bedroom in NY, um, the computer came back here and when I was freelance I would be back at

the computer all the time working on stuff or trying to find new jobs or trying to find different

things and applying to different positions or contacting people about um different projects or

different gigs or whatever. Um, but then I would play sometimes during the day too but when I

was focusing on work I was focusing on work [yeah]. And, then when I started working a couple

months ago and everything, the amount of time that I played just kind of decreased because I

have a lot of other responsibilities [right, right] you know

Jake: So going back..how, how long ago was it when you started? When was that?

Jeff: Uh, I moved to my apartment in Queens—which was when I started—2000...probably

February, 2010

Jake: And you’ve kind of remained playing consistently, even with varying times, but you’ve

kept playing [yup, pretty much] and what’s the variation in terms of the most you’ve played

during certain points and the least you’ve played and

Jeff: Probably the most I’ve played was when I could play and also be involved in what else was

going on around me. So I would be on the game but 50% paying attention to the game. Now

when I’m playing the game I’m back here to to do that, so I’m 100% paying attention to the

game. You know, so, it’s a different, play-style I guess.

Jake: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so even though, if the time is different, that has to be taken into

consideration.

Jeff: Yeah, if I sit back here for, cause when we do our raid now it goes from 8-11, or, you know,

try getting on a little early just sitting there ready to do, but the raid time is from 8-11, so that’s 3

hours of being, at least, you know, 95% involved in what’s going on in the game. Whereas

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before I’d sit down and be on from you know 5:30 to11 but I’m only 25% involved [right] in

what I’m doing

Jake: So during that time, with that like, low level of involvement, that was kind of like a nightly

thing, so you were pry playing like, I don’t know, what would that add up to a week [uh,

probably...] 20-30 hours or [something like that] something like that, yeah.

Jeff: 20-30 hours of being 20%, 25% involved, maybe up to 50% or whatever, but not like, “shut

up, go away, I’m busy” [right right] But now like, if I’m 95% to 100% involved, that’s like 6

hours, and you know it’s just something that I like to do and, she gets that. If I play on a day

that’s not like a Tuesday or a Thursday or whatever she’s like “why are you playing the game”

[laughter] “I know, I know”

Jake: So it’s kind of, kind of, um, you have a pretty set schedule right now.

Jeff: Yeah, I mean it’s, it gives me something to look forward to because it’s fun to play, and if I

did it all the time, it’s not as exciting to get on and play, because it’s just another thing to do

every day. Since I don’t play as much as I used to, it’s gives me something to look forward to

and something to you know, try to accomplish, because we are always doing different stuff in the

game, trying to make progression through some of the harder, more difficult things that are

happening, so it gives me like, a goal, even if it’s pointless, which I totally understand, but it’s

still fun to do.

Jake: What do you mean that it’s pointless?

Jeff: It’s just a game, I mean, I used to play that Two Towers game all the time, and, since that

was a typing game, I can type pretty fast now, [laughter] but that’s all I got out of it, you know,

that and lord of the rings lore, which I already knew a little about, so [So you’re not playing for

some...] yeah, I’m not, even, there was this article I read a while ago about somebody who was

like “yeah I’d love to hire WoW players to work for my company because they have these

certain skills that hardcore raiders have and stuff” and I’m like “yeah, that’s true I guess, but

you’re also in an environment that is meant to be beaten, so it’s not like you’re all that awesome

if you can do it—good job you did what you’re supposed to, you know [yeah] So, it’s nothing

that I’m gaining any skills from that I can use outside of the game [yeah] you know [so it’s a

pursuit within] yeah, but then again, it’s the same thing with any video game , even if it’s not an

online RPG game, if it’s, anything. Evan Scrabble doesn’t help you with anything because

you’re using words you already know, you’re not learning anything [yeah, true].

Jake: Um, so, take me through just like a typical gaming session—it sounds like right now your

typical session is a raid session [yeah, that’s pretty much all that I do] yeah, so what does that,

from start to finish, what does that involve?

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Jeff: Um, well today for example, when you got here, we were having dinner, um, we had just

finished, we were just hanging out, talking about whatever, and normally if you weren’t here

right now we’d probably still be hanging out, maybe would have watched an hour show, you

know Homeland or something that we didn’t watch, Walking Dead—that’s over now, but

something like that [yeah] we follow those shows and everything, so we would watch one of

those either while eating or maybe after eating dinner, and then I would come back here and try

to get on at like, 7, because if I don’t play outside of the raid, there are other things in the game

to do that can benefit you during that raid, um

Jake: What kinds of things?

Jeff: Just different things in the game like getting valor points to make your gear better so that

when you go raid, you’re more powerful—stuff like that. Um, things like that that I used to do

more often, that I used to do the different daily quests for things, but I don’t do any more. And

that’s on e of the things that the people in the group I play with, they’re like: “make sure you’re

doing this every week, make sure you’re doing that every week” And I told them—It’s a pretty,

from what I’ve seen and what other friends have said—the group that I play with is extremely

laid back, everybody’s really cool and I really like these 9 other people that I have met before,

you know? [yeah] They’re pretty good friends. You know, so, that’s, so I try to get on 7:15, 7:30

or something like that. And usually in the game we get our invites to group up around 7:30, 7:45

if you’re on, then get into the raid, and take a 5 minute break every hour, and if you need to get

up and go to the bathroom, or grab a drink, or whatever, he my house is burning down I’ll be

right back [laughter] they’re like “oh, okay” and they’ll just wait for you, it’s not like, it’s not

like, I guess there’s a lot of groups out there that are like “aw you were gone for 2 minutes,

you’re kicked out” you know, if it was that kind of stressful environment I would not be doing

what I do. But it’s very laid back, and when I get on later you’ll be able to hear the people

talking and [oh cool] and stuff like that. It’s always fun, the people in the group, which I’ll

probably cover later, there’s, I don’t know how old she is, we have a grandma in the group—she

has a 4yo grandson, we have uh, 2 ppl from Wales, I think they are engaged, I don’t know if

they’re just bf and gf or what, but, 2 ppl from Wales that play so it’s always fun making fun of

their accents, and they make fun of us in the states say, so it’s always interesting. So then that’s

the game, I mean we’ll, get into the raid at 8:00, and we take a 5-min break every hour, and then

11:00, we’re like “well, it’s 11, see you later” [so it’s a pretty set end time?] yeah, I mean the

people in Wales are on this server, because it’s more populated than a server that’s there, and it

works better for their schedule too, because it’s 4:00 in the morning when we’re done, but that

works out for them [that works for them, hm]. That works for them so..

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Jake: Okay, so what, I’m curios to like know more of the details of the, the minutiae, the little

things you do, like you mentioned getting valor points [yeah] and what is, what are all of the

little errands that you kind of have to do? [Um] And like why? How do they contribute?

Jeff: The way I play the game—I mean there’s a lot of different ways to play WoW—and the

way I like to play the game to be challenged with things. A lot of people that I play with are like

“I got this new sword to transmog” and all it does is make the sword you have look like the

sword that you just got. And I’m like “I wouldn’t care about that, like that doesn’t benefit

anybody” When I play I want, I want to get on and I want to leave...when I log on I want to—

what am I trying to say—when I log off I want to be, I want to have made progress during that

time. So if I get on, I’m going to do something useful, within the game, such as getting valor

points or getting these tokens which can give you bonus rolls on gear, or talking to people about

different strategies to set up the gear that you have, and figuring out stuff like that, and going

online—you see I have two monitors—I’ll have the game on one and sometimes I’ll have, like,

hey what upgrades can I get from this box over here and what, how should I reforge my gear for

all the stats [mhmm] and strategic things like that, so, pretty much, if I get on, I’m trying to get

valor points by running scenarios or doing quests, which I pretty much never do, it’s pretty much

just scenarios.

Jake: what’s the difference between a scenario and a quest?

Jeff: Uh, questing is you go out into the world and you find someone who says “do this for me”

and then you go run a stupid errand for them and then you come back and they give you five

valor points [okay] If you run a scenario, it cues you up with two other people, or you find two

other people to do it with, and you go and you do this mini-dungeon thing where it teleports you

to the beginning, you have a goal, you have to do it, and if you do it faster you get more points,

and, um, since our characters are pretty powerful in there, we can pretty much always do the

faster one and get more points. Um, you can do those for bonus valor points daily, but I can only

do them 2x a week, because that’s all I play anymore, um, and then, since I get on at 7:30

sometimes and it starts at 8, sometimes I can’t even do that. [yeah] so, there is a weekly cap for

how much valor you can get, and it’s been weeks, I think last week was the first time I met that

cap, and got full use of doing that stuff that week. And the other thing that you can do is you get

these tokens that allow you to get a bonus roll when getting loot from a boss. [okay] You can do

that once a week too and every week you can get three tokens [mhmm] and when I say every

week, it resets on Tuesdays, so, if I got on now, I could do any of that stuff, um, but I have

tokens saved up from last week that I didn’t use so I don’t need to do it right now, so maybe I’ll

do it on Thursday, maybe I’ll do it *shrug* [yeah] *both laugh*

Jake: So, what are valor points?

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Jeff: Um, just like and in-game currency.

Jake: Okay, so, and there’s different currencies, is that right? [yeah] there’s just sort of standard

gold and...

Jeff: there’s gold, the currencies in the game, there’s gold, then there’s different kinds of points,

there’s justice points, valor points, honor points, conquest points, honor and conquest are for

player vs. player gaming, and valor and justice points are for player vs. environment and I pretty

much only do player vs. environment. Player vs. player is...I don’t like it as much. Um, so you

can just go and do different things around dungeons, or around scenarios, do quests, to get those

points, and then use those points to buy items or upgrade the items that you have, so [okay],

that’s

Jake: So you would use valor points instead of gold and stuff? Or where does that?

Jeff: Yeah, well valor points are, I mean you can get gold from doing anything, I probably have a

total of 100,000 gold which is a decent amount, it’s not ridiculous, but that’s between like all my

characters, there’s like 100, 000, and, you can use gold to repair your gear after you die, to buy

materials to make things, such as new gear, which isn’t worth it for where my character is in the

game, cause I have better stuff than the things you can make, you can buy gems and

enchantments to upgrade the gear that you do have, and valor points are used to upgrade the

overall piece of gear as a whole. like you can put an enchantment on something where it says

“every time you do a damage, you deal and extra 5%” [yeah] you know, but if you just upgrade

the gear, instead of it saying +2000 intellect, or whatever it says, you know, +25, you know,

Jake: so it’ll just be, so the valor points you’re spending to increase, all sorts of attributes?

Jeff: Yeah, and it kinda goes by item level, kind of, um, so if you have an item level 553, I think

it is, and if you use some valor points to upgrade it, it’ll be 553-557 to 561, so it’s just like these

jumps.

Jake: So all gear has a number?

Jeff: yeah, um, and then in the game too, sometimes a thing might be a higher item level, but it

won’t be as good for your class specifically, because of the secondary stats that are on there

[mhmm] the character that I play benefits a lot from the haste stat and not so much from a spirit

stat [yeah] yeah, so if there’s a higher item level that has spirit I’m not going to want that, I’m

going to want haste [even if it’s a little less] yeah [it’s still more beneficial] yeah

Jake: So, you used the world “useful” before, like you want to do useful things [yeah] in contrast

to just getting a sword that looks different even though it’s not actually different [yeah] so it

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sounds like this sort of, um, like figuring out what’s useful is what you’re talking about

now...like what would most benefit...

Jeff: I mean, you can go online and you can, there’s a website called “Ask Mr. Robot” and it

analyzes different gear for different classes and you can hit a button that says “best in slot” and it

tells you the best in slot in gear, and there are different variables that you can change, but it’s

pretty generally a decent thing to look at if you want to know what is good for you or not good

for you. So, doing something useful to me means getting a new piece of gear, or getting valor to

make the gear better, or getting tokens to get a bonus roll, which would in turn give you more

gear, which you would use valor points to upgrade, so it’s this spiral kind of thing.

Jake: Yeah, and your time is pretty limited, so you’re trying to decide what’s the most, what’s

the best bang for your buck.

Jeff: Yeah, cause some of the gear—like everybody who I play with that play more, all of their

gear is upgraded as high as they can upgrade it, which is two times for a total of eight item

levels. My gear is not. [yeah] And they know that, and they’re like “hey why didn’t you upgrade

this?” And I’m like, “ I don’t have the Valor for it” “why not?” “cause I only raid with you on

Tuesdays and Thursdays” and they’re like, “oh, you should get more!” and I’m like “uhh—

mmm, okay, well I can’t, so” yeah.

Jake: So it sounds like you don’t have a sense of urgency to play more

Jeff: Um, I think I used to...but, not anymore. I don’t know what changed. I think a lot, I think of

the things that changed was that the sense of urgency that I had was when the new expansion

came out, it’s called Mists of Pandaria, when that came out there was a whole new island that

you were exploring, there were, they increased the level cap from 85 to 90, there were all new

dungeons and raids and scenarios, and different classes and different races, and different talents,

and everything, everytime there’s and expansion the kind of, at least slightly, overhaul

something, I mean everything, and sometimes there’s major overhauls and stuff. So there was

more of a sense of urgency to play then just because it was all different, and I wanted to learn it,

and I wanted to experience that, but now, that was version 5 that came out, the version 5.1 came

out that was minor upgrade, and then 5.2, 5.3, and it’s on 5.4 right now, and then they announced

the next expansion, which will be 6, you know [yeah] so, maybe when 6 comes out I will be

more urgent about things. Because there were all these different factions that if you would do the

quests for those factions you gain reputation, and then you use your, you gain the reputation and

use the valor points, or gold or whatever, to buy new gear that was better than what you had

before, because, your old gear was made for level 85s and now you’re level 90, and it was like,

all of this like, big change

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Jake: so it was like this whole new world of possibilities that were introduced

Jeff: Yeah and now that that’s kinda old news, it doesn’t really matter anymore

Jake: Uh-huh, but all those new possibilities were really exciting [yeah] to sort of have all these

new

Jeff: Just to wander around in a new place in the game and check out the new art that was in

there pretty much, and you know, I said before I went to school for animation for a little while,

and and even though that’s not what I ended up doing I’ve always really liked it [yeah] and when

I’m walking around in this 3D world and see really cool stuff I’m like “oh, that’s, that’s pretty

cool!” [yeah] It’d be awesome to do that kind of stuff, you know, make that kind of stuff, or, I

can’t do that so, at least I can hop on a dragons back and fly around it, you know *laughs*

[laughter, yeah yeah]

Jake: So it sounds like that’s a whole different level of how you enjoy it

Jeff: Some people level just for that, yeah, some people play just for that, but when I was playing

when these games first came out I was doing it to make my character, to develop my character