Bates1

Daniel Bates
DTC 375 1/22/09

World of Warcraft: The Communicative Tool of Choice by Gamers Everywhere

Communication is extremely important for our well being and there are many ways to get it in our daily lives. For many people, video games provide a new inlet of contact not previously available! World of Warcraft (WoW) is an extremely popular game that drew upon some older MMORPG concepts and combined it with their own to provide an online interchange. It's so popular, with a population of 11.5 plus million players, that it serves as an excellent tool of communication, because chances are you already know someone who plays. In this essay I will discuss the uniqueness of WoW and the benefits of WoW over offline games and other media.
WoW has a unique avatar creation system, with thousands of possibilities of combinations of features. So, it's easy to make a very personal figure to represent yourself the way you want to be seen! This is great, because the role of the avatar is not simply to represent the physical you. WoW also keeps the user constantly involved with a local chat room, a very large chat, a market chat, a guild chat, and a friend chat. They aren't always being used at the same time, which would cause a hectic mess, but it does leave a lot of possibility for interaction. Text is colored accordingly too, making it much easier to ignore all the irrelevant information flowing. WoW implemented player "Ignore lists" as a tool to silence spammers, gold sellers, and bothersome people a breeze. Talking with friends always has priority by design though. Personal chat gives a ringing sound to cause attention, pulling you out of game play.
If you've seen any video-gamer stereotyping on TV or on the news, you know they are seen as extremely antisocial while playing and loners while not playing! Well WoW helps out nerds that may be suffering from such actualities with its expansive communicable boundaries! It brings socializing to a normally isolated activity. There is also a microphone communication system, but it is most often used in just game oriented activities and not casual talk.
Communicating through WoW isn't as effective or direct as other media, but conversation almost always is oriented about the game - a hobby everyone on it is invested in. Over time, users get better at typing their thoughts faster and more accurately leading to better conversations. It's also easier to type offensive messages or make fun of others. Sarcasm is very difficult to interpret in chat and strong wording doesn’t lead to the same consequences it would have offline.
WoW players use this medium because, usually we want interaction mixed in with our hobbies. We don't want to just sit down and type, talk, or blog. Due to the nature of MMORPGs, I think players are more accomplishment oriented. Like with myself, I use a bike under my desk to get a workout while listening to music and chatting in WoW or using a headset. WoW is also a great place to find thousands of other players obviously interested in the same hobby.
WoW is very unique to other media, with one example being its simplicity. There is no dialing of abstract numbers or remembering complicatedemailaddresses1573. You simply check if your friends' characters are online with a little button and you can chat (type) with them.
I've found from personal experience WoW is a fine interface to communicate thoughts about the game and minor issues of offline happenings. But of course, chat doesn't do justice to all the emotions and expressions we show in person. Voice intonation and body signs, along with even touch and smell . . . alter the message often to extreme polarities, so in this regard, chatting is handicapped. And that's where voice chat comes in to limit the ground loss by distance. I've actually had funny experiences trying to chat with someone who was talking to me over the headset; talking is so fast, live, making it much more of an expressive experience. Those differences really come out when trying to chat with someone typing or vice versa. Now I refuse to talk with anyone who can only type back to me. Chat still creates its' own variations of emotion and provokes different thoughts in ways only text and emoticons can though.
Keeping all of this in mind, for very serious messages it is extremely inappropriate just to use text or sometimes just voice chat. You really need to be able to see face and body signals, because all it takes to mess up a relationship online is misinterpreting a serious message. I've had local friends tell me in game about extremely serious problems their having and they usually don't get anything back from me except, "Calling," or “Want to meet somewhere and talk about this?” Meeting in person is ground World of Warcraft or any technological communication could never cover and this is why I hope gamers don’t forgo nearby relationships for distant ones.