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All the World's a Stage is a weekly column by David Bowers, now published on Sundays, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.
For some, the whole process takes 5 minutes. They log in, click on "create new character," choose a race, a class, painstakingly compare each and every face and hairstyle, type in a name, click "accept," and they're done. Some take their time by paying a visit to the forums of each class, or asking their friends about which race is best -- but who sits down and makes up a story idea, a personality, and actual characteristics for characters these days?
Roleplayers do, of course. But how? What if you'd like to try out roleplaying but you just don't know where to begin creating an actual character, rather than just an avatar for yourself in the game? Each roleplayer tends to have his or her own way, but there are are a number of things they have in common. One of the first things to remember about designing your character concept, is to make your character essentially human, relatable, based on real experiences that you know about.
Mine your life. Think of what kinds of experiences you are familiar with, and which of them could be used as the foundation for another person's life, a new character with a story to tell, and a personality to engage other people's interest. Today, I'll give you a couple examples of how I tried to do this, and explain some of the pitfalls people often fall into when trying to make up an interesting character.
We had two similiar comments drop in on the tipline in the past few days that both are pretty interesting ideas that WoW does all right with, but could probably do a lot better. Foxtir dropped us a note the other day voicing an opinion about the night and day cycle of World of Warcraft. As you may have noticed, WoW does have a night/day cycle already-- when it's midday, the light looks very different from the middle of the night (and my favorite zone in the whole world is Hinterlands in the evening). But Foxtir wants an even more obvious cycle-- during the day, Stormwind should be bustling, while at night, the weirdos could come out, and maybe even some Defias could be found in the city. It would be cool to see the day and night cycles have a gameplay effect as well-- in Warcraft III, they definitely did, but in WoW, I don't know that the day/night timing has any effect but the lighting.
And Jasperwind sent another note saying basically the same thing about the weather-- we've got the occasional rain and snow, but what if weather affected gameplay somehow? Or even more extreme forms of weather, he suggests-- what if earthquakes scared mobs away for a matter of time?
Let's give Blizzard credit where credit is due-- most games don't have a night/day cycle (much less a realtime cycle), and many games have no weather at all, or implement it badly (and anyone who's ever experienced a freak storm in Tirisfal will agree that Blizzard didn't do that). So WoW is already ahead of the curve in both cases. But in an MMORPG where we pay monthly, we can always expect more. And it would definitely be cool (and add a little more strategy to the game) to have these cosmetic changes affect the lives and actions of the characters we play.
It occurred to me the other day that something I would never have understood before has, thanks to WoW, become part of how I think about gaming, to the point that I instantly recognized it when I heard that the new version of D&D is basically copying it - I'm talking about the role a character plays in a party or raid.
Before WoW, I played a lot of pen and paper RPG's, and the one thing that always stayed the same about them when compared to games like World of Warcraft or its MMO antecedents is that, in most pen and paper games, there is no mechanism for roles like 'tank' or 'dps'. There would usually be a healer of some kind or another, but in a tabletop RPG no one cares if the strongest melee combatant in the party is a holy paladin, a brutal sword-swinging warrior or a stealthy rogue, and whether or not any of them did more damage to the monster than, say, the wizard would be totally irrelevant. There was certainly no mechanism in the rules to keep a monster or monsters attention fixed on the guy with the most health or armor, either. So when I first started playing WoW I had no idea that my first character, a paladin, would be asked to heal people nor what 'tanking' even was. And since I was playing it at the time it first came out with other folks new to the game, no one bothered to explain to me what tanking was because none of my friends knew, either.
It wasn't until my first Scarlet Monastery run that I even realized I was supposed to do something there besides just hit things. Now, MMO's like WoW are so popular that the oldest pen and paper RPG is trying to learn from them, including incorporating how the various classes work in combat to some degree. It's all gone full circle, I guess - the first MMO's seemed determined to be D&D, and now D&D is becoming more like an MMO.
Did you immediately understand what you would be expected to do in a party? Did you accept it or reject it? And do you think it will translate into offline play? I went out and bought every book for the World of Warcraft Roleplaying Game but I never tried to actually run it... maybe I was just behind the times.
I love the question that juliamarcela over on Livejournal asks: What does Draenei skin feel like? Obviously Tauren are hairy cows, and almost all the other races are more or less Human (even if the color is a little different). But the Draenei are completely alien. Sure, they're probably not scaly or slimy, but it probably feels different than most skin we know. I like julia's suggestion, too: like shark skin.
And I think I like that question so much because it brings Azeroth alive for our senses. What do mana potions really taste like? What does Shadowmoon Valley smell like? The prairie in Nagrand is probably a little firmer under your feet than the lands of Azeroth (considering it's just rock down there), but Swamp of Sorrows is probably a muddy mess to get through. And what does it feel like when you actually pass through the Dark Portal-- do you get to watch that scene from Stargate as you fly through the stars?
I'm known to DM a D&D game on occasion, and I can tell you that there's no better way to bring a fictional setting to life than to imagine it through all of your five senses. From Draenei skin to what surely is a hot sulfur smell drifting through the Burning Steppes, I find it extremely interesting to think of what being in Azeroth would really be like.
Terra Nova is rethinking the conclusions the BBC made a while back about using WoW to study the spread of diseases. If you recall the article stated that player's reactions to the spread of Hakkar's Corrupted Blood was an excellent research tool for how epidemics spread in the real world. Not so says Dan Hunter.
All of this discussion stems from a spell called Corrupted Blood that infects players fighting Hakkar in Zul'Gurub. In some cases players took the disease back with them to Ironforge and Ogrimmar, and death spread amongst the populace of those cities. Dan argues against the BBC claim that we can study diseases within online games to find out how real epidemics would spread.
I see his point really. First, there is the nature of the spell itself, created as a game mechanic, not as a virus with incubation periods and deteriorating illnesses that ultimately lead to a victim's demise. There is nothing within WoW to show the ultimate toll on a population when they must live with an illness for long periods of time, where they cannot log out and go watch a movie instead. Once Corrupted Blood had spread it was over with, there was no need for quarantine, for the development of an antivirus, of really any of those elements that make dealing with a large scale deadly disease so horrific.
The reactions of the players to the debuff, their running around to either help or hurt their fellow players, is really an illustration of social behavior in online games, says Hunter. If we study this at all, we should do it from the context of social science rather than epidemiology. In order to truly study viruses in an online virtual world, we would need to create such a world specifically for that purpose a massively multiplayer online roleplaying scenario in which few would participate because there is nothing fun about disease. In such a scenario, players would not be able to simply remove themselves from the game in order to avoid the plague, otherwise there could be no real research into the behavior of the virus.
I see the value in such a project, and would gladly participate, but I can't foresee anyone with the research funding substantial enough to accomplish this spending it on what would be essentially termed a game. Unless of course a company like Blizzard donates their resources to the creation of such a project.
All the World's a Stage is a weekly column by David Bowers, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.
Roleplaying the opposite sex happens. It is alluring to some, and repulsive to others -- a lot of people do it, while a lot of other people very openly proclaim (as if they know these things) that anyone who does this weird, manipulative, deceitful, and so on.
People also tend to come up with various excuses for why they play a character of the opposite sex, as if they need to justify themselves according to their own gender's traditional expectations. Some men say, "if I'm going to have to stare at a characters butt for hours while I play, I'd rather it be a hot and sexy butt," while some women say, "I get all kinds of unwanted attention if I play a girl, and the only way I can get away from it is to play a boy." All that may be true in some cases, but it's hardly the whole story behind opposite-gender roleplaying.
First of all, let me just say it here and now: you have every right to create whatever character you want, particularly in an actual roleplaying environment, and particularly if you intend to be faithful to the character you're creating.
It can be a touch daunting to level a character in WoW, especially if you have a lot of real life commitments. The designers are aware of this, and changes are on the way. But what amazes me is that there are players out there who pay other people to level their characters for them. It's usually offered as an adjunct to real money transfer services, and it always boggles my mind.
I can understand that after you've leveled a few 70's up, you might get bored with the old world content to some degree. After my fourth 70 I was bound and determined that none of my under 60 prospects were going to set foot in Stranglethorn Vale again because I'm sick of the place (they all did, because while I'm sick of the place, I also know where all the quests are - I can go through STV like a steam powered quest thresher now, be it Horde or Alliance quests - expediency trumps all, I guess) but I still have a hard time imagining actually giving someone else access to my account, especially someone who is in all likelihood working for a gold seller.
I suppose it's only different from playing your wife's toon while she's at work by degree, but it seems different to me. (Hey, she really wants that Firefly, it would be a great anniversary present.) I play WoW because, well, I like the game. If I disliked playing the game so much that I felt like I needed to hire someone to play it for me, I don't think I'd play it at all. Is it that important to get to 70 super-fast? Is the game so much more fun at max level that you'd actually pay someone to get you there?
Henry Lowood, a Library Science teacher at San Jose State University recently took his online "Games and Libraries" class on a virtual field trip: into World of Warcraft. As he explains it on the How They Got Game 2 site, the lesson he was teaching dealt with the usefulness of online games in the library, and his students for the most part had no exposure to online gaming, and so the class logged in for class credit.
They started their own guild on the Windrunner realm so that they would have their own chat channel, and had to deal with the issue of mass death since most of the students were using 10-day trial accounts and thus were too low level to survive long. Despite the challenge, the online forum proved a successful environment in which to teach, and within WoW the students were able to encounter the community of online gamers, witness their teacher (a paladin) duel a priest to illustrate the PvP aspects of the game, and even received some resurrection from their instructor when they died along the way, "a first in terms of faculty-student relations."
Now, those of us who have taught know the difficulties of keeping a classroom of students engaged, so I think this is a pretty novel way to do so. It helps that the lesson was specifically about online gaming honestly, but I wonder how well this would apply to a discussion on say virtual storytelling, or even a history lesson on warfare. I know that would be one class session my students would have never skipped out on.
Perhaps brought on by the news that a Chinese MMO wants to reveal gender bending gamers, Cary posted a pretty interesting poll over on the WoW LJ, asking readers what their gender is and what sex they play as on their main character. The general consensus seems to be that most people play as their own gender, but overwhelmingly, more women play as their own gender than men. The poll itself seems a little off to me, as it's really pointless to compare the percentages given, but by crunching the numbers a bit (and please remember how bad at math I am), I get that 40% of men who answered play the game as women, while only 11% of women who answered play the game as men. Here's more data on this, that we've covered before.
Very interesting. We've touched on the reasons for gender bending in gamea few times before, and there are all kinds of reasons why people play as characters of the opposite sex, from staring at an attractive behind to garnering more money and attention (or less attention) from other players, to roleplaying a character.
But really, none of that matters too much-- it's just a game, and for whatever reason, people are welcome to play it as they please. A better question might be how you refer to the gender of other players. I've gotten in trouble a few times here by referring to players on the forums (including CMs, way back when I started) as one gender when it turns out they're actually another, so eventually I just decided to call it how I see it: if someone plays a female character I call them "her," and a male character gets called "him." For people playing a different gender, sure, it might come off a little strange. But it comes with the territory, I guess, of pretending to be someone else for a while.
Just a quick question this morning, from Indigo on Livejournal: if you compared the way you look in real life to a WoW race, what would you be? Indigo would be a Female Dwarf, and I'm sure lots of people would be human. Who would be a Tauren? Actually, now that I think about it, Samwise Didier, lead singer of Blizzard's L70ETC, would be a pretty good Tauren. But only because Pandaren aren't in the game yet.
No doubts here-- I'd be an Ogre. Just the one head, but considering my height and size, you can call me High King Mike. I can definitely break out the dance, though, at a moment's notice.
By "your moment" I mean that one, shining, crystalline moment of clarity when you finally feel like you 'get' World of Warcraft and why you play it. Technically as a player you could have many such moments - perhaps the first time you make a kill in PvP and finally feel like you understand how to do it, or the first time you successfully run an instance, or the first time you tank a major boss, or the first time your raid drops a major progession milestone... but it's just as likely to be when you dinged 40 and got your mount, or first stepped through the Dark Portal into outland. It's unique to you and yet you may well share it with hundreds if not more of your fellow players.
For me, the biggest moment was also my biggest screwup - tanking Onyxia in PvP gear with a 2h weapon. It made the game really click for me because 20 people pulled together in the face of my colossal screwup to kill Ony anyway. I've really never felt closer to a guild before or since than I did at that moment, and I've never had such a feeling of triumph when the boss finally hit the ground. It wasn't our first Ony kill, we were on much more challenging content, and I've since gone on to raid level 70 instances... but that Ony kill was special.
So I ask you, gentle (and not so gentle) readers: what was your moment? Have you had it yet?
The illustrious and oft-misunderstood cheese connoisseur Turpster of WoW Radio made a comment in the WoW Insider podcast last weekend to the effect that everybody in World of Warcraft is a guy, which was especially amusing because Elizabeth Harper was on the show with me. Warcry's Razorwire posted an article this morning that just about made my eyes pop out of my freakin' head on this very subject.
To make a long story short, as one of my friend's often says, a Chinese MMO has banned the account of every male player in the game who played a female character. Yes Virginia, they made every player in the game verify with a webcam. While not a foolproof system (especially if you have a female family member or friend who can be bought for the right price) it obviously netted them results.
Since the first day I played World of Warcraft I've heard adult players like myself tell me how much extra they'd be willing to pay to play on a server where age of majority is verified somehow. This kind of verification though, seems to me to be just a little bit over-the-top. At the same time though, I can see where certain segments of the gaming population would be jumping-up-and-down excited about it.
What do you think about gender verification? Please keep it clean and respectful. I have the prototype for that paladin ranged weapon BRK talked about yesterday and I'm not afraid to use it.
Hot on the heels of tomorrow's expected 2.2 release, Neth has posted the short-but-sweet 2.2.2 patch notes, which include Brewfest and Hallow's End, featuring lots of new seasonal rewards and quests. As we've said before, the fact that both of these holidays are coming up quick means we can't be more than one or two weeks away from this patch's release.
And the other interesting feature of this patch is the addition of quite a few new graveyards all over Old Azeroth. Southern Barrens, Western Plaguelands, Alterac Mountains, Searing Gorge and the Badlands are all getting extra graveyards (there's no indication whether they're Horde or Alliance specific or otherwise), and Tanaris, Winterspring, Stonetalon and Un'Goro are all getting two.
Wow. That should significantly speed things up in Un'Goro, Tanaris, and the Southern Barrens especially, since I have less-than-fond memories of super-long corpse runs there. Badlands, too, was pretty maddening, and while the long corpse run wasn't the only reason most players aren't big fans of Uldaman, it was definitely a reason for that. This is no doubt part of Blizzard's aim to speed up levels 1-60 for players. This alone, of course, doesn't exactly make me want to go back and run another alt through (only new content would do that), but at least when we do run another alt through, it'll be a little easier.
All the World's a Stage is a new weekly column by David Bowers, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.
As you know, WoW is a work of art, and roleplaying is probably the most creative aspect of the WoW experience. There are many reasons why people roleplay, and also many challenges to roleplayers, not the least of which is fitting in with all the other players who may not get why in the world you spend your time this way.
To put it most simply, as roleplayers, we view our WoW experience as a creative one. We want to make each other laugh and smile and share stories about our characters. By doing this, we not only have a good time, we get that sense of inspired expression that any artist loves, whether a comics illustrator or a knitting addict. Roleplayers aren't so different from other players -- we want to do quests, dungeons, raids, and fight other players just like everyone else, but we want to do it all in a creative, story-based way.
All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts,
Keen and Graev have a good post up about why (according to them) players prefer playing DPS roles. Statistically, it appears to be more or less true-- according to Warcraft Realms, four of the five highest class percentages are traditionally DPS classes: Mage, Rogue, Warlock, and Hunter. Warriors also have a higher population, but it could be argued that only 1/3 of the Warrior specs (Prot, as opposed to Arms or Fury) out there are actually meant for anything other than DPS.
So why do players seemingly prefer to play DPS? K&G give three main reasons. They cite something they call "Big Number Syndrome," which is the idea that unless you're dealing big damage, your class is worthless. They say that doing DPS requires less responsibility-- tanks and healers have to pay attention to everything, but DPSers choose a target and kill it. And they say that DPS classes level faster, which seems anecdotally (at least) to be true-- more damage means a faster kill, which means XP more often.
In general (very generally, in fact), I tend to agree. For these reasons, some people are definitely drawn to the DPS lifestyle. But I don't think that these reasons are why people chose these classes in the first place. Hunters, for example, have pets, and I think that's a much bigger draw to the class than "big number syndrome" ever was. And let's not forget that these are more or less the most archetypal classes in the game-- someone who's never played the game probably would immediately know what a "Mage" or "Rogue" could do, whereas a Shaman (the lowest class population, according to the census) is a little harder to explain.
So I think K&G are putting the chicken before the egg-- these things may be true about DPS looking back (and they may in fact be reasons people choose DPSers as alts). But when people first choose a class to call their own, I think it's a little simpler than that.
We had two similiar comments drop in on the tipline in the past few days that both are pretty interesting ideas that WoW does all right with, but could probably do a lot better. Foxtir dropped us a note the other day voicing an opinion about the night and day cycle of World of Warcraft. As you may have noticed, WoW does have a night/day cycle already-- when it's midday, the light looks very different from the middle of the night (and my favorite zone in the whole world is Hinterlands in the evening). But Foxtir wants an even more obvious cycle-- during the day, Stormwind should be bustling, while at night, the weirdos could come out, and maybe even some Defias could be found in the city. It would be cool to see the day and night cycles have a gameplay effect as well-- in 
It occurred to me the other day that something I would never have understood before has, thanks to WoW, become part of how I think about gaming, to the point that I instantly recognized it when I heard that the new version of 
I love the question that juliamarcela over on Livejournal asks: 
It can be a touch daunting to level a character in WoW, especially if you have a lot of real life commitments. The designers are aware of this, and 
Perhaps brought on by the news that a Chinese MMO 
The illustrious and oft-misunderstood cheese connoisseur 
Hot on the heels of tomorrow's 
Keen and Graev 
