If you’ve been thinking about trying out WoW, now’s the time to do it. Blizzard is running a new promotion that will allow you to start playing with a friend who already has an account—the friend with an existing account will get a really nice in-game gift, and both of you will be able to level your characters 3x as fast when you’re grouped together.
This addresses a long-standing problem with the game, which is the lack of a “sidekick” mode to allow people with high level characters to engage with friends whose characters are newer.
If this is the thing that “turns” you, I’d be very grateful if you’d let me be your referrer; in return, I’ll happily quest with you to get you leveled up quickly. Just let me know which email you want the referral code sent to.
I don’t expect blogging to resume with any regularity until grading, proposal reviewing, and leveling are all finished.
At Foo Camp last month, I finally had an opportunity to play the game werewolf—something I’ve heard a lot about, but hadn’t participated in. It’s not a technology-intensive activity, by any means. No computers, just a deck of cards. For details on the game (and its sibling game, Mafia), see the link above. For those of you too lazy to click through, here are the basics:
A group of people gather around a table. We had around 20 people starting each round, but you could have fewer. The game master (in our case it was danah boyd) hands out cards to each player—on the card is the role you’ll play for that game. The roles in our games were villager, werewolf, healer, and seer. For some of our games we had four werewolves, for others there were three. There’s always one seer and one healer. Nobody knows what anyone else’s role is when the game begins. The game master tells everyone to “go to sleep,” which means you close your eyes and make some kind of noise—humming, etc—so that you can’t hear what’s going on. The GM tells the werewolves to open to their eyes, and to acknowledge each other with eye contact; then the GM tells the werewolves to silently agree on someone in the village that they want to kill off. The werewolves then are told to close their eyes, and the healer is told to open his or her eyes, and to indicate silently to the GM who s/he would like to heal for that round. Then the healer closes his or her eyes, and the seer is allowed to wake up. The seer can point to one person in the circle and have the GM tell them if that person is or isn’t a werewolf. After that, the GM announces it’s morning, and that everyone can wake up. If the person the werewolves picked to kill was not healed by the healer, the GM tells the deceased of their fate, and they have to leave the circle. Then comes the fun part. The remaining players try to determine as a group which players are werewolves. The players can vote to lynch someone if they believe they’re a werewolf, or can choose to do nothing. Then the cycle repeats. The game ends at the point where either all the werewolves are dead (villagers win!) or there are more werewolves than villagers (werewolves win!).
One variant of the game allows deceased players to inform the group of their role, so that the village knows if a werewolf (or healer, or seer) has been killed. We didn’t play with that rule, so we never knew for sure who’d just been killed off.
So, what’s the point? You learn a lot about people from the subtle clues they give off. This is all about deception and perception, about how to read the “tells” from the people around you. The better you know people, I’ve heard, the easier it is to tell if they’re lying.
It is incredibly addictive. And it’s fun not just to play, but also to watch the game. Once you’ve been killed off, you get to see what everyone’s real roles are, and to see who’s most effective in convincing the others of their innocence (whether or not they really are innocent).
Tom Coates, danah boyd, and Jane McGonigal all have excellent accounts of the gameplay at Foo, and observations on the game itself, on their blogs. (Jane also talks about the fabulous “reverse scavenger hunt” that she ran at Foo, which was a great exercise in creative thinking and improvisational acting!)
So, this got me to thinking…are there werewolf players at RIT? If not, there totally should be. I’m thinking of proposing a monthly RIT werewolf game…time and place to be determined. Who wants to play?
I had invited T. L. Taylor to participate in the social computing symposium, but she had a prior E3 commitment. Much to my delight, Tamara Pesik snagged her to speak in the MSR speaker series this week, so I get a chance to hear a presentation from her today about her research! Yay!
There’s a good turnout, which is nice to see.
She starts by painting a basic picture of MMOG environments, including the software and service model associated with them, noting “breakthrough” titles such as Ultima Online (1997), EverQuest (1999), and World of Warcraft (2004).
Shows an excellent chart from mmogchart.com showing subscription data (how does he get this?). The WoW curve is pretty astounding (and it’s six months out of date, showing 5 million rather than 6.5 millions WoW subscribers).
She’s interested generally in the relationship between social and technological artifacts, and sees games as an excellent context in which to “unpack” that relationship.
Becoming a player involves a great deal of socialization—norms, practices, social regulation. There’s a lot of ‘indeterminacy’ — things that aren’t specified in the manual, that users have to make sense of and create through social practice. She uses “trains” in EverQuest as an example of how practice and lore develop around technical phenomenon. (She mentions use of trains for grief play, and this spurs an interesting side discussion, one that I refrain from responding to because this is a particularly sore spot for me in WoW right now.) Excellent point here — “you can’t look at a train and figure out what it means; you need to look at the context to understand it.”
Next she talks about guilds, and points out how different they are. Family guilds, professional guilds, raiding guilds, casual guilds, age-based guilds, and many others. Most involve trust, responsibility, accountability, and reputation. At the highest levels of most games, it’s almost impossible to play without having been socialized into a guild structure.
Shows a social network graph showing relationships among members of a family guild, differentiating between RL and RP (role playing) relationships. (Nice line: “Friends are the ultimate exploit.”) Notes the extent to which people share characters, which is technically a bannable offense—but an example of how users co-opt aspects of a system in ways devs may not expect or want.
Some discussion of the external databases of player-created information about the game. The examples she shows require explicit input by users, but many of the WoW sites now use add-ons to automatically update (like thottbot.com, or auctioneer).
Interesting question from the audience—how much of the reward for playing comes from system-based rewards (levels, xp, honor) and how much comes from social interaction (reputation, etc).
Shows a raid-leader’s screen, with mods everywhere. Wow. I’ve not seen this before. It does change the experience. She notes the social impact, as well, since these mods often show explicitly the micro-level contributions of each player.
Talks about some “persistent critical issues.” She mentions a variety of RMT issues—selling accounts, buying gold, etc. Public vs private sources of control. She shows the warrior protest in IronForge, and the “bullhorn-like” response by Blizzard. (Found the story and the screenshots; scroll down to bottom for system message.) Talks about the GLBT-friendly guild issue, as well, and the whole “should real life come into gaming environments” issue.
Discussion (as is typical at MSR talks) is intelligent and wide-ranging, so I’m not going to try to distill it. The most interesting surrounds the issue of “addiction.” This is clearly a divisive issue, and TL handles it quite well. She reminds people of the moral panic over the introduction of childrens’ literature, and talks about the increasing number of people playing with their kids.
Interesting question—“is there a takeaway from your book for designers of social spaces?” Makes me think there’s a hunger for this right now, for lessons we can bring from these increasingly important and influential spaces of play into other contexts.
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