Assignment#10 - I played WOW.

I have had plenty of resources and experiences to write a blog assignment regarding online interaction so far. However, this week the assignment was about the one thing I have absolutely no experience or knowledge: computer games. The only games I played in my entire life even including video games are Minesweeper and Super Mario. When I was looking for a Role Playing Game (RPG), thinking it would be safer to try something mentioned in the reading, I went to There.com. However, after I logged in, my avatar made with not many given choices, did not know where to go, what to do, etc. Although I spent quite amount of time to install this game, I decided to play with someone who can give me some advices. Since last summer, it has not been hard to see some of my friends playing World Of Warcraft (WOW). I borrowed one of my friends’ account and had him sitting next to me to give me suggestions on what to do and how to play the game. Because of this particular environment, my online self-representation had a similar limitation with the one of Yee & Bailenson’s experiment that the avatar was assigned rather than chosen by the participant. His avatar was called Draenei. Draenei was a tall human-looking figure with elf-ears and horns. Her feet looked like the one of a horse and her level was 50. As the first task, I, Draenei in a virtual space, was told to defeat Polberg clan and to take the bracelet of Polberg’s chief. During the request, I was attacked from the back by a Horde, another clan that is against mine. Since I also needed to manage the fight against Polberg, I was not able to survive through this unfair attack. On a public posting, I asked for a help from other players. Draenei at level 70 nearby me came over and killed the Horde in revenge.

WOW was certainly a virtual space because it is an online video game where more than one player plays in the same video game space at the same time. WOW was a quest-oriented game where a group of clans was antagonistic to another group of clans. In order to survive, the higher level one’s avatar was considered to be more attractive or more envied by others. As Yee & Bailenson proved with experiment results, avatars at a higher level acted with more confidence and were more active in interactions among other avatars. My friend also told me people usually choose which gender to play based on the feature of the gender of a particular type of race, not based on the gender of the participant. Therefore, there was less attraction towards the opposite gender. I was a tall female figure with relatively high level. This condition did influence me to act more confident and sometimes more aggressive when I was interacting other people in my clan. Since there was less attraction between the opposite genders, I did not find myself revealing more personal information to the other male avatars.