Applied Semiotics

Splintertree Post, Ashenvale, Western Continent of Kalimdor, Realm of Greymane

Yes, my life has come to this.

In an effort to discover what it is like to blog on a regular basis, just chunk messy, uncrafted prose right into an entry field on a web page, I have started a warcraft blog.

It started as many things have started in my life, as kind of participatory social experiment, anthropologist permanently in the field. The arrogance of this is, of course, that I am somehow detached from the idea of a massively parallel online role playing game. And that is just bullshit. I am a 36 year old man, but I some part of me is also permanently stuck in 18 year old Dungeons and Dragons mode.

What started as a sneek-and-peek is compulsion for me now - both as a twitchy teenager with an active social life and as a 36 year old who makes his living understanding the forces and movements of interactive consumer trends.

So, this is bullshit. Like most things where I am trying to cover for shame or nervousness I am intellectualizing this thing. And its crap because Warcraft is somehow an enactment of all those endless monster and orc killing sessions that unfolded in my mind during Ms. Slepski's Spanish class. The game is just fucking awesome.

The art direction is amazing. Everything is so beautifully rendered, from the paperdoll goodies to the ecosystems of the forests, beaches, and high plains. The game play is masterwork. And the social aspect - this is where my social scientist & critic antennae get vibrating. There are people in there, whole economies of friendship and war. There is real money and real man-hours loose inside that pocket world. That's what I want to understand.

My character is Suriqa, currently a level 22 female troll hunter. Hunters are awesome - sort of a Ranger of the North kind of character. Amazing damage per second with their bows, and the ability to tame beasts for use as a pet and companion -good for older losers like me who don't start the game with a built-in peer group of bloodthirsty teenage boys.

I was finishing up silverwing raid quest (with a real moron shaman that didn't seem to understand the idea of buffing and healing the DPS dude). I was headed back to splintertree to cash in the quest. For the neophyte at home, in Wow questgivers give various errands for the player to run, incentivized by a rewards of cash, experience points, and quest gear, like armor or weapons. Wow has a very deep quasi-free market structure, actions are always given a market incentive to entice players into taking part in the group narrative of the game - it is a fantasy world run by the Republicans. Which is great when your healthcare is provided by wandering bipedal buffalo who can heal you by driving enchanted tiki torches into the ground and lighting setting their enchanted, healing citronella candles alight.

I was back inside the gates of Splintertree, a military outpost that protects Orcish (Horde really) logging operations inside the contested forests of Ashenvale. These sort of realpolitik overnarratives are pretty common inside the geopolitics of the world. As I loped my tollish way towards the Inn, I was bushwhacked by a level 60 Night Elf druid in stealth stalking cat form. I was dead instantly.

I had to wander back from the graveyard as a ghost - reuniting with the shattered mortal coil of my character would bring me back to life. It usually take anywhere from 2-10 minutes of dumb ghostrunning to do this, a real pain in the ass.

Then I was killed again, by the same Night elf alliance bushwhacking son of a bitch.

This is not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part of the story is when I get on the general Splintertree chat channel (good old channel /1) and say "High level night elf druid in stealthed cat form, inside Splintertree wall."

A player, lets call them Moonlynx, whispered me to say, "Don't worry, we are on our way." What was on the way was a 5 man posse of level 60 Alliance hunters. They had been hunting this guy for hours, killing him repeatedly until he so bored that he eventually logged off. Apparently he had been harassing Splinter for 2 days, and this self organized irregular militia had had enough.

Moonlynx healed me up, and also became a friend, someone I can turn to for in-game advice.

I'll backtrack a little tomorrow, and talk about my first two instances (dungeons), and how different they were socially. Short version - Ragefire Canyon sucked, Wailing Caverns was awesome.

/SG

Labels: warcraft