What I’ve Learned from WoW: Part 1

January 31st, 2007Blog2 comments

Whenever you get people together, even in a virtual world, they will form a community.

I’m at level 21 now (been playing the game like I’d play Diablo — solo and grinding), and I kept getting invites to join guilds. A guild is essentially an organization of players in the game with its own chat channel. It can be tight like a gang or loose like a union. So finally I was like, “Eh, might as well”, and accepted a guild invite.

So our guild has a hideout which is essentially a tower in Stormwind. The hierarchy is such that the guild leader hangs out in the top level, the officers hang out in the next level, and the unwashed masses hang out in the lowest level. I’m not sure if this is standard protocol, but it’s pretty interesting and funny. What would happen if I go up to the top level?..

I read somewhere that humans establish hierarchies automatically and sometimes even subconsciously. Whenever a new person enters a room in real life, for instance, the hierarchy rearranges itself.

Whenever you put people together, communities develop — natural leaders appear or some people name themselves as leader. And like Kim said the other day, they also automatically find “the other” — another community to hate on.

What I really find interesting about this game is how it simplifies (and makes visible) a lot of the complexities of human nature in the real world. Also killing things for loot is pretty cool. I wish I could randomly run up to animals in real life and hit them until they died and dropped money.