What I’ve Learned from WoW: Part 2

February 1st, 2007Blog0 comments

People crave respect.

It’s a natural human tendency to want respect — I think it’s a form of love that you get from people that aren’t close enough to you to truly love you. In the real world it’s difficult for most people to get respect. The primary way to get it is to be really good at something, and most people aren’t good at anything that would give them scads of respect. Yet we live in a world that venerates superstars, and a supposition of the American dream is that being famous is just as good as being prosperous.

What WoW is really good at is simplifying respect down from a qualitative thing into a quantitative thing. Your rank in the world is measured by numerical terms: What level you are, how good your gear is, etc.. You can Inspect anyone nearby and see what they’re wearing and who they are. This makes the hierarchy clear. At the very least, you know who could beat you up and who you could beat up.

Even your reputation with various factions is represented by a number. This number goes up when you do quests that benefit that faction.

There’s something really seductive about this — knowing, absolutely, your place in the world. And if your real life consists of working a job that you hate and coming home and entertaining yourself with whatever — repeat until your imminent death — then being somebody, somewhere, sounds pretty darned good. And all you have to do is level grind and kill things.

That’s when any video game is at its best: When it gives the illusion of power and prestige. The problem is when it starts becoming a substitute for accomplishments in RL.

Press Photo of the Day:

Note that someone has blurred out the offending one-pixel middle finger.