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Well it ain’t pretty because I seriously lack web design skills - it would look a whole lot different if I knew how to use flash. I also would like to write more, and clarify certain ambiguities that may arise for people who are not familiar with the game at all. There are whole series of things I would have liked to add to this documentary, but unfortunately I do not have any more time, and I did not have any more time to allocate to this particular subject. Thanks goes out to Jeremy, Tracy, the anonymous interviewee, Wes Chan, and my honours buddies.

 Let me know if there are any big issues on the online documentary that I can quickly fix up

There are number of activities in the game that are quite festive and seem like things you would do with friends or perhaps family. Who, in-game, would one do these activities with? What kind of community?

Wedding Photos

Article about WoW weddings

And read point number 7 in this article

Wedding dress… why?

Here are some things to consider in my project (analysis of the World of Warcraft community) and comparisons to the real world:

·         What is a documentary?
·         Realm
o   Location
o   Faction balance
o   Realm age
·         Identity
o   Reputation
o   Game play
o   Friends
o   Gear
o   Mounts
o   Experience
o   Expression
o   Guild
o   Affiliations
o   Sociability
o   Gender
o   Location
o   Nationality
o   Kindness
o   Charity
o   Alts (alternate characters)
o   Online profiles
o   Forum personality
o   Personality and backbone
o   Character talent build
o   Class choice
o   Race choice
o   Friends list
o   Age
·         Guild
o   Guild status (i.e. how good is the guild?)
o   Hierarchy
o   Website
o   Forums
o   Invitations
o   Friends
o   Connections
o   Leadership
o   Ownership
o   Commitment
o   Familiarity
·         Economy
o   Auction house
o   Private selling
·         Gold
o   In-game value
o   Real-life dollar value
·         Faction
o   Prejudice
o   Rivalry
·         Professions
o   As compared to jobs in society
o   Levels of achievement
o   Connections
o   Monopolies
o   Mates-rates
·         Player versus player
o   “For people without friends”
o   Group play
o   Individual play
o   leadership
·         Dungeons and group dynamics
o   Progression
o   People who continue playing lower level dungeons
o   PUGS (pick up groups)
·         Raids
o   Team speak or Ventrilo
o   Items
o   Connections needed for gearing up
o   Progression
o   Reputation
o   Leadership
o   Guild
o   Consistency
o   PUGS

I sent an email to Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, asking whether I could use their screenshots in the online documentary and they eventually sent me a brief email with a link outlining their legal position:

http://www.battle.net/legalfaq.shtml

This basically says that Blizzard will allow me to use their screenshots on a website like the documentary I’m creating, as long as I place the disclamer for the particular game I’m using screenshots from, on my website. These disclamers etc can be found here: http://www.battle.net/copyright.shtml

An example:

Screenshot from the game: World of Warcraft™
World of Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Anyone see any forseeable problems?

A lot of factual information regarding World of Warcraft… 

“Some players try to misuse the game – In one case, a transgender player formed a transgender guild and Blizzard Entertainment banned this. People for and against the action voiced their protest and the game got into a needless controversy. In another case, around June 2005, a child died because of WOW-addiction. According to a leading psychologist, around 40% of WOW players are addicted to it. Well, whatever the criticism, World of Warcraft is growing stronger by the day.”

The transgender guild being created is interesting evidence of communities created within the larger WoW community, which can in turn replace communities in reality… It’s almost as interesting that the guild got banned, bringing attention to the governing body of the game, its GMs and some constitution-like code of World of Warcraft ethics and rules.

It’s kind of interesting to see the various character names employed by one person, and how they take up the alias of their more successful character. I remember in the game, if you happen to bump into someone’s “alt” - another of their characters – they say, “hey its me Bob” or whatever character name you are familiar with in reference to that person. One of a person’s many characters becomes the one they primarily identify with… and thus the achievements of this character are inscribed accordingly onto various character names. His blog is not, it seems, written under his own name, but rather his character name from World of Warcraft. I guess I’m doing the same thing on this blog – sathfilms – not my actual name, but I guess that can easily found by clicking on the honours student link on my blogroll. Nonetheless, the character/person handle or alias thing is quite fascinating since the communities are built up on this – calling somoene “starfire” or “boobdust” over a voice communications program or even in chat is not even considered that strange.

I searched the word “mundane” on technorati.com and this was like the fourth or fifth search result… And since I thought I’d do my oh so complex “Online Documentary” on the community of World of Warcraft and how it’s a synthetic replacement for real life or “RL” (which is often referred to as some sort of crazy distant plane of existence by some players… and the common “RL over WOW, man” or “sometimes, RL happens”) I thought it might a good idea to link this to my blog so that I wouldn’t forget about it.

This gentleman complains about this crappy gameplay in World of Warcraft and the laziness of Blizzard to actally make the game more than a stupid grind for “reputation” which takes times…. to get some stupid item that one can finally use to kill other plays… but instead, there’s other “reputation” to “grind.” He goes into much detail about the weakness of the game and how it does not really entertain him anymore because of the lack of variety… anyway, it’s all quite valid… but regardless of all that, he’s played the game for one and a half years. I’m not sure when he became unhappy with the game, but most of the quests have been quite boring for more than that time period, and assuming the “cool it’s new” factor wore off after 6 months… he did continue to play it for another year… my question is WHY did he keep playing… without making it sound wanky and ignore the actual gameplay which can make it addictive – perhaps it was the online community of people who one grinds, raids and socialises with online that makes/made him stay and play…  I mean talking to people on things like teamspeak or vent while playing, or even in-game guild-chat can act as a community which replaces “RL” or at least substitutes for some parts of it… I know of some sad cases where people only do that, and even “RL” social events are surrounding World of Warcraft and the community created therein.

I’ll probably comment on his blog and ask…