Before we get into the meat and potatoes of what happened yesterday, we went over a reminder – the tools and the technical vocabulary we have been given are tools to explore what an experience truly is, and how to play with it and capture every detail. We get to play with these tools, as they will help us get the most out of an experience, while still being able to get into ourselves and the subjectivity of our own selves.

And Now to WoW

Given the above thinking, we entered story time: our professor and his wife wanted to celebrate the new Lunar Year together by attending the Lunar Festival in WoW. So they logged on (PvP server) and started to engage in the quests of the Lunar Festival, as they found the setting to be quite beautiful. As they were walking along, and nearly done with all the quests and enjoyment of the festival, they ended up getting pwned (in gamer terminology) and spat on by someone 50 levels higher than them and spitting on their corpses. Bad story? Your call. The point of this was to bring up a question: was there a mistake made in this on behalf of the designers (a video from YouTube showing footage from this year’s Festival is below)?

Some more background before we get to the meat of this discussion: special event quests like this only happen for 2 weeks over 1 year, so these don’t come up often; the Festival is located in an area where normally higher level people are; our professor and his wife were level 10; this is one time in the year where both factions and races can actually come together and celebrate something, rather than kill each other; they also received Chinese dumplings in another town, which is important to this Festival; the symbolism of the Festival is extremely powerful for those who participate and engage truly in the festival (to the point where one holds the day in reveration by not doing much else).

A Gamer’s Opinion

So, being a gamer and having played games similar (but not MMO) to this and having watched a sibling play WoW for a while now, I’ll pitch in my own 2 cents. I wouldn’t have done this on a PvP server to start with, as I am a person who enjoys the style of PvE much more. If I had been on a PvP server, though, the experience would have been ruined for me as a player, as I would be expected that a festival such as this would allow me to transcend the bounds of the game and let me enjoy something to this extent. Not being able to do this would let me rant on about how much the people who designed this experience would have messed up. Big Time. I like fair play, and this type of experience is exactly why I would never play on a server like this if I ever did play WoW. I could rant on much more about this, but I’ll cut that diatribe short (because it has to deal with morality and things of this nature, and we don’t want to have that type of discussion here). I also think that there is enough evidence to say there is an error here, as if I were in the same situation, I would be in the expectation that this would be a safe ground, and anyone who violated this trust should be banned (or at least flamed or trolled, in my opinion). Simply put: DO NOT WANT.

The Class’s Opinion

As a class, there were mixed opinions about where the designers messed up or not. Some had the opinion it was our professor’s idea to engage in this festival at such a low level and on a PvP server. Why didn’t he use a different character? We didn’t really get an answer.

Others had a mentality that this was messed up – people just randomly killing each in WoW – that’s just not right. But then we heard an alternate perspective – in PvP, many have fun going around and just killing others randomly. It’s just what you do (but it’s part of the reason I don’t like PvP – the experience gets destroyed in an instant) and how one has fun. This was a heated discussion.

But then an even more informed perspective was brought to our attention. The Festival foreshadows what type of year one is going to have. Death is not even supposed to be talked about or even hinted about on this day. To go about killing people on this day is the antithesis of what the Festival is about, and is quite offensive to those who partake in the festival.

With all that said, a spectrum emerged about this type of play: there is normal PvP play, then there are diegetic festivals for players in WoW on PvP servers, and then there are non-diegetic festivals. We came to a consensus that this type of play is OK the further to the style of play in normal PvP action, but as the style of play starts to shift gears towards non-diegetic festivals, the more not cool this type of play is, and offensive it is for some.

To take away from this an experience, we have to remember that our unit of analysis was the felt, subjective experience (in the narrative and presentation of it) of our professor, not the interface of WoW. We analyzed the felt experience and expression of this experience and brought it to our own horizons and were able to critically interpret and realize what is really going on. In addition, we had to pay attention to intricate, particular details of the expression and experience, and from these, we can become informed and have a better view as to how people experience and go through their lives, even if it is in a virtual world, like WoW.