[I planned to post this yesterday, but I was a little distracted due to my being offered a position in Notre Dame's MFA program. That's a good excuse, right?]
Having completed my 10-day WoW trial, I am glad to be able to devote my free time to other pursuits. I signed up for the trial for a number of reasons. I've been following the game since before it came it. When it was released, I was living in Japan, the one east Asian country where the game remains unavailable to this day (Thanks a lot, EverQuest!). I've been playing Warcraft games since I was in high school. I still chuckle at the memory of clicking on a two-headed ogre in Warcraft 2 and listening for 'This way! No, that way!' to come out of my speakers. The franchise has had its hooks into me for a while. In addition, I'm interested in WoW as a virtual world and the degree to which such worlds are capable of simulating an environment that seems real or behaves in a realistic way, even if that reality is vastly different from our own.
My concerns about the game/world seem to be based on the reality that, when it comes to virtual worlds, games are not necessarily simulations, and vice versa. A more authentic portrayal of the "natural" environment in WoW, one in which the weight of death is not offset by respawning in all its myriad forms, would be shocking to gamers who've grown accustomed to using patience and button pushing as the means to cheat death. Shocking, I assert, but not something one couldn't adjust to. From a different angle, the morality of player/character actions is either railroaded down a very absolutist path, one heavily tied with racial and political identity, or more often is simply ignored. Absent the respawning phenomenon, the genocidal actions of both the Alliance and the Horde would (or at least should) be entirely unpaletable.
All that said, Blizzard isn't in the simulation business, and getting players to consider the morality of their in-game actions isn't something that's caught on quite yet, at least not to the degree I think it should. As an RPG, with special emphasis on the G, WoW succeeds in ways that other RPGs haven't for quite some time, and it has forced me to reassess my definitions of the game genre. Having had the opportunity to customize my character, to interact in a large, relatively open world on terms I set myself (as opposed to having some uber-plot forced down my throat) makes this a role-playing game as the term was meant to be used back in the days when only a pen and paper RPG could produce an experience as robust as this. As a contrasting example, the Final Fantasy series isn't about role-playing (or if it was, that ended after the Light Warriors slew Chaos back in the original game). WoW is, though, and I wish I'd taken the opportunity to create a character on a PvP role-playing server, as that would seem to set the bar even higher for a truly open role-playing experience.
Will I be signing up for a full account, sending $13 to $15/month to Blizzard to allow me the privilage of continuing to explore this incredibly detailed but nevertheless flawed world? No, and I knew that going in. Well, let me correct that. No, for now. I'll be moving in the near future, traveling across our own flawed world, and I won't have time for MMORPGs. But once those trips have concluded, once that move is over, will I stay out of WoW? I can't say for sure. I mean, after all I said about the need for a greater moral presence in video games and gaming, what kind of a person would I be if I allowed two lives to be snuffed out of existance, or to be held in some sort of wretched server-bound limbo, simply because I was too cheap to rescue them? Night Elves and Tauren are people, too.
WoW Trial - Complete Series
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