The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Five Lessons
by Vonya
I’ve been tagged by Kestrel. I think this particular tag thread, unlike chain letters and five-mile-long blog fill-in-the-blanks, has a great idea behind it and an excellent purpose, so I’ll roll up my sleeves and see whether or not I can contribute meaningfully.
Lesson 5 : No matter how much you love them, you may not be able to play with your friends and family.
I blogged about this topic recently, so I won’t bore you with another long, drawn-out explanation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had friends say “Hey, you play WoW too? What server are you on? We should get together!”
It has never ever worked out for me. Not once. The people I spend my time with and play with are the ones that I met along the way, the ones that I accidentally “bumped into” and we meshed.
I can wish and hope and dream of using WoW to spend time with my friends all I want, but I know better. The recipe for a successful gaming group is too delicate. It can’t be forced.
There’s a corollary to this rule, which says that Just because someone is an exceptionally nice person that you like a lot, that doesn’t make them a good player.
I’ve met people that I could chat with for hours on just about anything. We mesh, we meld, we get along famously, and one instance pull into an invite into Sunken Temple, I found myself shocked and appalled. It was like accidentally stepping into a horrific crime scene.
But they were so nice! Such a wonderful person! How could they, oh mah gawd, did they just…surely they didn’t…and they’re wearing WHALE gear?!?
Lesson 4 : Drama Never Goes Away
Drama never goes away. You cannot hide from it without avoiding human contact altogether. It doesn’t matter what guild you’re in, how great your friends are, how much you love something or how smoothly it’s going.
Drama will find a way. This goes for real life too. It all started back in Kindergarten when Billy said you pushed him, and you said you did not, you hit him because he stole your sucker.
Real life drama continues apace, from wanting to strangle your coworkers to feeling like your bosses are taking advantage of you and wondering whether or not your friends still care.
Gaming drama differs only in content, not in the effect. No guild can say they offer a drama-free environment. You cannot escape “drama” (the amorphous ideal) by leaving your guild or your server. You can avoid a specific instance of drama, sure, but you can never leave drama behind.
I imagine I’ll be a crazy 80-year-old lady someday, gossiping with the neighbor about that fellow that keeps letting his dog poop in my yard, and complaining about that whore, Agnes, who keeps inviting the mailman in “for a cup of coffee”.
Drama is never ending, no matter how hard you may fight against it. It’s a natural part of human interaction and life.
Lesson 3 : It’s the Journey, not the Destination
Sure, that may sound a bit too fortune-cookieish for most folks, but it’s true.
The first time you hit the level cap, it’s like the end of a long, arduous journey. You celebrate! You cheer, you take a deep breath and smile for hours.
…and then…what?
Oh! You can raid, right? Join a raiding guild, see the end game bosses, down the really difficult encounters!
…and then…what?
So many people (myself included sometimes) just RUSH through the content without ever enjoying the scenery, without noticing the crazy dwarf guy who gives the BRD quests (FIFTY! YUP!), without truly tasting the many flavors of the game.
You have a GOAL! And once you set your sights on that goal, you can’t see anything around you.
…but when you reach that goal. When you finally make it to that hallowed place that you’d set aside as your destination…what do you do then?
The destination is nice, and reaching it gives a feeling of accomplishment that is amazing.
But it’s fleeting. The journey, the friends you make along the way, the time you spend doing something silly, those are the things that stick with you, that have true staying power.
Lesson 2 : Teamwork
Again with the fortune cookies, but this one has had a profound effect on me. I’ve always been a bit of an antisocial loner. I hated group projects in school because I always ended up doing all the work. Nobody else cared enough to help, but I cared about my grade so I tucked my chin and set to work.
For a while, this defined my WoW career as well. I love my hunter (queen of soloing) at least partially because I don’t HAVE to have someone else to accomplish most goals. I avoided other people because I didn’t want to pull someone else’s weight anymore.
And then my husband and I met EgoTank, and all of that changed. Here was someone who cared even more than we did. Here’s someone who pulled not only his own weight, but the weight of whoever else he possibly could. Then we met my favorite EgoHunter, and she reminded me that you can be a good player AND a giving, generous person too.
Together, we could do ANYTHING. It was amazing, it was unprecedented, it was a hedonistic high of gloriously successful instance runs.
It wasn’t teamwork I was opposed to, it was teamwork with people who didn’t care. Now that team has expanded, and the incredible joy I get from WoW has grown exponentially. Teamwork with friends, teamwork with people who care and pull their own weight…that’s the secret to life.
Going it solo was nothing compared to this.
Lesson 1 : Online Friendships are REAL Friendships
Online friendships may be represented with pixels. You may not be able to meet the other person, you may not be able to laugh and hang out at the local bookstore or coffee joint.
But the friendships are no less real for that. The friends I have made via WoW, the friendships that we share – those are more powerful to me than most of the relationships I have “in the real world.”
I believe someone can say “I have never met my best friend, and we hang out almost every night” and that be a valid statement. People can argue all they want about how you “never really know someone till you meet them” and there’s just as much truth in that as there is in the assertion that online, people feel more free to be who they really are.
Friends you meet in real life can be two-faced and duplicitous even without hiding behind the face of a night elf.
The relationships you make in-game are real. Don’t ever start to devalue your online friends just because they aren’t standing next to you.
I have made better, more lasting friendships in this game than I do in real life. You can argue that’s because I’m an introverted hermit all you like – I think it’s because we have something in common, something we can talk about and that we are all passionate about.
Value your online friends. They are in no way inferior to your “real life” friends, and deserve to be treated accordingly.
December 4th, 2007
I’m still looking for this magical grouping of friendlies who manage to play at about the same speed I do, at about the same times I do. I was able to briefly slip into the extra slot on the group Ego’s bragging about, and I can personally attest to the miraculous way things just fell down in front of them. I’d like to think I contributed a bit, but it was fairly obvious that this foursome could take down anything even if I had been running my face into a wall during the entire instance. And they did it -fast-. I have been in guild runs that took an inordinate amount of time due to marking, going BACK over strategies, giving out orders and assigning duties. These guys are so tight-knit, they just count on the others in their group knowing what to do, and having the brains to adapt of anything goes unexpectedly. Zoom!
And it never felt rushed, so my lore-lovin butt could enjoy looking around at all the stuff and take a second to read quest gumps.
And Drama never dies. Amen.
/cheer
Good rules, Ego.
December 4th, 2007
I really aggree with the friends part. I have met some really great people playing this game and have actually got to meet them IRL. I am really big on my friends as I live so far from my family that, they are all I got. Even after I decided to move on from WoW, I know that I will still have that friendship I made with them.
December 4th, 2007
I have a couple friends that play only with end game content in mind and can’t understand why I drop quests at the drop of a hat to run off accross the outlands or port to the old world to help some guy I only know cause he is in the guild, or why I spend hours farming mats for/with people I don’t know and probably wont ever talk to again. I tell them What I tell everyone, “It’s what I do” I enjoy playing the game with people even if they don’t reciprocate the effort I put out, if they talk or in some way interact with me while they set themselves to follow and have me do their questing for them I am ok with it. I was going to do that quest anyway so who cares. When it all comes down to it I play the game by my own code of conduct, Help those I can and have fun doing it. the first on-line person I ever really met was another mage who told me she was Frost Spec. I was curious cause I am fire so I looked her up on the armory, she was maxing out each talent on every line. I talked to her again and asked about it. She said she didn’t know how it worked so I offered to make her a talent tree. I spent several hours researching the spells and previously used tree’s untill I had one I thought she might like, and sent it to her VIA guild mail. I did it cause I could help. Anyway, WoW only has quests so that people are forced to be in the same area which promotes interaction IMO =)
December 4th, 2007
I agree with all 5 points. =D
December 4th, 2007
I really agree with the friends part too. And sadly, it can go in a negative direction too – people can wrong you and hurt you in game (and you them) just like they can in real life. For instance, if someone steals from you in game, I don’t see it as being different than if they steal from you in real life, except in magnitude. If someone betrays you in game, magnitude may not even be a factor in the difference between real life. Any time someone says “it’s just a game”, I see it as a weak attempt to avoid acknowledging wrongdoing.
December 4th, 2007
Drama will find a way. This goes for real life too. It all started back in Kindergarten when Billy said you pushed him, and you said you did not, you hit him because he stole your sucker.
Love it
Congratulations on a great article, as usual.
December 4th, 2007
And this is why I tagged you, Ego.
Great list, and your #1 is the best yet, among all the “5 Lessons” I’ve read.
Thank you!
December 4th, 2007
WordPress needs a “heart” smilie. “
December 4th, 2007
Great lessonss. I too fully believe the friends I have online are not any different than RL. In fact, one of my best I met when I ventured into blogging 5 years ago, another military wife, whom I have never met but consider just as close a friend as if I had. Also I’m an introverted hermit:P
December 5th, 2007
A post like this really drives home the different ways in which people can approach this game. Only the teamwork and the journey lessons are ones that I can say I would be open to learning if I hadn’t already brought those perspectives with me when I started playing. I would say this is because I view the relative importance of WoW and real life differently. WoW will always be more than a game to me, but not much more.
I have three nights every week that I set aside for playing with RL friends, three different groups in all with some overlap. The issues you mentioned in your earlier post are flimsy obstacles. Schedules don’t always overlap, and sure, often someone can’t make it. So what? We have fun with those who can make it, and everyone who wants to participate can. Some of them are bad players, but you just have to not care about that–it’s just a game. And I agree that playing it is about the journey, not the destination–and it doesn’t matter if that journey is all wiping and gear of the whale. If you’re really friends, it won’t be hard to have a good time along the way. I’ve never found it difficult to play with my friends and family. I just discard everything about WoW that makes it work, enjoy everything about it that is a game, and I don’t have problems. I’ll worry about the goal oriented aspects of WoW some other time.
People will always make drama in WoW, because they take it more seriously than it deserves (it always boggles my mind that 99% of drama starts over loot that can barely be said to exist), but that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable that you will be involved in it. Don’t start nothin’, won’t be nothin’. This is my (tongue-in-cheek) philosphy in life and in the game–and I’ve never been involved in drama in WoW, and my real life has been almost as free of it. Treat others with respect, even when you don’t actually respect them. Always be truthful. Stop worrying about your progression and let things happen as they will. Things that happen in WoW can’t affect you elsewhere unless YOU let them. When you accept that you’re just playing a game, that you were doing just fine before you started playing, and will continue to do just fine if tomorrow all of the WoW servers suddenly explode, WoW-drama can’t touch you. (Please note that anyone who uses this concept as a rationale for acting like a douchebag is missing the point entirely).
I will agree that online friendships can become important and meaningful. I will agree that you can have online friendships that are more meaningful than some of your real ones. But I think that the vast majority of online relationships are nowhere close. And I know that even the best online relationships have limitations that real ones do not have. Online relationships are formed in a context that is a subset of real life, and thus there is no certainty they can survive outside of that context. For instance, if you meet an online friend in another context (say another game) you may not even recognize him. Further, you may have nothing in common besides the things that occur in the game–I can be great “friends” with a guy in my guild, but if he’s a 14 year old kid in real life then we won’t be friends outside of the game, the distance is too great. I know my friends in real life will always be my friends in a game. But I will never be able to say the reverse about online friends, not with certainty. Online relationships are formed through an artificial construct (like WoW), and it by definition can NOT offer the same opportunity for interaction as real life.
Don’t get me wrong–there are real people on the other end of that internet connection, and real relationships are formed in-game (I’m not a WoW-sociopath, and I’ll reiterate that anyone who uses these concepts to justify being a jerk is missing the point). I just dispute that these relationships can be equal to the ones you can form in real life. While you can see someone’s true personality online, the opportunities are limited, or the artificial construct itself can distort things. There’s no guarantee that the real world will offer the opportunities to see someone’s true nature, especially for an introverted person, this is very true. But real life has more potential. I will always put my real life friends ahead of my online friends. Always. And I will almost guarantee that those “online relationships” that are meaningful to you are thus because you’ve expanded the contexts that they exist in such that the relationship would exist even if the internet disappeared.
December 5th, 2007
I love this one. It’s very rare that someone ever takes the time to think this through and talk about it. At least where I’m from and where I play.
It feels good to know that the emotions runs deep everywhere.
Good good post.
December 5th, 2007
Very good post!
I give 5/5 Stars for this post =D
December 6th, 2007
@ Tv
Right on, play how you you like to and respect those around you. Guiding principles of life.
December 6th, 2007
LOL Meant, *Tiv*
December 9th, 2007
Agreed on all points.
Especially 5. Oh lord, 5. My then-boyfriend (now husband) and I started playing WoW together three days after it came out, and we’ve always meshed very well in the game. It’s possible that this is because we’ve leveled from 1-70 with each other twice, but whatever the cause we’ve played well together.
We finally convinced a couple of mutual friends of ours (WC3 addicts both) to give WoW a try. They were, and still are, horrible players. I really avoid running instances with them whenever possible, because these two guys are just that bad. Once they jointly ran a lowbie of mine through SM (because I had just finished running their lowbies through), and we couldn’t finished because they wiped twice… and they were both 60. One is a paladin and he can’t heal, tank, or dps well. He’s doing a little better with healing lately, but still not at the level he should be. The other is a hunter (like my main) and he still picks up strength gear, leaves growl on 24/7, is specced some hugely funky tri-spec that has all of two key hunter talents, etc. I love those two guys to death, and I would do anything for them, but they really, really, really suck at this game.
January 31st, 2008
Hmm… warcraft it seems like a good place to meet people and thats great but it turns out its just a silly willy game nothing more…
March 15th, 2008
Thanks for this. I found your blog just searching for information on just how prevalent drama was on wow, since I have had to deal with it in the past and I don’t do that well.. I too, IRL am mostly a Loner aside from my wife and kids.. I do things alone.. so it takes a lot of effort to think about teamwork in a gaming environment. This post is a great set of lessons, and have made me really re-think my style of play.