Alright, This weeks blog entry is as all of you know, our experience with virtual worlds and games.
I for one, have played many videos games in my life. But I will be covering the one game that influences me the most. Which would be World Of Warcraft.
I’m going to say I started playing World Of Warcraft around my first year of high school since my friends were playing the game and recommended that I should try it out. I was pretty much hooked the moment I began playing the game. It wasn’t so much that my friends were playing the game with me as much as it was my first time playing a Role Playing Game. The games I usually stuck with were always first person shooters..mainly halo.
When I finally got to the highest level of the game(which at that point was level 60.) I began joining guilds that were Doing the high end raids in the game. Now at that time I didn’t know how to really play my character that well(a restoration shaman.) So needless to say I did receive a lot of negative feed back about what all I was doing wrong..But as Randy Pausch said in his “last lecture” we watched earlier on in the semester. “if no one is giving you a hard time when you are doing something incorrectly then they have given up on you.” But of course there were some guilds that kicked me from the guild in the process. But the more time I spent playing I began to improve day by day. I started watching videos that people made as guides,I asked other shamans what talents they use for their class,downloaded addons,made macros, etc..
Eventually, all of the effort and time I put into working on my class became more then just a in-game skill. What I mean by all of that is I began to notice that I was able to multitask unbelievably better. Not to mention I started to type much faster.
However, those two skills are just implied to myself.There are a few things that you will experience when you are playing World Of Warcraft that can be compared to what you do in life.
alright, lets go ahead and compare a guild you are in to a job you are working at in real life:
- they require people to function
- they have schedules
- They both have a “boss” and “workers”
Okay, Now let me go over those three comparisons just so there is no confusion. The first one will be a little difficult to understand till I discuss the second comparison. So Let’s move on to that first!
Now for those of you who have not played World Of Warcraft most of the guilds in the game are formed for a certain purpose. They are ethier formed for players to get together to do PvP(player vs player) or PvE(player vs environment) with a specified role a player is to perform. And they will have a set schedule of what days and time frame they will be forming together to “raid”
Alright, now that I have explained the second comparison I can now go over the first one. So now let me ask this, what happens if a player doesn’t show up for the scheduled “raid”? Now in real life it will just leave them short handed. In the game its the same except it will sometimes end up making the group have to call off the “raid” for the night.
Now onto the third comparison. just like in real life there is someone who is in charge. In the game the person who would be considered the “boss” would be the guild leader. that person has literally the same abilities as a boss does in real life.
So Basically, the experience you gain from all of what I discussed is that others have high expectations of you.
Thanks for reading my blog this week! hope you enjoyed the whole discussion!!
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