Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft

[droqen]

Regarding Folding Ideas'
"Why It's Rude to Suck at [World of] Warcraft"

[droqen]

This is[..] not a discussion of good players as opposed to bad players. We are talking about the ways you play the game in which 'being good' is considered desirable. This is a critical distinction and perhaps if there is going to be one takeaway from all of this, it is this confrontation: the idea that 'being good at a game' is a good thing and the correct way of playing a game is one in which you are good at the game isn't some natural force of reality, but an imposed value.

[droqen]

[..] you cannot have free and instrumental play in their purest forms.

Olson discusses 'roleplayers' in this section and describes how even their free play 'morphs' into a form of instrumental play. I wonder: is he going to get into who defines the goals? In the case of the roleplayers, the instrumental play emerges from within the community. In the case of, say, raiders, the instrumental play emerges from outside the community. This flow of power seems incredibly important.

[droqen]

Yes he does! Cool.

~

I'm not sure I need to watch more of this video, because I think this more or less answers, or points to the answer to, the premise posed in the title:

Instrumental play has entrenched itself as the dominant mode of engagement with World of Warcraft.

It's rude to suck at World of Warcraft because culture ('the dominant mode of engagement') has deemed it so.

That's pretty much it, right?

[droqen]

Oh yeah he says as much. Cool.

It is taken as value neutral, and objectively true, that expertise and success are the natural objectives of play, and thus, the default mode of play that players owe to those around them.

In other words: It's bad manners to be bad at Warcraft.

Yes, sure sounds like people lol. I care less and less, by choice, about being rude in most contexts, because of the first couple clauses here. "It is taken as value neutral, and objectively true". I really despise this attitude very much. I hate it without limit.

[droqen]

A rich speed running scene can exist without it influencing my experience of the game. World of Warcraft, in contrast, has a very different relationship with instrumental practices. Even the social elements of the game, things seemingly free of numbers, become vessels for the propagation of the numbers.

Hmm this is kinda the good thing about an MMO. Inspiring. Need to take note of this part. Why would the social elements of the game be free of an integral part of the work??

WoW is a big game, and it's extremely complex and is composed of nearly two decades of sediment, long strings of stuff positioned with little baked in explanation for what it's for, why it's there, or even if you should bother. [Dead ends.] [..] given the existence of these cul-de-sacs, what is always the first piece of advice given to new players? Join a guild. [..] guilds are repositories of knowledge. Kristine Ask describes guilds as communities of practice, as institutions that store information. They are communities defined in part by what they do and why they do it.

Exactly like cities as described in Steven Johnson's Emergence! Cool.

I'm going to stop piecing through this video... I'm running into a lot of stuff I don't like and I don't think I'm getting any more out of it. But I'll leave a parting thought:

Knowledge is not easily erased.

Thank you. -droqen

[droqen]

p.s. I ended up watched this video to its conclusion. Interesting conclusion. I should read Golub's Being in the World sometime. No further comments on the video. But give me a good paper any day of the week :)