A Very WoW Valentine

I’m back on track with the blog, and it all kicks off (again) with Valentines day … on-line.
World of Warcraft has had some big events on – besides the release of The Burning Crusade – namely Valentines day (and I’m looking forward to the up-and-coming Lunar Festival).

Just a quick run down of the special event: As a player you could buy valentines day items such as “love tokens”, perfume and cologne. When wearing a perfume or cologne, one could interact with NPC’s (Non Playing Characters) – however, the majority of the NPC’s have a gender attached to the “sex” of the character – so what happened was that a player wearing perfume could only get interactions from male NPC’s and likewise: cologne got interactions from female characters. However – as a player you could wear either the cologne or the perfume – regardless of the “sex” of your character.

There were a couple of interesting things that some guild mates took note of:

• The Undercity ghouls (City belonging to the race of the Undead) were non gendered/without a sex.
  Which leads to the question of whether this is a deliberate move by Blizzard to have an androgynous space in the game?
• There was a wandering Alliance male Night Elf who was programmed (or not programmed/a glitch) to interact with cologne instead of the traditional “male + perfume” interaction.
• That the hetero-normativity of the programming was highly visible – but non hetero interactions could take place – i.e. someone playing a female character could wear cologne and interact with female NPC characters

I found all of Blizzards programming decisions extremely interesting – and it made for some alternative role playing – as the odd (but not quite queer – as the male NPC characters I approached (Orcs of course) would not “flirt” with female characters wearing cologne) programming was certainly something to work with.

The major Valentine day Quest (handing in love tokens) was, in itself, pretty horrible – but that quest also opened up for public humiliation (in my case it was a nasty little female orc who kept on breakin’ my characters heart by laughing manically at her love token offerings); this humiliation was very visible and rather demeaning, but it was also followed up by mate-ship (A guild mate (playing a female character) who gave me several “friendship bracelets”, which removed the curse of heartbreak so I could continue on this quest). Interestingly enough, all of the meaningful Valentines day experiences ended up being an affair that was “women only”.

Perhaps the frustration of not having the full choice of who I wanted to interact with made the “loopholes” even more memorable.

I’m looking forward to the next festival – and will be sure to keep my eye out for more loopholes!!

Emma.

Or check out the official WoW fan art Valentines day competition here

Elitism in WoW

I was recently playing World of Warcraft as my little level 5 banker-character in the Orc city (which has extremely heavy traffic), and a glorious vision passed my eyes; A “champion” was standing right by me with the nicest looking gear that I had seen in a while. Whilst I was inspecting the champion’s gear, I must have clicked on invite (my laptop just doesn’t like those big cities and lags). What happened quickly, and before I had even registered what I had done, was that this so called champion had reported me, and proceeded to whisper it too me in a very blunt fashion.

Is this the attitude that “elite” players have these days? I too have been harrassed at a measly level 15 to group with a lowbie, but this was a one time invite – and an accident at that.

What do elite players contibute to the “world” of warcraft? I will continue to watch out for cases of elitism in MMOG’s – but do tell of your own incidents, or even reasons for acting in such manners as the profiled “champion”.

Who am I

According to quiz galaxy’s warcraft quiz I am …

Undead Warrior Undead are the forsaken: just like you. While it’s important that you don’t fall apart (physically or mentally), you might find yourself salivating in an unhealthy manner when someone comes selling cookies. Get more sleep.As a warrior, you like to take charge of things. You feel that you’re an important part of what’s happening – and if things turn sour, you like to have a very large weapon on hand that you can use to negotiate.

And I have been playing Druids and Warlocks up till now! Time wasted!!!!

Long time admirer, first time creator

My first attempt at Machinima has just been put up (release party and everything … me, myself, and my headphones)

Check it out here!

World of Warcraft – where new collaborative methods are put to the test

According to the Danish newspaper “Computerworld” (print 8. September 2006) the leaders of Danish Hi-tech businesses should be paying more attention to the methods of American Japanese Internet entrepreneur Joichi Ito. Ito has been busy fine tuning a new model of management within the virtual world framework of World of Warcraft (WoW). His WoW Guild is somewhat of a collective guinea pig for testing out new management models that, when transplanted into a proposed new company (a company whose employees will supposedly be recruited from Ito’s guild), will blow the exisiting management models out of the water.
The tone of the editorial note really questions

1) Whether Denmark is really a part of the global “technorati”? 

2) Whether there is anyone really pushing the envelope around here?

If there were a 90’s slogan slapped onto this it might be “I wanna be like Joichi”.

Looking forward to hearing more about the 9 year old as a department head.
See Joici Ito’s comments here.