Addiction

It’s been quiet around here, and I only have World of Warcraft to blame. I still bathe on a regular basis and haven’t given up my day job (yet), but I forget to eat and am incredibly moody when the server is having problems (more often than not on Khaz’goroth).

To justify my need to spend countless hours immersed in the WoW landscape, I did a quick Google search on “World of Warcraft ethnographic study” and came up with some interesting results. The first hit is a website for a college level course, Games for the Web, offered by Trinity University. This class requires you to spend a “significant amount of time” playing World of Warcraft. From the course description:

Throughout the semester, we will spend a significant amount of time in World of Warcraft. This virtual world is an ideal location for studying on-line gamers, cyberculture, and videogame aesthetics. A significant amount of class time will be spent in the game-world, but you are also expected to devote at least five hours a week to ethnographic research within World of Warcraft.

The Student section contains links to blogs students kept throughout the semester, in addition to their final papers. While perusing the blogs I saw several mentions of a gnome protest, so I did some further searching…

… and came across screenshots of the Gnome Tea Party, an in-game protest held a couple months after World of Warcraft went public. The protest, regarding changes to the Warrior class between the beta-version and final public release, crashed the server and resulted in a good number of banned accounts (I don’t think the ban was permanent).

EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and Ultima Online have also played host to virtual protests. TerraNova made a post about the nature of virtual protests and possible emergent politics and governance in online spaces. The post, Synthetic Statehood and the Right to Assemble and the ensuing comments bring up some interesting points from both sides of the fence.

And let me not forget the in-game 4th of July fireworks.

Enough with the justification, it’s time for me to go questing…