World of Warcraft by Daniel Lisi

Author:Daniel Lisi [Lisi, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Computers, Programming, Games, Games & Activities, Board Games, Video & Mobile, Language Arts & Disciplines, Writing, Nonfiction (Incl. Memoirs), Social Science, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9781940535128
Google: svuEDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1940535123
Goodreads: 30001654
Publisher: Boss Fight Books
Published: 2016-06-20T07:00:00+00:00

PART 4:

GRIEFERS, TROLLS, AND OTHER MONSTERS

Tribes of Warcraft

When playing as one of my alternate characters, a female Tauren Druid, I joined a pick-up group of assembled strangers to attempt a dungeon. I was the group’s main healer, and I did my job on autopilot. The content wasn’t demanding, and we all appeared to know the dungeon’s encounters well. When the tank piled on more enemies than he could chew, our party wiped, and the group leader called me “a dumb fucking bitch” and told me “this is why chix cant play WOW!!!” before removing me from the group.

I was a tourist in the land of misogyny. Actual women live there.

To get a better perspective on harassment in WoW’s culture, I spoke with Devony Schmidt, a former guildmate of mine with whom I’ve maintained a real-life friendship post-WoW. “I’d have people in parties of course make jokes like ‘tits or gtfo’ if I made a comment that indicated I was female,” Schmidt told me, “or there was a lot of ‘women don’t exist on the internet’ kind of stuff, and general surprise if I talked on Ventrilo [...] The biggest type of targeting was that I would often get offered ‘gifts’ by male players (one of which later harassed me for nude photos).”

As in all places on the internet, anonymity in WoW breeds aggressive behavior, which tends to be directed toward often-marginalized groups of people. World of Warcraft’s player base frequently displays downright despicable acts of racism and sexism in both public forums and private messages. WoW players often engage in trolling, a form of internet abuse in which a player makes it their personal mission to make other players’ experiences in the game a living hell.

In an article titled “Guild Life in the World of Warcraft: Online Gaming Tribalism,” Thomas Brignall writes,

Virtual worlds are not free from real-world stereotypes and prejudices. Stereotypes and cultural identities follow players into the game. Anonymity allows individuals to avoid the negative consequences of being prejudicial to other players. According to Blizzard Entertainment’s rules on its website, the company enforces policies that forbid prejudicial language. Blizzard Entertainment has not published how frequently it enforces this rule. In a world where individuals can behave as they choose, and avoid people they dislike, hard-core players often employed tribalistic techniques in order to associate only with players they liked. Some groups displayed high levels of unity and cooperation. However, there were frequent occurrences of groups fragmenting into smaller subgroups. When our guild’s population fragmented into smaller isolated groups, competition and resentment ensued.

Enter the griefer, such a frequent occurrence in our online gaming culture that it warrants its own Wikipedia article, which defines it as “a player in a multiplayer video game who deliberately irritates and harasses other players within the game, using aspects of the game in unintended ways. A griefer derives pleasure primarily or exclusively from the act of annoying other users, and as such is a particular nuisance in online gaming communities, since griefers often cannot be deterred by penalties related to in-game goals.

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