Is there any real honor in PvP?
In reading through my list of video game blogs I came across a fascinating post on Got Game. Andrew Whelps discusses how he views the WoW PvP battle system to be one without honor, since the battle has no real consequence. It's a "dirty war" sort of scenario, wrapped in an idealized fantasy.
Interesting to contemplate really. The notion that our battle has no consequence to the real world is valid. We run our battles either in instances, or in the world. In the instances, we have no context as to why we must kill, only know we are there to defeat the enemy. We hate them, therefore they must die. The NPCs will respawn, the opposing faction will resurrect, no harm done. We perform brutal acts that have no affect on our environment. If we raid Crossroads or Lakeshire the towns do not burn, the landscape remains unchanged.
We therefore receive "honor" from the kill itself, or for capturing objectives on the battlefield, objectives that will just as swiftly be retaken once the instance resets. Exactly how honorable though are the actions we take in PvP really? Andrew suggests we have built as a society and notion of honorable war, war for a greater cause, and that this idea is what fuels the concept that what we do in PvP is honorable. He ends his article thusly:
I imagine, one day, an Alliance general returning from razing an entire Horde village to the ground, killing the undead men, women, children, and animals, burning the crops and plundering the countryside. He saunters back into town only to be decapitated by his own tribe, because to do otherwise is to condone the behavior. Even in the conflict of Azeroth, there should be honor.
If we lay these actions at the feet of social context, they appear horrible and gruesome. But we play within a game, and we can at any time walk away from the game. So in essence, we are twice removed from the effects of what we do. Not only does the instance reset, but so we.
