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Where Are They Now? The WoW personalities of 2010 and 2011
Quite a few of today's World of Warcraft players first set foot in Azeroth during the Cataclysm era. The years 2010 and 2011 saw gaming in general move into its own, and we began interviewing more and more WoW players and public personalities who were confident and eager to talk about their game of choice. Are they still playing today in Mists of Pandaria? Many are -- although the exploits of those who aren't are sometimes equally as interesting to hear! Catch up on 2008 and 2009 in part 1 of our retrospective, and be sure click the bold subheadings at the beginning of each entry below to see the original interviews. Pulverizing WoW MMA fighter Jens "Little Evil" Pulver has been trying his hand at Mists while preparing for his next fights. "I have not been inside a dungeon or raid but I have enjoyed leveling a few characters," he writes. "My hunter is my PvP character, and I try to get in a few games in the evening. Outside of WoW, I have been wrapping up my career as a MMA fighter and will be fighting in the semi's of the ONEFC bantamweight Grand Prix in April." Jens is also hard at work on projects including gaming hardware, depression, and motivational speaking; find out more at JensPulver.com or @jens_pulver on Twitter.
The Guild Counsel: Why The Raid is worth seeing
Over the weekend, Gary Gannon from Gamebreaker.TV hosted a unique event in the world of MMOs: a film premiere, complete with fancy suits and ties and even an afterparty (albeit in the form of a chat room). The film is The Raid, which followed the World of Warcraft guild Double Dragons as it worked through the raid content from Wrath of the Lich King. There has been a lot of feedback from those who saw the premiere, but it's been decidedly mixed so far. Furthermore, viewers had such strong reactions to certain parts of the documentary that director Kevin Michael Johnson made a post on the site to try to address some of the criticism. But is the mixed review simply the cynical gamer at his best, or is it legit? In this week's Guild Counsel, we'll take a closer look at The Raid, and I'll explain why I think it's definitely worth seeing.
15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi on WoW culture and art
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. We've written before at WoW.com and even here in 15 Minutes of Fame about attempts to study World of Warcraft culture from a sociological, psychological or anthropological point of view. In all of these cases, the researchers in question have logged time playing WoW as part of their research, albeit some with greater degrees of immersive success than others. So I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that Bonnie Nardi, a University of California-Irvine expert in the social implications of digital technologies and author of the rather blithely titled My Life as a Night Elf Priest, not only rolled the token raiding character in order to observe the curious behavior of the raiding animal -- she actually enjoys WoW in its own right. Rather than cautiously sniffing WoW culture only to generate another wide-eyed, ZOMG-look-at-this-funny-lingo report from the digital field, Nardi dove deep enough to play in four different guilds: a casual raiding guild; a raiding guild composed of fellow academics; a small, casual guild; and her own friends-and-family guild. Our two-part interview with Nardi, packed with opinion and cultural analysis, reveals a witty approach to WoW culture that successfully combines academic insight with the familiarity of a seasoned player.
"My Life as a Night Elf Priest"
A University of California Irvine anthropologist named Bonnie Nardi has been studying one of the strangest cultures known to man lately, and she's going to be presenting her findings in a book called "My life as a Night Elf Priest" -- that's right, she's been taking notes on the weird sociological experiment known as Azeroth. It sounds pretty interesting -- she's been examining the way Chinese and American players play the game (and of course the differences between them), and she's also looking into how games like WoW can bring us closer together rather than isolating us socially. It's funny -- as a genre and a technology, MMO games are actually in the absolute earliest phases of their history. Socoiologists and psychologists have been studying real humans for thousands of years, and yet it's only in the past few decades that they've gotten access to MMO games, like little petri dishes of condensed human behavior. Nardi may be one of the first to try and scientifically examine how players use (and are affected by) this technology, but she'll definitely be far from the last.
UC Irvine to compare WoW players from America, China
The University of California at Irvine has been granted $100,000 to study the differences between Chinese and American World of Warcraft players, according to the Orange County Register. The study will mostly focus on explaining why American players are much more likely to employ modifications such as Cosmos than Chinese players are, but project lead Bonnie Nardi made some interesting observations outside the scope of this particular endeavor.For example, she noted that Chinese players are for some reason more likely to talk about the aesthetic appearance of the game than are Americans. Whereas American players often play with their children, parents, or siblings, Chinese players are unlikely to do that. "The older generation dislikes video games," she said, and playing with siblings is obviously rare since most Chinese of the gaming generation have none."The vast majority of Chinese players are not gold farmers," she said. "They're ordinary players like anyone. The media has blown that story out of all proportion. Many people think Chinese play for a job. They play for fun." Enlightening stuff. We're looking forward to seeing what else comes out of her research.[Via Ten Ton Hammer] One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!
