I’m such a noob.  By choice, as it happens in this particular case, but that doesn’t make it any less true.  The cartoonish, tailed and hooved avatar who currently represents me is definitely a noob.  As I write this I am making the long, arduous journey from Ironforge to the Wetlands for the first time.  It’s going to take me some time, I know, but I can’t avoid it.  I ‘have’ to do it.  I have to sit, at my desk and watch a weird satyr with an axe and shield canter through the mountains for ten or fifteen minutes.  Now this is playing!  But at least I have some time to think while I run. 

Ok so what am I really doing?  Why am I doing it?  What is gameplay, in this 'game' world?  There are so many layers. 

I suppose we could start with the ‘I’ in the questions.  Just who am I at the moment?  Just phrasing the question that way suggests part of the answer: decidedly post-modern, I am definitely distributed in Turkle’s terms.  I am not one, but many.  I would not be widely recognized as Jaxalte, but as Jaxell?  That might be another story.  Certainly the guild I belong to would know me, when I sign in and say hello.  But Jaxalte?  He has no one to welcome him when he materializes into being in Azeroth.  I don’t play him much, I am usually on my druid, the aforementioned celebrity, Jaxell.  That makes this paladin my alt, and Jaxell my main.  Actually this is my alt-alt… maybe even one or two more removes.  I have another lvl 70 shaman, and a 64 warrior, and a 49 mage… all ‘me.’  Or different shards of me. 

If the world of Ultima Online can exist in shards, why not the players?  Only my shards are not discreet replicas of the same, they are individuals who can be taken as whole, or when cast as a part of a greater whole, create the more mature being I’ve elsewhere described as a ‘craftsman’ of the MMO world. 

This thesis is an examination of the playing experience of World of Warcraft. As a video game it shares some common characteristics with other video games. As an online community, the game shares aspects of other online communities. What I will show is that as a combination of many things, the game of Warcraft becomes a layered experience for players. I will explore the storytelling nature of this environment, and how the metaphorical space allows for a kind of immersion that allows a different experience of one’s identity to take place within the game. That experience of identification I have found to be separated into three stages. The first is a general identification with the on-screen avatar, where players begin to share the goals and fears of their character. The second throws players into the social world of Warcraft, where players must interact with other characters- which are of course, other players themselves. This causes players to begin to identify as their character in order to achieve their goals. Eventually, as I will show, the player transcends this role and becomes what I have called a craftsman: one skilled in the development of these characters, characters whose quality reflects the skill of their maker. I will explore the relationships originating with the player at each stage, and demonstrate the complexities of multiple-identity in this online environment.

Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft is one of a new breed of online video games, collectively known as MMORPGs: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. Boasting over 8 million players globally (according to Blizzard’s www.worldofwarcraft.com website, as of September 2007) it is a social phenomenon of enormous proportions.[1] As a game, Warcraft is a logical evolutionary step from the RPG genre generally. As a piece of software it is a technical solution to the problem of computer-based role-playing games, in that it allows for multiple players to take part in a shared experience- like that of the original table-top game, and unlike the single-player computer games prior. Yet in so doing, Warcraft has created a wholly new space within which people are able to spend time together. The created space is not exactly physical, but not exactly imaginary either. It is a social space, a metaphorical space, where players interact according to the rules of the world. Rules that are hard-coded into the system: gravity, line of sight, the number of arrows one can carry in a single quiver; and the social rules that live in the social aether found in and surrounding the game. So, while the word game will always be used to describe Warcraft, to suppose that it just a game is somewhat limiting. Blizzard themselves have come to the conclusion that “It’s not a game. It’s a world.” (www.worldofwarcraft.com)

In this thesis, two distinct sections will be presented. The first will deal with Warcraft itself as a new media type which is simultaneously a collectively written text, and an event (or series of events) experienced by the participants. The game itself will be described as a framework or architecture, developed by a gaming publisher, which creates a space in which players can enact narratives about themselves, their characters, and each other. The gamespace will be set up as a ‘narrative architecture’ as per Henry Jenkins, and as a symbolic ‘realm of action’ as described by Kenneth Burke. In this space, varied strands of narration work themselves out through motion and experience, as a player must be in the world and move through it in order to absorb the stories.

The second section will undertake an analysis of the player experience of the game world. We will move into discussions of how players experience the game as a process of interaction and identification with their character, other characters, and finally, other players. Working from a broad model developed by Sherry Turkle in her research into MUD culture, I will show that players experience a three part process of identification in Warcraft that resembles in some ways what Turkle identified in the earlier environments. I have called the process an identification cycle, and it consists of three parts. Firstly, the player will identify with the character/avatar on-screen much like with any other video game. As the player progresses, he or she will come into contact with other players and the identification will shift and the player and character will merge: the player will identify as the character in social situations, and be identified as such by others. This stage invokes part of Turkle’s theories on fashioning of an identity online. Finally the third stage is reached when a player, as a member of a relatively stable social network, fashions more than one character, and cycles between them as a kind of craftsman able to occupy the many roles he has developed. This third stage invokes other aspects of Turkle’s work, and corresponds well to her theory of multipresence, or a cycling through identities which collectively make up the total identity of the individual. As players mature into the third stage, they are at liberty to ‘become’ different characters at different times, and play different roles in either the same or different social networks. So these players will in effect be both outside and greater than their characters, but also inside and continuing to identify as the character when required.