Clayton D. Miller ’10 doesn’t look like someone who would casually refer to himself in conversation as a Level 68 Dwarf Priest. Disarmingly polite, with a large buckled belt and a baseball cap that proudly reads “The Virginian,” Miller is every bit the Southern gentleman. And yet, surprisingly, every bit the World of Warcraft enthusiast.
“You think you won’t be into it ‘til you try it,” he drawls. “Like Harry Potter.”
It’s an apt comparison. Like the ubiquitous bespectacled boy wonder, World of Warcraft (WoW) is a hugely popular “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMORPG) that asks its participants to imagine an alternative reality where the inhabitants aren’t your friends and suite-mates, but rather strangers huddled around computers hundreds of miles away. But while—Facebook groups aside—most “Harry Potter” readers have no illusions of actually attending Hogwarts, Harvard’s Warcraft players enter the continents of “The Eastern Kingdoms” or “Kalimdor” just as easily as they might enter the Radcliffe Quad. And while this lifestyle strikes some people as strangely antisocial, it is precisely the social aspects of the game that keep players coming back hour after hour. It’s their virtual party, and they’ll fly dragons if they want to.
THE WORLD OF WARCRACK
“It’s easy to feel a little overwhelmed by peering into it from the outside,” acknowledges WoW player Roland C. Nadler ’09.
WoW is indeed a complicated game with, as Nadler describes it, its “own Tolkienesque lore.” Players create a level one character and complete various missions in order to push their characters up the ranks until they hit level 70. It’s a lot of work, but according to Nadler, “having a level 70 character is a bit of a status symbol among people who play videogames.”
Anthony R. Casagrande ’10 is one of these privileged few, with two such characters at this scant-achieved level. Tall, with dark, long curly hair and glasses, Casagrande is rather nonchalant about this double feat.
“You can get a character up to 70 playing less than two hours a day for three months,” shrugs Casagrande, who plays on average ten to fifteen hours a week—a time commitment he considers reasonable in comparison to some more extreme WoW players.
“I’ve had friends who have dropped out of school or been fired from their jobs because they want to play the game,” says Casagrande. “People call it World of Warcrack because it sort of has the same qualities that keep you coming back.”
A former level 60 WoW player, Matthew Y. Blake ’08-’09 is all too aware of the time-consuming nature of the game.
“I’ve seen people who’ve gotten too involved. I was probably playing more of it than I should have,” he admits. But true love, ever-demanding, intervened: “I was dating a girl at that time who didn’t like it at all, and there was this pressure from her to play less Warcraft and do something productive with myself.” Something like a Warcrack intervention, minus the scary scenes of confrontation.
THE SOCIAL GAME OF WOW
But while social interactions pull some players out of the game, it also draws some in.
Nadler, who at level 58 was the lowest-ranked player of the four interviewed, is what one might call a social gamer. He began playing the real-time strategy game Warcraft 3 with his freshman year roommates, moving to World of Warcraft the next year after he discovered that one of his roommates had been playing it in secret.
“I had qualms,” he says of the switch. “I didn’t want to waste time…but the idea spread like a plague.”
And he’s not the only Nadler to catch the plague: at the age of twelve, his little brother is already a level 70.
“One of my best memories with my brother was when we were both at the same level. We went to a player versus player battle and stuck together as a team of two people,” says Nadler, smiling to himself. “Stuff like that is what will keep you coming back.”
Similarly, it was the social aspect of WoW that most attracted Miller to the game.
“It’s only helped my social life up here [at Harvard] because I can keep in touch with people back home,” says Miller.
In addition, whether you begin WoW with friends or without, you can very easily make some. Like other MMORPGs, WoW encourages players to communicate with each other by way of groups called guilds.
“You’re not just sequestered in your room, and even if you are, there’s always someone to chat or interact with,” says Casagrande.
BREAKING THE ‘NERD’ BARRIER
But while the players themselves see the game as social, they are aware of the stereotype that surrounds them: that of the loner who is more comfortable in a virtual world than a real one. Not that they find this to be far from the mark.
“You picture this stereotypical archetype of the nerd iconoclast who probably hasn’t seen sun in several days, [who] just puts on this badass persona when he logs on and makes fun of other people because he has no power to do it in real life,” Casagrande admits, adding, “It really is true.”
However, Nadler isn’t quite as willing to accept the stigmatization.
“Just as business transactions aren’t different in Amazon.com and a brick and mortar store,” he says, “so we’ll see that valuing things that are part of cyberspace will be an acceptable thing to do and not a sign of misaligned priorities.”
Most commonly, though, players are hesitant to differentiate WoW from the other normalized and acceptable video games or hobbies.
“There are levels of nerdy things you can do,” says Miller sheepishly. “It starts with something like Harry Potter and then it goes up to WoW, and then it goes to trading card games. That’s the peak of what you can do.”
But, ever-respectful, Miller realizes that he has just insulted the card traders and hurriedly adds, “I’m sure if I sat down and tried it, it would be fun. But it’s something I’ve never tried,”—a sentiment that could be said about WoW. After all, in the scheme of things, a flying mount and a Muggle aren’t as different as one might think.
Just don’t start trading cards, cause that would be weird.
