June 26th, 2007

So, I've mentioned before about the game that took over my online life: Oblivion. I played nearly all the quests—90%+ and then all the quests in the expansion pack, and am now stuck with installing third-party "fan-fiction" type mods to the game and playing those quests. It's been a year and a half since I started playing it and I really should be ready to move on to new pastures ...

Like my friend who is playing temptress with Siren calls about my joining the online mega-community MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW). I resist, but I know it's futile; she and others will very soon see my characters slicing up trolls and atronachs with swords and melting them (the monsters, that is) with spells. I know it's only a matter of time. My wife reads my blog; she's probably banging her head on the desk as she reads this: Not another game ... !

But the one thing that has thus far frightened me off of WoW is the interpersonal element. I mean, I've heard tales of character stalking, social cliques, and even the elevator effect (cue The Police: "Don't stand / Don't stand / Don't stand so close to me ...")

And, frankly, I find this the most fascinating of phenomenon: People behave antisocially or hypersocially the same way online (inadvertently ... mostly ... hopefully) as they do in "real" life. And so all the amateur anthropologists who are also software developers can take note: You can create all the brave new worlds online that you want, but just because you offer people a new way to behave doesn't mean that they are going to do so. Or, worse (and predictably): They will take advantage of the anonymity and the idea that "nobody gets hurt" and behave even worse in their virtual lives.

But, having said all that, I've survived 40 winters thus far without freezing to death, and so I expect I will join WoW and survive and even thrive there. It's not like it's the first online community I've been a part of; heck, back in 1985 I was a member of the first computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). And though we were all polite and literate, we suffered from the text-based online equivalent of elevator effect, cliques, virtual halitosis (linguistically speaking), and other nastiness. And I loved it back then and pissed my family right off by hogging the telephone from 7:00 in the evening until ... well, until I couldn't stay awake, which sometimes meant breakfast time the next day.

The Siren's call beckons again, and my Odyssean ropes aren't strong enough to hold me back forever ...

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