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Alic0004 on 07 April 2010
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CommonMan said:
Alic0004 said:

WoW sucks you in because you start to feel like you have an obligation to the other players you meet and the friends you make. The social aspect of games like WoW is way beyond what you find in most console games, many of which don't even encourage you to play with the same people more than once (random matchmaking).

Quitting WoW doesn't just mean not playing the game any more, it means dropping every friendship you've made inside the game, often forever, because if you ever want to go back you'll be much lower level than your old friends. So you not only lose the experience of playing the game, you lose what for many people is their main social activity, their most active set of relationships, and their favorite topic of conversation with friends. (In-game friends, but friends all the same.)

It also means giving up on your ambition to reach the highest level, or (assuming you're at the cap) your ambition of having the best gear or stats of anyone on your server, or anyone in your guild. These things have a strange power when you're in a virtual world with thousands of other people.

I think the draw of WoW goes way beyond the gameplay itself, which is what most games attempt to draw you in with.

I'm sorta confused, these "friends" you make on WoW, couldn't you say "hey, I'm quitting this game because I want to experience sunlight again, can I call/skype you?" and then do so? Wouldn't you then have gained real relationships with people and also freedom from an obligatory gaming experience (which to me makes it seem less fun and more, well obligatory) at the same time? If not, then you've really not made friends yourself but your WoW character has, which is about as deep of an experience as my pinky gets when it's mining nose gold.

I don't really have an answer to that.  People will find friends in all sorts of different places?  How much time do people spend on VGChartz and other forums, so they can talk about games with people they don't really know in person? 

But certainly the experience of having a guild or circle of friends in an MMO is strange, in that once you quit the game you often lose touch with all of them, unless they were people you knew outside the game.  Also, it's always been true that plenty of people out there have problems making friends in real life.  I might even go so far as to say that the group who have hard time making friends in person and the group who play a lot of video games intersect somewhat.

 

Lol at mining nose gold :)