A Pox on PuGs!

No, not the cute little doggies! Leave the puppy-babies alone…!

I’m talking about our little anti-pickup group guild experiment, the brainchild of the lovely Ess at Outland Bound. It’s a phenom, I tells ya! A snowball with a mind of its own! [Insert your favorite runaway-train cliche here.]

I’m not going to cover ground that some of my future guildies have already covered, so go read them first:

• Hooved Shaman
• Two and a half Orcs
• Musings of a Nut Job
• Kung POW!
• Life Tap

So if you did read any of those posts, you get the basic premise of what we’re doing. We now have a guild name, Pox Arcanum, and Wulfa’s working on a tabard for us.

Last night, we met for the first time and had a blast! One highlight of my evening was getting a 6-slot bag as a drop from a Vile Familiar. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about lewt! But the true fun of the night was the chatter on our private channel. These bloggers crack me up! I can’t wait till we’re dancing together on top of the Org bank!

If any of this sounds like fun to you, the Yellow Poxless group has an opening for a DPS-er. Check it out here. Also, some folks on the EU servers would like to get a similar group going on their side of the Pond. Check Outland Bound’s comments for those folks to hook up with.

Now to the more philosophical part of the post. Some people talk about World of Warcraft being addictive. I can’t argue with that accusation. The game sets up a system of rewards that is pure operant conditioning via variable ratio reinforcement. Same as other addictive behaviors like gambling. When we quest for Epic Loot, we are essentially pigeons who keep pecking at the feeder for some pellets.

I am aware of this Pavlovian aspect of the game. However, an MMO is not just the game that the designers envisioned it would be. Due to the presence of masses of people, the game becomes an organic thing, growing and changing in ways no level designer could’ve predicted. This social effect astonishes and fascinates me, especially as a future game designer myself.

In grad school, we studied how users often adopt technology for purposes other than the innovators envisioned. For example, when the VCR was invented, the inventors and marketers thought that it would primarily be used for taping shows to either save or give to other people to watch. Their biggest fear was that people would SELL their shows to one another. (WTF??) They never imagined for an instant that consumers had found the technology most useful for time shifting their shows. You can thank those creative early adopters who changed the purpose of the VCR for the existence of your TiVo or DVR.

Take, for example, BRK’s Gnaked Gnome Race. And now, think about our little premeditated guild experiment, described above. These two events, occurring within the last few weeks, have been some of the funnest moments I’ve had in World of Warcraft lately. I’ve been totally jazzed about participating in these little sub-games. Did Blizzard have ANY IDEA that the social aspect of the game would be used in this way? Absolutely not. The users made the game their own. I think this organic possibility that the MMO offers is a large part of the reason for its popularity.

I’m sure there are dozens of of other examples of WoW games-within-the-game out there, like kiting a huge mob to Stormwind and whatnot — something fun for which Blizzard never imagined the game would be used. Have you heard of one you’d like to share?

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