Time and time again I see driven and excited people come together as a guild or clan, progress well but ultimately fizzle out and die.

Whether it’s because of loot drama or a tyrannical guild leader, the main thing stopping a guild from becoming successful is survival. As I’ve touched on before, World of Warcraft is an easy game. The thing holding you back from that elusive Server First is not player skills; it’s teamwork and logistics.

Now, teamwork and logistics are huge topics for another day. What I want to talk about today is something that you will need to develop and foster while your raid team or guild starts to coalesce. Alongside the implementation of a DKP system and a good raid schedule, you must also develop your community.

A good community is perhaps the main thing that holds back many new guilds. Many old guilds also take it for granted, letting it gradually waste away; a community can not be just left to hang, it must be gently cultivated, nurtured and looked after!

So, perhaps we should start with the definition of the term, and go from there:

What is a community?

A community is often defined as a group of people living in the same locality, governed by the same laws or rules. It could be as small as a group of friends that meet up at the same place and have their own ‘house rules’, or it could be as large as international ‘gaming community’ (although communities that span the globe don’t tend to have the same rules as localised ones). For the sake of this article I’m going to be talking about community sizes you often find in contemporary online games and virtual worlds; in clans, guilds and corporations.

Online communities tend to consist of 5 to 100 people. While some communities are larger, they often splinter into ‘cliques’ – groups of friends that stick very much together and don’t really add anything to the community itself. Generally, I wouldn’t recommend trying to run a online community that has more than 100 members, but if you’ve successfully grown a community and you see no reason to stop… see what you can do!

A community, then, in an online game, is a group of gamers that come together in the same place (albeit virtual, it’s still a place!) and live by the same rules, as laid down by the leader of the community (at the start, anyway!)

Creating a place for the community to exist

For an online community to come together, the members need somewhere to hang out! For an online game it’s obviously guild chat or a forum. For smaller clans it might be an IRC room, or a mailing list. As I already said, these are virtual places, but they are still places; places where thoughts and emotions can exist and run wild. A community needs a place where its members can be. It is vitally important if a thought needs sharing, or a question posed, that a place exists for that interchange.

Creating a place for the community to exist is as simple as creating a guild or chat room. A forum is also incredibly useful for the sharing of thoughts in larger communities (I’ve listed a few free forum providers at the end of this article).

The rules of the community

Once you’ve created a place, the next step is to define some common rules that everyone adheres to. I’m not talking here about draconian commandments, but I am talking about rules that add flavour, or define who you are. Perhaps a roleplaying guild might require all of its members to stay ‘in character’. Maybe you’re a player-killing clan that only has one rule: kill anything that breathes. It might just be as simple as ‘play your best and aim for server number one’.

It’s these rules that will bring your community together. Through common rites, rules and goals you will begin to trust each other; it’s only with that implicit trust and security that the community can continue its growth and become a ‘true community’.

The levels of community

M. Scott Peck was an American psychologist that had a huge body of work, but most importantly for this article, he focused a lot on communities, their characteristics, and how the phases they go through in their development.

He proposes 4 distinct stages that a community goes through (hopefully they make it to the end!):

• Pseudocommunity – As the name suggests, this isn’t really a community. Members often cover up their differences, for the sake of survival, or a common goal. This is very much a community of ’survival’; a group of players see an opportunity to improve their survival, so they group up!
• Chaos – When the psuedocommunity ultimately fails (and it will, given enough drama), the members start to go to each other for help, or guidance, or to vent their differences or grievances. This is the first stage of bonding, and trust-building! It goes beyond plain survival here — the members are trying to improve their survival!
• Emptiness – Eventually, differences are laid aside. Egos, or ego-related issues are suppressed. This is where the strong individual urges are destroyed and the community is actually born.
• True community – After making it through all of the previous stages, the members of the community are in complete empathy with one another. Arguments will arise, but they will be settled in a timely fashion without things becoming too heated. Motives are never called into question in a true community – it’s way beyond that point! – any members of the community that made it to this point are in it for the long run, perhaps until the day they die (or quit!)

These stages are very easily mapped onto online communities. Using World of Wacraft guilds as a base for the examples:

• Stage 1 – A guild forms. The leader has normally chosen a purpose for the guild’s existence, but that’s the only thing keeping the guild together. ‘A place to farm easy epics!’ or ‘Become number one on the server!’ are two common goals for a guild at this stage
• Stage 2 – It’s the guild leader’s job to get the guild to this stage as soon as possible! Stage 1 is quite destructive (and some guilds never leave it), and real progress and melding as a group can only occur once there is discourse and argument about how best to do things. Most WoW guilds that get to this stage can survive for a long time; simply getting the members to care enough and discuss issues or boss strategies is an achievement!
• Stage 3 – Once the rampant egos have been squashed, or removed, a guild might make it to this stage. This is when people start sharing real life issues and empathy starts popping up. People earnestly care for each other. It’s around this stage that people start turning up for every raid – and if they don’t, they’re very apologetic about it. Being let down by a member of the community is rare at this stage.
• Stage 4 – Often referred to as ‘spiritual community’, this is a stage that very few guilds will reach. This is where you start finishing each other’s sentences. There is an overwhelming feeling of inclusivity, commitment and consensus in a true community. A single leader also becomes less important at this stage; the community tends to govern itself through rational discussion that can only occur in a truly safe environment.

Peck defines true community with lots of shiny, happy terms, but the key values of a true community are: a safe place, a spirit (shared wisdom/love), and a place where everyone feels involved and included, without the fear that their feelings will be ignored, or attacked by other members.

Obviously, if an online community can reach the 4th and final stage, they’re going to be around for a long time, and perhaps span multiple games. The community transcends individual games; it becomes a lot more about the forum, voice coms, or even real-life meets!

Most guilds will only ever reach Stage 2 or 3 though, which is generally fine. A lot of progress will appear when people lay down their differences and egos, and focus on actually working together. If a community never progresses from Stage 1, you are in for a short, wild ride. There might be some progress, but it will be fleeting. Many flash-in-the-pan guilds recruit heavily, get bullied around by a guild leader, progress a bit, and ultimately dissipate to other guilds — these guilds serve a purpose though… they gear up people for other guilds with strong communities!

How to build a community — an example

Let me give you an example of a community that’s started from scratch. This could be a tiny fledgling guild started in The Barrens, or it could be a clan of Counter Strike players that bumped into each other in a random free-for-all game.

The first step is obviously to create a place to exist. This might be a forum, or a chat room, or just guild chat. It’s not hard to create a place! As long as the tools are there to facilitate communication, that’s all that matters. In general, though, a forum is the best solution for almost every kind of community — it allows real-time communication, and also threads of thought that can be answered at a later date. A forum also acts as a ‘group consciousness’, storing information from the past for future generations! Freedom of information is very important!

Once you have a place, you need some rules. This is the great part of online communities: your set of laws and rules can be incredibly flimsy, or very restrictive — whatever works! You might choose to have an almost non-existant rule set (our guild only has one rule, for example: ‘Don’t be an asshat’), or you might have a huge charter that lays down what you can and can’t do while in that community. I’ve seen roleplay guilds that have entire ‘rules of engagement’ laid out, that everyone must follow!

The most important thing is that these rules must be inclusive. Freedom of speech, as is the freedom of information. You are building a community not a tyranny. The members of the community must be able to speak their minds; they must be able to share their passions and concerns. It is only through concensus of opinion and inclusion that a community can grow upwards through the 4 stages!

The exception here is when someone (often the leader, although it could be by group agreement too) oversteps the line and needs correction, or removal. Racism is a common example of ‘excessive’ freedom of speech, as is misogyny in a community that includes girls. Religion might also be a sensitive subject in some cultures. Basically, any avenue of conversation that might push people out, rather than include. If a community reaches Stage 4 — true community — most codes of conduct are self-governing; it’s the early stages of a community that need the most hand-holding and guidance.

Once you have a place, and some rules, the community will begin to flourish. A little guidance might be necessary though! A community is nothing if it’s not used. What good is a forum, chat room or guild chat if no one actually uses it? I’ve seen WoW guilds with maybe 1 or 2 new forum posts every week; needless to say, their communities were incredibly weak — they just exist to raid, and never get past Stage 1.

It is someone’s (or everyone’s!) job to make sure the community grows. Encourage people to log into the forum and ask questions. Expect other people to assist you during your travels. If someone asks a question — answer it in a timely fashion!

You are trying to develop a group where everyone feels included, where you can put your entire soul into it without the fear that your investment won’t be returned. A community is only as strong as its members make it — if there is some rule, or some person (a tyrant!) that prevents people from dedicating themselves fully, your community may never get past Stage 1 or 2.

Notes

As with everything I’ve written, there’s always some exclusions or special cases that need mentioning. The common factor of Stage 3 and 4 communities is that they don’t have a tyrant leader — they have a shared leadership, with the members defining the rules and delivering justice. In fact, once a community progresses out of Stage 2, a leader might find himself with very little to do; problems seem to get solved on their own, and eventually problems just don’t arise!

Unfortunately, many online guilds tend to have tyrannical leaders. I’ve seen many guilds on the cusp of Stage 3 crushed by a tyrannical guild leader that’s afraid to lose his grip on control of the community. Some leaders are perhaps only playing to lead, rather than create a great and thriving community.

This isn’t to say that a leader has no place in Stage 3 or 4 communities! Their role tends to become more of a ’spiritual father’ (for want of a better term), guiding the community in times of unrest. As online communities are nearly always recruiting to replace quitters, it is also the leader’s job is to remove new members that don’t gel with the rest of the community; although the members themselves might force new people out, if they don’t fit.

I said I would provide a list of good, free forum providers, so here they are:

Free Forums/Guild Portals

• Guild Portal
• Guildomatic
• GamerDNA
• GuildLaunch

If on the other hand you are a smaller clan, how about getting an IRC room on QuakeNet? (It’s a very comprehensive guide!)

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

There is one common trait among all guilds, of every size and all descriptions: players quit. They can suffer burnout, or perhaps start a new job that prevents them from playing, but at the end of the day the result is the same: you’ve lost a member of the community, and perhaps the raid team too. In this article, I’ll try to explain the main cause of players quitting, and how to prevent it from happening in the first place!

Obviously, you can’t prevent players from ever quitting (though that would be nice!). The only way to counteract such losses is through recruitment (at least until we can have virtual children…) The method of recruitment will vary from guild to guild and server to server, but I hope to cover most of the basics in this article; I’ll even try to throw in a few ‘veteran tips’ that might give your guild a slight advantage over the rest!

Quitters

Eventually, everyone quits. Awfully philosophical, I know. At some stage, whether it’s tomorrow, or 50 years from now, the game ceases to be a game, and you quit. Humans aren’t very good at playing ‘non games’ for long: there has to be some kind of tangible improvement, some kind of fun. Without a game, what’s the point? Without some kind of competition, or some end goal to strive towards, why bother?

The real life equivalent would probably be suicide, which thankfully isn’t as prevalent as people quitting an online game: Interpersonal ties, those ties that keep you going and striving for success, are much stronger when you see and talk to someone face-to-face. There are also a much larger abundance of games to play in real life; a much vaster range of challenges and aspirations that you might one day achieve.

This is where MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, suffer: they have a finite number of games; a limited number of possibilities. In the case of WoW, the world might be very large indeed, with a lot of possible developer- and player-created games, but at the end of the day you are still bound to the world created by Blizzard. In real life, there are almost no limitations — if you see the top of a mountain, you can almost certainly go there, even if it takes years of training. In a game, you can only go there if the designer hasn’t placed an invisible wall in the way. Ultimately, you have to play the game they want you to play.

Inevitably, when all of the content is exhausted (or you have exhausted everything that is fun), you quit.

You’re not going to stop everyone from quitting, but there are certainly some steps you can take to lessen the chances of it happening.

You must have fun

This is to both the players, and the guild leaders. You, as a player, must find the game fun. You, you grumpy, tyrannical guild leader, must make the game fun for the members of your guild! When the game stops being fun, you can guarantee that people will start quitting. It might be a slow trickle at first, but without any significant changes, that trickle will fast become a torrent of quitters.

MMOs in general, and WoW in specific tend to be fun — they are games after all! The problems normally arise when you’ve cleared all of the content and you’re eagerly awaiting the next patch from the developer. Sometimes, though, fun can be destroyed simply by wiping too much on a boss, or being demoted too many times by a power mad guild leader. I’ll break down the most common ways of destroying fun:

• Wiping is bad — I’m sure this comes as no surprise to any of you. Wiping is awfully testing on morale. As humans, we don’t mind repetitive actions, but there has to be observable progress over a span of a few wipes, or in the case of harder bosses, a few raids. Depending on the kind of guild or raid group, the average player tolerance to wipes will vary a lot, but in general wiping is very, very bad.
• Stagnation is bad – In the same vein as wiping repetitively without progress, stagnation is another huge cause of discontent. When the guild or raid is so static, so devoid of progress or simply without communication, it stagnates. People stop logging in, guild chat becomes quiet, and raids become just ‘yet another farm run’. Stagnation in itself isn’t entirely crippling, but it just happens to be the breeding ground of the next fun-destroying element:
• Drama – One of the most-used phrases thrown around in MMORPGs today is ‘drama’. Drama, in online games, is usually defined as the ‘aggravation of a situation’ and it’s often pointless, baseless aggravation too. As I was saying, stagnation is normally the cause of drama: dramatic players thrive in a stagnated (or simply stressed) guild environment. If you imagine a dark, lifeless pond, and then stir it around with a stick… that’s what drama often feels like in a guild. Smelly and nasty — and you can’t help but feel it was better to leave the pond unstirred.

These are the common causes of a drop in morale, the following discontent, and ultimately quitters. As with most things, it falls to the guild leader (or officers) to try and avoid such situations. The solutions are fairly simple:

• Reduce the impact of wipe-fests – Probably the best way to prevent player burnout is by making the hours spent wiping slightly less painful. You could introduce breaks every two hours, or you could promise only one wipe raid a week. Most guilds now provide repair funds and consumables for their raiders which reduces the strain of raiding by a huge amount. The only real cause of burnout today is ‘hard’ bosses — but if you play WoW, it sure seems Blizzard are trying to prevent the effect C’thun and Kael’thas had on hardcore raiding guilds. This article of mine has more detailed information on the topic of raiding, wiping and progressing.
• Stir things up before the drama queens can — In my previous example of a stagnated, dead pond being stirred, it was a dramatic player doing the stirring. They were adding their own bias to situations, and perhaps catching you, the guild leader, off-balance. The key here is to stir things up before the guild stagnates. Change the raiding schedule, or remove some of the raiders that have been holding you back! Perhaps organise a raid as level 1 gnomes on another server, or arrange a foot-race from Undercity to Booty Bay? It is nearly always the job of the guild leader to keep things fresh and interesting, so do it!
• Control the drama – Drama isn’t always bad! The wrong drama, at the wrong time, is bad. A bit of good drama never did a strong guild any harm, though! Depending on the ‘community level‘ of your guild, it might vary from guild to guild what you can actually get away with, but inspiring the members of your guild to discuss interesting topics can do a lot to develop the community, and at the same time is fun! Be careful with censorship too; obviously heavy anti-guild sentiment might need to be controlled, but also you might find that the rest of the guild gangs up on the drama queen — and there’s almost nothing more fun than coming together as a community to play ‘defeat the anti-guild forum troll’!Worth noting is that drama involving other guilds is always a good thing. If you heard about another guild having problems with a particular encounter, or with a troublesome raider, tell your guild! It’ll be great for morale, especially if you’ve been wiping on a boss for hours.

If you take these steps to make the game fun again — or even prevent the game from becoming boring in the first place! — you should have a lot less problems with quitters, which means you won’t need the next section quite so much!

Recruitment

Whether you’re a casual, raiding or hardcore guild, the bread and butter of your survival is recruitment. Recruitment is the only way you will continue to have fun and progress, and as such it is vital you understand how to control the ‘newbie hose’ of recruitment. You need to know which direction to spray it in, and when turn it on, or off.

It isn’t purely the role of the guild leader or officers to manage recruitment: it is something for every member to keep in mind. When your guild needs a replacement, before next week, chances are someone in the guild knows a suitable replacement. Of course, it’s ideal if each class leader knows every possible recruit, but that rarely happens (if you have a class leader that does know every possible recruit, look after them!)

Let’s start with the basics of recruitment.

When should you recruit?

Most guilds make the big mistake of waiting until too late to recruit; waiting one more day might make the difference between the life and death of your guild! Whether you’re a casual or raiding guild, it’s important to recruit before you lose the ‘critical mass’ of players — whatever that number of players might be!

A casual guild is probably even more fickle than their raiding or hardcore counterparts. If shit hits the fan in a casual guild, there’s usually very little to prevent players from just jumping ship and heading to another guild. In raiding-oriented guilds there is usually the soft, velvet-gloved, addictive allure of epics that keeps players hanging on for a little longer — but rest assured, people will pack their bags and run away; they’ll run very fast indeed if they think the guild has begun its dying throes.

When is it best to recruit then? Early.Very, very early. I’ve already written a bit on the size and attendance of raiding groups, and the best way to manage recruitment is to keep a very close eye on attendance. As soon as a player starts dipping below the desired percentage (80%) you should be looking for possible replacements. You should be incredibly cautious of ‘repeat offenders’ — those players that, seemingly by magic, skip raids over and over (usually due to real life commitments). These players will likely never be reliable, and in serious raiding guilds should be replaced!

In general, recruitment is a lot about gut instinct. After a while, you should be able to predict the ebb and flow of players: the inevitable loss of a few players after you finish an instance; the handful of players that you will always lose after the summer holiday. The start of the school year is another common event which will force you to recruit — but no matter the occasion, do it sooner, rather than later! If you’ve had to cancel a few raids, you were too slow!

Who should you recruit?

If we’re being WoW-specific, this question is quite easy to answer: you can recruit almost anyone. Other games might be harder (in fact, they’re probably all harder than WoW), so the recruitment criteria might be a little more stringent. With WoW though,  you should almost always recruit first and consider their actual abilities afterward.

The following is the order of importance for desirable traits in new recruits:

1. Not a dick
2. Can attend your guild’s raiding schedule (or whatever kind of schedule your guild has)
3. Relevant experience
4. Gear (or whether they have the right tools for the task)

Top guilds will obviously be a lot more choosy in who they pick up, but they also have a huge pool of possible recruits available to them. Most guilds can not pick and choose; they just have to take what they’re given. Most guilds should stick to recruiting friends of other members, which is often a sure-fire way to find non-dicky players and also work on the feeling of community and inclusion the same time. It’s not uncommon for top guilds to be made up entirely of groups of real life friends for this reason! Personal recommendation goes a long way; not having to rely on relatively-unknown forum applicants is highly desirable.

As I’ve said quite a few times now, WoW is an easy game. The number one reason for not succeeding, progressing or surviving is: not having enough players. Don’t fall into the same trap that so many other guilds have tried to work around in vain. You really can recruit just about anyone — as long as they’re not a dick!

Finally, how do you recruit?

This is the step that most guilds stumble on. You know you’re struggling and you can feel progress and morale slipping away. You know what kind of player would fit into your guild, but… there are no applications! Why aren’t people APPLYING? Don’t people know that we need a new mage? Don’t people know that we could be the best guild on the server if we just picked up the right tank?

Fortunately, all of these questions are probably caused by the same, easily-fixed problem: you are unknown. Yep, that’s why no one has applied to your awesome guild — no one knows that you’re recruiting. Rectifying this rather sizable issue is thankfully very simple: spam.

I know, I know, everyone hates trade-channel spam, but it really is your best tool to get the word out there that you need recruits. Make some macros and use them regularly (a few times an hour is enough!) For extra potency, send the macros to other people in your guild too! Assuming you have a good reputation, you should quickly notice a burst of fresh applications. (The exception to this rule is congested or dead servers, but I won’t go into that here.)

If the idea of spamming trade chat doesn’t appeal (and some guilds might fancy themselves slightly more ‘upper class’), you could also encourage all of your guild members to talk to their friends and poke them to join. If talking and poking isn’t enough, get them to start emotionally blackmailing those same friends — eventually they’ll crack and apply, trust me!

Posting on your realm’s forum is also a good idea (but I’m sure you’ve already done that, right?) Make sure to include all of the perks that members of your guild get, such as repair funds, raiding consumables, a forum, voice communications… and whether you have a tabard or not!

Tips & Tricks

Consider this section as ‘extra reading’, or a ‘bonus feature’. Either way, what you’ve read so far is more than enough to keep a casual or raiding guild alive and healthy. What follows is a few tips that might be of use to hardcore guilds, or for guild leaders that enjoy the politics of the game as much as, or more, than the actual raiding. These are also almost entirely for guild leaders, and probably won’t be very useful to the members of a guild.

• Maintain friends in other guilds – Being inherently social games, most MMORPG players like to make friends: buddies they can talk to when the going gets rough, or ask for advice on particular encounters. There’s no reason for your friends to all be from your own guild! Make friends with the officers and raiders of other guilds — or even other guild leaders!
• Similarly, keep communication channels open – Always keep your ear to the ground. Listen to what your guild members have to say, no matter how mundane it might seem to be. The web of player interconnections in MMOs like WoW  is so vast that most players are only ever 2 degrees of separation apart. This means that there is a strong chance that even if you are not friends with a possible recruit, someone in your guild probably is. Utilise and leverage those relationships to get the right players into your guild.
• Politics, and the knife in the back – I’m starting to get into territory that will no doubt cause a little uneasiness, which is no surprise as I am now talking about the wholesale slaughter of other guilds! Turning one guild’s misfortune into your own fortuitous windfall! I am of course talking about poaching important players from other guilds.Poaching itself is nothing special — almost everyone you recruit will be from another guild! — but I’m talking here about poaching a key player in another guild: their main tank, or perhaps an important social figure.  This requires a combination of having good friends, keeping an eye on ‘current affairs’, and being charismatic enough to lure someone into your guild; someone that is likely very loyal to their current guild.I’m not going to go into the details of poaching as it’s a topic best-suited to an article on the sociological and psychological stresses on the denizens of virtual worlds, and how to manipulate them.

At the end of the day, you must remember that as a guild leader, you are in a unique position. You are at the top of a pyramid: the end-point of all activity and communication below you. It is your job as guild leader to sift through the thousands of pieces of data available to you and find the important bits; it’s your job to differentiate between the pimples of harmless whining, and those little blackheads that will eventually develop into nasty, pussy spots that’ll make your life hell.

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

Apologies for the long-winded title; it’s actually quite hard to find a subject that gets right to the point. This isn’t about triggering a particular emotion in gamers — not directly, at least. It’s also not about how ‘emotional’ gaming can be — we already know that playing games can be an intense experience that can warrant a massive gamut of emotions.

This entry’s about your avatar — your character, the model that represents you — and the emotions that it can, or as the case may be, cannot display.

Emotions have long played a vital role in communication and human interaction. We smile and raise our shoulders a little when we’re happy; we frown and slump when we’re sad — these emotional keys are a form of communication in their own right: body language!

Beyond subtle muscle shifts we also have emotive reactions that we’re less aware of: we blush when we’re embarrassed or caught lying; we raise our voice in anger or petulance. Most importantly though are the muscles groups on our face: the flaring or contraction of our lips and eyes, the furrowing or raising of the brow — each of these actions, or reactions, are ‘programmed in’ genetically and almost impossible to alter. It’s these same minute movements that we’re (often unconsciously) reading in the face of whoever we’re talking to. It’s these tiny twitches in someone else’s face or body language that can trigger our own involuntary responses: that momentary curl of the lip might be all the indication you need to run away quickly.

This ‘hunt for emotion’ as we communicate with other people is so ingrained that online communication has always felt a little… distant. Internet veterans are cautious, aware that without body language their words can easily be misconstrued. Newbies often blunder, forgetting that no one can see the ironic smile on their face. There’s a reason emoticons , *asterisks*, CAPSLOCK and _underscores_ exist: to convey emotion! It’s clunky and slow compared to body language or facial expressions but it’s the best that we have.

Why, twenty years after the first text-based world, are we still communicating with such basic tools? Some early games like LegendMUD had ways to inflect mood into your conversation through expansion of the verb sets (’say alts’) but since then… nothing. In graphical virtual worlds a couple of games have tried to incorporate moods (notably Star Wars: Galaxies and EverQuest2) but still they were still primarily low-tech text-only executions, toggles: /angry, /sad, /afraid, or parsing exclamations and queries.

Why are we still running around in virtual worlds with emotionless, gormless avatars? In single-player games it’s almost the state of the art, the bleeding edge! ‘More realistic than ever before!’ the developers cry. What makes the games more realistic? Interaction with the game world: physics and realistic NPCs, or in the case of virtual worlds, other player avatars. You only need to look at the success of LittleBigPlanet — a very simple platformer with oodles of delicious detail and bucket loads of charm and a very diverse emotion system.

For a market segment that generates almost all of its appeal (and revenue) from the immersive quality of virtual worlds it’s amazing that there isn’t yet a virtual world that has the power to model emotions through various facial expressions and body poses. You could even go one step further from the toggle system and parse complex emotions like sadness, apprehension and lust out of chat. Then there’s the character state itself: in battle your avatar would grimace upon being hit; a healer would smile upon saving a party member.

Are we simply being held back by World of Warcraft’s ancient graphics engine? Surely it’s time for realistic, immersive emotions in virtual worlds.

Further Reading

• Some work into avatar puppeteering in Second Life which, unlike WoW, actually has some built-in facial expressions
• Bob Moore’s presentation from the Austin GDC 2008 has a more-scientific, sociological look at it under the header ‘Challenges in Avatar-Mediated Interaction’

Recently I was contacted by a very nice Canadian chap called Lee. He writes for a big Internet blog and news source — the kind of site that has a million unique visitors a month — and he asked me if I’d like to write for them! Apparently, I’m a bit snarky. Apparently that’s what they want; someone that tells it like it is. Someone that isn’t afraid to step on a few toes.

And that’s cool. I can do that. Artists will do anything for a cheap buck.

But I can’t believe he actually called me SNARKY! Of all the things he could’ve called me! Intelligent, wise, bright, charming, charismatic… even tall or hairy would’ve been fine. But snarky? Who the fuck does he think he is? I wouldn’t mind if he was American — that would explain a few things — but a Canadian? A civilian pawn of the mighty, Earth-spanning British Empire? Really, some people ought to know their place.

Which brings me neatly onto the topic of the Internet class system. Or the sickening and complete lack thereof. Online, everyone is born equal. From the moment you plug that cable in and battle your way through Internet Explorer’s shit MSN homepage redirection, you are… A NETIZEN — an Internet citizen — a very grandiose term that basically means you belong to the Online Community. A small monthly fee, a modem and a computer — that’s all you need to become a fully paid-up member of the largest, most powerful and ubiquitous community in the world.

You can become a civilian of the modern society — the only real society that counts — where rules and etiquette are created and destroyed as technology and peer pressure dictates. This often happens so quickly that no one really knows what’s going on: The Internet is in disarray! Anyone and everyone rules the roost, or their small part of it. The Internet is an anarchic system of authority. And therein lies the problem: there is no social structure.

Historically the citizens of a country are those that are born there. Changing your nationality was something that very few people did; you only emigrated or sought asylum during the most dire of situations. Why? Because there was a class or caste system in place; a pecking order. Jobs would be given to specific families first. If you were born into a family of cleaners or chimney sweeps, you really didn’t have much of a career choice. The rich died rich; the poor died poor. When you move country you drop down to the bottom — and trust me, there is always someone worse off than you — a thought petrifying enough to scare off all but the most desperate emigrants. In a world where class means everything, losing your class is not unlike dying. Social status, perks, opportunity — all gone.

But there’s one exception: a new country. You can move to a new country where everyone is equal, at least for a short time. A new, primordial society, amorphous and malleable. A new culture just waiting to be defined by creative and daring individuals. A New World. America.

Is it really a surprise that five hundred years later we’ve created the virtual equivalent of America?

The Internet is still at that stage where everyone is equal. The loud-shouting neophyte is as much a patron of the new world order as the venerable Internet veteran. Is that correct? Should we be born equal in this New Virtual World? After being on the Internet for 15 years should a jumped-up newbie with bold, brash ideas be able to tell me what to do? No! Should I defer, prostrate myself and shuffle nervously around those that have been online since the very dawn of our current epoch 40 years ago? As much as it pains my ego to say so: yes, yes I should.

In the hope of achieving a more sane and useful society, in true Virtual World style, I propose a level system. When you first connect to the Internet, you are level 1. Every year of continued use thereafter, you gain a level. It would need to be tracked by some kind of governing body — like the Censor’s Office in Roman times, or the peerage registers in the UK.

Each level would bestow rights, privileges. Perhaps you could mute lower levels in chat rooms or on forums. You would be eligible for more bandwidth when downloading illegal movies and music. Perhaps if the level difference is great enough you could even bestow ‘time outs’ on particularly irritating runts by cutting their Internet access for an hour.

You would be forced to use an Apple Mac until level 5.

Smileys would be banned until you reach level 10.

Streaming porn would remain unavailable until you reach level 15.

How about it, peons?

I’m going to tell you a story that, a few years ago, would read like an urban legend. While it certainly isn’t a common occurrence today, three years ago this simply wouldn’t have happened. Unless you’re me. Three years ago this made me a God amongst my gamer friends.

Three years ago, almost to the day, I made love to a beautiful woman while playing World of Warcraft. If you don’t want a basic intro on what World of Warcraft is, skip down the page a bit.

For this story to make sense I need to explain a little about what World of Warcraft (WoW) is: it’s a Massively-Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). Massively-multiplayer means hundreds and thousands of players share the same virtual world as you: while you run around killing monsters, there are other people also running around killing the same monsters! Sometimes they get in the way — in which case you kill them! — and sometimes you group up to kill bigger monsters that you can’t kill on your own.

WoW is in essence, a team game. You can play it on your own, and a lot of people do, but it is the allure of playing with — and competing against! — other people that is the main unique selling point. Because it’s a team game, it is also highly social (this is where most of the the ‘cool’ reality-TV-watching people (girls?) snort derisively and say ‘How can a video game be SOCIAL?!’)  It is not uncommon for WoW players to spend hours talking to their friends and enemies every night! Yes, these are real people, even though it’s a video game! Do you know how little people communicate nowadays? How many minutes on average we spend talking every day? For men, it’s about half an hour. Women, an hour or two. So playing WoW or other online games is social. Let’s get that straight. (I’ll write more on this topic another day.)

Anyway… now for the story. For more TMI stories, visit Lilu’s blog!

It was dark outside and I was playing WoW. Behind me on my bed lay a naked, blushed-pink girl. My girlfriends tend to be the understanding type; they might not all be gamers, but they at least understand my love for games — and bless them, they give the games a go! But there’s definitely something to be said for the lack of female hand-eye coordination… More on that another day.

She was restlessly ‘making waves’ on my water bed — and whining. Whining in that piteous way that only horny girls have truly mastered.

‘Seeeeebbbby.’

Perhaps ‘yearning’ is a better word. But I wasn’t going to be so easily won over. Only a few nights before, I’d tried the same routine, bouncing dangerously on my bed and begging. She’d resolutely stayed at my desk, finishing some email she had to write. I can only assume she thought I liked her a whole lot more than I actually did. In fact, girls seem to think that the moment you start going out with them, they are catapulted to the top of your priority list. So not true!

Call me a utilitarian, or just plain sensible, but if 25 people are relying on me to lead them to greater glory in WoW, it is wrong to just abandon them to screw a girl, right? Their needs are greater than my carnal desires. The writhing, whining, naked girl can wait! Those 25 people, those 25 friends, connected from all over Europe, cannot. I guess its real-world analogy is ‘abandoning your mates at the club to go home with a girl’ — you just don’t do it, unless it’s a pre-arranged go-out-and-get-laid thing!

And so, clicking frantically with my mouse and focusing intently on my screen, I tried my luck.

‘Get your ass over here, bitch.’

Yeah, I actually said that. There was the most disturbing, pregnant pause ever. It could go either way, I knew. We’d been together for a while, so I didn’t think she’d dump me. But there was the risk that there might be days or even weeks of no nookie for Sebby. She was silent and I was busy staring at my monitor, focusing on WoW. The fact that I couldn’t see her was driving me insane, with nerves, with curiousity. And then I heard her giggle. And then she slithered off the bed.

I could hear footsteps behind me.

Ahead of me, the dragon was only half dead.

Was I really about to live out the greatest geek fantasy of all time?

‘Your… bitch… is here.’ The words coming from her mouth sounded understandably foreign. She was no one’s bitch, but you have to give the girl credit for going with the flow. ‘Do you need my help to kill the dragon?’

A mumbling, murmuring grunt escaped my lips. It was all I could do to keep my focus on the computer. I could smell her as she kissed the side of my neck. Focus… focus Sebastian… focus! The dragon was almost dead! Just two more minutes…!

Then she straddled me. She reached down, unzipped, deftly extracted and plunged.

But I didn’t lose my cool. I kept my focus. We killed the dragon and I threw that bitch from my lap and onto the bed. I proceeded to screw her brains out until she whined piteously for entirely different reasons.

* * *

I know what you’re thinking: A happy ending to a Too Much Information story?! Well, I’m going to go one step further…

Gentlemen: Do you want to know the secret? Do you want to know how to bone beautiful, big-breasted women and play video games at  the same time? If so… come a little closer.

The trick… the key… the secret…

Get a big wide-screen monitor or TV. That way you can still see around her when she’s sitting on your lap. They think they have your full attention but they don’t. Works every time.

Immersion is the act of being plunged, sometimes without us fully realising, into another place; another world. Be it via book, film, video game or any other form of media, our imagination lends itself readily, eagerly, to immersion in other worlds. It can be a very visceral experience, the new world plucking you from your present reality and sucking you through some kind of warping wormhole with a pop. Or it can be less obvious, the new world’s tendrils slowly creeping up and wrapping themselves around you until, before you know it, it feels like you’ve always been there — only you’re not quite sure how you got there.

And it’s healthy. Immersion is healthy. With immersion comes understanding and with that, eventually wisdom. When we’re immersed in a subject matter, be it vampires or the history of British monarchs (or the overlap of both!), we become dedicated to that cause. In reading a good book we often find ourselves identifying with a character and championing their thoughts and emotions. Hell, many people attribute entire shifts in viewpoint and way of life to books! The same can be said of films and video games too — if a book can be life-changing, so can a game!

‘Life-changing’ is the key phrase with immersion. When we enter into another person’s world — for that’s what we’re doing — we are assuming a new role, a new point of view; in essence, a new body. We glance around with the steady, fresh gaze of the newly birthed, curious and forever analysing. We’re actually granted a fresh set of senses which, depending on the story might vary in purpose or intensity — free, wild; sad, caged — but they are new! New, never-before-experienced senses! Just like that, the senses and experiences we carry with us in life can be dropped: prejudice, fear, pain, stress — gone. At least for a little while. Without leaving the library or even rolling out of bed we are able to live through a gamut of emotions and sensory experiences that might, were it not for immersion in a new world, go unused.

The problem, if there is one, is that that the virtual frontiers to which we are exposed are entirely governed by the author of the book, film or game. If the artist wants us to feel scared or fascinated or mystified, we will be. The author or director takes us on a journey, a tour of their imagination. We see and smell and hear their fears and torments, we feel their passions. We experience the joy, elation and pain of their first love, kiss and heart break.

It seems that, irrespective of how wild or terrifying or unreal a world is to us, we want to immerse ourselves. We want to be deeply involved. We want to be an important part of the world. We want, dare I say it, a world that can revolve around us — even if that world only exists in our own head, on loan from the creator and decorated by imagination for our own needs and wants.

You can be under your duvet with a good book and grinning like a fool or sweating and torturously scared — but entirely unable to put it down because that world — your world — would cease to exist, and you’re never quite ready for that to happen. And this is just single-player immersion! Some people aren’t content with being alone in these fleeting, imaginary worlds that disappear when we turn the last page or finish the film.  Just as sitting in your room reading a book or playing a game can get a little lonely: sometimes it’s better to stomp around a virtual, imaginary world with other immersed people in tow, with companions, with comrades… with friends!

And that is when you log into an Internet forum and find fellow Twilight fans. Or, if you have a penis, install World of Warcraft.

* * *

More tomorrow on immersion for Thoughtful Tuesday!

If you’re reading this after midday, UK time, go and check out week 4 of ‘52 Weeks’ — it’s a good one.