WoW

In preparation for the presentation that I'll be doing next week on James Gee, I played World of Warcraft for the first time last night. I installed a 10 day trial on one of the Lounge computers and played under guidance of James S. (who was playing with the character name PotteryBarn). The first thing that struck me was the amount of text and the level of text involved in the game. Unlike other games that I've played, particularly console games like Star Wars or Halo, WoW is a text-intensive environment. It takes some time to get used to where the text will appear in the interface. At one point, James told me that I had picked something up and I asked him how he knew. He pointed out the text on the lower left part of the screen that reported my action. Until he pointed that out, I wasn't attending to that part of the screen at all. As a new player, I didn't know where to place my attention to receive relevant information. As I played, exclamation points appeared at the bottom of the screen. When I clicked on each exclamation point, a text box appeared explaining some aspect of the game that I had just encountered for the first time. These messages were providing me with small pieces of information at the point of need. I was still in control of the display of this text, but it was offered when the context was appropriate, i.e. when I had encountered the concept, the concept was labeled and explained for me.

Being a low level player, my movements are limited to certain areas, while I learn. There are other players around and computer-operated characters that provide structure, guidance, instructions, directions (how to get from A to B), and other kinds of interactions. James explained to me that WoW is unique in that it is scalable in many directions. The game works well for someone who plays eight hours per day and also works well for someone who plays an hour per week. It works for those who wish to go deep (this is drillable) into the back story and for those who primarily wish to fight battles. The game environment supports many different approaches to game play. The largest proportion of the hour or so that I spent playing last night was spent running from one place to another. What objectives I chose to adopt, what goals I completed, all of that was up to me.

For next week, I need to figure out how to communicate all of the information that I want to get across in this environment without detracting from the experience. I know some of them will simply be overwhelmed by the interface. We'll see.