'He was an incurable romantic': The boy who lived a secret life in World of Warcraft
'He was an incurable romantic': The boy who lived a secret life in World of Warcraft
A new documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, explores the friendships a disabled boy forged in an online game – without his family knowing.
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That was sad, heartwarming, and inspiring.
I’ve never been into RPGs and didn’t really understand the appeal. I now regret missing out on the communities that these games can seemingly foster. I was more into Minecraft on my own, which allowed me to escape but the loneliness was probably made worse and thus any low mood that followed.
Really glad I went against my initial instinct that I wouldn’t enjoy this programme as it was really well made.
As someone who was lucky enough to get to experience those first ~6 years; it truly was lightning in a bottle.
20 years on, I am still friends with a number of those I met in WOW - and an in contact with a few more beyond that!
Unfortunately, it does feel like that sense of community those early years fostered are long gone, save perhaps a blip when Classic first launched.
Who knows when the next game will come along, which will be able to foster such relationships.
Most games now have all the "qol" features that remove the need to communicate if that is even possible at all. It is a sad world we live in where everything has to go faster all the time. More dopamine per minute.
I also was in for the first couple of years in wow and even played Dark Age of Camelot before that and some Ultima online also. It was a different world back then. As a gamer I had all the time in the world to sink into these games. As an adult and a parent I got no time to sit down for hours upon hours to play like I did back then but I wish that kids that grow up today should have the same opportunity as I did to experience this.
I read of such stories once in a while. Sadly, I cannot relate because I always played singleplayer games back then, so I missed out on that. But I would like to add that joining pve world events in guild wars 2, there is some chance that there are people chatting publicly like they have known each other for a long time. Not sure what is is worth, though, but it always give good vibes to work together. Me playing mostly wvw (pvp) we (me and my friend) somehow found some likeminded people who invited us to their private voice chat and talk there while playing together. It is not very often, but it is a start, I guess.
Not sure where I was going with that but I though I add what I could I guess. Thank you for reading!
Thanks for sharing your experience in this world.
Do you have any idea what changed over that time to make the game evolve to lose that sense of community?
Is it a numbers thing in that it got so large it became more difficult to build longstanding communities? Or something else.
I’m just very interested in this now.
I doing think it was an one thing, but more-so a build-up over time - a death of a thousand cuts, if you will:
It was a cultural moment generally, just think back to all of those celebrity commercials (“I’m Mr. T and I’m a Night Elf Mohawk”). All cultural moments pass eventually.
The third expansion (Cataclysm) was quite weak to begin with; coupled with a lack of content in the tail-end of the second (Wrath of the Lich King), which itself was incredible - narratively wrapped up the story that began all the way back in Warcraft 3.
So a lot of people chose that time to bow out of the game, as it required a fair bit of time dedication and seemed like an appropriate time to do so - given the narrative pay-off.
Lastly, the introduction of a number of game tools to automate the group composition process meant that the impact of player reputation on servers was severely diminished. Before then, there players who were toxic (stealing items, intentionally killing the group, failing quests) were infamous on a server.
Once this tool was further opened up to allow for groups to form across multiple servers - the sense of community was shattered as you would have no way to know if the person from another server was good/bad etc. it stopped being about bringing in the individual player, and just getting a body in to fill a role.
can't answer for wow but i imagine the change is similar for runescape, where
- people engage with the game more efficiently than before, which slurps the fun out
- people have jobs now, so they don't have as much free time to play games
I was hoping that'd be a Dan video. He has another one about how it's Rude to Suck at Warcraft, which I found enlightening on how things have changed in WoW
Not only WoW, but most old MMOs were built around being social experiences. The really old ones (Everquest, most notably) were basically chat rooms with games attached. The gameplay was very slow, and you relied heavily on other players to progress, so you spent a lot of time just chatting with people, either in zone chat or in groups or in guilds. Over time, you started to recognize the same names showing up in the same places, or as you progressed, the same players would be progressing at the same pace so you'd keep seeing them as you moved from zone to zone.
It was also a lot easier to build friendships for otherwise socially awkward people. You had an immediate common interest and common goal (advancing in the game), so you had common ground to talk about, and a common activity to enjoy together, but during the downtime, conversation would often shift to other things - where you lived, how old you were, what your hobbies were... so you'd get to know people 'outside the game', too.
Nowadays, WoW and other MMOs are much more fast-paced, and much more solo play oriented. There's still group-required content, but it's very action-heavy; you don't have a lot of time that you're just sitting around chatting, and groups are much more short-term things. 15 or 20 minutes, whereas once upon a time, it was 3+ hours as standard.
I met my oldest friend in an MMO about 24 or 25 years ago... we accompanied each other to a few different games over the years, and now we aren't playing anything together, but we still talk. I flew across the country to attend his wedding a couple years ago. Similarly, I met my wife in WoW. Our first "date" was killing bugs in Silithus together. We've been together for about 18 years.
Old (as in, early-late 2000s) MMOs generated a lot of friendships; this isn't at all an uncommon story to hear from people who played them at that time.
It's odd, even games like Halo 3 back in the day. I was also a solo player and never thought I fit into a team. I'm a Leroy, I will rush in grenades flying, shotgun blasting so I prefer to play alone. But one time I joined a group and they kept inviting me and we became a unit. They liked that I would rush in the back of an enemy hiding place and flush everyone out with my grenades, shotguns and screaming. I may get killed rushing in there but I'll take at least one down and flush out the rest for my teammates to pick off.
I miss that group