Personal Narrative In WoW

I came across a fascinating piece by David Bowers on WoWInsider today, on the differences in play styles between role playing and the game mechanics of World of Warcraft. The issues he raises ties into a few interests of our research group, so if you’ll pardon the digression, I’d like to speculate a little about narrative in virtual worlds, motivation and identity in developing a WoW character, and some of the implications for learning.

The issue is one which most players of WoW have encountered many times: If, say, I’m running through the Wailing Caverns “instance” (dungeon) for the third time in order to pick up some gear (as I’ve been doing with one of my secondary characters this week), why is it that all of the monsters I’ve killed are returned to their original locations, alive and well, each subsequent time I go through the instance? Didn’t I just kill those guys? In terms of an overarching narrative continuity, aspects of WoW don’t make a lot of sense — if the stated goal of Wailing Caverns is to purge the caverns of the monsters and save the imprisoned druid “Naralex,” how can it make sense that every time I go back in, poor Naralex is again surrounded by bad guys… the very ones I’d beaten just a few hours before?

Here are a few interesting snippets from Bowers’ piece, which address this question:

The fact is that there is no narrative continuity in WoW in any objective or absolute sense: nothing your character can do will actually change the game world in any significant way. Many roleplayers get disappointed when this becomes an inescapable reality, especially at the level cap. If they can’t find any motivation for their characters to just kill the same bosses again and again without effect, they may quit roleplaying or quit the game altogether. They cannot claim to be saving the world anymore, because the next day they go back and those same evil monsters are still there. It would never happen in a story, so if it’s happening for your character, then your character cannot be in a story — it feels like “just a game.”

So, in terms of motivation for playing WoW, it becomes clear that “being the hero” in the terms that the game lays out for you will only take you so far. “Rerunning an instance” is simply the most effective way to acquire gear for one’s character in the game. As one progresses, the game requires having items (armor, weapons, etc.) which enhance one’s gameplay, and the “running of instances” for this purpose becomes a central part of play in the game. Yet, there’s a discontinuity here — in terms of the storyline, it doesn’t make a ton of sense for the game to tell me that I am, say, the single, very important blood elf who has succeeded in helping blood elves gain entry into the Horde when I can see that thousands of players have completed that same same set of quests before me, with the same story. If one takes role playing their character seriously, then this could be confusing or potentially demoralizing.

Bowers continues:

In fact, even though there is no objective continuity, the game itself is based on a kind of “subjective continuity,” which a roleplayer can leverage to his or her advantage. That’s to say, the whole reason people play this game is to make their character and their friends’ characters grow more powerful over time. As we do this, our relationships to the world change, and the enemies of old content effectively “die” as we leave them behind for newer and more challenging adversaries. You can’t make VanCleef and his pirates disappear for good, for instance, but you can become so powerful that killing them again is utterly trivial and you have no real reason to do so anymore. Relative to you, he might as well be dead.

Bowers is onto something important here — though the individual-but-not-really narrative of the game can be confusing for players who take it seriously, all players will still craft their own subjective continuities in the game, motivated to repeat parts of the game over and over again until they’ve achieved what they needed, then move on to new goals. That is to say, players are developing personal narratives which exist in relation to the narrative of the game but are not limited by them.

I’d argue that our science literacy work implies that reverse engineering the game’s mechanics is a large part of the development of a personal narrative in WoW. If one is running and rerunning the same instance in order to acquire better items to improve his or her gameplay, the player has some implicit understanding that the storyline of, say, “saving Naralex” is subordinate to getting geared up to tackle the next, more difficult set of quests. Or, in other words, the player is able to sideline the storyline of the game in order to achieve his or her personal undersanding of how the mechanics of the game work — to level faster, to experience new dungeons, and to simply be better than he or she was before. The relationship between identity and achievement in virtual worlds seems laid bare with these kinds of examples, and highlight the interesting structure of WoW, which is simultaneously an environment in which a player can shape his or her unique identity along with developing an understanding of how the various systems in the game interrelate, depending on what a player chooses to do.

This certainly contrasts with the top-down sort of narratives that pervade our schools. How often are classes — or even single assignments — incentivized for students to repeat them in this kind of fashion? Unfortunately, not terribly often, due to a variety of pragmatic and institutional reasons. But, shouldn’t we at least explore the potential of structures for learning in which the learner is encouraged to develop his or her personal path through the material, and rewarded for repeating and refining their practice?

Though WoW is certainly not a changeable, dynamic virtual world in the way that many others are, the flexibility of gameplay and the means by which a player can craft these kinds of personal narratives (through roleplay or by focusing on learning the game’s underlying mechanics) might give us a clue to structuring alternative curricula and environments for learning. At the very least, it alerts us to the simple fact that even when one imposes a particular narrative on a learner, motivation (in the right environment) can lead to ignoring imposed narratives and the development of individualized ones. After all, while helping kids achieve imposed, external goals can sometimes be useful, ultimately we’re setting our sights higher: Empowering young learners to develop their own learning strategies and to see themselves as producers of knowledge.