Loyalty to Faceless "Friends"

Associate editor Bob Colayco's guild is feverishly trying to finish Blackwing Lair before the new raid instances open up. Send aggro-holding advice on Broodlord to bob@gamespot.com.

I know the hollow realities of the grind, but there's a social allure to the game, as well. I'll tolerate the grind because it turns out that World of Warcraft is one of the rare things that almost all of my friends can agree on. It's a better water-cooler topic than Dancing with the Stars, at least in this office, and I'm a pretty social guy who really enjoys being involved with the greater group. For these reasons, I'm afraid the days where I see natural light on the weekends is numbered.

Sunlight is overrated, anyway. To be brutally honest, it isn't so much the game itself that's kept me playing World of Warcraft almost continuously since the beta started. At first, it seemed crazy that all I've been doing for months is killing the same bosses and grinding the same instances over and over again, making only incremental progress. How can something that appears to be so mind-numbingly repetitive be so enthralling?

The answer is that usually the real fun in doing activities isn't what you're doing, but who you're doing it with. It's the fact that a lot of my good friends are playing it also. Were it not for the game, I'd be watching something on TV or grinding through a single-player game, or playing something like Counter-Strike against anonymous public players (better known as "pubbies"). Instead, WoW serves as a useful vehicle for me to stay in contact with friends and even one of my brothers, who got hooked on the smack thanks to me. The game may not be a conventional means of socializing, but it serves the purpose.

Now the odd part is that the majority of people I raid with aren't really my "friends." Or are they? My guild is unusual in that membership is restricted only to real-life friends and family of existing members, but we have paired up with another medium-sized guild so that together we can conquer more-difficult in-game content that requires the cooperation of 40 players. Between the other guild, and third- and fourth-degree acquaintances in my own guild, there are dozens of people whose real names and faces I don't know.

Yet I've spent more time talking and interacting with them over the past several months than with most of my friends and family. I feel like I've gotten to know a lot of them fairly well, at least in terms of their demeanor and their sense of humor. When you think about the social power of an online game in those terms, it really isn't so mind boggling that real-life romantic relationships cannot only be broken by, but can also be forged through, these games.

But even though I'm a lifelong game player who's fully caught up in the grip of an online game, I still find it's difficult to wrap my head around the sociological implications sometimes. We have regular, scheduled 40-man raids a few times a week, and I feel a genuine obligation to people, who I've never met, to either show up or let them know ahead of time if I can't make it. I've become irritated at times--just as I would be if a real-life person flaked out after we'd agreed to meet in person--when raid attendees don't show up, and they neglect to say anything. It's odd, isn't it? Should I really be bothered by something that happens in a game, especially when it involves people I've never actually met face-to-face? I guess it should when more than 30 people have set aside that chunk of time to do something, and it becomes impossible when another 10 don't show up.

Recently we had another dramatic episode when a member of our sister guild was "caught" applying to a different, high-level raiding guild. This resulted in a lot of upset people who actually felt betrayed, as if we were a college football team and one of our players tried to quietly transfer to another school. All the skills he learned by raiding with us, and more importantly, all the weapons and armor we helped him obtain, were going to go right out the door. People were even more upset after he was confronted about it and didn't initially understand why his actions were upsetting to everyone. We were mad because he didn't display any loyalty to us, even though he'd never actually met most of us. Did he really owe that to a bunch of faceless friends? Given the amount of time and effort we spent helping each other, most of us felt the answer was yes.

I guess the moral of the story is that even though it's still just a video game, and a lot of people don't see it on the same level as real life, there are still real, flesh-and-blood people sitting there at the other end of the fiber-optic line. When you're disrespectful in an online game, you're not just being rude to a gnome warrior, or some other cartoon character. You're doing something that could be hurtful to an actual person who's controlling that avatar. It's something that's all too often forgotten just because you don't have to look that person in the eye. Yes, I'm talking to you honor farmers on the Lightbringer battlegrounds who love to go "/afk" (away from your keyboards), and especially all of you jerkfaces on Xbox Live.

Next Up: Freeplay by Matthew Rorie