Assignment 10: So this is what it’s all about

I have some engineering friends who are serious online gamers. By serious, I mean borderline (or even past the border) PIU. Of course guys who are hardcore gamers are hard to understand, so I thought I’d try, for this assignment at least, to get a taste of what causes this addiction. My friend recommended playing DotA, which stands for Defense of the Ancients. This game is played online between players split into teams. It game is supposedly set in the same universe as WoW (which makes no difference or sense to me).

So when I logged in, the first image that greeted me was the game channel. This showed your friends and their online/offline status. Apparently you can join another game or make your own, and since I was a newbie, I joined someone else’s game. Then I waited for all the slots to be full, in order to actually play the game. There are two sides (aka Good versus Evil) and I picked a Hero to use as my avatar. The goal of the game is to destroy the opposite side’s base, which is a mirror image of my own team’s base.

After all the waiting, the game pretty much started right away. I was very overwhelmed by the pace and action, especially with all the sound effects that came with each attack (I had my speakers on). The terrain itself was pretty simple, consisting mostly of a forest with paths, a river boundary and the team’s bases at the corners. I noticed that there was little chatting going on, unless it was important to the game and when allies warned each other. There was certain lingo that made no sense initially, such as “bot mia” which meant the enemy at the bottom of the screen is missing and might ambush, and “pwn (blank) head for (blank) gold”. The game makes it simple for one to leave at anytime, so there were random departures, especially when the game was shifting more towards one side.

Yee and Bailenson’s study of the Proteus Effect did not really apply to my experience playing this online game. None of the avatars were particularly attractive, and that feature had no impact on the physical game. Also, I chose a threatening-looking Hero with huge blades because I wanted to compensate for my lack of experience. However, I felt no more confident since the game was so overwhelming for a beginner. At the same time, I did feel intimidated by particularly ugly or scary looking avatars chosen by other players but that was because these characters were so alien to me. In this game, size and looks mattered little, compared to the strength and skills characteristics of the avatars. Finally, who I chose did not affect how much I self-disclosed to my fellow team mates. The only conversations going on were based on strategy or some taunting, or in my case, asking for help. Yee and Bailenson’s study would apply more to games in which avatar choice was essential to an online identity, and where online interactions make up the basis of the game.

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