I am Igby, proud Mage and defender of the Alliance. My experience sets me at the pinnacle of magus ranks, my second tier armor provides magical bonuses of untold power, and I stand proudly with the Defenders of Order. I am also Mark Maloney-- a student in COMM 245, a class that analyzes behavior on the Internet. I played World of Warcraft (WoW) on the Archimond server for a couple hours using my roommate's account and level 60 Gnomish Mage character as an experiment to determine if I observed any hints of the Proteus Effect during my gameplay. The Proteus Effect relates that users of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games like WoW will begin to behave in a manner they believe others would expect of them given the self-representation they create (Yee & Bailenson 2007). Thus, if the Proteus Effect was in play during my gameplay, I might be expected to act in an altruistic manner given my perception of the character as a mighty and noble wizard dedicated to serving the Alliance. Further, given the Gnome's short stature and cartoonish features (aviator goggles, tufts of bright green hair and a handlebar mustache to match donning brightly-colored, oversized robes), I might act cartoonish and overly animated myself.
In reality, I did indeed act in a manner expected of me. Since my goal was to determine how I interacted with other players, I didn't bother with any of the adventure portions of the game, instead I traveled between a couple cities and towns to try and gain audience with some of the other players. Throughout my travels about Azeroth, I found myself continuely fingering the spacebar key causing my character to hop about in circles and act in a manner one could describe as no less than bouncy. This would represent a means to gain some attention to my character by making a show of movement to accomadate my short stature, but also the jovial approach I took towards exploring and interacting in WoW as Igby. My conversational style with other players for the most part was friendly, goofy, and sarcastic. Since my knowledge of the game itself is very limited (in comparison with the real owner of the account), I was unfortunately unable to provide any good answers to questions lower leveled characters asked me when I visited some low level towns. However, that didn't keep me from giving advice anyways, as I felt it was proper for a little gnome to act a bit mischievously. Still, as a Defender of Order, I felt it was my duty to serve the newer players by giving them some gold and token items that I thought might be of use to them. In the end, I did find myself acting according to the individual identity cues that I understood to be presented by the character Igby I was playing.
However, some further exploration for the cause of my behavior in WoW could be helpful for our understanding, because it may well be that the Proteus Effect was not the sole nor even a strong contributor to my actions. The social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) (Postmes, Spears, & Lea, 1998, Spears & Lea, 1994) relates that in anonymous environments (such as being online) where group norms are salient, a deindividuating effect will occur that results in a user performing in a manner consistent with the norms of the world. While I hedged earlier that I was not a knowledgable WoW player, I do have some knowledge of the norms of both the MMO gaming community and that particular to WoW from prior gaming experience and garnered during my exploration of the game. WoW is a decidedly cartoonish game, in fact every title in the Warcraft series has been cartoonish and jovial. So, was my manner of interaction as a goofy and overly animated Gnome a behavior resolved from my self representation or was it resolved from my understanding of group norms in the WoW community? I would have to assume it was a combination of both. While I assumed the accepted norm for the gaming environment was to be light-hearted and fun, I also felt that the particular character I chose to play was most befitting to this behavior. My friend had other characters on the account that were starkly less cartoonish and had I played them, I might have acted a bit more reserved because bouncing around as a female, human priest in noble clerical robes would not have been fitting. But, if we recall my altruistic giving of gold and items to low level players, I would find that to be much more of a result of the deindividuation effect I felt from playing a character in a guild known to be giving and to "look out for the little guy" as my roommate had explained it to me. Therefore, both SIDE and the Proteus Effect were affecting my behavior in the game.
Further, much of my behavior is very similar to the way I have acted in other games. While I behaved in a manner to depict Igby as a charitable but sarcastic and mischievous alliance member, I have done so with many of my characters in games such as Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC, a graphical MMO) and Dark Grimoire (a text based MMO). Perhaps, this WoW experience was only a continuation of an on-going online identity and representation I have assumed. However, if that is the case, we would have to examine if this representation was in any way altered playing in the WoW world as Igby, because if the Proteus Effect was truly changing my behavior then some difference in Igby's avatar from others I played in other games would have caused a direct effect on my behavior. Unfortunately, as many of my peers have noted in their own posts, the time constraints and experimental conditions were far from ideal for doing such a detailed exploration of the Proteus Effect. In fact, I am unable to recall nor did I observe any stark difference between my play as Igby and any other character I had played in DAOC. So then, perhaps it was not the Proteus effect that was determining my mannerisms in WoW at all, merely I was reflecting a pre-prepared self representation that has been built over years of gameplay that I assume when I'm online.
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2 comments:
Hey, Mark, great post. I enjoyed your overview of your experiences in Azeroth. I also found myself playing WoW for this assignment, and I too was a gnome character ("Pogger"). Like you, I spent a lot of time interacting with other players in the major cities. I didn't notice the Proteus Effect, however, as I was very social, had fun, was generally a nuisance to other players, and didn't take the whole thing seriously.
I particularly enjoyed the last bit of your blog where you hypothesize that your behavior was some how pre-conditioned by past MMO experiences. I think this could definately inform your behavior and is especially significant when an individual has been playing for so long that they have a socially expected persona that they are expected to live up to (i.e., in cases where a guild migrates to a new game and players are expected to retain the same characteristics of their previous avatars - if not in appearance, at least in behavior).
Mark, very interesting analysis of your time in WoW. I think you bring up a very good point by examining theories beyond the Proteus effect in this assignment because there were certainly other factors at work during your time in game. I too found that while I did this assignment my behavior was consistent with the Proteus effect, and I too had trouble convincing myself that there was enough evidence to actually support the theory.
Furthermore, after reading both RJ’s post and yours, I think it seems that the Proteus effect might even be working backwards for this assignment. What I mean by that is, it seems you both entered the game intending to act jovial and less serious and because of this you chose the gnome character. As you said, you could have chosen the noble-looking female priest, but I think you chose not to in order to be able to act how you wanted.
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