Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft

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Published 2022-11-25
You enter a bright new digital world, exited to explore and hyped just to enjoy the vibe. Ten months later you're yelling at someone for standing in fire. What changed?

Produced by Dan Olson
Written by Nathan Landel and Dan Olson

Choice's channel - youtube.com/c/Choice_au

Bibliography
A Reports/Books/Articles
Ask, Kristine, ‘The Value of Calculations: The Coproduction of Theorycraft and Player Practices’ (2016) 36(3) Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 190.
Boellstroff, Tom, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008)
Chen, Mark, ‘Leet Noobs: Expertise and Collaboration in a World of Warcraft Player Group as Distributed Sociomaterial Practice’ (PhD Thesis, University of Washington, 2010) [Not: College of Education].
Consalvo, Mia, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (MIT Press, 2007) 28.
Egliston, Benjamin, ‘Play to Win: How competitive modes of play have influenced cultural practices in digital games’ (Honours Thesis, University of Sydney 2013) [Not: School of Art, Communication and English] 24.
Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Glas, René, Battlefields of Negotiation: Control, Agency, and Ownership in World of Warcraft (Amsterdam University Press, 2013).
Golub, Alex, ‘Being in the World (Of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game’ (2010) 83(1) Anthropological Quarterly 17.
Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)
Lehdonvirta, Vili and Edward Castronova, Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (The MIT Press, 2014).
McArthur, Victoria et al, ‘Knowing, Not Doing: Modalities of Gameplay Expertise in World of Warcraft Addons’ in CHI ’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM, 2012) 101.
Prax, Patrick, ‘Co-Creative Interface Development in MMORPGs - the Case of World of Warcraft Add-Ons’ (2012) 4(1) Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 3.
Skare, Roswitha, ‘Paratext’ (2020) 47(6) Knowledge Organization 511.
Skare, Roswitha, ‘The paratext of digital documents’ (2021) 77(2) Journal of Documentation 449.
Steinkuehler, Constance, ‘The Mangle of Play’ (2006) 1(3) Games and Culture 199.
Taylor, T.L, ‘Does WoW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause’ (2006) 1(4) Games and Culture 318.
Taylor, T.L, ‘The Assemblage of Play’ (2009) 4(4) Games and Culture 331.
Taylor, T.L, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006).

B Other
Crusader3455, ‘MIESTRO DOES A LEGIT 2v3 AT 2500 CR’ (YouTube, 30 August 2022)
AzAMOus, ‘It’s 2922 and You Enter Utgarde Keep’ (YouTube, 29 September 2022)
Mark Chen, ‘Mark Chen presenting Leet Noobs 10 years later’ (YouTube, 12 March 2021)

www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-warcraft/wow-legion-max-…

Crowdfunding: www.patreon.com/foldablehuman
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman

00:00:00 Preface
00:01:28 Chapter 1 - Instrumental Play
00:17:58 Chapter 2 - Paratext
00:31:44 Chapter 3 - How Add-ons Ruined my Manchildhood
00:40:50 Chapter 4 - Join a Guild, They Said
00:56:45 Chapter 5 - WoW Classic, A Hellscape of Instrumental Practices
01:12:03 Chapter 6 - Decomposing the World
01:19:37 Conclusion

All Comments (21)
  • @andromeda138
    I relate to this so hard just playing Stardew with my family. One brother maximizes and optimizes absolutely everything, aiming to unlock things as soon as possible. Meanwhile our cousin just makes his character look like Luigi and walks around eating sap.
  • @Mirrormn
    As the original author of WeakAuras, I never expected it to become such a pervasive (and perhaps controversial) piece of paratext in relation to WoW.
  • @Michael-eq8th
    The irony of being called a tourist in a game you’ve played since 2005 because you didn’t take classic seriously is rich
  • @JohnGenericName
    That line “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game” is painfully relevant in MMO style games. I remember when Black Spindle came out in Destiny you couldn't get into raids without it. Almost every LFG group demanded you have Black Spindle with specific rolls or you'd be denied entry. Never mind the fact that the raids had been completed countless times before the weapon even existed. If it wasn't "optimal," it wasn't acceptable.
  • @Tamlinearthly
    Feels relevant: Countless years ago, in the earliest days of Vanilla WoW, I'm just poking around somewhat aimlessly killing Troggs for a quest that was taking just forever, and some wandering Warrior I don't know suggests we party up and kill them faster. All well and good, but then he tells me, "You take Aggro."

    So I ask him, "What's Aggro mean?" I had never heard the word before--never played an MMO before, in fact. He was totally incredulous, but after some prodding he explained the meaning of the term and why it made sense for me to do it, which it did; we killed some bad guys, finished out the quest, and all was well. Or so I thought.

    Literally YEARS later there's a thread on Blizzard's WoW forum asking what's the worst party you've ever been in in the game, and sure enough, some Warrior stops long enough to pipe in, "Oh man, I met a Paladin once who didn't even know what Aggro was."

    They're going to carve this on my tombstone, just you wait and see.
  • @kyleb4781
    it's really cool that Dan has started making hours-long documentaries SPECIFICALLY for me, I appreciate that.
  • @Gunbudder
    one of my closest friends i've ever had played like that barefoot gnome at the start, only he refused to cave. i love that guy and he played the game HIS way until everyone else got tired of the game like 7 years in. he told me later it was because he hated Warcraft a lot, but loved spending time with us, so he made the game fun for himself. it made us all feel terrible because we never considered if he enjoyed the "correct" way of playing WoW
  • @Ro-the-redhead
    I played wow when I was little on the family computer. I played in what I called "single player mode" I turned off the chat box and I would spend hours exploring the maps, doing fetch quests for npcs, and selling pelts from low-level animals I killed. It was great! I didn't know what guilds were and I leveled up very slowly. WoW has some really cool areas to check out! The games pretty fun when you don't know what people are saying.
  • @mb73861
    My college friends and I still laugh about back in 2005 when a guy in our dorm kept looting during fights in wailing caverns. And he would actively deny it. Then during a fight the game lagged real hard and everyone was stuck moving around in whatever animation they were stuck in. Zach was stuck in the loot animation. He still denied it. 😂
  • i’ve always described my aversion to multiplayer team games as “i was bad at sports in middle school and got yelled at by my teammates for it, and i don’t have a strong desire to relive it”. all that to say that this video is so real to my experience not just with WoW but multiplayer team games as a whole.
  • @JCintheBCC
    56:00 is a really interesting point. My small guild did the same back in 2009. Outside sources were discouraged. We banned reading WoWhead. Theorycrafting was right out. We wanted to experience the game and encounters organically, and it made everything harder but more satisfying.

    After a couple months we got good at it. We started "solving" dungeons and bosses faster. We felt good. Then we noticed that Brian was always the first one to "remember" a boss' big attack and "anticipate" a movement or a mob spawn. He was always the first to crack a strategy. Once we started looking for it, we saw that Loren almost always had the right element enchanted on his weapon the first time we fought a boss, and Jon was exact to the tenth of a second with his threat generation. I got called out for my Tankadin's rotation being a macro when someone heard my bag of chips crinkling over VoIP. We were all lying.
  • @FungiiDraws
    i will never forget putting this on as bed time noise and getting woken up by 21:36 with a genuine feeling of being confused and under attack
  • @giascle
    As someone who has never played WoW, my biggest takeaway from this vid is "wait, it's not SUPPOSED to look like that?"
  • @NikHem343
    In Guild Wars 1 there was a tutorial world, which was a completely different instance from the main game to which you could not return to once leaving. To get the best armor in this tutorial - which was somewhat useful in the main game - you needed to farm x items from two different enemies. I’ve put 100+ hours into Guild Wars, 99% in the main game, but the best memory I have from all that time is when I created a character named „Tutorial Merchant“, farmed those two mob items and then sold it to other players for very little gold, gold that I had no use for, because I already had the best tutorial equipment. Whenever I sold out, I ran into the woods again, farmed, got back into town again and announced my goods to the travellers. Most people were really appreciative. Some were on their Xth character and just wanted to get the tutorial over with. Others were new players and I like to think I added just that much to their wondrous experience with my small nonsensical business. Great memory for me.
  • @TheFettman13
    In Vanilla I rolled a Tauren Druid, purely because he looked and sounded cool. I knew nothing about classes and roles, the meta etc. I knew nothing about playing optimally (or even somewhat decently probably) and would form an early version of a hybrid druid purely by accident. I'd get asked if I could tank, I'd look at my kit and be like "Yeah it's possible", and it would go poorly. I'd be asked to heal, see that I have healing spells, and it would go poorly. After that, I eventually just started collecting rare things. Miscellaneous items, critters, objects that have literally no value, weapons, anything that even sounded fun. I made so many bank alts, dressed them up like pimps, then just started playing to make gold from buying, selling, and farming. I literally didn't care to raid or even dungeon unless there was a cool item. I became a merchant and in my mind I won.
  • @littlebird862
    This really hit me hard as a disabled gamer. I always feel like I can't really join any kind of game related community because so much are focused on optimizing everything, and my body just can't keep up. No matter how many videos I watch I'll never be as optimal as an able bodied player who doesn't struggle to use a keyboard. If I join a guild that wants to focus on being the best then I'll always hold them back. It's really depressing because that's also how I tend to get treated for my disability anyway. I can't even escape being judged for my physical ability in a completely virtual environment. It's really awful how isolating it is. I really just wish there were more spaces where I wasn't judged on my abilities in some way.
  • @apig1049
    "worlds become real when we care about them, not when they look similar to our own." gonna go find a window to stare out of for the next 500 years. this month has been so good for the longform videos, but i am also so incredibly full of big existential thoughts
  • In Mario Kart, while I was hugging curves and defending my lead my son decided to ram his kart in front of a stage full of Koompas dancing, throw down the controller, jump up, shake his ass shouting "Woo Hoo! Yeah! Let's Party!". I've never been more pwnd in my whole life. Not only was I playing THIS game incorrectly, I was playing EVERY game incorrectly. GG son.
  • @slackerman9758
    The “stand here and do what you are told” aspect of raids is what made me stay away from them. I mean, why would I trade the freedom of doing what I want on Friday evenings to get, over a period of months, slightly better items where I would get to stand somewhere different and do what I was told.