The Use of Language in MMOs
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG or MMO) are a model of videogames that have gained immense popularity in the last five to six years. These games, which are run on server-based virtual worlds, are persistent spaces where the game "keeps going" regardless of whether a particular player is logged in or not.
One of the aspects that differentiate MMOs from most other gaming experiences is their highly social nature. World of Warcraft (WoW), indisputably the most popular MMO in history with more than two million subscribers worldwide, is a virtual world with a fantasy theme where the player takes on an avatar from one of a number of races (elves, orcs, humans, trolls and so on). The purpose of the game, essentially, is to increase the character’s power and social status in the form of treasures collected by completing a series of quests.
Gee’s notion of knowledge in games as a situated phenomenon isn’t more evident anywhere than in the way language is used in an MMO such as World of Warcraft. Players in the world have the ability to communicate with each other via a text chat interface or a voiceover IP channel. However, it is the unique terms that have are used in the discourse of WoW players that exemplifies its situatedness.
Let’s look at the example a phenomenon in World of Warcraft called ninja looting. In a different context, this term might refer to a Japanese assassin. However, in the context of WoW, it has a completely different and contextualized connotation. When a group of players, called a party, defeats a monster a series of items, or loot, are dropped onto the ground that anyone in the party can benefit from.
The accepted social norm in WoW is that every player should forego the dropped loot until the party leader decides who can best benefit from the items. However, since anyone can pick up the loot at any moment, a ninja looter will ignore social norms and loot all the treasure dropped and then depart with it, much to the annoyance of the rest of the party.