Gamer Culture in Online Role-Playing Games

Welcome back fellow gamers! Today I want to discuss the importance of your virtual Avatar and how people feel connected to their characters. As I mentioned in my intro blog post a few weeks ago, I talked about how in World Of Warcraft, there was this creation screen you see above (link to it here ) and how interactive the creating process was. Unfortunately, that was only a small part of the whole process and there is so much more that goes into your avatar that you think only subconsciously. First off, for anyone new, this "Avatar" that I speak of is pretty much your user representation in the video game like the man standing in the picture above. When logging into the game for the first time as that character, that is who would appear to others and when you walked around in game, people would see that character. It does not look as appealing but do not fret, that is from multiple expansions ago in the case of that game and so the newest iterations currently look way mo...

One of the most interesting and also dangerous aspects of online multiplayer games is also one of the biggest parts of these games, its massive multiplayer aspect. The picture above is from a game called Second Life and it shows actual characters (run by real people) meeting up at a specific location at a specific time. This is what people do! There are millions of people who play World of Warcraft and you can see them all in the game. You can run by a famous celebrity (some have been known to play the game and others are less known to do it here! ) and not even know it! But the biggest danger that this possesses is the fact that it is all anonymous essentially and you never know who could be lying or trying to dupe you, and someone who is actually being friendly. The important thing is though, you CAN make friends and mess around in World of Warcraft for example, and it is really cool to do. When I first got into the game, I had my brother and my cousin who j...