Discussion for University Study on MMORPG's

I don't know if I have placed this in the right area, if not then I apologise.

I'm a third year student at Portsmouth University, United Kingdom and I am writing my final Dissertation piece on "Sexual and Social Transgression in Online Gaming with Emphasis on World of Warcraft and Second Life"

I was hoping to create this discussion so that I could get some information from people who play the game on the social and sexual aspects of the game.

The kinds of questions I wanted to ask are how important do you think the act of role-playing actually is in this game. Do you think that WoW acts as more than just a game in the idea of creating new identities, races and genders?

And with reguard to cybersex within the game. I'd like to know how prominent it actually is within the game, whether or not it is actually allowed in game? And what are peoples opinons of this aspect of the game, is it a generally accepted past time or not.

Thanks in advance for any replies I recieve.|||This probably belongs in the Research and Survey thread but I will mention it here.

1. Act of roleplaying: Depends on the server. Most of us play on non-roleplaying servers, so it plays little to no role in our lives at all. I've played on the few roleplaying servers that exist and it seems to depend on what guild you're in. Out "in the world" on the RP servers I've played on, it's light to nonexistant. Mostly roleplaying manifests as not telling nearly as many Chuck Norris jokes in trade. There are, however, guilds on such servers that advertise themselves as "heavy RP" guilds and require their members to roleplay at all times. But most of that seems largely internal to the guild.

2. Cybersex: I've been playing MMORPGs since 2000 and have only very rarely run into this in the wild (I should mention that "Second Life" is not one of the games I have played; I played Everquest until 2005 and WoW from 2006 to present). I don't recall any specific incidents in Everquest, but I do recall hearing other people talk about it happening once in awhile.

In WoW, I've always played female characters, primarily Horde, but the only times I have gotten any kind of proposition was when I was playing occurred when I was on my Alliance female toons, and then only twice that I can remember. On one occasion, my human character was sitting down and another male character walked up and started simulating the sex act at my human's face level (you get my drift) and started emoting some pretty explicit stuff. I stood up, informed him I was reporting him and put him on /ignore. Looking back, I should have told him I was a mom helping out her 12-year-old daughter. I had another one sometime a few years ago when a night elf druid character I was playing got some kind of suggestive tell and I told him, "Son, I hate to disappoint you, but I am almost certainly old enough to be your mother." Didn't hear back.

The only other time happened quite recently on my Alliance mage, when a guy started in on me at the start of a dungeon group, in whispers. I said to him, in group, "Excuse me, (Name), but are you really suggesting having cyber sex with a 43-year-old married woman?" He apparently hit alt-F4 quick because his toon disappeared almost immediately. Group got a huge kick out of it. So, those are three events I can actually remember in the past 10+ years.

Apparently, mentioning my age (which is true, BTW) has a complete squelching effect on the young male hormonal system.

It's one of those things you often hear about going on but almost never see yourself. Unless, I suppose, you're on Moonguard server. That server has an absolutely terrible reputation.

I can answer the "allowed" question as a former volunteer GM in Everquest, back when they were using volunteer GMs. The short answer is no, it's not allowed if others can hear it. The long answer is, good luck catching it going on. What happens in a private conversation between two or more toons is only investigated and looked up if there is a complaint involved (and I didn't have access to those databases so I don't know what if anything could be done about a private convo). As a GM I had an "invisible mode" where I could watch and listen what was going on completely undetected, but this means that you have to catch people in the act Right Now. I only received a couple tickets I can remember about inappropriate public behavior but never caught anyone actually doing it, mostly because the time elapse between the time a ticket is generated and me actually looking at the ticket. Since Blizzard logs everything that occurs on their server, they probably have more ability to handle these things, but again, someone has to complain. It's not like it's someone's job to read private chat logs of every person who plays the game.

I don't look for cybersex, so I don't see it. Probably if one is looking for it, they'd find more, but I have seen little to none in the game. Sorry, not a very exciting answer, but true.

...Ren|||Quote:








Apparently, mentioning my age (which is true, BTW) has a complete squelching effect on the young male hormonal system.

...Ren




Wouldn't have stopped me at that age, if i can remember that far back

I haven't noticed any in WOW probably because I'm antisocial, but in the previous game I played for 4 years *whispers* Runescape, it was very common practice.

There was an NPC in game that would change the gender of your toon for a few gold (needed for a few quests too) and since it was normally impossible to guess the original gender from their screen name alone, you had no way of knowing.

You saw a lot of people purely using female characters to beg/dupe people for items such as gold and equipment. Others would pretend to be female and spam that chat window with ��looking for a BF� until some poor sap fell for it.

Sadly with a large young male (hormonal) player base it was incredibly easy to do and apart from reporting/ignoring and temp banning them, there wasn�t much else you could do, even as a player moderator.

It�s wasn�t just the �younger� players who fell for this; I talked to someone in-game who kept telling me about a lovely female player they had met and had fallen in love with, only to find out months later that their �Beautiful Babara� was actually �Brian the bricklayer from Brighton��well he was warned!!

But then you do have the insidious side of the game too, players using their fake gender to try and coerce explicit information from other players; age, gender, where they live, sexual habits etc. Even though this was strictly against the game rules and even with the chat filter in place, it was still pretty horrifying to read in general chat (text bubbles above the players head).

Reporting them as a normal player took far too long and spamming the reporting tool had little effect except for getting the person reporting the incident a warning for �misuse of the reporting system�.

Although the wow gutter trade chat might not reflect this, I feel that wow players in general have or appear to have a much more mature attitude compared with the majority of players I came across whilst playing Runescape.