CCT370H5 Andrea, Natalie, Priya, Rob

We have no had previous experience playing WoW. After further experimentation, some of us….are now addicted.

Objective Relation to Theoretical Concepts Overview of Experiment Video Questions

Physical appearance is often a reflection of your actual physical abilities. However, in WoW, the characters physical appearance does not merit their physical abilities.

Arbitrary Representation Cross-Culture Validity Simulation Simulacra

 WoW uses arbitrary representation that you can choose from a male, female, Tauren, Dwarf, etc. and no character has an advantage over the other in terms of game-play abilities.  They all start out on even ground and if engaged in battle and each character is at the same level, the fight would be completely fair. Skill level is attained by game-play progress, not by the appearance of characters.  In real life this would not be the case. It less than likely a short person say 5’1 can go and beat up somebody who is 6’4 or even be able to do all the same things.  In WoW how the character looks is arbitrary to what he, she, or it can do. Gender and size make no difference.

 The fact that this arbitrary representation can be understood but all gamers across the world within different cultures shows that there is an apparent cross-cultural validity when in comes to character selection. You don’t need know prior information about WoW or its characters to play.  It is understood that all characters in the game start out as equal.

 Today, there are millions of gamers out there that play WoW all over the world. These players consist of young and old, male and female, tall and short, and all the colours in the race rainbow.  WoW relates Baudrillard’s theory to its characters by allowing gamers to customize every type character such as choosing the species, gender, and colour. The character you choose and customize is the simulacrum of yourself.  An interesting example of simulacra is caricature and most recently computer generated characters.  An artist/designer makes drawings that closely approximates the facial features of a real person, the drawing cannot be easily identified by a random observer, but could just as easily be a resemblance of any person, rather than the particular subject.

We recorded several different experiments/scenarios that helped us further understand and prove our objective. Real Height v. Warcraft Height Real Gender v. Warcraft Gender Real Build v. Warcraft Build Real Age v. Warcraft Age Watch our cool video.

Any Questions?