Growing up on WoW

It's a strange thing to grow up in the 90s, as far as the Internet is concerned. We are the first generation to experience the online world as part of our emerging social lives. Sure, the generations before us are engaging with people online as well, but our generation was the first to grow up with it.

Chatting , IMing, and online gaming were just becoming the standards they are today. Parental controls were on the cusp of being considered, as all sorts of chat room horror stories were emerging. I know I did a lot of stupid and very silly things in chat rooms, not to mention saw several things no child should see before they are mentally ready. I also succeeded in embarrassing myself thoroughly in the first Multi-User Dungeon I ever attempted.

And that's the thing. I was embarrassed in front of many people that I would never meet, never see, and never recognize me in real life as the player that was killed by a fish. The online world was adding more social pressures in addition to the many social situations that kids would have experienced pre-Internet. Not only are we embarrassed by some middle school fashion atrocity, but something we told a "friend" in confidence over AIM is now being gossiped about over the entire school. I can't fully express my relief that I didn't experience the worst of cyber bullying until I was old enough to deal with it, but it is a sad reality for kids growing up today.

My guild has always had a "18 and over" policy. With Wrath, this recently changed to "21 and over," a change I question. Not only does this exclude a handful of raiders, in addition to one officer, but it means a good core of our membership would not have been admitted in the past. Has that three-year difference changed so much?

There has been only one exception to our policy, and we accepted him as a raider because of many vouchers for his maturity, intelligence, and skill as a player. He was the epitome of a good raider all through BC and into Wrath, and everything you really expect from a decent person on the Internet, so much that officers, myself included, tend to forget that he is just 14. But, he is still a young teenager, and if any issue arises around him, his age does comes into factor.

As 3.1 nears, tensions are rising as we decide what initiates are pulling their weight, what backup raiders we need to gear, and who we should bring in to polish off the meta-achievements. Our resident teenager already caused some frustration amongst the officers for asking earlier to join another guild's OS10+3D farm raid in order to polish off his Glory of the Raider. This was the day before we downed it ourselves, so while his worry was excusable, the lack of faith in his fellow raiders was unnerving. It took a miscommunication between him and the guild leader to start up another debate as to how his age affects our shared online experiences.

I was playing moderator for this incident. I know both the raider and the GL well, and I was working with one over Vent and the other in chat to find the source of the bitterness. When the evening's raid finally ended, the officers got together in Vent, and I asked the raider to join us. He said very little aloud, instead communicating in chat through me. The other officers wouldn't have this, and called him out on it. When he did finally make a statement, his voice was heavy with tears.

I felt awful. He was now being badgered for crying over a game by adult men who had no idea what it was like to grow up in a social environment like an MMO. I was proud of him for admitting that he preferred to keep it to chat because he could control himself better and keep his thoughts rational, but I felt so guilty for pressuring him into a Vent conversation where he would be exposed for putting so much emotional investment into an online community. I told him that he was not alone in his frustrations of dealing with this social life, and that if he ever needed to talk, I was always here and knew what it was like.

One of the officers called me a "mother hen" for wanting to shelter him, but I don't think I wanted to shelter him as much as I wanted the other officers to empathize with him. He had admitted his mistakes and the fault for the miscommunication, but they did not fully grasp what it was like to have such emotional ties to a group of people online. What happens in WoW can be as important as any other real life event, socially and emotionally. Getting laughed at by your guildees can be as harrowing as getting laughed at by your high school peers. It is the same development that everyone deals with, except now it is in relative anonymity and amongst people who don't recognize that online society doesn't immediately disappear when they log off.

The consequences of how we treat our fellow gamers are real. It is now standard for kids to learn how to deal with the connections they make online, and how to manage the resulting emotions similarly to what they experience in the real world. You cannot expect everyone to experience WoW like it is "just a game." While we may be fighting groups of pixels in order to achieve shinier pixels as rewards, the friendships we form, the words that we say, and the memories that we share show that MMORPGs are beyond just interacting with a computer.