“One of the crucial insights from the research is that toxic behavior doesn’t necessarily come from terrible people; it comes from regular people having a bad day,” said Justin Reich, research scientist from Harvard’s Berkman Center. “That means that our strategies to address toxic behavior online can’t be targeted just at hardened trolls; they need to account for our collective human tendency to allow the worst of ourselves to emerge under the anonymity of the Internet.”

Simon Parkin, “A Video-Game Algorithm to Solve Online Abuse”, MIT Technology Review, September 14, 2015.

In my experiences playing thus far, I have not engaged in conversation with the game, but have consulted other internet resources, as well as discussing it with friends who have played the game before. I have not been approached within the game itself, and to be perfectly honest, have been too scared to start a conversation, because of thoughts such as “What would I say? Will they think I’m ‘dumb’? What if they tell others about me? What will they think of me?” and similar rabbit holes. In my mind, this has led to me negotiating my own internalized discourses around asking for help and when that is necessary, and my solution so far has been to simply Google it and see if I can solve the problem myself first, which I have been able to.

Interestingly, my anonymity has actually made me less inclined to speak up, for I feel that I might be misconstrued within this very specific context, as opposed to real-life interaction, where I feel I can always redeem myself. At least when I ask a question to someone in person, I can compensate for my lack of knowledge in one area by contributing to the conversation in others. I have had past experiences with anonymous forms of social media that have led to some interesting insights about people’s perceived anonymity and therefore lack of boundaries, but for me in this instance, it was the opposite.

For this reason, I was very grateful for those who created resources outside of the game to help answer basic questions about format, movement, quests, etc. As a game that is played on a computer on the internet, the lines about what is considered “cheating” become increasingly blurry for me, and I have a difficult time drawing hard lines on this issue. Personally, I do not consider it a transgression simply because of the format of the game itself, whereas I would feel differently if it was an in-person game that people temporarily exited to google a solution. Perhaps this is my own bias and lack of familiarity, but it does seem to me that within the context of an MMORPG, there is no cheating.

Overall, the mid-game interactions in this game have honestly been quite a huge barrier for me, but they have led me to address some of my own internalized thought forms that I thought were long gone, which has proved quite useful and interesting.

“The study of digital storytelling is both forward-looking, with regard to its being an iteration of the digital humanities, and increasingly visible, as recent developments in new-media studies and narratology have removed some of the stigma that was once attached to gaming within the academy, but digital games are still considered by many in the humanities as frivolous (and monstrously violent to boot)”.

Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp

As someone who has never played a video game prior to Guild Wars 2, I was surprised by the level of drama that was involved in the narration of the game, as well as the intricacies that kept thickening the plot as I kept playing. I did not anticipate that there would be such an elaborate backstory, not only for the whole of the game, but for each individual task. Admittedly, I sometimes found it difficult to feel engaged in a world that felt so removed from my own, but that could also be my own lack of familiarity with this type of content. However, when the game involved me in said content, I felt much more motivated to perform the tasks and participate in the causes, seeing as I was now a part of it.

The first task I found to be interesting in several ways: as a member of the Asura race, our ‘people’ are valued for our ingenuity and intelligence, not outright battle skills, which I was informed of in the first few moments of playing the game. As such, when there was an invasion, I was half expecting to have to suit up for battle and physically fight constantly, for in my mind, that’s what video games were like. I was surprised, however, that the main task was to re-wire these robots called “golems” that had been tinkered with by the opposition.

This holistic view of such a fictional battle impressed and engaged me, because it debunked my previous assumptions about the so-called “mindless killing” in video games. Additionally, and perhaps this is because I projected too much of myself onto my avatar, but I was thinking to myself “ugh I don’t want to fight,” and while I had a few small battles, I mostly was fixing things and conducting research, which appealed to my own interests in daily life much more than fighting anyways. Not only did this aspect of the narration engage me personally, but it also has an underlying message of valuing multiple forms of strength and intelligence, which I can very much get behind.