Month: March 2019

I didn’t interact much with other players in general. I found it difficult to engage with other players, and as a result I kind of gave up. The method of speaking made it difficult to do things and talk at the same time, which I wasn’t a huge fan of. However, I did convince my little brother to download the game so we could play it together. After a significant struggle to get both our avatars in the same place, it ended up being pretty entertaining, although the game didn’t really feel designed for two players. We both kept going off and doing different things because the tasks we were doing were not team based. We used the app Discord to talk to each other. It is an app used by gamers to interact when playing games that don’t have easy ways to chat with other players. My brother described it to me as “a bunch of big group chats”. You can do audio or just text and my brother and I decided to use the audio function so we wouldn’t have to stop the gameplay every time one of us wanted to say something. It did enhance the experience, I felt more excited and willing to explore all aspects of the game.

It interested me to see the various groups and leagues because I preferred to play the game on my own. I think it must be a very different experience to play it while belonging to an in game group. I also noticed a fair bit of in-group out-group mentality based around these guilds. They like to have a feeling of exclusivity and as a result, anyone in the out-group was inferior. No surprises there, but it was interesting to see some based on real world nationality. The only way to determine if they were or weren’t of that nationality was by just taking the word of the player. The restriction had absolutely nothing to do with the game and was just a way to create a faux sense of community. Overall, I didn’t explore the multiplayer side of things enough to find any real benefit, and stuck with playing on my own.

While I engaged with the narrative, I found that a lot of the stories told in Guild Wars 2 were a bit predictable. I found myself more drawn to the fighting based tasks because while it didn’t have a ton of variation, I was more attentive to what was happening. It was difficult for me to become emotionally invested in most of the characters and stories. I am fairly familiar with a few games, and I felt that a lot of the narrative was repeated across games. While usually that doesn’t make much of a difference for me, there was another aspect to why this game in particular didn’t hold my imaginative processes. I believe it was the fact that it was a multiplayer online game that I had a hard time becoming invested in it. I thought a bit about why I felt the experience was cheapened by playing online with others and I came to realize that one of my favorite parts of games is the individualistic quality gained from being “the chosen one”. When you see a bunch of other people you don’t know going through the game also thinking they are the only savior of this fictional world it doesn’t give you the same sense of being special. I looked at a few of the other games I enjoy playing, and determined that it might not be this game in particular that lacks that feeling for me, but perhaps MMORPG’s in general. I tried a few of them, and none really captured my attention the same way a lot of single first person narrative games have. I particularly enjoy those which have an open world aspect as well.

Skyrim V, Fallout 4, and Portal have been my favorite games so far, and each of them tell the story of the chosen one (The Dragonborn, The Sole Survivor, and the last test participant). In each there is a different backstory and a different reason as to why they are the only one to save the day. I believe this need I have to feel like not just an individual, but a special individual stems from the capitalist romanticization of the individual. This significantly affects my drive to play through these storylines because I am not able to be invested if I don’t feel special. As a medium for narrative, games can be extremely effective, but other societal and individual factors must be considered and it wouldn’t be easy to make a generalization. I need a narrative that appears to be tailored for even if that is not actually the case.