As someone who had never been a committed gamer prior to this course, I found the experience of playing Guild Wars 2 for the first time to be quite a challenge. When first starting out, I was excited about the prospect of being entrenched into the online community, and saw it as an opportunity to gain an inside perspective on something that seems to evoke a lot of emotion – whether positive or not – in my own relationships, as well as in those of others around me.
Through these four months of gaming, something I found significant about my experience was how difficult I found it to be. Firstly, I was shocked by my incompetency at the game. Although I had not previously been a ‘gamer,’ I considered myself to be technically skilled enough to play the game without much difficulty. Rather, even months after I started playing, I was unsure as to what my goals in the game were, and still experienced feelings of confusion and frustration trying to navigate the online world. I was also faced with the emotional effects that the game had on me. Guild Wars 2 tells a story of colonial conquest and violent war; along with the stress-inducing music that changed with the landscape, the narrative of the game evoked feelings of fear, sadness, and anxiousness that drove me away from wanting to play.
One of the greatest challenges I faced was my own lack of motivation to regularly play the game. Gaming is something that is often not seen to be of great value in Western society – it has been declared a disorder, viewed as a waste of time, and condemned for provoking aggression and violent behaviour. This perception, along with the capitalist notion that we must be doing something ‘productive’ with our time, is something that I have internalized and allowed to affect my gaming experience. Finding time to play the game was challenging because the supposedly separate work and leisure spheres were being disrupted by the fact that this was a non-‘productive’ activity that had to be done for an academic course. Because it did not feel right to game when I was supposed to be doing coursework, and gaming was not something I took up during times of leisure, there seemed to be no right time to play the game in my everyday life.
Valuable to my gaming experience were the feelings of comfort and community I felt when playing with others. The game allowed me to have a ‘party’ as well as join group events that could only be completed by players working in a team; not only were these interactions helpful in furthering my character in the game, they were also beneficial in terms of alleviating the stressful feelings I was experiencing. Although Guild Wars 2 was not a MMORPG I thoroughly enjoyed, playing it was an insightful experience as it offered me some understanding of the gaming community and the tactics used by developers to attract and engage large numbers of players, as well as to the ways that media can be used to communicate and perpetuate certain narratives or ideologies.