Doing a repeated activity that is painful or tedious with the intent of building up skill or attributes, on a virtual character
Exercise for your specs, ’speccing out’
Example: “I’m going to see how many whelps I can kill in 1 hour… starting now.. and GO” Example: “Anyone here going to hit the raid (gym)? I need someone to spot me.” Example: Murloc villages may not have much variety, but they make for good spexercise
Nothing new here, but just some interesting things I’ve stumbled across in my research and study of a few recent things, especially the discussion on Griefing.
A few friends at work have been teasing someone for her new found entry into the World of Warcraft. It’s mostly tongue-in-cheek but it’s come up in my mind that a few of these people talk about TV shows a lot. They asked her how much she played she of course skirted around the issue. Nobody wants to admit it, because you know exactly how much you /played. Sure enough, The Daedalus Project already had numbers to back it up:
MMORPG gamers spend on average 21.0 hours per week playing the game (N = 1996), and spend on average 7.7 hours per week watching TV (N = 1996). The national average for TV watching per week is around 28, which is what the above averages add up to.
A person who plays MMOs invests the same total amount of time having fun as someone who doesn’t. The only difference is, there’s no /played command for seeing how much time you’ve spent watching TV. Looking at the comments for some of these things, I also notice that the rift of MMO-players and non-MMO players is still there and very present. The general consensus that these games steal away your life is still out in the open, when it looks like the average person spends no more or less time playing then other people spend watching TV.
The comments that appear accusing people of spending that much time gaming as being addicted are the ones that entertain me the most, and speak to exactly what I’m talking about here. Don’t get me wrong, I spend quite a bit of my time in some form of game or another, but I’m not addicted. :3
The book on gaming addiction is still somewhat open, as far as I can tell. I’ve been reading more of the Theory of Fun, and as Koster talks about it, it’s completely possible; we ultimately play games because that squirt of chemical that goes off in our brain whenever we accomplish something feels good. It’s possible to get addicted to that, so that’s that.
WoW insider points to a 9 minute minidoc that went up recently about these same topics. It’s nothing new, but another good summary if you’re interested in catching up.
My favorite part is when they shredded the disks; any of the 8 million people who play can tell you, you don’t need the disks to play the game. I was also a bit confused that they blacked out the name of the game on the CDs but were fine with saying it on the air.
