Hacker News Reader

Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

WoW is a more social activity than a lot of people ever partake in on a regular basis. Claiming it is "exactly the same" as flipping channels doesn't add up. In fact, I can't think of a less interactive, less social, less engaging activity than flipping channels (something I spent much of my youth doing).

View on HN

I have a lot of fond memories of WoW. While it is a bit of a waste for a young person who is doing it instead of working on their future, it seems ideal for someone who is retired. Problem solving, socializing, etc. is way healthier than most screen activities.

I agree that WoW is a waste when considered in relation to the space of possible things a young person can be doing. In practice, though, teenagers are basically trapped in their school related social circle and activities. For me, WoW was a place to be someone else, other than who I was at school, and to feel valued for reasons beyond my performance in high school social games.

Beyond that, I legitimately think that my experiences with raiding, min-maxing, grinding, etc. were a sort of preparation for the social dynamics of... corporate leadership. Of course, a lot more was required (technical skills, philosophical grounding, etc), but it was a good start.

Growing up in suburban Houston our options truly were limited to make WoW not a bad option to engage with all sorts of people. ALL other social activities require a car, so until my mom or dad will was available to drive me my only recourse was the internet.

Now I live in Taiwan and I envy the young people who i see out and about all over thanks to the bus and train system, participating in all sorts of random activities.

The problem WoW shares with TV is that for many (most) people, logging in to WoW is an easier route to a pleasurable experience than any safe affordable activity available to a person living 70 years ago or 700 years ago or 7000 years ago. One worry that neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and others have is that if you partake often in potent pleasures that do not require much effort to achieve, you lose motivation to work hard at pursuits that haven't been carefully crafted by "designers" to be maximally engaging and pleasurable or require more effort or sacrifice to access than WoW or TV require.

It is not obvious to me that WoW's being very interactive (or its putting you in communication with real people) protects it from having the adverse effect I just described. Maybe the interactivity merely gives the designers of WoW more levers to pull in their quest to make WoW as engaging and compelling as possible -- which is more engaging and compelling than is probably good for you for something as easy to access as WoW is.

Specifically, if you binge on WoW it can take over a month for your motivational system to return to normal, and while it its taking its time returning, you have less motivation to tackle real life. Also, since pleasure causes whatever you were doing right before the pleasure to be "reinforced", if you play WoW a lot, then stop, for years afterwards whenever you are tired or under stress while at the computer you will tend to type in the command to start up WoW without any conscious awareness of intending to do so.

Of course video games, online role-playing games and TV aren't the only activities with this problem. The paperback novel for example is an invention that provides customers (at least those good at turning printed words into mental imagery) easy access to a fairly potent pleasure. This is a problem that society has been grappling with for a few centuries.

That's very insightful. You said as much, but I think that goes for anything that provides any sort of satisfaction. The less effort required to achieve the satisfaction, the more likely you'll gravitate to it. I do, anyway.

I might even take the liberty to generalize it to a sort of long-term-thinking blindness. For me, anyway, there are things I get much more more satisfaction from, that I could be doing, but require effort to do. Yet here I am on HN. I know this. I know that, on a satisfaction:time ratio, I'll get more out of one day's effort and finishing a project than a week's worth of mindlessly reading HN. That's a more fulfilling life.

It seems most of the time life just passes me by as I watch other people put in actual effort (in areas I have skills in! I could be the one doing that!) and achieve cool things. It's a difficult cycle to break. I'll figure it out tomorrow.

Depends on how you use/play it, just like it depends on how you use social media or TV. A lot of my social media usage is finding stuff and sharing with friends in group chats and us having discussions/laughs over them. Most of the "TV" (streaming services, anime, etc) that I watch is done with my partner or a group of friends. If you just turn your brain off and grind, then WoW or any other MMORPG is an equivalent mindless time waste to just consuming TV. I suspect it gets more fondness in nerdy circles just because more folks in these circles relate to it.

I didn't play very long (under a year) but I had a ton of fun mostly thanks to my guildmates. I didn't mind some grinding, and WoW has plenty, but most of what kept me coming back was to meet up with other players I had gotten to know and had a lot of fun playing and chatting with.

Definitely, and I have many friends who still play MMOs as adults who do the same thing. They open group chats with longtime (and new!) friends and play. The grind is a thing to do while everyone hangs out. But I also know people who turn their brain off and grind as a way to just pass the time. One of my favorite ways to waste time is to get a little high, fire up Diablo, and grind away. It's the same with social media. Social media can be social or it can be parasocial depending on how you use it.

parasocial maybe, but not social.

I don't understand - the relationships between guild mates aren't one sided at all. WoW raiding is like being on the phone with all your friends while you play a video game together.

Proxysocial

At least in my case they are absolutely social in nature, not parasocial in the slightest, what are you on about?

"Adjective. parasocial (not comparable) One-sided (especially of a relationship, as for example between celebrities and their audience or fans)."

In which way organizing a raid via (say Discord or whatever communication way you use) coordinating efforts towards a common objective and, in some cases, meeting your teammates offline is something parasocial?

Well, for every raider on WoW there are multiple people who just mindlessly do stuff solo. Most players never even reach raiding.

Huh TIL. Never played WoW and everything I've heard about it has involved guilds and raiding with people. I didn't even know it was possible to play solo.

Yeah, after yet another "fetch 5 random organs" quest I gave up in disgust around level 20 (twice).

This was kinda me, I literally have never done a single raid in WoW despite absurd hours of /played. Still doesn't fit definition of parasocial but since we've diverted: that was the cool thing about WoW, you really could make it your own game back in the day (200...7? To about 2010ish). My buddies and I, irl and online-only, would spend our time chit chatting either in game or using VoIP software while flying around on the game's transit system, levelling alts. Or I would be sitting in a city getting into political debates on /2 (channel available across all cities for your faction when you're in a city).

So it was still a very social game even if you weren't raiding. And the problem solving was very strong back then for the pvp scene, the concept of "meta" was still in it's infancy, I remember when one guy utterly changed the entire game of pvp with his pvp warrior videos, or another dude started publishing naked rogue gank videos. Anyway point is the social aspect was like any human society: incredibly diverse in form.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com