This is the first week of a new class and for this one, I am studying the human interaction in an online environment such as an MMORPG. The game in question is going to be Guild Wars, a fantasy game in a fictional world. The intial idea had been to do Second Life, but after spending around 30 minutes in game, the UI, minimal tutorial and confusing controls proved too much and I moved on to a different game.
Within Guild Wars, I spent this first day mostly checking around different social hubs, both major cities and some of the outposts that are lesser visited. Within these areas, the concentration of people was heavy, but the in game chat wasn't very active. The majority of chatter was for trade purposes within these major cities. The higher level areas had a lot of chatter, but this was almost all focused on getting a group, usually for specific events and usually searching for specific members. The lower level outposts didn't even have this minimal searching and there was only a single party search every 5 minutes or so.
Where I did see a lot of chatter for a purely social gain was in the guild and alliance chat. In these windows, people that were fairly familiar with each other talked back and forth and did everything from trade, social chatter, group seeking, etc.
All told, today proved to get a good grasp of where people tend to talk in game. Until my next post, my goal is to try and get into groups and do some joined events that require teamwork to accomplish.
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