Students Blog

team. I only found working in a team to be beneficial if it led to completing a difficult or tedious quest, whose completion would advance me further toward my goals. As an achiever, world of warcraft did a great job at creating a world in which achievers could “immerse themselves and find compelling.”

But just as Bartle points out numerous times, no player is only one player type: I also display vestiges of explorer, socialiser, and killer. I typically tend to be more of an explorer in most other games, but I believe that the cartoony graphics and feel of World of Warcraft made in difficult for me to really get that sense of wonder about the unfamiliar world that explorers crave. I found the social aspect of the game to be rewarding as well. My brother and I did some research and joined on of the top guilds on the server, which turned out to be a very beneficial move. Joining this network of great players allowed me to find skilled players with which to preform the most difficult tasks with (some of which required as many as 40 people!) I would guess that the guild I joined was also predominately achievers, we all enjoyed progressing our characters and watching each other become more powerful. However, I did feel the social allure as well. At times I joined a group of guild-mates to tackle a challenge that would benefit them, but not me. This must have been because I knew them pretty well and wanted to help them out. I am least of a killer. Although there are long term benefits to killing other players (the “honor” system), it takes such a long time of killing to achieve them. I saw killing as pretty much a waste of time. The times that I did kill other players, my motive was to ensure that they didn’t interrupt me as I kill mobiles and move toward completing quests.

I find Bartle’s views on player interactions to be very true. For example, as an achiever, I didn’t really understand or respect explorers, I was befuddled by socialisers who seemed to waste a lot of time doing nothing of merit, and I despised killers who interrupted my progress toward power and riches.

My experience with Guild Wars was very similar. Rather than choose a predetermined level 20 character and jump right into PvP, I wanted to create my own character and develop his skills and abilities myself. I enjoyed the fact that I could log on for even a short amount of time and make a great deal of progress toward the next level. When I encountered mobiles that I was unable to defeat myself, I always enlisted the help of NPC mercenaries rather than other players who would get a share of the experience and treasure. Graphically, I found guild wars to be superior to World of Warcraft. This made my explorer side come out a bit more. Many times I enjoyed just wandering off killing whatever I would find (I didn’t feel like this was a waste of time in terms of character development). However, I was extremely antisocial in Guild Wars. I almost never chatted with or played alongside other players. My killer side was all but snubbed out because there are no enemy players in the campaign. The game does a have a tremendous appeal to killers however, because there is an entirely different PvP mode that is very popular.