online role-play games: attraction and addiction

Topic: Online role play games
Research Question: Discuss two popular online role-play games, comparing the reasons for their popularity and their likely effects (positive and negative) on
the players.

Thanks to technology advancement, computers are necessities in our daily life and this encourages the maturity of online community, online games, Nintendo DS(NDS) , digital art, etc. We can always see many children and youngster talk a lot about online games and spent most of their precious time in front of the computer’s screen. Therefore, I was particularly impressed by the lucrative online games. There are kinds of online games, Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), was particularly attractive for our generation. MMORPG are different from conventional personal computer games; provide us a virtual society, in which we can experience a different kind of life.

What are the reasons behind its popularity? Do they have positive or negative effects on individuals or our society? These questions deserve and direct me to think deeply about this issue. In this paper, I will select two different Massively Multi-Player Role Playing Game, World of Warcarft (WoW) and A Tale In The Desert (ATITD) to explore the reasons behind why they become so popular and their corresponding consequences.

World of Warcarft is a game about combat whereas A Tale In The Desert is a game concerning economic development. World of Warcarft belongs to Blizzard Entertainment Warcraft universe's fourth game. It is a type of hack and slash , means action game with non real-time strategy. Players can control a character avatar within a persistent game world to explore the landscape,perform quests, to fight the monsters and evils , interact with other players, etc. What the players can reward are money, items and experience, which in turn improve and up-grade their power.

The other totally different genre, A Tale In The Desert set in Ancient Egypt, run by the independent company eGenesis. The main focus of the game is on society rather than combat which totally different from most of other MMORPGs. Palyers can familiar themselves with a training system called Mentorship. So that they have some idea for where to go, say where to go to next step and how to get familiar with the games. Game users’ goal is to begin the central challenges of the game and they have to finished some specific tasks, for instance find public resources, and expand upon what knowledge. This direct them to integrate themselves into the community as a whole with other game users.

Reasons of their popularity
Why World of Warcarft and A Tale In The Desert become so popular? Why every one talks along them and immense into the games’ world? There are difference reasons for their famousness. For World of Warcarft, the reputation system and voice chat play an important role. While the feeling of living and legal system gives raise to its popularity in the game A Tale In The Desert.

The reputation system of World of Warcarft have direct impact on character advancement. In World of Warcraft, characters' score with a faction is depends on killing how many certain mobs or handing how many items. Its like that the more time and effort you put in, the more reward you can get return. The player with higher reputation can grant many benefits to characters including reduced prices from vendors, the ability to purchase unique items and expanded access to certain areas in the game. This provide incentives for the players to continue to play the game to achieve higher reputation. They cannot stop or else they will lose points. Good characters can acquire various items such as herbs or raw ores in the game. And they can also equip themseleves with different weapons and armors.

Besides, World of Warcarft contains a unique in-game voice chat feature. This function is designed to replace text chat more efficiently and provide voice chat to more players. There are different channels set for various things such as groups, general zones, battlegrounds and raids. They serves a platform for game users to interact and exchange some skill of the game or their feeling. Players may also join, create and moderate their own channels freely with a log in account. The program features " voice activated " and " push-to-talk " features to the players' choice.

Comapred to World of Waecraft, A Tale In The Desert has a strong sense of community as it set the Ancient Egypt scenario in the game. So the emphasize of it is not combat but the society as a whole. The communities always change in the game to give a sense of living, resulting generally in friendliness throughout. Thus it attract the players from addicted to the game.

The other attraction of ATITD is its legal system. What is a legal system? It is a controlled variant, which is restricted by what the developers can code the nature of such a system. It is interesting that players can create petitions to redistribute expired accounts’ materials and belongings or even change avatar’s sex. Moreover, the legal system also requires a great deal of cooperation between players, as a petition must be spread, signed, and returned with a certain numbers of signatures.

Positive impacts
There is no doubt that online games can provide us a way to enlighten and entertain our exhausted city life. The interesting story, the game characters, the great weapons, eye-catching screen and fantasy figures enable us to experience a different kind of life. People, especially adolescents like to play online game to relax and escape from the busy schoolwork. Engaging in online role-play games can be a nice channel and it is increasingly important among our generation. As more and more people are involved in such kind of activities, there is heated debate on the pros and cons of online role-play games. Though A Tale In The Desert (ATITD) and World of Warcarft (WoW) are different types of online role play games, they still share some positive effects among the players.

The prevalence of role-play online games provides us a chance to communicate and cooperate with other players of our own age. World of Warcarft (WoW) and A Tale In The Desert (ATITD) are simple to handle and the contents of them are quite straightforward and easy to fellow. You can play most of the games even without thinking. No matter what genre are, say World of Warcarft is action-based game whereas Tale In The Desert Some is a society-based game. They are very easy to let the young people to get familiar and fellow the rules and systems. Due to technology, youngsters or children maybe shy in front of people as their social skill is deteriorating, but they maybe feel more comfortable playing in a virtual community and communicating with others. With a computer, you don't need friends to play role-playing games. This may serve a channel for some youngsters to express their feeling and meet different people from different background. A well-known game designer Katie Salen stated that online game world is like a ‘magic circle’. She claimed, “ As a closed circle, the space it circumscribes is enclosed and separate from the real world”. As well as online game tends to result in a great deal of interaction between players, thus establish a closer-knit community. Everyone keep contact and interact with each other in this online world with their own accounts.

Negative impacts
But unfortunately it seems that there are some students that fail to control themselves burning the mid-night oil playing games online instead of studying their books and knowledge. This arouses our serious attentions as it affects our mind and daily life.

With playing those online games, it will cause some negative effects to players and the whole society. The common likely negative impacts of both games are no doubt the psychological addiction. It refers to a kind of internet addiction disorder which resuls the players isolated themselves from social contact and only focuse entirely on in-game achievements rather than daily life affairs. They are out of control towards the online games. Some extreme cause maybe cause domestic volence. Children and youngsters refuse to listen to their parents’ advice and argument occurs.

According to a survey by the Entertainment Software Association in 2005, it found that "video game overuse" was very common among MMORPGs players. Take World of Warcraft as an example, Dr. Maressa Orzack of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts estimated that 40% of the 8.5 million players of World of Warcraft are addicted in the year 2005.

Moreover, there are also some influences from the perspective of our society. With many youngsters immerge themselves deeply into online computer games, they will no longer concentrate on social linkage and even studying and working. As a society need manpower to function well and smooth, continuous pursuiting of higher level in online games of players will reduce the productivity of the society. According to a survey on online gamers, heavy games players can play an average 17 to 26 hours a week. It is really amazing and shocked us.

Due to each game’s uniqueness, they have some specific negative influence concerning to the players as well. As the company of World of Warcraft, Blizzard started offering free trial game play accounts, there are increasing numbers of spam sent by bots in the virtual mailboxes of their characters received by the game players. This problem is particularly usual in the European realms.

Compared to World of Warcraft, the online game Tale in the Desert focuses more on the cooperation of many game users. They need to devote much time to finish a task and directly take part in almost all aspects of the game. Higher-level tests are much more complex and require you to enlist lower-level characters. Furthermore, it cost money for users to play the game to keep a persistent online world functioning and running. If you first download the software, it is free for charge. But there is monthly fee of US$13.95 to continue playing after 24 hours in game.

With regards to this increasing online game popularity, Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) is the “stickiest” form of online games in which hundreds of thousands of players interact with one another online. It was really surprised me because of the enormous amount of time they consumed. There is no doubt that online games become part of their life. Online games are attracted to us, but also make us addicted to them. They can bring us entertainment but in another way also cause many problems. We have to control the time consumed in playing in front of computers and deal with this before it is too late. We are the owners of ourselves, but not the computers games, which control over us.

book:
1.Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games
(R.V Kelly2, McFarland & Company, Inc, Publishers, 2004)
comment: It is a useful source because it explain MMORPRG culture in detailed and clear way. Book about online games are difficult to searcg, but this one is really quite desirable.

websites:
2.http://hk.news.yahoo.com/070727/318/2cfft.html
comment: This is a reliable source.
3.http://www.answers.com/topic/role-playing-game?cat=health
comment: The website is very detail and easy to read.
4.http://202.120.60.18/coolenglish/docs/essay/Online%20Game%20Around%20Us_%E6%B2%88%E4%B8%B0.htm
comment: The source is mainly the findings in China, so it may be too dogmatic.
5.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG

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