Are we another social experiment?

Not a good bet, the average of all gamers has been cited as 33. WoW tends to skew older than the average.

Now this is absolutely correct. You could place almost all blame on that. There is zero accountability now as you stated and that “set free” so much bad behavior. It’s the Pandora’s Box of WoW.

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Not that I’m necessarily skeptical, but where is this from? And does it count consoles, phones, the whole shebang?

Depending on the distribution, it’s totally possible to have a majority of a set be less than average. Take the 80-year-old you cited earlier, and group her with 4 people who are 25. In that set of 5, the sum is 180 and the average is 36. Yet 4 out of 5 of them are way under the average.

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A quick search found this (it has pie charts!) And it’s apparently 31 not 33 according to the study cited here:

https://venturebeat.com/2014/04/29/gaming-advocacy-group-the-average-gamer-is-31-and-most-play-on-a-console/

The average age of someone who plays games is 31 years old. In fact, more gamers are over the age of 36 than between the ages of 18 to 35 or under the age of 18.

An interesting paragraph for sure. In my experience WoW, being an older game with way less hype than it used to have, would seem to fit that 36 and over target. And 36+ year old people with anonymity can be off the chart toxic.

edit: got to run, will look for replies if any later to continue the debate.

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That’s definitely interesting, but I think Jarawana’s point is valid. The survey doesn’t seem to differentiate much between people playing WoW, and people playing Candy Crush. Yet I think most people here would draw a sharp distinction between the two. I think the citation isn’t very meaningful unless we can get numbers for just MMORPG games.

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Well WoW in particular wouldn’t surprise me that it skews an older demographic, since the game is so old. It’s literally ancient in technology standards. (not counting updates and such obviously, it’s not the same game anymore by a long shot).

Teens who started in Vanilla are 30+ now. Many are still playing. And there’s a lot of 20-somethings and 30-somethings that started back in the day too.

But every time I go to Walmart and see the giant display of cheap Fortnite and Minecraft action figures I’m reminded we (?) might not be the primary demo.

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Here’s a more recent article. It also has a lot of other interesting info on gamers.

https://www.theesa.com/esa-research/2019-essential-facts-about-the-computer-and-video-game-industry/

I think there is some truth to players feeling no accountability. They don’t expect to see these players again and if they do nobody will remember. That and they just don’t care how it affects other players.

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Absolutely this is happening. It happens IRL too. That’s why people largely don’t give a :poop: to other people at the store or other people driving. There’s so many people even if you see someone again, you probably won’t remember each other anyways. Might as well whip your balls out and make a hasty retreat. There will be no repercussions.

WoW has replicated this with all the CRZ and LFG functionality. That load screen “protip” that says “Be nice when grouped and you’ll be invited back” literally has no relevance anymore in Retail.

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Hello, everyone. I posted earlier and have read through , well glanced at everything posted since, and want to elaborate on my paranoid fears.
First, I was scared to post that Blizz might would be amenable to using WOW as a testing grounds. I enjoy WOW and would hate to get kicked. Even more, I would hate it if unfriendly strangers were to pop a bag over my head and drag me off in a inconspicuous cargo van … Deep breaths here… Ok, really, I enjoy WOW, but am unhappy with many several recent changes/adjustments that to me, seem to be nonsensical. I mean DAMN… And its not al all just me… So if I’m noid, I got plenty of company. Ok, since its not possible to consistently and repeatably injure yourself and your environment accidentally , then its on purpose.
Why would a Monarch make decisions that negatively affect their subjects quality of life? Decisions that restrict their travel, and how they travel, decisions that simplify their capabilities, even the clothes they wear? Idano, maybe the Monarch is a control freak. Or has some friends that are. Probably, the Monarch and ‘friends’ just want whats best… On another note, toxic behavior, usually text?
Well, a foolish youngster may be casually toxic, rude, bad mannered, most grow out of it. For sheer texted poison though, ability increases with age…

don’t underestimate people.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the Monarch. I think that contracts pay very well and no company that has lost a large number of subscribers would refuse a good payday. IF that was the case, Classic would be the official apology. Classic refreshes the monarchs reputation and does damage control. True or false, it’s an interesting concept.

Going back to my OP, “I’m starting to wonder if the imbalance, which could possibly mimic current world events, isn’t deliberate.” I believe it really is the perfect model which would make Classic a necessity if it were true. I say this because what happens after the exodus from Alliance?

Game over. Horde can’t battle themselves in a BG.

The way to win in WoW has always been resources. He who has the most resources wins. Well, if there’s no one left to play on the opposing side then the winning team stagnates. They have no one to battle but their own.

I say jokingly, I wonder if Cataclysm will drop next?

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tl;dr:

  • the internet world runs parallel to the physical world, yet is a universe itself distinct. most people haven’t fully realized this implications of this yet.

  • wow is not precisely a social experiment, but as the last major mover in a now-stagnant MMORPG genre, blizzard has enjoyed 15 years of monopoly in creating and maintaining the major VR-simulated environ – with full access to azeroth-wide data, (real-time) database of player behavior, and analytics in the back-end

  • by definition, MMORPGs aim for an immersive and simulative environment, brought to life through emergent player behavior (not unlike similar blockbuster MMO titles like Facebook and Twitter). it is arguable wow is the largest visual-based virtual reality in existence, as opposed to much larger, identity-based platforms that are f2p like social networks

  • the unique attributes of wow – multi-million userbase; virtual ~sandbox with tight developer I/O controls; digital physics that allow emergent behavior like corrupted blood – allow researchers to get a first-approximation of how virtual reality universes operate and, importantly, how humans change and modify themselves to interface with digital worlds

HISTORY
it is somewhat coincidental that wow and facebook (kings of MMO) both launched in 2004: the transition from web 1.0 to 2.0 inherited the public’s scepticism of post-dotcom bust internet, with few survivors (notably 1998’s google and 1995’s amazon - who now owns twitch, itself a blockbuster virtual reality). strong public scepticism = asymmetric opportunity to create major platforms on the new cyberspace frontier

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
– Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, speaking in 1998

the internet provided the rigid protocol foundation to allow new ‘virtual reality’ environments to be built upon it, leading to failed experiments like friendster/myspace and winners like blogs, facebook, chatrooms/usenet/IRC, 100s of multiplayer videogame universes, etc.

william gibson called cyberspace a ‘collective hallucination’ in his 1984 book-- appropriate, given the earliest environments (usenet, IRC) let other people put their words/thoughts onto your CRT screen, to cryptic/magical effect

broadband internet access was ramping up heavily US-wide, which matured quickly in the next 2 years (2006) to finally allow streaming video to emerge (youtube/netflix). yet, the internet lacked user critical mass, and beige pc boxes with pentium 4s were still strictly the domain of nerds.

the early survivors, coupled with newer giants, have now clearly been ‘eating’ much of the old world, but in 2004 nobody took the internet seriously. even fewer people took it seriously in 1991, when the www protocol was invented

apple introduced a working mobile computer (not a phone) in 2007 that could reasonably interface with the internet, and all the major ‘virtual reality’ platforms began building around this paradigm shift (computers in every human’s pocket) to get people online (digital frontier goldrush).

what was just 58 million facebook users in dec 2007 became >2 billion by june 2016 (side note: facebook is likely the best proxy indicator for internet growth.)

the internet became cool, the computer became cool, and now we have billions of people connected in dozens of disparate, coarse, first-gen virtual reality environments

LOGIC
the logic of the internet allows person-to-person communication, cooperation, data transfer, and now value transfer – across borders and above gatekeepers[0]

this can be words, pictures, videos, memes (an incredibly underrated phenomena), games, business database entries, a network of taxi cabs, users in a twitch streamer’s chatroom, …

these attributes can work in a distributed, uncontrolled fashion (rules without rulers anarchy) or in central-planning fashion. the pendulum oscillates: early internet was distributed (www hyperlinks as bridges between vistas), got ate up by central platforms with a superior user experience and/or free services (google, facebook, youtube, tinder, uber, so on), and now with recent compsci breakthroughs, completely distributed information transfer is now possible (web 3.0)

facebook knows more about genuine human psychology than every psychology department at every university combined.

facebook is, more or less, a big database of databases:

  • a database of your friends,
  • a database of your status updates,
  • a database of the connections between user’s friends (graph)

we get a peek into our own profile’s database, but not everyone else’s – which is why facebook has unprecedented power over much of the world. amazon, google, blizzard is the same way. the more data they get, the more powerful they become. blizzard is unique in that their virtual reality has a visual-based world with movement and physics, and their developers can pull direct data/insights from this living world of emergent human behavior

emergent human behavior? why is this important? in many modern social ‘sciences’, which have been politicized and have a demonstrable replication crisis, theory is quickly pawned as truth, only to be found useless 5 years later. on the digital frontier, with platforms having real-time back-end access to how humans actually behave, theory takes a backseat to observable, direct cause and effect in human behavior.

in theory, theory=practice. in practice, theory and practice are not the same. facebook knows more about genuine human psychology than every psychology department at every university combined. blizzard, accordingly, should be at least in the same ballpark

wow, for social experimental reasons, can be thought of similarly:

  • a database of players,
  • a database of realID connections between players,
  • a database of each server’s general and trade chats,
  • a visual-based virtual reality world bound by VR physics,
  • etc.

how do these databases of social interaction play out as the internet evolves? we shall see…


[0] gatekeepers like hollywood directors, television producers, publishing houses, newspapers editors, governments… basically the cabal of power-hungry turbonerd elites who held reigns over public opinion pre-Internet. if you wanted to “get the word out” about something, good luck getting your ‘letter to the editor’ published. try going door to door maybe?

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Well it seems 12 years ago the average WoW player was 28. Since a lot of people are remainers rather than new players it’s likely the average is above 31 by now.

Likely. Which is all we could do with statistics anyway, find what is likely.

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/world-of-warcraft1.htm

Not sold on the data gathering method tbh, but it’s probably not off by more than a year.

I see now, after reading your post, I am one of those people. One tree I could see pretty well, never noticed the forest growing up around me. Great post.

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Hi. During Legion I fought for the Horde in Ashran, yet I have no Horde characters.
At the time I was a Night Elf, loading into Ashran , I became a Blood Elf.
Are we another social experiment? Not ‘another’, delete that word and substitute the letter ‘a’. Written thusly, I can answer, ‘I think so.’ :no_mouth:

A lot of the changes that have spoiled this game in small ways or large are actually because people asked for them. It’s the literal “you think you want it, but you don’t.” Hindsight is pretty cool.

I don’t think any society, culture, subculture, parallel world inhabitants or any other being I might have failed to include would ask for an imbalance or set of imbalances. No one invites frustration, repression, anger, sadness, struggle or the feeling or powerlessness which are all emotions those who are on the negative side of imbalance feel.

When I say these words, I’m not just talking WoW or imbalanced BG’s or imbalanced factions. I’m speaking about real life, internet life and everything in between.

Here’s some Analogies for you; who would ask for a paralyzed economy that is saturated with under priced items, the same ones we need to sell at an inflated price to be able to purchase supplies? (Flasks, foods, runes, armour) This question is being asked in two completely different scenarios (real world and WoW world) that just so happen to mimic one another.

Who would ask for such a separation of strength that one part of the society is eating cake while the other is enjoying Thanksgiving feasts?

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Politics is very unbalanced, only 2 parties to boot. :thinking:

And hate to break it to you, the world’s full of cheap crap. All those Walmart trucks you see driving this way and that? Most of it is cheap imported plastic BS. Yet if it all went away our economy would collapse.

I respect your sentiment and all but that’s the world we live in. Never is any of it ideal. But that’s life. Dust yourself off and keep your head up.

You’re all of 15 years old. You have never lived in the “land of promise” or in a time when “The American Dream” was easily obtainable. Your words, weather you realize it or not, give your age and lack of experience away. You are coming of age at a time when your outlook is beak, where kids are angry and don’t even realize they ARE angry, and believe their opinions carry as much significance as an adult because of social media.

Our economy would not collapse without China. It would be the exact opposite. Right now we are a dumping ground for China and their cheap, toxic garbage. We will be their cheap, toxic dumping ground for a long while because too many have followed the exodus and switched sides. As long as those who switched sides on us continue to gain resources, those of us who stayed will continue to bear the burdens.

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Hey when I was a kid Bumblebee could talk. But plot twist, the little yellow one I had was probably assembled in China too.