All we are, are our separate experiences.
If you want the world to “live”, then the experiences have to be temporal, and separate. They have to be a “you should have been there” kind of effect. Otherwise it’s just different actors in the same movie.
I ride motorcycles. I love motorcycles. I particularly like long range touring with a friend.
One aspect of motorcycle touring vs just two people in a car is the fact that both folks are involved in that actual traveling part. You can have two people going to the same place, the same way, at the same time, but they still have different experiences.
It’s always a joy to ride with someone for a 100 miles, and stop and then share what they had just seen and experienced. Even though they were together the entire time, the stories are different. They saw different things, felt different things, smelled different things.
Now, WoW simply isn’t rich enough for this to work well. The real world is vastly more complex in subtle ways compared to the charade of something like a video game.
In WoW, I had this happen in mid-alpha.
In early alpha, I would observe the world, and one of the things that stood out was, for example, there would be birds in the air – but they weren’t moving. Or windmills at a standstill.
Later, either after a patch, or maybe I even upgraded my hardware, “suddenly” they were all moving like one would expect.
I mentioned that to my friend, who’d been a leveling companion for much of alpha. I said “Hey look, the birds are moving now!” and he said “What are you talking about, they’ve always been moving!”
This is a telling experience, something no doubt philosophers have naval gazed long and hard about – the sharing of the individual experience.
What I see and experience in WoW is not what others see. It’s close, but it’s not the same. The camera, the colors, my settings vs there settings. At one point (again in the alpha) I could no longer see waterfalls. There was some quest in Ashenvale near a water fall. I had to call out to a stranger to show me where to look – they could see waterfalls.
I appreciate how this post is likely a treatise against things like phasing and what not, but, frankly, phasing gives much more depth to the game. Yes, it makes it more personal. You lookup and see the Jade Dragon statue, crumbled and in ruin. I, however, do not – as one of my characters did not advance the quest line that far – I like the statue, so I kept it in tact for that character. I have no idea what would happen if we were together in the game, whether the game would allow us to be together (of phase us apart).
But in the end, if you want to bond this community, the world has to change, and while the players don’t have to manifest the change, we have to be involved in it. No one can see the great statues in the Vale any more. They were destroyed. It would have been very cool if that were something like a gate event. The idea of being able to be there to see it happen, but I certainly understand why that’s not the case.
But I once rode beneath those statues. Now, they’re just rubble. I was there for the blood plague. I was there when the Ziggurats were floating outside of the capital cities.
Also, like others, I was there when Teldrassil burned.
Sharing coherency when hunting 10 boar tusks, you know, is less important. We may visit these events individually (within cinematic, or personal scenarios/instances), but they don’t drive us apart. In the end, we can share “did you see that?”