Profile Outline/Quotes

Plan of attack: introducing World of Warcraft as my topic, give some facts about the game, address the assumptions and conventional wisdom about immersive video games in general. Introduce my interview subjects. Address the claims about and charges against WoW (and gaming in general), who says what. Responding with quotes from my interview as an additional enlightening perspective. End with a summary of why conventional wisdom in many aspects may be wrong, and how, gamers or not, people are people and they are mostly the same everywhere in every situation.

Relevant quotes:

"There was and is a stigma attached to it, like it's a weird thing that only super nerds do or it's not cool for whatever reason. Also that it takes over your life when it starts and it's a huge time sink."

"It has a lot of cooperative elements where you can take on other challenges with other people that require a lot of cooperation and communication."

"I consciously tried to play less, because if I let myself I could spend a lot more time playing the game than I want to. There's so much that you could do, or try to do, that I would feel was ultimately not worth doing. Both within the game and outisde the game. But you feel like you want to keep pace with the people you play with, and achieve what they achieve."

"A lot of people, when they receive media, just take everything in and don't give anything back. In the game, there is a certain give and take, and a lot of people can't adjust to that. There's a lot of immaturity and there are deliberately inflammatory comments, people just seeking attention."

"There are so many people that play WoW - I found out my cousin plays, I found out my uncle, a conservative Southern Baptist minister, plays too - so it's a huge sample of the population."

"It's skewed towards people who have enough privilege to afford a computer, afford the subscription, and sit in front of a computer all day. They don't have 3 kids they need to support, or some other financial or social obligation that prevents them from taking part."

"I think people mostly don't understand how fun it can be, and I 'm not the kind of person to ridicule something someone else does that I haven't personally tried. So I tend to think the people who ridicule it are doing so out of some sort of insecurity of their own. But I do think some of the complaints people have about it are very valid. Some of my own perspective on WoW includes that ridicule - paying for the subscription and spending the time playing that I do. But I haven't faced a lot of ridicule, just because I usually don't tell people I play."

"Most of the officers in the guild I would consider friends. Three of them are on a raid team that Aisa and I lead together. We're as close to them as anyone in the game, they have my cell phone number, they can text me and stuff. Two of them live in LA and one of them lives in Florida. There's another guy that lives in Boston that we're close to too."