WoW Lessons Pt. 2

"What we are is the sum of a thousand lies, what we know is hardly nothing at all..."-Rise Against, The Strength to Go On

I was thinking more about the storytelling that's being done in the World of Warcraft expansion, and I realized that there's another interesting facet to what they're doing. Basically--everyone's character is doing the same quests. On the surface, it should be very difficult for players to buy that their character is special at all, because they know that every other character is getting the exact same storyline played out for them. This may be why quests until this expansion pack were fairly bland--it's easy for you to believe that everyone has to kill x amount of wolves so Farmer Brown's cows can survive. It's more difficult to believe that the greatest villain the world has ever seen is taking a personal interest in every single adventurer that comes close to his lair.

And yet it works.

I think that's a testament to the oft-maligned imaginations of videogame players, many of whom, by the way, are adults. Somehow, we've all managed to either suspend our disbelief or construct a narrative in which our character is one of maybe a few thousand very special people, which is still pretty cool. It's a surprising phenomenon, and one I'd like to get some more information on. Maybe I'll e-mail the people over at the Daedalus Project and see if I can get them to do a survey on it.