The Plight of the ERPer

I'd fit in perfectly!

Despite how trendy it is nowadays to roll a level 1 on Moon Guard and laugh at the batshit crazy RPers in Goldshire, my friend was so bored the other night that he convinced me to go on an excursion with him. Now, I can attest that all the horror stories that people tell about this server's ERP epicenter are true.

First off, it was 4am and it was as crowded as my server's Stormwind is on a Tuesday night. It was obviously prime time for WoWers looking to "camp an instance portal," if you know what I mean. Also, the anonymity was prompting some of these guys (and you know they're guys) to say some of the most off-color/offensive/nowhere near subtle sexual utterances that I never imagined I would encounter, much less be exposed to in a public space. It makes me wonder what percentage of the Goldshire crowd is seriously looking to cyber and how much of it is just trolls from other servers doing as the Romans do.

Yes, there are definitely people looking to find someone of supposedly the opposite sex with which they can type one-handed. I even found some guy wanting to Skype-sex a daddy/daughter scenario, which IMO was a pretty smart way of guaranteeing the gender of the person with which he's touching himself. I said no thanks, by the way.

And then there are people like my friend, who was getting way into the spirit of the festivities and walking up to any and all naked players, propositioning them by walking into them repeatedly from behind. How is an honest sexual deviant supposed to find a good time with assholes like that floating around his hangout?

Poor Moon Guard. I feel your pain.

-Avia.

Call me a geek scholar.

I want to make a cake like this.

For my internship at a small publisher for students, I've been doing research for an eBook on the gaming community as a social group. Basically, I go into work every day and read WoW blogs for four hours. I'm a creative writer, and reporting the facts as I find them is totally not my M.O. I always want to change things as I see fit in order to support my grand Idea. I actually got into a discussion with my coworker about it, because she basically saw fiction-writing as "lying." I had to explain that while journalism consists of telling the facts, creative writing doesn't mind fudging the facts in order to convey a greater Truth. With a capital T. She didn't get it.

But anyway, when I finally stopped perusing WoW.com to do some real research for my project, I found that there is actual academic literature out there on trolling.

I am incredibly interested in reading said material.

Google Books let me preview a few pages of Communities in Cyberspace, and in their chapter "Identity and deception in the virtual community," the writers broke down the conveyed meanings in Usenet posts. They analyzed Geek Code used in signatures, interpreted different domain names as users would perceive them, and concluded that reputation incentives drive people to pretend to be knowledgeable on forums. They basically did close readings of message boards, like the posts were poems, and they reverse-interpreted the inner workings of their poets/users.

Sociologists get all the fun. I chose the wrong major.

-Avia.