World of Warcraft as Collector's Paradise

As a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) owing its success to previous installments of the genre and the original real-time strategy games, World of Warcraft (WoW) is just itching for philosophical analysis. The cultural reach of WoW is incredible, and we couldn’t hope to do justice to it in a short introduction. We do consider WoW to be a profound cultural phenomenon and, quite frankly, a great game. Though our focus with this book is WoW and its expansions, the authors also touch on the Warcraft franchise, lore, and other media If you’re new to philosophy, you also might be wondering what philosophy is in the first place and why we would presume to mix it with your World of Warcraft! Well, what does it mean when a person gives you his “philosophy” of, say, leveling up a character? It doesn’t mean that he will give you specific examples, but rather an overarching guide of the principles that inform his leveling up process. For any gamer, such principles are important because, without them, he would be lost The secret is that we all have such guiding principles, Reader, whether we’re aware of them or not. They direct us when we play and they direct us when we order the latest strategy guide from Amazon. The beginning stage of becoming a philosopher is learning to recognize and understand the justifications for these guiding principles in ourselves, as we play and as we live To put it another way, philosophy is a tradition that poses and occasionally answers questions. In some cases questions are not specifically answered. In other cases investigating a certain question leads to more questions! Of course, to think that there is an easy answer to every question out there is to be a bit naive, or to attribute a simplicity to the world that is unwarranted. The ancient philosopher Socrates made the famous statement that he knew he did not know, and this claim in itself opened him up to being the wisest person in Athens. There are some things we know and there are other things we don’t, as individuals and as a species. Socrates taught that it’s best to be honest about what we don’t know rather than pretend to have reached some level of understanding which we clearly haven’t reached. Part of the philosopher’s task is to humbly ponder the seemingly unknowable things, occasionally reaching acceptable answers and advancing general human knowledge And this is just what the authors do in this book in relation to WoW. Videogames are still a very new cultural phenomenon in the eyes of human history—MMORPGs even more so. It is our belief that WoW can teach us not just about huge virtual worlds and videogames, but also about people and society. In some cases, WoW serves as a model for examining the potential of economic, ethical, or political theories. While the world is virtual, the people controlling the toons in that world are real The folks at Blizzard are real This quest does not necessarily need to be completed in order Depending on your current level of understanding, you may decide to skip ahead to chapters that seem most interesting to you. This is perfectly natural for philosophy, Reader! Different sorts of people are drawn to philosophy for different reasons If you’re a beginner, however, we recommend you start at the apprentice level, where there is a more eclectic selection of material However, at the beginning of each section we provide an overview of the major themes covered, in addition to some of the big questions the authors tackle in that section Whether or not you fully complete your quest, we hope that you emerge from the experience with a more open mind, a deeper appreciation for and understanding of your life as a gamer and person, and a greater respect for the issues that arise from in depth gameworlds like WoW