Concepts & Perspectives.

My husband and I have played WoW for over two years. Both of us are fairly sophisticated and dedicated gamers (in fact, we originally "met" on a text-based MUD). It's hard for us to imagine what life would be like without some sort of computer game to play.

On the other hand, my Mom (before this experience) has never played anything more complex on the computer than Solitaire and those little games you can send through a single e-mail attachment. Teaching her World of Warcraft, then, is sort of like bringing Marie Curie in a time-machine and showing her the Large Hadron Collider. If nothing else, it showed us just how much we take for granted when we say that a game has an "easy learning curve".

First we showed Mom how to create her character. I had made some assumptions before this, and based on my mother's likes and dislikes, I thought she would prefer playing Alliance. (Besides, everyone always starts with Alliance before they discover the awesomeness of the Horde -- ahem.) I had created an Alliance alt beforehand, a level 40 human mage, to assist Mom in case she needed some heavy artillery. I expected Mom would decide to play a human, or possibly a night elf. Knowing some classes are more difficult to start with than others, I encouraged her to start with a paladin for the self-heals, or a druid for its versatility, or a hunter for the ranged ability and the fun pets.

Instead, Mom chose to play a dwarf. She also looked at the gnomes and pronounced them "really cute", but alas, gnomes cannot be druids, paladins or hunters. So a pretty, redheaded dwarf hunter was born. Mom wanted to name her after an old friend, and with a little tweaking we got a character name that was close enough to the original.

For the purposes of this blog, we'll refer to Mom's avatar as Jolynne.

One of the first things Mom had to tackle was movement. Now, every raider knows that the best (i.e. fastest and most responsive) way to move one's character is with the mouse. I considered this option for about half a minute before abandoning it. My mother has never even used the right-click mouse button before this, and I had visions of Jolynne flailing madly all over Azeroth, or her camera view lurching around like she was smoking really bad Bloodthistle.

So I taught her the basic ADSW configuration, a little about the strafe keys and pressing NumLock to keep going forward. Then I set her loose.

Her avatar, perhaps predictably, did some interesting gyrations before finally settling down into a forward-only motion. Mom learned to "steer" with some trouble as the landscape's changing elevations threw her a bit off-kilter. I pointed her toward her first questgiver, and she managed to approach the sturdy dwarf Sten Stoutarm without running through him and hitting the fence. Given her previous attempts to move around smoothly, this was an achievement.

She was a little worried about having to kill creatures to finish quests. "I'm a healer, not a fighter," she said. By this she didn't mean she wanted to play a priest -- she was referring to her real life career as a nurse.

I explained that she was going to do a lot of killing, so to get used to the idea. I also explained that many creatures were going to try to kill her, so in most cases it was self-defense to kill them first. I also explained nothing in the game stays dead for very long, including her avatar. It's not real dead, it's pretend dead -- so mortality is just a minor inconvenience. Mom laughed at this and I knew we were on our way.

After explaining how to accept the quest, I pointed Mom toward the area with her first victims -- Ragged Young Wolves. This produced a new set of challenges: explaining what ranged combat was, how to initiate combat and how to loot. Mom quickly found out what the right-click button on her mouse was for, at least in game.

I tried to boil it down to one simple rule. "Use left-click to target something, and right-click to interact with it." I explained that interacting included everything from killing a creature to using an item to talking with a questgiver. I made a mental note to explain what a "mob" and an "NPC" were in the near future, because I was so used to those terms that I would slip into saying them without thinking, which understandably produced a look of confusion on Mom's part.

Mom did very well for a beginner, but we had to stop because her back was starting to bother her. (She has lower back problems that flare up occasionally.) After she logged off, I took a minute to introduce her to my level 40 human mage that I'd so lovingly leveled up to help her. As she watched my screen, I showed her my mage's horse mount and demonstrated how to fly on a gryphon from a flight point in Southshore.

As I was flying over the ocean, Mom startled me with her first unpredictable question: "But you were just on a horse! Where did the horse go? Your horse wouldn't fit on that gryphon."

She was perfectly logical. A horse wouldn't fit on a gryphon! It took me completely by surprise. Being so used to computer games, I had never even thought of the impossibility before she said it. It demonstrated the wide gulf between our knowledge sets. I had come to Warcraft with certain expectations and concepts already in place from previous gaming -- Mom was coming at this as a blank slate. I laughed at my own surprise. It took me a few minutes to come up with an answer she could understand -- because really, the concept is fundamentally nonsensical.

I know I'm going to love these questions from Mom, and I intend to tag them separately so we can keep track of them. I hope to hear a lot more of them, because the more I understand her perspective, the better teacher I'll become as we go along. I'll be learning from her just as much as she's learning from me -- and that's pretty cool.