To Boldly Go...

Monday, October 26, 2009

A couple of months ago, I had an idea for a daring experiment -- to introduce Mom to gaming through World of Warcraft.

What's the big deal, you may ask? Lots of parents play WoW, right? Here's the deal -- for many of us, we learned the rules of D&D in our cribs, been weaned on text-based MUDs, played around on consoles and joined online MMORPGs. We've been trained on concepts that are now second nature to us -- character stats, hit points, mana pools, gear upgrades and damage output. Even LARPs have some of these attributes.

But what would happen if a complete RPG virgin were to be thrust into the world of fantasy MMOs? What if someone without any prior gaming context tried to tackle a game as all-encompassing as World of Warcraft?

My mother is retired and has never played anything except cards and board games, or simple computer games like Pac-Man. She has zero experience with D&D, has never done character creation, has no idea what DPS means. If she were to read the first couple paragraphs of this post, she would likely ask me what all those acronyms mean because I'm pretty sure she's never seen them before.

However, she's intelligent, independent, isn't afraid of new concepts and likes a challenge. Also, she and I are lucky enough to have a relationship where we're not just mother and daughter, but also good friends. So I'm encouraging her to give me plenty of feedback, because I'm certain that some of my well-established gaming assumptions are going to get thrown right out the window. And I'm finding myself very interested to see Mom's take on these concepts, because I'm pretty sure they aren't going to be anything I could have predicted.

I expect this will be pretty uphill for her. This is a way of game-playing that's outside her experience, and she'll be literally thrust into a strange new world. But for me, the reward will be seeing how Mom's mind tackles these challenges, and how easy WoW really is for a new player who has never seen anything -- anything -- like it before.

I'm looking forward to it.

NOTE: The date on my blog post and the date here don't match because I originally posted it on another blog. I've since deleted the old one and started this one, so I just copied it over.