Forked Thread: "The Death of the Imagination" re: World of Warcraft

[CountPopeula]

Timesink or not, please note that I have posted the effects on my own creativity before, during, and after. They were *real* effects on my imagination no matter what the driving force in the game may have been, time waster or not. This is something that cannot be argued with me I'm afraid. It was a first hand account, it happened in my case, end of story.

/snip

I think our disagreement is mostly semantic anyway, and while I love to argue semantics, I think we're both basically saying "Playing warcraft too much takes away from time and effort you could be using to do something else entirely," just in different ways.

And it does have a social force pulling you to play more and more. I find myself being roped into tanking kara every time I log on, even though I just want to do my exceptionally boring reputation grind for my pretty pretty dragon mount.

I think it's just I don't find Warcraft any more or less imagination-killing than spending the day watching a Torchwood marathon to ogle John Barrowman and Eve Miles or reading that Twilight book my girlfriend is always talking about. Actually, WoW might actually be more creatively stimulating than that last one, and it's far less likely to be the cause of my girlfriend one day dragging me to some creepy VtM LARP. Think having dreams about playing WoW is bad? I have nightmares about VtM.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Yes, you did insult people. You just did it with ENWorld Moderation Approved Insult Technique.

Wrong on ENWorld- You are a moron.
Right on ENWorld- Such and such appeals only to morons.

You're wrong, Cadfan.

Almost all of the things I end up moderating at the moment are of the passive-aggressive 'such and such appeals only to morons' type of thing.

There are still some 'you are a moron' posts which we have to get too, but the majority of moderation work is reminding people that implying others are morons won't fly here.

Thanks

 

[Jack99]

As Ruin Explorer already said, I didn't say that. I did not call WoW players "morons." I obviously believe that it is harmful, at least in more than moderate amounts. But lots of highly intelligent people do harmful things to themselves, consciously or not. My guess is that most WoW don't consciously know that what they are doing is having the effect that (I think) it is, although on some some sub-conscious level some might. But even if they did, heck, I smoked cigarettes for over a decade and I wouldn't consider myself a moron.

There is no studies that prove that playing games has a deteriorating effect on the brain, especially not the imagination. While playing WoW constantly might put your imagination "on hold", it does not destroy it, nor does it make it worse. You just do not use it for a while.

We might be circling the pot here, my point is simply that deteriorating is not the same as putting on hold. One assumes it gets worse, the other merely that you don't use it.

Anyway, RE; which server were you on, mate?

First of all, I am not equating imagination with intelligence. I take the Gardnerian view of "multiple intelligences" so believe that one could have a high IQ but little imagination, or vice versa.

Ugh, Gardner and his multiple intelligences.. /cringe

Secondly, let me ask you a question. Do you think it is an "insult" to say that smoking causes lung cancer?

No, but it is flat out wrong. Smoking increases the odds of getting lung cancer.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Where did this idea of "young people have imagination" come from in the first place?

Man, when I was young, D&D was all about my ranger (YEAH YEAH LAUGH IT UP) and his three buddies going through haunted woods, finding an evil sorcerer, killing him, and rescuing a princess. I can't really say it was that imaginative. I think the first time I played I even named him Link.

Then again, there's a good chance when we refer to "the youth," we refer to a group a weeee bit older then I was on first getting into tabletop. But hey, say what you will, to a group of kids, nothing is more awesome then a party made of Link, Gandalf, Elf (Did I mention we were unimaginative?) and Buttscratcher (Did I mention we were young?).

On second though, yes, there's lots of things more awesome then that.

I started playing D&D when I was 20. My childhood was filled with:
- Reading Sci-Fi books (never was much into fantasy except Discworld, which came later in my childhood/adolescence)
- Watching TV (StarTrek, Babylon 5, Space 2063; Knight Rider, A-Team, Air-Wolf)
- Playing computer games
- Playing with Lego. Mostly building space ships
- Sometimes playing with my starship models
- Playing with playmobile
- Playing with model cars (matchbox, SIKUs)

I typically recreated what I read or saw in my games, or rather start with it and then make my own story. When playing with cars, it was mostly Knight-Rider related stuff. When playing with my starship models, it was Star Trek. When I was playing with Lego, I was sometimes re-building ships from TV shows, sometimes building my own, and I eventually created my own "setting" with several factions warring each other. That might have been the most creative thing I did.
I also remember once writing up stuff on Vulcans (Star Trek), some my own, most inspired by Startrek books I read. (Using Word on MS-DOS 6.22!)

So, I can definitely attest that I played a lot, read a lot and watched a lot. But I certainly was also imaginative in what I played.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Now to sorta link my last post back to this.

I dunno if MMORPG fans will get into D&D. What I DO know is that most D&D fans start with something that isn't tabletop and get into tabletop because of it. I loved myself the vidya and my cartoons and movies as a kid, and they translated directly into me enjoying sitting with some friends around a table, pretending to be rangers named Link or thieves named Buttscratcher.

Did Zelda rot my brain and kill my memory? I don't think so. I'm sure that, were you to go back in time to me playing Zelda, you'd find ample number of people who would argue until blue in the face that I was rotting my brain and killing my memory and I bet there's going to be science that proves this, you'll see!. Science never did get around to proving that, last I checked, so that old Nintendo game, it seems, wasn't all that harmful. But it did get me into tabletop gaming, albeit indirectly. Granted, you could make the argument that this IS harmful, I suppose.

I think the only problem with WoW is that it's not single player, which is why vidya games got me into tabletop, as I couldn't be Link AND play with the kids down the street at the same time. Still, I think people who play MMORPGs can more easily make the transition to tabletop gaming then people who don't play video games, just as people who read a lot will sit at the table far more willingly then people who don't. You say it impairs their creativity. I say it helps them learn how to focus it. There's a huge number of Warcraft based fan art, some of it pretty damn good. I wonder, would those artists have made artwork without WoW, simply making it of some other topic? Or did their enjoyment of WoW cause them to get the tablet out (kids with their rich parents these days...) and start drawing?

At the very least, the widespread popularity of MMORPGs has made being a dork/nerd a little less horrific as far as social status goes for the leetle ones, just as, like them or hate them, the Harry Potter books got kids reading.

Edit: Man, and a certain arch chancellor decides to steal my thunder right before I can post! ;p

 

[cangrejoide]

To the OP:

The 1,000's of Fanfics about WOW and the 1000's of fan art about WOW would be evidence against your point that it supresses imaginations.

You can also add to that the 1000's of forum threads discussin WOW Lore or even RPG threads.

Actually WOW delivers the fantasy genere to people who would otherwise would not ever read a fantasy novel. heck WOW even compells people to read up on WOW lore, and entices people to read its onw WOW novels.

Even in game, the actual storyline compells imagination and a sense of wonder.

With those things in mind I would not dare say WOW supresses imagination any more than an actual fantasy/sci-fi novel or comic book.

 

[Steely Dan]

I can see what the OP is saying, but I just think it comes down to time and commitment – most people don't have the time to commit to a table top RPG, especially working adults.

I don't play any video games or computer games, only D&D (as DM), but I can certainly see why most people play the former.

 

[Wormwood]

With those things in mind I would not dare say WOW supresses imagination any more than an actual fantasy/sci-fi novel or comic book.

This.

 

[GnomeWorks]

After playing WoW for an extended period, I often find myself thinking about things in WoW terms.

Of course, the same thing happened with pokemon (which I played quite heavily for a couple months, around this time last year) - and there's a funny and topical story there, too. I was playing a druid, and we were fighting hell hounds. I forget the exact situation, but I was casting summon nature's ally, and decided to throw out a water elemental.

One of the other players asked me why. "Fire is weak to water," I said.

I was given a few weird looks, then I remembered: oh yeah, D&D, not pokemon.

So I think that it's pretty much anything that you commit a lot of time to. You spend a good several hours a day working on, thinking about, or reading about something, it would seem to me to be pretty much guaranteed that whatever it was you were thinking about will color how you think about other things.

 

[Insight]

I'll say two things relevant to this conversation, based on my experiences only.

I have played WoW a lot. Maybe not as much as some, but in hindsight, certainly more than I should. What I have found is that playing a game like WoW is definitely a time sink (I have to grind rep with X faction to get Y item I want so I can survive in Z dungeon, so I can get an item to replace Y). This is by design. Blizzard wants people to play (and keep paying to play). I don't have a problem with this concept, but the first step in dealing with this design structure is to recognize it exists. If you are not willing to accept that WoW is a huge time sink, you've got a problem.

Second, and this is going to vary from person to person, but as a creative person, I find it easier to play WoW than to work on something creative. With WoW, I can sit back and kill stuff click click click with no real in-depth thought involved. If I have to be creative - work on a D&D campaign, write fiction, etc - it's hard work. When I face an internal resistance to being creative, a game like WoW is an easy escape.

None of the foregoing is to say no one should play WoW, or that WoW is designed to sap the imagination. I think maybe the OP has missed what is really going on. As you continue to play WoW (or similar games) more and more, it draws you in, and you have to fight off the urge to keep playing and do other things in your life. It's easier to play WoW than to be creative.