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

[cangrejoide]

For the sake of argument, here's the fan fic/fan art site my wife and I run. It's one of the better-read WoW sites of its kind.

This site is a truly work of art, I wish I had the skills and time to set up something like this.

Congrats on excellence.

 

[Jack99]

-How do you know if someone's been playing WoW in your house?


-Your garbage cans are empty and your sisters pregnant.

Either I have played too much WoW and gotten too stupid , or it must be a cultural thing. I don't get what is supposed to be funny. Someone explain it to me, please.

 

[Asmor]

Hi Fifth Element. Let me clarify something and then (briefly) explicate my view on this. First of all, I did not insult anyone except for the World of Warcraft itself, which is not a person therefore not insulted (or so I hope!). If I had implied that players of WoW were deliberately "killing imagination" it would have been an insult (of sorts). What I was saying, or at least meant to imply, is that World of Warcraft--and games like it--actually kill, or at least atrophy, imagination.

Now obviously there is an implication that could be read into this, that players of WoW have less imagination than non-players. This is something I wouldn't even try to prove, even if I wanted to (which I don't). But I don't think it is a stretch to conjecture that the imaginative faculties of someone before hours and hours of play are greater than after, if only subtly. Long-term play is more of a concern, and can be highly detrimental to one's imagination.

So, to paraphrase, the following are 4 points you've made:

1. You insulted the game, not the people playing it.
2. You could understand how it might look like you were saying "people who play the game are less imaginative"
3. The previous point which might have been inferred could be construed as an insult.
4. People who play the game are less imaginative.

So in other words, you didn't (past tense) insult players of WoW, but now you have (present tense) insulted players of WoW.

 

[Matt Black]

Some more anecdotal evidence to add to the data:

I have played WoW in phases over the past few years. I'll get really into it for a month or two and then stop playing entirely for some months. Here's my experience:

When I'm playing WoW intensely (a few hours a day, most days of the week) I can't do any creative writing and I can't DM. I feel like my imagination is suppressed. I get sick of that so I stop playing WoW and my creative faculties come back after a little time. It takes time for my imagination to return because it has been out of practice. The longer I play the longer it takes to return to normal. So yes, WoW deteriorates my imagination. It's possible to recover, but it's still a deterioration.

That's my personal experience, but I've also noticed a similar effect in my friends.

 

[Desdichado]

Read my above edit. I don't know why you have a beef with me or what I said to get you "on my tail," but lay off. I'm not the droid you're looking for, for chrissakes. I mean, unless you are a huge 4E and you are misinterpreting me as a 4E hater, I just don't see the source of your ire towards me

Sigh. Now who's telling whom how they think? I don't have any "ire" towards you or a beef with you and I'm not a "huge 4e [fan?]" I actually don't even like 4e. Or WoW.

I'm just a bit irritated at passive aggressive behavior in general.

To put it another way, I think your "hostility detector" needs re-fitting. Or at least look up "projection" in a psychology textbook. Here, I'll do it for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

Wikipedia isn't a psychology textbook.

In any case, to address the main point of the thread, no of course WoW isn't the "death of imagination" (and whether intentional or not, that is insulting to say, because it strongly implies that WoW fans have less imagination. If you honestly don't mean to insult people and yet you say that, you have all the social awareness of a comatose wombat.)

Certainly there are players who focus solely on the gamist aspects of WoW, and therefore don't "imagine" themselves as their character in the same way that D&D players often think.

Then again, that's been true of video/computer games from the get-go. You might as well say that Pac-Man is the death of imagination. It'd still be just as aburd, but it wouldn't be inconsistent, at least. Passive entertainment is never one that exercises the imagination. Creative entertainment exercises the imagination. To tweak Mallus a bit, don't go read Proust and listen to classical music, go write your own book and compose your own music if you want to exercise your imagination!

In any case, it's fairly absurd to imply that just because someone enjoys passive entertainment that they don't exercise imagination plenty.

 

[Steely Dan]

I'm just a bit irritated at passive aggressive behavior in general.

I feel the same way.

...Why are we here?

 

[Mallus]

I feel the same way.

...Why are we here?

We enjoy being irritated.

 

[ThirdWizard]

We enjoy being irritated.

People like righteous indignation, at least.

And, I mean that seriously. I don't know if its a character flaw or not, but, its really satisfying to tell people off when they're very loudly wrong. Without righteous indignation, the Internet would not be nearly as fun as it is. Heck, my job wouldn't be nearly as fun!

 

[Steely Dan]

We enjoy being irritated.

Yeah, I guess we have a masochistic streak, but as a sadist I will never hit a masochist.

 

[Mallus]

...but as a sadist I will never hit a masochist.

That's just mean.