As a child I spent most of my time playing outside and watching movies, but the one thing that I loved to do more was to play video games. As I started to grow more mature I started playing WoW (World of Warcraft) avidly during the summer as well as one weekends during winter when there was literally nothing else to do. Needless to say I played this game a lot and learned all of the lingo and material that was related to the game.
To give a little background of the game would be to tell you that you spend most of your time doing quests to gain experience and level up so that you can progress further into the game. Many talents and equipment are also required if you don't want to die easily. Among all of this is the fact that the game is online so that you can quest and interact with many other people from all around the world. These people can become your friends, enemies, or just simply passers by. My discourse community of focus comes from the idea of friends within this mass multiplayer online role playing game or MMORPG of short.
There are options within the game to create what the game calls a "guild". Guilds in this game are groups of individuals that share common interests in the game and help each other out as levels progress and material in the game becomes harder. There are many different goals of what each individual guild wants to accomplish which makes this perfect for my discourse community. In my ethnography a intend to focus on Swales as well as other authors from the book to help disclose exactly why guilds are a good example of a discourse community.Swales proposes six characteristics that are essential ingredients that are required for a group of individuals to be considered a discourse community. These guilds follow these criteria and will be introduced accordingly within the ethnography. (p.471-473)
Of course this is just one topic that will be covered later in more detail, but it was definitely the determining piece of writing that gave me the idea World of Warcraft guild proposal.
In summary of this proposal the discourse community information will come from some actual websites of guilds and hopefully interviews from some of the leaders of the guilds so that the can provide insight of what they actually do, however i am still awaiting a reply. If the interview idea does not succeed the essay will be more general in terms of what these guilds do because of the lack of primary source material.
Hi Matt- Good start. I love the idea of studying Guilds in WOW. I think you can do a lot with this. One way to think about guilds is as genres. Look back at Swale's definition of the 4th criteria: "A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims" (WAW 472). What do guilds accomplish in the d.c. of WOW? How does belonging to a certain guild influence the gamer's language and behavior? What are the major differences between guilds? How do different guilds relate and work together or come into conflict? Do guilds change? If a genre is a conventional response to a recurring situation, what do guilds respond to and what kind of characteristics become conventional? You could go other ways with this, but these questions might be a good place to start.
ReplyDeleteGood work.
Here's the article I was telling you guys working with WOW about:
ReplyDeletehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.compcom.2010.12.004