Intimacy and WoW

This weeks' T-600 talk titled “Love, loss and Leeeeroy: Aesthetic interaction in World of Warcraft” was presented by Jeffery Bardzell , an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Design and New Media at the School of Informatics and Affiliated Faculty of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. 

Although I am not a gamer and I have never stepped into WoW, I found some universal themes in his talk. The talk was given in a “gamer” language that I did not always understand, however I find this field of research truly fascinating.

One concept that especially caught my attention and it is intimacy. Intimacy ? online? Hell yeah! There is a lot of skepticism about at other departments at IU, but a huge body of research acknowledges the construction of it through video games.

Professor Bardzell presented four intimacy themes as studied in WoW: Intimacy across realities- intimacy is located across real and virtual worlds; Intimacy and the mundane- intimacy emerges from mundane rather than extraordinary events; Intimate reciprocity- people share vulnerability and empathy and time and intimacy- intimacy created in a single episode and explored in detail or can be created across many episodes.

Video games offer us a chance to study how individuals experience, collaborate and are being creative online. It’s time to acknowledge that.

Here is a cool WoW video presented in the talk