(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
played making it not reducible to its rules. It is on this precept of recursive and dynamic quality that
the concept of games being “processual” rather than static is fundamentally based. It is therefore
imperative that any attempt made to define a game based on its inherent rules or genre classification
is insufficient because it falls short on considering how it is capable of producing new and
developing effects, which consequently affect the instances of the game.
4.2. Skill, Affordance, and Coordination
MMORPGs have inherent limitations and affordances. Like any other games, WoW allows its
players to do various things with its design components as part of the requirements of the game. For
instance, a player can engage in combat tactics, acquire and sell goods, level up, configure items, and
complete quests. These elements that allow the players to design how they want to play the game are
referred to as skills. These skills are, of course, determined by the limitations of a character’s race or
class.
At its simplest form, skills bring about affordances or the variation and combination of things that a
player can do in the game. As the game progresses, gaming becomes increasingly complex; therefore
a character would also need to evolve in order to satisfy the skills requirement of the game level.
However, a character’s set of affordances is limited unless it connects to the social network of play.
The link that exists between a player and other players helps the affordances of a character to
increase and be more powerful. In WoW, players learn to use spells and items that will not only
benefit themselves, but other players, a group, or an entire party embarking on the same quest. There
are some spells in WoW which are required of a character or class or else chances for the character to
be kicked out of a raid group is most likely. However, having such spells is not enough to secure
membership in a raid group or party; rather, it is the ability of the player to know how and when to
use it is more critical. For instance, a healer who knows how to heal a warrior efficiently is much
more precious to a group than a healer who may have better equipment and spells, but lacks the skills
of using them. Proper timing in healing is crucial to group’s advantage, whereas poor timing may
lead to group’s defeat against the enemy. The ability of a player to develop its affordances becomes
even more complex as it aims towards coordinated and collaborative actions.
In every difficult dungeon (‘instance’) in WoW, coordinated action is necessary as it entails complex
ways of dealing with other players. Ideally, every character’s objective in WoW is to advance in
terms of level and skills. However, there are certain skill sets that are more useful in coordinated
plays rather than individual playing. In a coordinated play or group raid, a particular role is
predetermined by the character’s class (Ducheneaut, et al, 2006). In most raid groups, the players are
required to design their characters to take the full advantage of their class. Although different raid
groups operate according to their own needs and level in which they are in, most of the time, they
value diversity and allow players to define their characters’ affordances. Instances, which require 5
to 40 players, aim on completing tasks by killing ‘bosses’ or powerful monsters. Without varied and
complementing character classes, a quest will not be completed. Skill is an important measure in
understanding character classes (Smith, 2005). For instance, warriors are usually assigned with tank
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