Media influence in video games

You might have heard, years back, how The Matrix caused the shooting at Columbine. Or one of many other claims. They're really all the same. The general theme is that violence, presented to us in a fictional setting, creates violent patterns which carry into real life. In other words, violent media causes violent behavior.

In a more general sense this is used to make many claims about mirroring media. Children imitate their parents and those around them, playing at what they see. People are influenced by the world, but how much?

I wonder how much the community of WoW is influenced by media, the media produced by the community. Do kill videos inspire us to greater heights in PvE? Can a PvP video make us want to step into a battleground? Perhaps a rogue video makes us want a rogue, to be that rogue that we saw. Or maybe the other way around, we want to beat that rogue.

I noticed I was running out of space on my computer, so I mapped out my hard drive (my apologies to more savvy people for whom this term actually means something) to see what was taking up the most space. I noticed some old PvP videos. One was Drakedog, an old warlock (I'm talking when MC was hardcore stuff) who as far as I can tell, helped to popularize the style of seduce-nuking. It's essentially what it sounds like: seduce the target, nuke them, repeat until dead. Watching a short bit of one make me think: "I really miss my warlock." Then I pulled up a paladin video from BC and watched an arena fight. I got the strangest feeling.

I wanted to do arenas. Not just do ten games, but do 20, 30, 40 games, or more. And then watch some matches and see what I was doing right and wrong and figure out everything. Something in my analytical side clicked and I wanted to play WoW 'wrong', not as a game, but as a theorycrafted, over-analyzed, no longer fun hobby. And then I shook my head a bit and remembered: I have barely any PvP gear, I have no team, I have no one who would be willing to play with like that, finding someone like that now would be nearly impossible. My last thought was to power level my dwarf on another server and play with a friend there.

Finally I came to my senses and went back to looking for ways to free up space, settling on compressing raw Fraps videos, since they are gigantic. 1.5gb down to 11mb. Well done.

Something must be done. This potential threat to decent society must be analyzed, figured out, and dealt with. What does it mean for the future of humanity that a couple minutes of a video can push a person almost to the point of committing such a horrible act as playing in arenas?