Free Choice Blog 2: Make-A-Wish in World of Warcraft

One of my roommates was recently playing World of Warcraft when I walked into his room. With a sort of distressed look on his face, he explained that there was a new character added in World of Warcraft with a new series of quests, and an eerie voice. He proceeded to explain to me that, apparently, the new character, Ahab Wheathoof, was the creation of a ten-year-old boy with a terminal illness. My roommate, Alec, informed me that, through the Make-A-Wish foundation, the boy had been able to have a character created in WoW.

10-year-old Ezra Chatterton, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, whose house had burned down, and whose parents are divorced, had initially wished only for access to World of Warcraft, so that he could play with his father who had been a WoW fan since the original release of the game.

The Make-A-Wish foundation arranged for Ezra to have a day-long session at Blizzard’s offices to work on the game. Over the course of seven hours, Ezra was able to design a new weapon for the game, a new character, and a new quest involving a dog modeled after his own dog in real life.

While this is in some ways a sweet story, something about it leaves me very unsettled. The idea that a child’s emotional satisfaction is being based around access to a video game. Video games can be a nice form of entertainment, but I have a difficult time entirely dissociating it with the corporate systems that accompany it. Not strictly speaking a work of art or culture with what I would typically regard as significant meaning, all I see in video games and the commercial systems surrounding them and the occasional release from real life.

I can’t, however, deny the significance this must have for Ezra Chatterton. In a matter of life and death, I think my concerns would be grander, and based in the physical world. Something is incredibly depressing to me, to think that this boy is satisfied by access to a computer and a video game. The best I can say is that WoW may provide the child with a way to alleviate the pressure of what must be an extremely stressful point in his life. It also breaks down spatial boundaries, allowing him to easily spend more time with his father.

This is a tricky area for me with discussion of virtual worlds: on one hand, they certain offer opportunities for people in any kind of unhappy situation to relieve themselves from their physical lives to pursue fantasies in virtual worlds; on the other hand, I see virtual worlds as being a venue people can become dependent on to escape from a real world where access to happiness is unevenly distributed.

I think the majority (though not all) of discussion we’ve seen in class from authors on cyber-reality has been focused on simply exploring the nature of social life in virtual worlds. I’d like to see more works investigating more explicitly the effects of virtual worlds on the physical lives of those who inhabit them most frequently.