Rearticulating Rewards in WoW - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 116

designed to of er a variety of paths to epics, as WoW Insider blogger Paul
Sherrard observed, “I think that WoW will always be semi-focused on get-
ting you to the big dungeons, but thankfully the Burning Crusade isn't
*all* about the raiding.” 11 Raiding was still a primary avenue to epics for
many, as successful raiders have dozens of the highest quality epics in the
game and the best equipment is most often acquired via raiding, but more
factions with epic rewards and a revamped honor system allowed individu-
als to acquire epics without requiring the help of others.
Beyond reputation and PvP epics, holiday events now include epic rewards,
and dozens of new patterns and recipes were introduced that enabled play-
ers to make far more epic items, a general trend that changed the relative
scarcity of 'purples' in WoW . It reached the point where, in responding to
a complaint about holidays in WoW , a Blizzard world designer cautioned
players to be “moderate in your expectations. Don't expect epic items from
every holiday, for example.” 12
With the fundamental changes to loot distribution in the expansion of
WoW , 13 it is no wonder that someone vested in raiding and its rewards,
like Tigole, might begrudge the distribution of epics to all players. No lon-
ger the domain of the minority who raid, the other 70% of gamers were
ef ectively given access to the raider's treasure chest, which likely provoked
Tigole's statement and the intensity of the online community's response.
Fully tracking implications of assessing WoW 's reward system with word-
play requires fi rst discussing characterizations of welfare and the role of
loot in online gaming.
WELFARE AND GAMING
Welfare is a term with clear rhetorical implications that is hard to consider
benign or neutral. Receiving welfare often implies that a person is not an
appropriately productive member of society. Lisa Crooms argues that in the
contemporary U.S. “the current bipartisan discourse about welfare reform
frames the issue of poverty as one of moral failure and personal irrespon-
sibility fueled by the fi nancial incentives of public assistance.” 14 Welfare is
a loaded term, at least in part because “what person would wish to think
of themselves as a 'bludger'?” 15 'Good' members of capitalist societies are
taught that welfare is something that may be necessary to support people
in need, but is not generally desirable to be receiving. This underlying belief
that welfare recipients reap rewards with minimal ef ort is represented in
one WoW forum post after Tigole's comments, in which the poster wrote,
This is from WOW [sic] Insider
“At BlizzCon, Lead Designer Jef Kaplan (Tigole) said a lot of inter-
esting things. He called Arena gear “Welfare Epics”—that raiders earn
their gear” [sic]