Conclusions

Now that our experiments are over, I'm so glad that I don't have to play this game anymore.

That's probably not the player response the creators of the game were hoping to achieve. Early on, I realized that I was probably not going to get addicted to the game. I found too many aspects of the game frustrating, especially with the limited amount of time I had to spend on it. My inexperience was a large factor in this frustration. In every PvP that we did, I was trying to keep up with my fellow group members, and the majority of them were several levels above me, while half of them were attempting to kill me. I remember that one of my earliest experiences with the game was swimming around through a long stretch of river, because I had foolishly ended up in the water, with cliffs on both sides. No civilization or fake wildlife in sight. Some time later, I would discover a) the map and b) the return-to-last-city function.

Maybe my beginner Warhammer flubs were not unique. (At least, that's what I keep telling myself.) But what keeps other inexperienced players from being "weeded out"? For one, they don't have a tentative deadline for reaching certain levels, so there's less of a rush. The game might be more enjoyable to novices who are given time to fully explore the world and familiarize themselves with the game. On the other hand, this says a lot about our approach to the game. From the start, we thought of it as an experiment. This has been brought up before, but when you feel like you have to play the game, it's not much fun.

However, after our LARP today, I realized that we did have a lot of fun throughout the project, even if it wasn't the kind of fun that we initially expected. I'd thought that I would be more into the game. Instead, I think what our group enjoyed most was working out different ways to play the game, while we were somewhat bored with the game itself. We also agreed that playing in the lab with other people around was much better than playing by yourself. We really became a team. That was the fun part. We didn't really enjoy the game as players; we were too busy being students, examining the game and game addiction critically, in addition to doing homework and attending class and a million other things. However, as students, I think, we enjoyed ourselves.