Practicum #1

My practicum assignment is to examine a MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. I chose Maple Story mainly because it is free to download and install, because I have had a small bit of experience with it in the past (played it for about 10 minutes and gave up back in high school) and it seemed relatively easy to get into.

It is a cartoony, 2D style game as opposed to the very detailed 3D universe of WoW. The characters are "chibi" style (Japanese for small child) or "Super Deformed" people. My avatar isn't very exciting yet, as I haven't gotten a chance to buy any interesting outfits or hairstyles. She has straight black hair and some pretty bland clothes. All the names that I wanted to use and typically use on other websites were either already taken or too long, so I looked around my apartment for something to name her. Eventually I settled on "Hausu" as my eyes landed on a small handbill for the Japanese movie on the wall.

As Hausu I walk around these very cartoony cities, encountering NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) who either give helpful hints or send me on quests. Quests range from talking to another character to fighting a certain number of monsters, and in return I receive items, money or experience points which will eventually raise my level when I have enough. To fight monsters, I originally had a hand axe but eventually was upgraded to a razor (somehow this is more effective than an axe?). The first cities are training areas, which I navigated through defeating monsters and raising my levels.

Once I reached a certain level, I could leave the training island. The next destination was a sort of sea port from where I could enter other areas with different settings, climates, characters, monsters, etc. I could also choose my "job". The jobs available for you to choose are Magician, Pirate, Warrior, Bowman, and Thief. I chose Warrior because the moves looked the coolest...

So far I haven't encountered many other people to talk to because the majority of my first session was spent in the training area. There were a lot of other people in this part, but no one was talking and to be honest, I have yet to figure out how the chat features work and when and where people do actually converse. Hopefully once I've gotten a bit more comfortable with the controls, the map and my actual goals I will have more interesting experiences.