Killing 40 wild turkeys in a row with less than 30 seconds between kills is really hard. Seriously. Just tune into trade chat this week on WoW and you’ll hear all about it. However, Cassaria the intrepid Blood Elf Priest managed the feat, earning herself the Turkinator title, and thereby achieving the second most difficult task in the Pilgrim’s Bounty achievement. I think Pilgrim Cassaria has a nice ring to it, don’t you?
Of course, Cassaria is my character in WoW, one of two who I am currently working on. On the other side of Azshara, while Cassaria was parked happily at a table in Dalaran waiting for the dailies to refresh the next day, Cassis was undergoing a moral dilemma. Cassis, you see, does not condone the senseless murder of critters. Even when eating them gives her 40 attack bonus and 20 stamina for an hour. As a wee Gnome Warrior, Cassis really isn’t the adventuring type. As much as she loves the journey, all that fighting is just too stressful. There’s nothing she’d like more than to pick herbs and combine them using her alchemy skill to help out fellow adventurers, and to travel the world, learning new recipes and meeting new people.
Cassis was my very first WoW character, and although I didn’t play her for too long, maybe half a year, she holds a special place in my heart. She is such a sweet, happy, friendly little gnome, very generous of spirit. It’s hard not to feel good playing her. Cassaria, on the other hand, was levelled earlier this year using a refer-a-friend experience bonus, and was built specifically for raiding. She would raid 5, 10 and 25 player dungeons in a raiding guild several times a week. Cassaria doesn’t have much character. She just gets things done, and she’s fairly decent at it.
Although I have role played with Cassis, she’s not a role play character as such… I’m not very committed to keeping her ‘in character’ when I play, I don’t often seek out role play situations, but she definitely has a distinct character, and I am almost incapable of going contrary to it even when the game demands it of me. This might be because Cassis is closer to my own identity, or is maybe an instance of it, or a part of it. Thus going against her inclinations would be going against my own (my self) in a real way.
So when Cassis was asked to hunt down and slow roast twenty wild turkeys in honey and autumnal herbs, she was sincerely torn. Cass 
loves cooking, and she loves Thanksgiving, and she especially loves big celebratory dinners where you get to feed all your friends. The turkeys are necessary to complete the feasts in the game, which you can then feed to your whole party (normally each dish only feeds one), thereby granting them significant bonuses in game for a short duration. To be clear, Cassis regularly hunts and kills animals for food, quests, and in self defense. But there is a significant difference between critters and regular beasts. Critters do not fight back, and they are completely defenseless. Even an accidental blow will kill them. There are achievements in game for killing critters, and others for /love -ing them. In general, casually killing critters as you come across them is a normal and pleasurable part of game behaviour (perhaps there’s some sort of repressed morbidity happening here). But it makes Cass /cry every time she sees it.
I think this highlights something important about the way players relate to characters, something to bear in mind when doing empirical research. No one player necessarily relates to her characters in the same way. Even within the same game, there is variation in the identity relationship between the player and character- so much so that sometimes it’s not even sufficient to refer to it as an identity relationship. Characters are sometimes little more than tools with tendencies. So if we wanted to know, for example, how MMO players identify with characters, as compared to FPS players, we’d need to account for these variables. Similarly, there might be different kinds of ethical implications in identifying closely with a character- one might be more susceptible to learning from that character’s interactions, and from the story. It would also be interesting to know what kinds of qualities encourage or discourage closer identity relationships between players and characters.
In my own experience, part of the reason why I stopped playing Cassis and moved on to other characters is that Cassis was lacking in areas of my identity that I wanted to play out in this fantasy setting. Since Gnomes are child-like in attitude and appearance, playing one inhibited me from exploring more mature relationships and interactions in game. Although Cassis definitely has some of the personal qualities I want to play out, she doesn’t have all of them. It might be that I inhibit myself, so if I feel that two personal qualities are incongruent, I separate them into separate characters. In some ways, this might ease some of the incongruence that I feel (and, I’m sure, many others feel) between different aspect of my own identity. However, it could be that the way characters are designed in WoW they are pegged into somewhat restrictive roles. Aspects of personality are played out through the /silly, /flirt, and even the /laugh commands, and these are immutable, though one can certainly choose not to use them. If game designers decided that Blood Elves will be daft, shallow, and sexy, and all the Blood Elves you interact with emote in this sort of way, then your Blood Elf will carry those connotations into the world, and your character must develop in response to them. This in turn affects how you relate to your character.
