The Steamwheedle Faire - "I am a Tauren and I Dance Upon the Beach"

Yesterday we went to the Steamwheedle Faire, an IC event on our server. Several Truants attended, along with a huge amount of other people (logged by Squirrel News - linked below, as just over 200 users, and 165 as an average), Alliance and Horde. And Riverbank got everyone to dance upon the beach...

My images - numbers 10 & 11 need to be clicked on separately

Jill's pictures

more images from various people on the thread

Squirrel News (weblog of the organising guild)

Oh where to start where to start... at least two full raid groups storming across the Tanaris Flats with Our Raid Leaders shouting (in /yell)  battle orders at us "Do NOT attack the Alliance! This is a peaceful Event!' 'Do not shame our Horde Brethren! DO NOT Target the e
Enemy!". Everyone being ordered to sheathe their weapons ... realising we couldn't speak to the Alliance at all as they barked away in Common... dancing on the beach... a lot of dancing on the beach... watching the parade and wondering what the Hell was going on. Seeing my alt standing sheepishly to one side over on the Alliance side (it was almost identical, including the nice new top I made myself this week)...

Jill has already posted about this, and like me, Kimiko and Janie leading us across the Shimmering Flats and through Thousand Needles was one of her highlights. Kimiko is someone I had met briefly before, so it was cool to whisper her IC and get the others invited to the raid. Janie was on a mount (each race gets differnt things to ride. Trolls have sort of Velociraptor beasties), and stormed us through teh hard bits. As we got to the flats, the group spread out, running hard along the sands...

Bindr, Gazza, Limbus and Malloy from the guild also joined us when we got there and I chatted in the queue as I waited for my free beer (it had, of course, run out - and about ten minutes after getting out of Razorfen Kraul last night I finished Chen's Empty Keg... *sigh*, so I could have brought my own if only I had tried a bit harder to smite those stormhides). The chatter was amazing - I was supposed to be logging it (but not sure if I managed to or not - computer says 'no' at the moment) but it was just off the scale - impossibly to keep track with talks, guild chat, whispering and party conversation all going on at the same time.

Seriously, however, there was a lot to see and a lot to think about. The Faire does however prove what Jill has said in her post, and JP and I are going to be talking about in our paper (incoming Tuesday, we hope), which is that actually, real roleplaying in game is very, very hard and that the interface simply prevents it from being easy to facilitiate. The lag was amazing - my tempermental machine which has a massive hissy fit every time I group in Darkshore was weirdly fine, but at first it was just impossible to move. The person behind me in the queue for beer kept telling me not to queue jump, amusingly, although actually I was just having problems moving about. So many people in one area was just too dififcult and in fact, most of my images show about half the people who turned up as many just left, crashed or couldn't take the graphics.

The whole thing reminded me very strongly of the big LARP festivals (fests) in the UK. In these ,several things happen, all of which seemed to be going on here.

1. Several guilds, both IC and OOC, spend a huge amount of time doing amazing feats of organisation.

2. Plot is themed - there is a Faire, everyone meets in peace, but limited. These things can be witnessed - eg. the Parade, the Boxing, but have limited potential for developing - ie. no one went to the Faire to find someone, steal a jewel from them and then take it back home, or perhaps more positively (rewarding roleplaying) a had a quest to share ale with five oppositional characters.

3. Roleplaying is done predominantly between people who know each other, who use /w (whisper) and other types of communication to 'really' talk, because this is done less self consciously and also is 'trustworthy'.

4. However, the staged and spontaneous group events - watching and heckling, dancing or sitting around a campfire drinking are commented on in a more general way. This was made doubly interesting by the fact that /em (emote) comes out to the other side as '*character name* makes some strange guestures', and that language can't bebreached. Whislt dancing, the Alliance clearly started to sing a song. I have no idea what that song was because it was incomprehensible to me; but I knew it was a song because the word structure looked as if it was repreating (smae length of words, people 'singing' over each other).

5. The willingness of people to RP in meaningful, directivly intereactive ways is apparent. This game is not just doing quests and running about, it is also ful lof people 'being', or trying to be In. Many turned up to watch, but many also actively tried to 'do' something (our dance on the beach and the people sitting around the campfire drinking being an example of that)

Comments

[Ed]

I really enjoyed reading this write up of the faire. I'm glad it managed to invoke such a creative response from yourself and so many other people. I hope you enjoy the next 11 months of events I have planned. ;-)

*whispers: I'm Stormina Teacup.*

[Jinni Combobulator]

Hello there!

Jinni from the SNN here.

I'm so glad you enjoyed the Faire, I had so much fun rinning around taking pictures of everyone.

Believe in us though, there will be plenty more events such as this organised by the SNN and Kaboom!

Hope to see you at as many as you can get too!

Jinni
xx

(OOC: It's really nice to see such lovley write-ups! Thanks. It makes us feel all warm and fuzzy.

Well, we feel good about it anyhow :o)

Expect much more over the next few months, We're gonna drag the RP community out into the open if it kills us!))

[Jill]

Oh, how glorious, the organisers responded! And it really was a great event, too - I'm looking forward to the next events.

Stormina has eleven months planned out? Awesome!

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Thx! :)