Posts with tag iraq

15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft personalities of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, from the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

Ahh, the life of an Iraqi farmer. According to WoW player FallenWolf, currently deployed in Iraq with the U.S. Army (FSC, 7th Engineer Battalion), farming is about all most U.S. military WoW players there can reliably expect to accomplish. Desert sand and insta-cast DoTs have not proven to be particularly compatible for this former (and soon-to-be returning) raiding warlock. We visited with FallenWolf about how he's managed to adapt to being halfway across the world from his guild and his wife (a frequent WoW partner), plus how he copes with an awkward schedule and ugly latency.

15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, from the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

David French is a busy guy. Take a glance over his bio: A graduate of Harvard Law School and David Lipscomb University, French serves as senior counsel and director of the university litigation project for a large non-profit legal organization. He is also a captain in the United States Army Reserve and recently returned from a year-long deployment to Iraq with the 2d Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, where he earned a Bronze Star. The former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, he also taught at Cornell Law School and served as a partner in a large law firm. He is the author of four books and numerous op-eds. Regularly interviewed by both print and broadcast media, David has a guest on The O'Reilly Factor, ABC World News Tonight, The Fox Report with Shepard Smith, Special Report with Brit Hume, and Your World with Neil Cavuto, among others. He has been profiled in several magazines and appears regularly on dozens of radio programs, including National Public Radio. He is a married father of two.

There's one more thing that David French's bio doesn't mention: He's cleared the first wing of ICC-10 on two toons, ICC-25 on one and still found time to wipe for hours on Festergut. ("Good times.")

This is the story of how (and why) he does it all.

We've seen WoW used for a lot of research, from epidemics to anthropological fieldwork, but this is probably one of the craziest and one of the most helpful (assuming it works) ways to use it. Psychologists at the University of Miami and the University of California, Irvine have been studying how guilds and groups form in World of Warcraft in the hopes that it'll help them figure out how gangs form in real life. It sounds like a wild idea, but following guilds and groups in World of Warcraft is much easier than trying to study spontaneous guilds in the real world, because you've got immediate access to data: when people joined and left and why. And the psychologists say putting data together like this will help, because it'll help answer questions about, for example, what happens when you decide to separate a group of people -- do they form their own groups again or do they stay separated?

They say there are other connections as well: though killing dragons is far less heinous than killing innocent bystanders, Warcraft guilds form, grow, stick together, and fall apart just like gangs and even other groups all over the world do. No matter what kind of group it is, the researchers say that "group ecology" is the same everywhere, so studying the way we work in endgame raids can lead to ideas about what we're doing elsewhere. Very interesting.

Unfortunately, they're full on potential but still pretty short on conclusions yet (listen, guys, all you have to do to break up gangs is ensure there's not enough loot to go around), but once again, Azeroth seems like a fertile ground for directly studying just how we players interact as humans.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

Today in The Queue we're going to spend the entire time answering a question we got from a U.S. Marine currently deployed in Iraq. And while the above YouTube clip has very little (or nothing) to do with the Marines or Iraq, I think that everyone can use a little more Bill Murray in their life.

Thalimor asked...

"I currently am a Marine deployed in Iraq and I was wondering how much the game will change in one year? I am worried that when I do get back, it will feel completely different. What are your thoughts?"

First and foremost, thanks for your service. I hope that things are as safe as possible for you and your fellow servicemen and servicewomen.

I'm going to answer your question in two parts. First, what has happened to WoW in the past year. And second, what will probably happen to WoW in the following year. That should cover the entire timeframe for yourself and others in your situation.

I can't say that I'm the biggest fan of tattoos out there, but that is a nice tattoo -- xstitchfla's son Christopher got it on his arm just recently, and clearly he's flying the Horde flag proudly. It took about five hours to put on there, which seems like it would hurt a lot, but then again, Hordies can take it, right?

Christopher is also headed off to Iraq next year, too, so we wish him the best of luck and hope that he stays safe.

And while we're at it, just what is it with the Horde and WoW tattoos? Seems like every picture we see is of the Orc/Tauren/Troll/Blood Elf/Forsaken variety. Aren't there any Humans, Gnomes or Dwarves out there getting inked up?

Reader Scott chimes in with a very interesting WoWspace this week:

He says:

:-) this is a nice idea, anyhow this was my wow space from aroudn March of last year, so I reckon it still counts. I played many an hour of Wow from this desk.
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I worked for a protection company in Baghdad in the red zone, as their head of IT, so this was my personal space where I spelt and where I played when I could.

From Baghdad connecting to the EU servers wasn't really a problem, I often had better pings when there than when I accessed WoW in Germany.

My station was a Ferrari 3200 which wasn't that bad, and of course the web cam for skyping the wife each night. against the desk were the rifles we had to lug around with us, and the pistol as a personal side arm.

So keep sending in photos and words about your WoWspace. We'll post one a week in the order we get them, and remember to include plenty of description and let us know what you'd like to improve on. Send those in to "readerwowspace at gmail dot com" (replacing the at and dot, of course.)