Every Story Needs a Hero

When researching video game convergence with other sources of media, it is important to consider player-created game movies.  Players have expressed their creativity by creating their own narratives while utilizing an existing platform.  Not only do these stories often involve extending the original lore of the game into their creation, some are purely innovative.  Henry Lowood’s “Storyline, Dance/Music, or PvP?: Games Movies and Community Players in World of Warcraft” provides The Ironforge Band Robbery as an example of such novelty.  Daddar’s dramatic in-game exploit revolutionized the perspective of not only World of Warcraft, but massively multiplayer online games in general.  Lowood adds that, “Daddar’s video also demonstrated the arrival of WoW movies as a central focus of the game and fan culture growing up around the game, by then clearly destined to set new standards in terms of both sales and popularity.”  Thus, the convergence of such media has great economic benefits.  While players create their own tales with the games presented to them, every story needs a hero.

                Leeroy Jenkins is an icon known to nearly every avid gamer for his incompetence while playing World of Warcraft.  Leeroy Jenkins’ stupidity captured a universal experience felt by players of every multiplayer game: death by an inept playing partner.  Although this happens all the time, Ben Schulz (the creator of Leeroy Jenkins), demonstrated this is in a comedic fashion.  The fact that the scene is globally recognized shows how perceptive the public is to video games as film.  Many pop culture references have been made parodying this event.  In the South Park episode, “Make Love, Not Warcraft”, the antagonist was named Jenkins. 

                For those gamers that have played MMOs, do you fantasize your own adventures and create your own stories?  Have you made your own short film from gaming?