I'm not sure what, if anything other than my abject depravity, is evident from the last post. What I'd like to think was apparent is the scope and interconnectedness of in-game activities and concerns. WoW is an exceedingly transparent, if not downright easy, game in most respects; what makes it feel at once complex to outsiders and rich with depth to insiders is the highly involved ways in which the simple components are all inexplicably intertwined.
With few exceptions (there must be some though I can't think of any at the moment), no single activity, no matter how small, trivial or boring, ever has only one effect. What this means is that suddenly every single one of your brief fleeting moments of consciousness has a measurable or potential meaning. The power that this rapidly oscillating, feedback loop of unmitigated satisfaction exerts over your sanity is daunting. And when in the rare instant that this perfect illusion of ever-meaningful action begins to falter, you can always count on the gambling reflex to carry you through the lull.
As briefly noted in the prior post, one of the stupidest undertakings I ever took on in WoW was the search for Mr. Pinchy. Mr Pinchy is a "non-combat" or "vanity" pet. Vanity pets annoy many people, they are like than tiny, mobile accessories that perform absolutely no technical game function other than to follow you around. They can't attack, they can't die, they can't run away. You don't have to feed them or watch them or worry about them in any way. They actually annoy a lot of people because they unneccessarily add to the visual chaos, particularly in a raid situation where you mostly want to be tracking and targeting actual players and monsters and not everyone's pointless accessory pets.
On the other hand, at a certain point in the endgame players begin to look increasingly similar, or at least exceedingly familiar, because some gear is just better than other gear. To perform well is partly dependent on wearing the the best gear you can get your hands on, and eventually similar characters end up garbed in similar outfits and equipped with similar weapons and the hard fought work you put into being an individual seems submerged beneath a cloak of identical excellence. Enter vanity pets! There's nothing quite like a random vanity pet to distinguish you from the crowd! And it can't be just any vanity pet, oh no, it has to be rare and difficult to acquire, because how can you expect to distinguish yourself with a plain brown bunny?
(The converse of this rule does not escape me: as most people seek out and eventually acquire rare vanity pets, the ones you see least frequently are in fact the ones which are most easily attainable. And that brown bunny looks damn adorable hopping alongside a druid bear charging in to tank a towering endgame boss.)
Back to Mr. Pinchy. Mr Pinchy can only be acquired through fishing. Fishing is arguably the dullest activity in the game outside of running from point to point. But it's oddly pleasant at the same time. Lapping digital water sounds, repetitious click-click-clicking, and all those fish! And sealed trunks! And magical scrolls and motes of water! In non-gamer parlance, just a bunch of useful stuff that either parlays into better playing or more gold. Fishing for Mr Pinchy is like gambling. Each and every cast is like pulling the arm of a slot machine. There's hope, tension, disappointment, rinse, repeat and none of it involves actual real life money.
The thing about fishing for Mr Pinchy was the veneer of usefulness about the entire undertaking. Mr Pinchy can only be fished up from extremely specific spots within the game -- which are both remote and mildly dangerous. It so happens that the fish (who are not Mr Pinchy) from these spots are highly prized by certain character classes. Not only do they sell for good, hard, imaginary gold, but they can be shared with other players. For months and months I supplied a number of guild members with a steady stream of these special fish in the neverending quest for Mr Pinchy.
My Mr Pinchy obsession was a micro-game. As technically complex as a flash game designed for a three-year old and about as interesting, it nonetheless carried with it a sense of marginal usefulness. I was helping guild mates (c.f., building social relationships), earning gold (c.f., improving my character) and increasing faction reputation every time I had to defend my fishing spot from monsters (c.f., um, I haven't exactly explained in-game reputation so I'll skip that one). And with each and every cast there was something like a 1 in 6000 chance of acquiring Mr Pinchy himself.
(I really wish I could remember my high school probability math. For those interested in the actual odds: you have a 1/1000 chance of fishing up a magical box which may or may not contain Mr Pinchy. The box can be opened exactly 3 times, each time having a 1/6 chance of containing the Mr Pinchy vanity pet. I may not be able to do the math for that, but the odds aren't good and I had to fish up about 3,000 fish before I got the pet. You absolutely do not want to know how long that took.)
I read somewhere that women clock more online gaming hours than men if you factor in flash games. Going by whatever study came up with that interesting fact, there's obviously some baffling appeal to these sorts of micro games. WoW not only offers outlets for this sort of mindless, simplistic play experience, but it does so against a background tapestry of incredible complexity and momentary meaning. You aren't just sitting alone playing Klondike on an ad-ladden flash website, you're individualizing a character who's a participating member of a larger community. If that sounds like an extreme statement, believe me, it's really how it feels most of the time. And that feeling, just like micro games or gambling, is very seductive.
Friday, November 7, 2008
How did I play thee, let me count the ways
(Reader beware, this post makes no effort to explicit WoW-specific terms and only exists to elucidate, quite exactly, what it was I personally did or accomplished within the game.)
To begin with, I never made it to the Sunwell but I made it through nearly everything else on one toon or another. I have the maximum number (10) allowable toons for single server. It was rolling the last one -- a cute level six troll shaman because I wanted a third healer, which pretty much sums up the "crazy" if you know the game -- was what prompted me to quit. My two mains are both healers with be.imba gear scores solidly into Sunwell readiness. Though admittedly the priest's score dropped just out of range after I began experimenting with the pre-Wrath patch talent trees, respec'ing her to full 56/5/0 Discipline which prompted me to regem and enchant a bunch of abandoned epics from the bank so she could hit 17% unbuffed +crit (I highly recommend the approach for 10-man or main tank healing because that Penance spell is a blast and very overpowered when backed up with reliable crit).
The majority of my endgame activities were confined to weekly badge farming Kara runs, running dailies, and taking the druid tree on ZA speed runs -- the priest was uber but nothing keeps a 'lock up and running quite like a tree. (Sadly, we fell short by scant minutes every time and never did see the bear mount drop.) I can't say I pvp'd a lot -- it makes me tense -- but I did enough to pick up a few of the more exceptional epics, including the ranking-independent arena gloves. My guild was too small (at the time, I think it's doubled in the last month oddly) at the time to fill up 25-man raids which is the only reason our cadre of extremely well-geared and well-played toons never regularly raided the high-end content. But the smallness forced us to PUG all that content (successfully I might add), forging alliances and server-friendships with dozens of other guilds and isolated strong players.
The fact that I play Horde-side on a low population PVE-RP server has a lot to do with our guild's successful record raiding with PUGs. Demographically speaking, RP servers tend to boast larger populations of adults seeking to avoid the immature babble and ganking endemic to PVP servers while playing Horde-side isolates you from the worst of the ERP idiocy exhibited by the Tolkien-wannabe Alliance elf lovers. PVE servers, being far easier to level on than PVP servers, also tend to attract both a greater percentage of players interested in getting quickly to endgame content and a greater number of "grown ups" with jobs, families and real lives that make the endless interruption of needless attacks unmanageable on a restricted playing schedule. A larger population of "adults" (I put that in quotes because if WoW has taught me anything it's that maturity in no way correlates with age) means there are a larger number of small real-life-friend guilds populated with players who take their gaming seriously: they put effort and mental acuity into gear, skills, stats, strategy and teamwork. And maybe most importantly they tend to be less horrific to listen to over voice chat (a pre-requisite of 25-man raiding and the one aspect of the game I most truly dislike).
Keeping two healer mains supplied with gold, consumables and all the mats for ridiculously expensive healing enchants is an enormous pain. The resto druid might be effectively unkillable (have you ever watched two duel?), but they are s l o w. So I rolled a hunter to be the family farmer because hunters are absurdly easy to level up. Then I got into a fight with my boyfriend who thinks hunters are despicable, so I rolled a warlock to spite him (which is completely dumb even inside a gaming context). But I can't just power level my characters, I get sidetracked by the game. I decided the hunter needed a rare pet, so around level 45 I took her into the Alliance starting zone to pick up a Draenei cat, which I then tediously ground up 24 levels or so (again, this was before the recent patch automatically leveled a pet to within 5 levels of the owner) gaining a few levels for the toon in the process. Having to co-level two pets with the nerfed pre-60 leveling XP meant that the hunter had to actively avoid questing in order not to outlevel the pets. When she hit 70 and I wanted to max out my stable slots I first went around training every pet skill (back when you had to do this kind of thing) from every region and level in the game just to cover my bases.
As crazy as the hunter saga was (keep in mind I only wanted a farming toon, so there was literally no point to my pet obsessions), the 'lock ended up being worse for me. Rolled as a loner with no need for instancing, I decided early on that she needed a kodo mount instead of the warlock horse which would necessitate finding a group to run DM. So when she hit 60, I ran around backfilling low level quests for TB rep which triggered my OCD. She has the Ambassador title now and somehow hit 64 without once questing in the Outlands.
Then there are the four bank alts. The main bank alt is a level one shaman I ran straight from the starter zone into Thunder Bluff. The shaman handles the bulk of the auctioning for the four high-level toons but storage is at premium, so I converted an abandoned lvl 22 warrior into overflow and long-term storage (can't just delete snowballs). The low-population of our server seems to wreak havoc on the Auction House, so I rolled two alliance bank alts in order to traffic lower-priced goods from one side to the other. I seeded a level 1 gnome with 400 gold by way of a level 14 shaman who swam all the way to neutral AH in Booty Bay. I ultimately never did use them to profit from the cross-faction AH, but that didn't stop me from logging in the gnome to play the Alliance AH. The gnome doubled her gold in about a month and it's fun to hop her back and forth from the mailbox.
Though I never invested in bags or bank space for the Alliance alts, the rest of the seven Horde toons have 18-slot bags across the board, with larger profession-specific or 20-slot bags where appropriate. That alone took about a week or more running dailies on all the 70s to gather enough the cloth and green gear for druid to disenchant to supply the priest. And of course the hunter had to collect the stupid spider thread because the healers kill too slowly. My toon family takes its crafting seriously. Maxed out crafting skills all around (including fishing), though only the enchanter aims for any sort of completeness in the recipe department. My capacity for grinding is seemingly endless, so although she has all the farmable BOE and enchants, she still lacks a handful of the more exotic BOP instance-specific recipes. While she has all the outlands rep enchants, she doesn't have any Timbermaw (I was still a noob back then and killed too many mobs in that tunnel until they Hated me and I never really recovered from that) or the final Thorium enchant, but she's Honored with Zandalar for those 'chants thanks to a half a dozen horrible PUG runs through ZG and a few weeks of 3-man'ing the fish boss in a failed attempt to get the turtle polymorph drop for some mage friends.
Because the Zandalar enchanting oils are still unique and situationally useful even in the Outlands, the druid regularly tags along Strat runs in order to disenchant the blue gear required by the recipes -- either running with my boyfriend's pali who solos the place for oddly valuable runecloth or with a fury warrior friend (now Arms) who's obsessed with the Baron mount. Subsequently, the druid is the proud owner of one dance-inducing Piccolo of the Flaming Fire and a mere thousand points shy of Exalted with Argent Dawn -- all despite having begun playing after the Burning Crusade and never once running those instances at level. (Though in her defense she ran everything else at level because I raised her before the 2.3 leveling nerf -- it's far easier to level as resto, which I stupidly did, by burning rest XP on an instance run.)
As if all that isn't enough to paint an accurate picture of how I played, I'll toss out some more tidbits. The three 70s all have epic flying -- the priest has a ray, the druid has flight form and the hunter has a generic gryphon because she, seemingly alone in my toon family madness, eschews rep grinding. All four of the over-60s have maxed fishing (before the 3.0 patch equalized spellpower the healers went through an enormous number of Golden Fishsticks), but only the druid has Mr Pinchy -- which, according to my Fishing Buddy addon, only required fishing up a scant 2983 objects to find. Then the priest wanted a non-combat vanity pet to match her epic mooncloth gear so she farmed up Exalted rep with Sporeggar for the baby sporeling.
The Sporeggar rep actually came in handy when I decided I needed a high level alchemist and had the priest drop her maxed out mining in favor of elixir mastery (healers are elixir junkies). In order to supply the new alchemist, the druid dropped her maxed skinning in favor of herbing, which is an absolute dream profession in epic flight form. The druid's skinning was useless anyway as it was simply a holdover from her leatherworking days, a skill she dropped just shy of Mastery because the guild didn't have an enchanter at the time. I quit just as inscription opened up, never had a blacksmith and the mage's engineering is still stuck at 300 because she's only 40-something, but the worst craft-grind I've played through was getting the 'lock out of the aquamarine stage of jewelcrafting -- I swear that trivialized both enchanting and the endless drum-making the hunter went through to max out her leatherworking.
Aside from the Fishing Buddy addon, most of my mods are pretty standard. Auctioneer, of course, Omen for threat, Recount for stats (it helps prioritize who to keep alive if you have some sense of a raid's top DPS contributors), Cartographer, Gatherer, Quest Helper for the babies. Grid is my preferred raid frame mod, so much so that I finally took a foray into LUA and rewrote the Lifebloom extension for that mod after it broke with the 3.0 patch. Oh, and Outfitter. The priest and the druid were respec'ing about twice a week (funded by the ever-efficient hunter's gold) and you have to keep the gear-per-spec mayhem straight somehow. The druid of course has three complete sets of epic gear for each form, not that she's ever been a terribly adept feral damage dealer. The priest had two entirely distinct sets of gear, one for healing and for damage, but the recent spellpower changes muddied the waters a tad. Now she simply has combinations for different healing situations (long term mana-intensive endgame raiding and a high-crit, large mana pool for the shorter fights of Kara, ZA and heroic badge farming). The hunter is only half-epic'd (Kara-ready by the old standards) and doesn't raid so she only carries around one set of gear (but don't think the bank isn't storing a ton of high agility gear in case she ever respecs Survival). The warlock, being only mid-60, is still in a combination of green and blue gear and I plan to restrain myself from crafting her any epic purples simply because I think it'd be interesting to see how difficult it is to progress from 70 to 71 without ever running an outland instance.
Hah. Did you see that? I have "plans," plans for future play. This brings us to an interesting point doesn't it? All that psychotic effort expended and for what? Simply to abandon the family with all their obscure achievements, hard-earned crafting skills, rare vanity pets, convoluted banking systems, fancy titles (Champion of the Naaru anyone?) and multiple gear sets? I mean, these toons don't play themselves.
It's difficult to say. I can't play the way I used to play, I know that much. Whether I'm capable of playing in some less obsessive way is not an endeavor I'm willing to risk undertaking at the moment. The toons can all take a good long nap for now. I mean, think of all the bonus rest XP they'll have if I ever wake them up.
To begin with, I never made it to the Sunwell but I made it through nearly everything else on one toon or another. I have the maximum number (10) allowable toons for single server. It was rolling the last one -- a cute level six troll shaman because I wanted a third healer, which pretty much sums up the "crazy" if you know the game -- was what prompted me to quit. My two mains are both healers with be.imba gear scores solidly into Sunwell readiness. Though admittedly the priest's score dropped just out of range after I began experimenting with the pre-Wrath patch talent trees, respec'ing her to full 56/5/0 Discipline which prompted me to regem and enchant a bunch of abandoned epics from the bank so she could hit 17% unbuffed +crit (I highly recommend the approach for 10-man or main tank healing because that Penance spell is a blast and very overpowered when backed up with reliable crit).
The majority of my endgame activities were confined to weekly badge farming Kara runs, running dailies, and taking the druid tree on ZA speed runs -- the priest was uber but nothing keeps a 'lock up and running quite like a tree. (Sadly, we fell short by scant minutes every time and never did see the bear mount drop.) I can't say I pvp'd a lot -- it makes me tense -- but I did enough to pick up a few of the more exceptional epics, including the ranking-independent arena gloves. My guild was too small (at the time, I think it's doubled in the last month oddly) at the time to fill up 25-man raids which is the only reason our cadre of extremely well-geared and well-played toons never regularly raided the high-end content. But the smallness forced us to PUG all that content (successfully I might add), forging alliances and server-friendships with dozens of other guilds and isolated strong players.
The fact that I play Horde-side on a low population PVE-RP server has a lot to do with our guild's successful record raiding with PUGs. Demographically speaking, RP servers tend to boast larger populations of adults seeking to avoid the immature babble and ganking endemic to PVP servers while playing Horde-side isolates you from the worst of the ERP idiocy exhibited by the Tolkien-wannabe Alliance elf lovers. PVE servers, being far easier to level on than PVP servers, also tend to attract both a greater percentage of players interested in getting quickly to endgame content and a greater number of "grown ups" with jobs, families and real lives that make the endless interruption of needless attacks unmanageable on a restricted playing schedule. A larger population of "adults" (I put that in quotes because if WoW has taught me anything it's that maturity in no way correlates with age) means there are a larger number of small real-life-friend guilds populated with players who take their gaming seriously: they put effort and mental acuity into gear, skills, stats, strategy and teamwork. And maybe most importantly they tend to be less horrific to listen to over voice chat (a pre-requisite of 25-man raiding and the one aspect of the game I most truly dislike).
Keeping two healer mains supplied with gold, consumables and all the mats for ridiculously expensive healing enchants is an enormous pain. The resto druid might be effectively unkillable (have you ever watched two duel?), but they are s l o w. So I rolled a hunter to be the family farmer because hunters are absurdly easy to level up. Then I got into a fight with my boyfriend who thinks hunters are despicable, so I rolled a warlock to spite him (which is completely dumb even inside a gaming context). But I can't just power level my characters, I get sidetracked by the game. I decided the hunter needed a rare pet, so around level 45 I took her into the Alliance starting zone to pick up a Draenei cat, which I then tediously ground up 24 levels or so (again, this was before the recent patch automatically leveled a pet to within 5 levels of the owner) gaining a few levels for the toon in the process. Having to co-level two pets with the nerfed pre-60 leveling XP meant that the hunter had to actively avoid questing in order not to outlevel the pets. When she hit 70 and I wanted to max out my stable slots I first went around training every pet skill (back when you had to do this kind of thing) from every region and level in the game just to cover my bases.
As crazy as the hunter saga was (keep in mind I only wanted a farming toon, so there was literally no point to my pet obsessions), the 'lock ended up being worse for me. Rolled as a loner with no need for instancing, I decided early on that she needed a kodo mount instead of the warlock horse which would necessitate finding a group to run DM. So when she hit 60, I ran around backfilling low level quests for TB rep which triggered my OCD. She has the Ambassador title now and somehow hit 64 without once questing in the Outlands.
Then there are the four bank alts. The main bank alt is a level one shaman I ran straight from the starter zone into Thunder Bluff. The shaman handles the bulk of the auctioning for the four high-level toons but storage is at premium, so I converted an abandoned lvl 22 warrior into overflow and long-term storage (can't just delete snowballs). The low-population of our server seems to wreak havoc on the Auction House, so I rolled two alliance bank alts in order to traffic lower-priced goods from one side to the other. I seeded a level 1 gnome with 400 gold by way of a level 14 shaman who swam all the way to neutral AH in Booty Bay. I ultimately never did use them to profit from the cross-faction AH, but that didn't stop me from logging in the gnome to play the Alliance AH. The gnome doubled her gold in about a month and it's fun to hop her back and forth from the mailbox.
Though I never invested in bags or bank space for the Alliance alts, the rest of the seven Horde toons have 18-slot bags across the board, with larger profession-specific or 20-slot bags where appropriate. That alone took about a week or more running dailies on all the 70s to gather enough the cloth and green gear for druid to disenchant to supply the priest. And of course the hunter had to collect the stupid spider thread because the healers kill too slowly. My toon family takes its crafting seriously. Maxed out crafting skills all around (including fishing), though only the enchanter aims for any sort of completeness in the recipe department. My capacity for grinding is seemingly endless, so although she has all the farmable BOE and enchants, she still lacks a handful of the more exotic BOP instance-specific recipes. While she has all the outlands rep enchants, she doesn't have any Timbermaw (I was still a noob back then and killed too many mobs in that tunnel until they Hated me and I never really recovered from that) or the final Thorium enchant, but she's Honored with Zandalar for those 'chants thanks to a half a dozen horrible PUG runs through ZG and a few weeks of 3-man'ing the fish boss in a failed attempt to get the turtle polymorph drop for some mage friends.
Because the Zandalar enchanting oils are still unique and situationally useful even in the Outlands, the druid regularly tags along Strat runs in order to disenchant the blue gear required by the recipes -- either running with my boyfriend's pali who solos the place for oddly valuable runecloth or with a fury warrior friend (now Arms) who's obsessed with the Baron mount. Subsequently, the druid is the proud owner of one dance-inducing Piccolo of the Flaming Fire and a mere thousand points shy of Exalted with Argent Dawn -- all despite having begun playing after the Burning Crusade and never once running those instances at level. (Though in her defense she ran everything else at level because I raised her before the 2.3 leveling nerf -- it's far easier to level as resto, which I stupidly did, by burning rest XP on an instance run.)
As if all that isn't enough to paint an accurate picture of how I played, I'll toss out some more tidbits. The three 70s all have epic flying -- the priest has a ray, the druid has flight form and the hunter has a generic gryphon because she, seemingly alone in my toon family madness, eschews rep grinding. All four of the over-60s have maxed fishing (before the 3.0 patch equalized spellpower the healers went through an enormous number of Golden Fishsticks), but only the druid has Mr Pinchy -- which, according to my Fishing Buddy addon, only required fishing up a scant 2983 objects to find. Then the priest wanted a non-combat vanity pet to match her epic mooncloth gear so she farmed up Exalted rep with Sporeggar for the baby sporeling.
The Sporeggar rep actually came in handy when I decided I needed a high level alchemist and had the priest drop her maxed out mining in favor of elixir mastery (healers are elixir junkies). In order to supply the new alchemist, the druid dropped her maxed skinning in favor of herbing, which is an absolute dream profession in epic flight form. The druid's skinning was useless anyway as it was simply a holdover from her leatherworking days, a skill she dropped just shy of Mastery because the guild didn't have an enchanter at the time. I quit just as inscription opened up, never had a blacksmith and the mage's engineering is still stuck at 300 because she's only 40-something, but the worst craft-grind I've played through was getting the 'lock out of the aquamarine stage of jewelcrafting -- I swear that trivialized both enchanting and the endless drum-making the hunter went through to max out her leatherworking.
Aside from the Fishing Buddy addon, most of my mods are pretty standard. Auctioneer, of course, Omen for threat, Recount for stats (it helps prioritize who to keep alive if you have some sense of a raid's top DPS contributors), Cartographer, Gatherer, Quest Helper for the babies. Grid is my preferred raid frame mod, so much so that I finally took a foray into LUA and rewrote the Lifebloom extension for that mod after it broke with the 3.0 patch. Oh, and Outfitter. The priest and the druid were respec'ing about twice a week (funded by the ever-efficient hunter's gold) and you have to keep the gear-per-spec mayhem straight somehow. The druid of course has three complete sets of epic gear for each form, not that she's ever been a terribly adept feral damage dealer. The priest had two entirely distinct sets of gear, one for healing and for damage, but the recent spellpower changes muddied the waters a tad. Now she simply has combinations for different healing situations (long term mana-intensive endgame raiding and a high-crit, large mana pool for the shorter fights of Kara, ZA and heroic badge farming). The hunter is only half-epic'd (Kara-ready by the old standards) and doesn't raid so she only carries around one set of gear (but don't think the bank isn't storing a ton of high agility gear in case she ever respecs Survival). The warlock, being only mid-60, is still in a combination of green and blue gear and I plan to restrain myself from crafting her any epic purples simply because I think it'd be interesting to see how difficult it is to progress from 70 to 71 without ever running an outland instance.
Hah. Did you see that? I have "plans," plans for future play. This brings us to an interesting point doesn't it? All that psychotic effort expended and for what? Simply to abandon the family with all their obscure achievements, hard-earned crafting skills, rare vanity pets, convoluted banking systems, fancy titles (Champion of the Naaru anyone?) and multiple gear sets? I mean, these toons don't play themselves.
It's difficult to say. I can't play the way I used to play, I know that much. Whether I'm capable of playing in some less obsessive way is not an endeavor I'm willing to risk undertaking at the moment. The toons can all take a good long nap for now. I mean, think of all the bonus rest XP they'll have if I ever wake them up.
but why?
The cravings to play again have dissipated considerably now. I owe a lot of that to starting this blog and, to be honest, rewatching the better part of all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Truthfully, I have a ton of free time on my hands now and an apparent inability to remember exactly what it was I used to do to while away the hours before I began playing WoW a little over a year ago.
So, more about me. It feels a bit like cheating to be writing about all the ways in which WoW can be so eminently playable and addicting without first fessing up to the nature of my own intimacy with the game.
Before the full on descent into WoW I was freakishly overworked and had been so for a few years when I quit working about a year ago (and then quit consulting a few months after that). The over-working was mostly my own fault (though possibly just the steady state of working in technology). I'd moved back to the Bay Area from the east coast, having abandoned a house and life I'd wanted but which hadn't quite worked out for me. And, yes, there was a guy involved in that too. So I threw myself into work and then overworking and then, unsurprisingly, hit a wall. There was stuff to process, realities to face, and a significant amount of cash saved up from all that overworking to allow for months of, well, continued avoidance.
I have a tendency to move locations when I feel a path I've taken hasn't worked out the way I hoped it would. I think moving offers an opportunity to reset priorities and reframe goals, provides breathing room for making personality adjustments and maybe most importantly offers distraction guised as productivity while you deal with the strange newness of undertaking even the most mundane tasks -- shopping for groceries isn't just an errand, it becomes an adventure! Well, this time around I didn't move, instead I just withdrew. Or, rather, I moved into Azeroth. Let's be honest, there's a lot less packing involved.
I'm sure there's a smarter path than the one I chose, but as withdrawl from the world goes, it wasn't particularly ill-timed or overly destructive. It's not as if I was dropping out of school or racking up credit card debt to support my slacker lifestyle. I could have spent the year in a bar for starters. Or, better, moved to Mexico -- which was the runner-up plan -- and, most likely, spent the year in a bar, albeit cheaper bars. Sure, Mexico would have been an experience with the whole capital "e", but my life to date has hardly lacked for experience, education, risk-taking, adventure or accomplishment. You'll need to trust me on that one because I'm not going to entertain you with the details to back it up.
The downside of losing yourself to a MMO should be pretty obvious. It's exactly like losing yourself to anything really -- a relationship, work, drugs, religious cult. Well, perhaps the subsequent extraction from the scene is messier than some of those other avenues for self-loss but at least WoW addiction is inexpensive. A nice $10 per month, self-renewing subscription and you're good to go. No messing with shifty drug dealers or couples therapy. On the other hand, work-addiction has a tendency to result in a financial net gain and while leaving you with some fancy lines to put on your resume that read far better than "2008: played a game". So I guess if you're looking for an addiction to fill your life with, you're probably best off choosing "work". Or maybe "the gym" as a fallback.
It might be worth noting that my inherent laziness, which hinders grocery shopping, and frugality, which curtails ordering in, combined with WoW-addiction prompted me to lose about fifteen pounds despite my dramatic increase in immobility. Though sometimes I suspect it might have less to do with gaming and more to do with not having to eat so many lunches with coworkers, I prefer to blame gaming because I like how that explodes the stereotype that gaming makes you fat. Stock up on soups and whole grains, clear the house of fatty snacks and get a game addiction and I can almost guarantee you'll lose weight. But we digress.
What exactly does anyone *do* with so much logged game time? This blog is partly an attempt to answer that question without diving too deeply into the kinds of specifics which would require a fluency with the game in order to comprehend. On the other hand, they say the devil is in the details, so for anyone brave enough to forge the hell that is game-specific jargon, I'll be descending into that inferno in the next post.
So, more about me. It feels a bit like cheating to be writing about all the ways in which WoW can be so eminently playable and addicting without first fessing up to the nature of my own intimacy with the game.
Before the full on descent into WoW I was freakishly overworked and had been so for a few years when I quit working about a year ago (and then quit consulting a few months after that). The over-working was mostly my own fault (though possibly just the steady state of working in technology). I'd moved back to the Bay Area from the east coast, having abandoned a house and life I'd wanted but which hadn't quite worked out for me. And, yes, there was a guy involved in that too. So I threw myself into work and then overworking and then, unsurprisingly, hit a wall. There was stuff to process, realities to face, and a significant amount of cash saved up from all that overworking to allow for months of, well, continued avoidance.
I have a tendency to move locations when I feel a path I've taken hasn't worked out the way I hoped it would. I think moving offers an opportunity to reset priorities and reframe goals, provides breathing room for making personality adjustments and maybe most importantly offers distraction guised as productivity while you deal with the strange newness of undertaking even the most mundane tasks -- shopping for groceries isn't just an errand, it becomes an adventure! Well, this time around I didn't move, instead I just withdrew. Or, rather, I moved into Azeroth. Let's be honest, there's a lot less packing involved.
I'm sure there's a smarter path than the one I chose, but as withdrawl from the world goes, it wasn't particularly ill-timed or overly destructive. It's not as if I was dropping out of school or racking up credit card debt to support my slacker lifestyle. I could have spent the year in a bar for starters. Or, better, moved to Mexico -- which was the runner-up plan -- and, most likely, spent the year in a bar, albeit cheaper bars. Sure, Mexico would have been an experience with the whole capital "e", but my life to date has hardly lacked for experience, education, risk-taking, adventure or accomplishment. You'll need to trust me on that one because I'm not going to entertain you with the details to back it up.
The downside of losing yourself to a MMO should be pretty obvious. It's exactly like losing yourself to anything really -- a relationship, work, drugs, religious cult. Well, perhaps the subsequent extraction from the scene is messier than some of those other avenues for self-loss but at least WoW addiction is inexpensive. A nice $10 per month, self-renewing subscription and you're good to go. No messing with shifty drug dealers or couples therapy. On the other hand, work-addiction has a tendency to result in a financial net gain and while leaving you with some fancy lines to put on your resume that read far better than "2008: played a game". So I guess if you're looking for an addiction to fill your life with, you're probably best off choosing "work". Or maybe "the gym" as a fallback.
It might be worth noting that my inherent laziness, which hinders grocery shopping, and frugality, which curtails ordering in, combined with WoW-addiction prompted me to lose about fifteen pounds despite my dramatic increase in immobility. Though sometimes I suspect it might have less to do with gaming and more to do with not having to eat so many lunches with coworkers, I prefer to blame gaming because I like how that explodes the stereotype that gaming makes you fat. Stock up on soups and whole grains, clear the house of fatty snacks and get a game addiction and I can almost guarantee you'll lose weight. But we digress.
What exactly does anyone *do* with so much logged game time? This blog is partly an attempt to answer that question without diving too deeply into the kinds of specifics which would require a fluency with the game in order to comprehend. On the other hand, they say the devil is in the details, so for anyone brave enough to forge the hell that is game-specific jargon, I'll be descending into that inferno in the next post.
be the game
I came across a story today about a 15-year old Canadian boy found dead after he ran away following his parents' confiscation of his Xbox. The father's quote is tragic to me because it seems to portray him as both understanding and ignorant. "This (the Xbox game, Call of Duty 4) had become his (the runaway son's) identity, and I didn't realize how in-depth this was until I took his Xbox away.... I just took away his identity, so I can understand why he got so mad and took off." Whether or not the family home life was exemplary or the boy otherwise troubled is way beyond me, but the quote seems to indicate that the Xbox restriction might have happened differently if the father had understood the relationship between identity and gaming.
The father's initial failure to appreciate how significant the game was for his son is far from uncommon. This lack of understanding is widespread, perhaps dangerously so. Most people frame their understanding of the unknown within terms of the known. What this means for gaming is that too many people think of MMOs (I should note that Call of Duty is not, by my definition, an MMO) as some more complex form Tetris or Super Mario or the ever-ubiquitous Solitaire pre-installed on technology ranging from earliest personal computers to the latest mobile phones. People think to themselves, "Yeah, I used to be really into such-and-such a game. I get it." But those simple games are as similar to MMOs as doing a round of pushups alone in your bedroom is to playing a team sport. If a parent were to suddenly forbid their child from playing on the school basketball team, they would do so knowing that they were taking away a routine (the time commitment of practice), an identity (both on-team as, say, a point guard, and in a larger sense as "basketball player") and a total social environment replete with friendships, rivalries, gossip, hierarchies and shared history.
A quick look at the Wikipedia entry on identity formation indicates that while there are far too many theories for me to sort through immediately the components of identity formation fall primarily into two fairly intuitive categories: self-concept and interpersonal identity. The mechanics of playing an MMO revolve around developing a character in ways which directly mimic the process of identity formation. To play an MMO is to quite literally engage in identity development within a restricted, simplistic world whose rules are often more transparent than the rules of the so-called real world.
You begin playing WoW by making specific character choices, establishing a provisional concept of self if you will, by choosing a faction, race, class and certain visual attributes. As you play over time you are presented with seemingly endless opportunities to further hone this self-identity by building up specific areas of expertise. While establishing the various quantifiable individual character attributes allowed by the game, you concurrently create an identity within the larger social by meeting other players, belonging to a guild, and participating in group events.
That the development of social identity occurs over time within the context of a multiplayer game should be obvious. To trivialize an MMO identity because it is something which occurs only within "a game" is to overlook the importance of things which persist over time. We all have persistent developing identities within any context we inhabit over time: family, school, work, etc. All of these sub-identities, roles and social histories are part and parcel of individual identity. When the amount of time spent within a game context is greater than time spent within other contexts, the importance of a game identity shouldn't come a shocking surprise to anyone.
What I believe is less obvious to non-players is the extent to which a character's self-identity, opposed to its social identity, can be individualized within WoW. There may be ten million subscribers world wide, but it's statistically improbable that any two are literally identical from a quantifiable perspective. Think back to the game of Monopoly for a minute. Players begin by choosing a tiny figurine to represent themselves during the game. You role the dice, accrue money, buy property, suffer penalties and progress to the end of the game all the while moving about a specific, fixed figurine. There is a decidedly limited number of figurines available to differentiate player identities in Monopoly. Furthermore, throughout game play these representations never alter; you start out as the Hat or the Thimble or the Wheelbarrow and finish the game as the Hat or the Thimble or the Wheelbarrow.
Where Monopoly traditionally has a grand total of twelve representative figures to choose from, WoW has fifty-two (or sixty-two if you include the Death Knight class which something of a special case). A player chooses a faction (a binary decision to play "Horde" or "Alliance"), within which there are five faction-specific races (i.e., the Troll race is specific to the Horde faction) and a total of ten classes (i.e., Warrior, Druid, Mage) which are subject to racial restrictions (i.e., if you want to play a Druid you can only choose the Night Elf or Tauren race or, conversely, if you want to play a Gnome, you can only be a Rogue, Warrior, Mage or Warlock). Each of these fifty-two starting options is subject to dozens of user-driven visual customizations such as hair style and skin color, none of which even begins to touch on the avenue for individualization presented by the class-specific talent tree mechanism which bumps possible character permutations from the comprehensible hundreds into the mind-boggling millions.
Someone with a tad more math mojo and a lot more patience than I could calculate the exact number of so-called "talent specs" possible at maximum character level, but a rough description of how it works should serve to indicate the enormous number of possibilities. Each of the ten possible classes has three distinct "talent trees" whereby a maximum total of seventy-one "talent points" can be spent across the trees. Players gain one talent point for every level attained above level ten and typically choose to spend these points within one tree in order to unlock certain tree-specific skills. For instance, the three talent trees available to the Mage class are Frost, Fire and Arcane. A mage with points invested in Frost will have specific frost spells and powers not available to a mage with points invested in the Fire tree.
Not only are there are more ways to spend points within a tree than the total available points (a typical talent tree has approximately 85 available talents while a player only has a maximum of 71 points to spend), but it is often undesirable to spend all of one's points within a single tree. This leads players to develop an endless parade of hybrid specs or "talent builds" (i.e., 40/0/31 with 40 points in Arcane, 0 in Fire and 31 in Frost). From a mathematical perspective it should be clear that distributing seventy-one points across three possible trees available to each of the ten classes results in a truly enormous number of potential talent builds.
Although the numeric possibilities literally number in the millions, certain talent builds are more desirable from a game-playing perspective and it's not uncommon to run into another player with a similar build. When two players with similar builds encounter each other, they typically launch into a long, tedious, highly involved discussion about their respective talent distribution choices. These conversations are painfully excruciating to outsiders but highly satisfying to players. Talent builds are fundamentally about identity; they are the final expression of extremely individual decisions based on personal play style, preferred in-game activities (such as raiding vs pvp) and character history (particularly history as it's evinced by the acquisition of specific gear which can either augment or undermine specific builds).
The main point here is that in Monopoly you play a Hat but in WoW you play a snowflake. You play a character with millions of possible variations whose individuality is based on self-determination and experience garnered through social interaction. You play an identity. Pulling the plug on an MMO is not like pulling the plug on too much television watching, it's pulling the plug on an identity. And like any abrupt change in identity (graduating from school, getting married, being fired from a job), the consequences are uncomfortable. After all, I pulled the plug on myself and it made me crazy enough to start a blog again -- I can only imagine what might happen to other people. For an adolescent who likely found more satisfaction from the simplistic simulacrum of MMO identity formation than the messy confusion of real world identity development, for anyone who doesn't have a strong, well-formed and multifaceted identity to fall back on, the sudden amputation of what is, effectively, a psychological limb, is understandably traumatizing.
The father's initial failure to appreciate how significant the game was for his son is far from uncommon. This lack of understanding is widespread, perhaps dangerously so. Most people frame their understanding of the unknown within terms of the known. What this means for gaming is that too many people think of MMOs (I should note that Call of Duty is not, by my definition, an MMO) as some more complex form Tetris or Super Mario or the ever-ubiquitous Solitaire pre-installed on technology ranging from earliest personal computers to the latest mobile phones. People think to themselves, "Yeah, I used to be really into such-and-such a game. I get it." But those simple games are as similar to MMOs as doing a round of pushups alone in your bedroom is to playing a team sport. If a parent were to suddenly forbid their child from playing on the school basketball team, they would do so knowing that they were taking away a routine (the time commitment of practice), an identity (both on-team as, say, a point guard, and in a larger sense as "basketball player") and a total social environment replete with friendships, rivalries, gossip, hierarchies and shared history.
A quick look at the Wikipedia entry on identity formation indicates that while there are far too many theories for me to sort through immediately the components of identity formation fall primarily into two fairly intuitive categories: self-concept and interpersonal identity. The mechanics of playing an MMO revolve around developing a character in ways which directly mimic the process of identity formation. To play an MMO is to quite literally engage in identity development within a restricted, simplistic world whose rules are often more transparent than the rules of the so-called real world.
You begin playing WoW by making specific character choices, establishing a provisional concept of self if you will, by choosing a faction, race, class and certain visual attributes. As you play over time you are presented with seemingly endless opportunities to further hone this self-identity by building up specific areas of expertise. While establishing the various quantifiable individual character attributes allowed by the game, you concurrently create an identity within the larger social by meeting other players, belonging to a guild, and participating in group events.
That the development of social identity occurs over time within the context of a multiplayer game should be obvious. To trivialize an MMO identity because it is something which occurs only within "a game" is to overlook the importance of things which persist over time. We all have persistent developing identities within any context we inhabit over time: family, school, work, etc. All of these sub-identities, roles and social histories are part and parcel of individual identity. When the amount of time spent within a game context is greater than time spent within other contexts, the importance of a game identity shouldn't come a shocking surprise to anyone.
What I believe is less obvious to non-players is the extent to which a character's self-identity, opposed to its social identity, can be individualized within WoW. There may be ten million subscribers world wide, but it's statistically improbable that any two are literally identical from a quantifiable perspective. Think back to the game of Monopoly for a minute. Players begin by choosing a tiny figurine to represent themselves during the game. You role the dice, accrue money, buy property, suffer penalties and progress to the end of the game all the while moving about a specific, fixed figurine. There is a decidedly limited number of figurines available to differentiate player identities in Monopoly. Furthermore, throughout game play these representations never alter; you start out as the Hat or the Thimble or the Wheelbarrow and finish the game as the Hat or the Thimble or the Wheelbarrow.
Where Monopoly traditionally has a grand total of twelve representative figures to choose from, WoW has fifty-two (or sixty-two if you include the Death Knight class which something of a special case). A player chooses a faction (a binary decision to play "Horde" or "Alliance"), within which there are five faction-specific races (i.e., the Troll race is specific to the Horde faction) and a total of ten classes (i.e., Warrior, Druid, Mage) which are subject to racial restrictions (i.e., if you want to play a Druid you can only choose the Night Elf or Tauren race or, conversely, if you want to play a Gnome, you can only be a Rogue, Warrior, Mage or Warlock). Each of these fifty-two starting options is subject to dozens of user-driven visual customizations such as hair style and skin color, none of which even begins to touch on the avenue for individualization presented by the class-specific talent tree mechanism which bumps possible character permutations from the comprehensible hundreds into the mind-boggling millions.
Someone with a tad more math mojo and a lot more patience than I could calculate the exact number of so-called "talent specs" possible at maximum character level, but a rough description of how it works should serve to indicate the enormous number of possibilities. Each of the ten possible classes has three distinct "talent trees" whereby a maximum total of seventy-one "talent points" can be spent across the trees. Players gain one talent point for every level attained above level ten and typically choose to spend these points within one tree in order to unlock certain tree-specific skills. For instance, the three talent trees available to the Mage class are Frost, Fire and Arcane. A mage with points invested in Frost will have specific frost spells and powers not available to a mage with points invested in the Fire tree.
Not only are there are more ways to spend points within a tree than the total available points (a typical talent tree has approximately 85 available talents while a player only has a maximum of 71 points to spend), but it is often undesirable to spend all of one's points within a single tree. This leads players to develop an endless parade of hybrid specs or "talent builds" (i.e., 40/0/31 with 40 points in Arcane, 0 in Fire and 31 in Frost). From a mathematical perspective it should be clear that distributing seventy-one points across three possible trees available to each of the ten classes results in a truly enormous number of potential talent builds.
Although the numeric possibilities literally number in the millions, certain talent builds are more desirable from a game-playing perspective and it's not uncommon to run into another player with a similar build. When two players with similar builds encounter each other, they typically launch into a long, tedious, highly involved discussion about their respective talent distribution choices. These conversations are painfully excruciating to outsiders but highly satisfying to players. Talent builds are fundamentally about identity; they are the final expression of extremely individual decisions based on personal play style, preferred in-game activities (such as raiding vs pvp) and character history (particularly history as it's evinced by the acquisition of specific gear which can either augment or undermine specific builds).
The main point here is that in Monopoly you play a Hat but in WoW you play a snowflake. You play a character with millions of possible variations whose individuality is based on self-determination and experience garnered through social interaction. You play an identity. Pulling the plug on an MMO is not like pulling the plug on too much television watching, it's pulling the plug on an identity. And like any abrupt change in identity (graduating from school, getting married, being fired from a job), the consequences are uncomfortable. After all, I pulled the plug on myself and it made me crazy enough to start a blog again -- I can only imagine what might happen to other people. For an adolescent who likely found more satisfaction from the simplistic simulacrum of MMO identity formation than the messy confusion of real world identity development, for anyone who doesn't have a strong, well-formed and multifaceted identity to fall back on, the sudden amputation of what is, effectively, a psychological limb, is understandably traumatizing.
no high score 4 u
Back in the dark ages of the 1980s the world had video arcades where game players pitted themselves against pixels for the honor of being able to type in a three letter text string by which to claim their spot on a High Score list. Ah, the glory days, back when winning was still possible.
MMOs might have numeric indicators of relative excellence but it's nearly impossible to pinpoint what constitutes a "win." Certainly there are moments of high-scoring achievement to be had in WoW, but they are fleeting and contextual and almost entirely lacking the significance of ye olde High Score board. The absence of quantifiably achievable supremacy factors into the game's addictiveness because players can never experience that one moment where they know, with mathematical scoreboard-type certainty, that they are they Number One, that one moment in which to gloat and preen, sit back, bask in the supremacy of total victory... and stop playing for a while.
To be honest, there are ways in which to "win" at WoW. For starters, there's a cross-server pvp arena contest which produces a single winning team. Without getting into the technical details of the contest, I suspect its popularity draws largely from the fact that it is the one component of the game which is so clearly winnable. Arena pvp teams have rankings based on wins and losses and provide an outlet for the types of people who prefer their success be measured in readily comprehensible scores, the types of people who need to win in a visible, communicable, public manner. Insofar as WoW is actually a game, and most people play games to win, it's not difficult to understand how a significant chunk of the the WoW population would fall into this category.
Arena-style pvp is isolated, in the literal sense and much like raiding, from the rest of the WoW world. As it is now, it's not even possible to view the matches in real time. I'd like to go out on a limb and say that WoW is, at heart, more about raiding than about the pvp matches, but I don't think the numbers back me up on this (not that I have the numbers to be honest). But from an historical perspective, the game has roots in story-driven Dungeons & Dragons type world, sporting a dichotomy of vague of ugly creatures versus pretty creatures and everyone against some larger, meaner uber-bad thing. From the quests which serve as the character leveling mechanism all the way up to endgame raids, there's a narrative background which lends a certain veneer of contextual meaning to everything -- all of which is entirely irrelevant within the arena matches where it's just one small team of players battling another small team of players selected in some mysterious orderly fashion from a queue joined by eager participants.
Looked at in a certain way, it is possible to "win" at raiding. A team of players enters into a specific raid instance, progressing through mostly fixed pathways to vanquish various creatures ("trash mobs") and a select few extra-mean creatures ("bosses") on route to defeat the raid's meanest creature (the "end boss"). Downing the end boss can be thought of as "winning" the raid; downing the hardest end boss in the game's hardest raid could be conceived of as "winning WoW." While the recently launched in-game "achievement" system now allows players to track, and therefore share, their raiding accomplishments, in the past the only way to communicate this level of success was by means of winning and then wearing specific pieces of gear known to be attainable by defeating certain end bosses.
Communication of game prowess through gear visibly worn by a character is common to both pvp and raid accomplishments, but in both cases requires that other players be familiar with the gear itself. In other words, a player new to the game has no way of knowing, simply by looking at weaponry, the relative game success achieved by another player -- one big sparkly glowing mace looks just like the next. To make matters more opaque, it's impossible to equip (to wear, display, show off, etc) more than one weapon of a specific type at any one time. A player who's mastered the highest levels of both pvp and raid content is effectively limited as to which accomplishment can be broadcast at one time. This is an extreme generalization and to a large extent untrue; but it is true that accomplishments are largely communicated by equipped gear and the total sum of one's in-game accomplishments cannot be conveyed due to character limitations (i.e., you can only wear one helm at one time because your character only has one head). "Winning" at both pvp and raiding (the difficulty of which should not be underestimated) means "winning" at two entirely different things and there is no one set of gear, let alone one single comprehensible scoreboard, which conveys this mastery to the larger player community.
The fact that the phrase, "you win at WoW!" is used sarcastically amongst players is probably the greatest indicator that the game is not, in fact, "winnable" in any common sense of the term. It's worth noting that in certain cases the better gear isn't acquired through pvp or raiding but through crafting (player-made game objects) or is purchasable only after attaining a certain level faction-specific reputation. This sort of gear communicates a very different though no less significant set of accomplishments. Similarly, there are whole avenues of success which, until the very recent achievement system launched, were virtually unmeasurable to any degree. For instance, it's possible to "win" at pvp and raiding without having visited the entire virtual world (a feat for which there is now a corresponding achievement that rewards a character with a displayable title). To say that a player has "won" a game they have yet to fully explore seems peculiar as we tend to associate winning with mastery, and mastery with breadth of knowledge and experience.
No matter how you rank in-game accomplishments in terms of "wins," there is a final, somewhat philosophical point which I think makes WoW fundamentally unwinnable. When you win a card game it's very clear (unless of course it's Bridge) that the winning-you is the same as the playing-you. When you play WoW you are playing with and through a very unique specific character. Assuming (which of course I don't) that it's ever meaningful to say definitively that "you" have won WoW, the only thing it means is that your specific character has won. No matter what you master within WoW, that mastery is necessarily accomplished by a given character who fulfills one or more specific roles within a group situation to enable a "win." All of the major pvp and raid accomplishments from which any sense of "winning" can be contrived are always team efforts. You might win WoW playing the role of a warrior within a group, but that doesn't therefore mean you've won playing a healer or mage or a hunter.
The extent to which winning and experience or mastery are equated is the extent to which the game is truly winnable -- which is to say never, at least from a completeness point of view. For players who require clean, clear endings, the game is never winnable and either frustrating or, more commonly I suspect, endless and addicting; for players willing to define their own goals, the game is as winnable as they want it to be. While the endless addiction trajectory is hardly a bonus for the genre, the fact that so much of the winnableness of the game is both vaguely defined and directly dependent on teamwork is, to my mind, a strong improvement over the strict rankings of solitary individuals each occupying a lonely line on a hierarchical scoreboard.
MMOs might have numeric indicators of relative excellence but it's nearly impossible to pinpoint what constitutes a "win." Certainly there are moments of high-scoring achievement to be had in WoW, but they are fleeting and contextual and almost entirely lacking the significance of ye olde High Score board. The absence of quantifiably achievable supremacy factors into the game's addictiveness because players can never experience that one moment where they know, with mathematical scoreboard-type certainty, that they are they Number One, that one moment in which to gloat and preen, sit back, bask in the supremacy of total victory... and stop playing for a while.
To be honest, there are ways in which to "win" at WoW. For starters, there's a cross-server pvp arena contest which produces a single winning team. Without getting into the technical details of the contest, I suspect its popularity draws largely from the fact that it is the one component of the game which is so clearly winnable. Arena pvp teams have rankings based on wins and losses and provide an outlet for the types of people who prefer their success be measured in readily comprehensible scores, the types of people who need to win in a visible, communicable, public manner. Insofar as WoW is actually a game, and most people play games to win, it's not difficult to understand how a significant chunk of the the WoW population would fall into this category.
Arena-style pvp is isolated, in the literal sense and much like raiding, from the rest of the WoW world. As it is now, it's not even possible to view the matches in real time. I'd like to go out on a limb and say that WoW is, at heart, more about raiding than about the pvp matches, but I don't think the numbers back me up on this (not that I have the numbers to be honest). But from an historical perspective, the game has roots in story-driven Dungeons & Dragons type world, sporting a dichotomy of vague of ugly creatures versus pretty creatures and everyone against some larger, meaner uber-bad thing. From the quests which serve as the character leveling mechanism all the way up to endgame raids, there's a narrative background which lends a certain veneer of contextual meaning to everything -- all of which is entirely irrelevant within the arena matches where it's just one small team of players battling another small team of players selected in some mysterious orderly fashion from a queue joined by eager participants.
Looked at in a certain way, it is possible to "win" at raiding. A team of players enters into a specific raid instance, progressing through mostly fixed pathways to vanquish various creatures ("trash mobs") and a select few extra-mean creatures ("bosses") on route to defeat the raid's meanest creature (the "end boss"). Downing the end boss can be thought of as "winning" the raid; downing the hardest end boss in the game's hardest raid could be conceived of as "winning WoW." While the recently launched in-game "achievement" system now allows players to track, and therefore share, their raiding accomplishments, in the past the only way to communicate this level of success was by means of winning and then wearing specific pieces of gear known to be attainable by defeating certain end bosses.
Communication of game prowess through gear visibly worn by a character is common to both pvp and raid accomplishments, but in both cases requires that other players be familiar with the gear itself. In other words, a player new to the game has no way of knowing, simply by looking at weaponry, the relative game success achieved by another player -- one big sparkly glowing mace looks just like the next. To make matters more opaque, it's impossible to equip (to wear, display, show off, etc) more than one weapon of a specific type at any one time. A player who's mastered the highest levels of both pvp and raid content is effectively limited as to which accomplishment can be broadcast at one time. This is an extreme generalization and to a large extent untrue; but it is true that accomplishments are largely communicated by equipped gear and the total sum of one's in-game accomplishments cannot be conveyed due to character limitations (i.e., you can only wear one helm at one time because your character only has one head). "Winning" at both pvp and raiding (the difficulty of which should not be underestimated) means "winning" at two entirely different things and there is no one set of gear, let alone one single comprehensible scoreboard, which conveys this mastery to the larger player community.
The fact that the phrase, "you win at WoW!" is used sarcastically amongst players is probably the greatest indicator that the game is not, in fact, "winnable" in any common sense of the term. It's worth noting that in certain cases the better gear isn't acquired through pvp or raiding but through crafting (player-made game objects) or is purchasable only after attaining a certain level faction-specific reputation. This sort of gear communicates a very different though no less significant set of accomplishments. Similarly, there are whole avenues of success which, until the very recent achievement system launched, were virtually unmeasurable to any degree. For instance, it's possible to "win" at pvp and raiding without having visited the entire virtual world (a feat for which there is now a corresponding achievement that rewards a character with a displayable title). To say that a player has "won" a game they have yet to fully explore seems peculiar as we tend to associate winning with mastery, and mastery with breadth of knowledge and experience.
No matter how you rank in-game accomplishments in terms of "wins," there is a final, somewhat philosophical point which I think makes WoW fundamentally unwinnable. When you win a card game it's very clear (unless of course it's Bridge) that the winning-you is the same as the playing-you. When you play WoW you are playing with and through a very unique specific character. Assuming (which of course I don't) that it's ever meaningful to say definitively that "you" have won WoW, the only thing it means is that your specific character has won. No matter what you master within WoW, that mastery is necessarily accomplished by a given character who fulfills one or more specific roles within a group situation to enable a "win." All of the major pvp and raid accomplishments from which any sense of "winning" can be contrived are always team efforts. You might win WoW playing the role of a warrior within a group, but that doesn't therefore mean you've won playing a healer or mage or a hunter.
The extent to which winning and experience or mastery are equated is the extent to which the game is truly winnable -- which is to say never, at least from a completeness point of view. For players who require clean, clear endings, the game is never winnable and either frustrating or, more commonly I suspect, endless and addicting; for players willing to define their own goals, the game is as winnable as they want it to be. While the endless addiction trajectory is hardly a bonus for the genre, the fact that so much of the winnableness of the game is both vaguely defined and directly dependent on teamwork is, to my mind, a strong improvement over the strict rankings of solitary individuals each occupying a lonely line on a hierarchical scoreboard.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Pick me!
While I do think that futzing with icons is basically an addicting activity in and of itself, it's obviously the larger context of the game which makes it so innately satisfying. If you've never played an MMO, you can't quite imagine the complex world of actions available for the undertaking. If this blog has a purpose at all other than to occupy all those hours I formerly devoted to playing WoW, it's to provide some sort of window into that world. Why is it fun? Why is it addicting? Why is it such a phenomenon? And a phenomenon it is. With over 10 million subscribers it has a larger population than NYC, half the population of Australia, and more players than the weekly viewing audience of a major television network.
Explaining WoW is probably going to be something like dissecting a frog. ("Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you understand it better, but the frog dies in the process." -- Mark Twain, according to the internet.) Perhaps that's not the right metaphor. But blah blah gestalt: the sum is greater than the parts. If it's like anything it's probably most like a religion, in that you can examine the theology, the ritual, the history, the demographics, the sociological behavior of the believers, but whatever lens you use to examine one aspect of the whole necessarily obscures one or more other crucial elements. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Schrödinger's Cat, dissected frogs all around.
One way of describing WoW is to say it's just about icon management. A less demeaning way of describing the game is to break it down into activity categories. Looked at through a certain lens, playing WoW consists of leveling (improving your character), raiding (teaming up with other players to achieve a game-defined goal such as defeating a big mean monster), pvp (player vs. player) and crafting (what it sounds like). This four-point categorization is as reductive as it is universally applicable to other MMOs. It's worth noting that I haven't actually played any other MMOs, but I've spent a great deal of time talking to other gamers and reading up on other games and to one degree or another these categorical activities are available in most progressive multiplayer games. In any case, the end goal of these activities is, ironically, the perpetuation of said activities, with an emphasis on repeated raiding or pvp, both of which involve the presence of other players -- it's not called "multiplayer" for nothing.
WoW isn't a game that ends, it's more like a sport: some people spend their weekends golfing, other people raid or pvp (yes, it's a noun and a verb). Playing the game is to engage in a never-ending cycle of activities devoted to character improvement, customization and differentiation in order that your character might perform well in a group activity. It's not possible to win, it's only possible to succeed. Think of it like high school (and truly the parallels are myriad): no one "wins" at high school, but everyone experiences success and failure within the context. Valedictorians, MVPs, the yearbook committee, class clowns, degenerate gangs, cheerleaders, geeks and freaks and dorks, oh my!
WoW might be a tad heavy on the geeks and freaks and dorks, but the analogy holds up, particularly when you begin to look at reputation. WoW is not a game that's played alone. It can be done ("solo'ing," again a new verb), but the constant presence of other players simply imbues your character with a loner vibe or reputation. While being a high school loner might be a solid survival strategy, it's not particularly enjoyable and within the WoW context, that approach sort of misses the entire point. To begin with, you can't even play or experience the more interesting content on your own because that's not how the game is programmed (i.e., your character would be killed instantly).
Not having a reputation is effectively impossible. A lack of reputation is itself a kind of reputation. I have no idea what the dictionary definition of "reputation" is (nor am I going to find one and paste it in here -- no matter how much time I spent in the high school environment that is the World of Warcraft, I'm not going to cave into using such a sophmoric writing device), but it's clear that it's something one "has" only in the sense that it's completely out of one's control. Your reputation is that which others perceive about you, your actions can create and change it but it never belongs to you. The only way to completely lack a reputation is to avoid all interaction with other people. Taking as an assumption that WoW is about playing with other people, this means your character has a reputation
Leaving aside for a moment the factors which effect player reputation, I can't stress enough the critical role reputation plays in WoW. It's unlikely that most players are acutely aware of their reputation as such (if anything, they're more likely to conflate it with "identity," which, given the context of the game, isn't far off from the truth), but the maintenance of reputation or identity is a crucial cornerstone of the game's addictiveness. The drive to establish and maintain one's reputation is what brings many players back day in and day out, whether or not they actually think of it in those terms. To play WoW is to expend effort on your character, to develop skills and acquire gear that augments those skills. These skills are then brought to bear within a group context where they influence the success or failure of the group endeavor. Perform well or poorly and other players are likely to remember you because the game itself encourages this sort of memory. Technically speaking, all players can create a "friend's list" which, thanks to recent changes in the game, sports a very useful note field. However, even before the friend's list note field was implemented, players were motivated to keep mental notes simply because the game revolves around group dynamics. No one wants to waste their play time with an incompetent or annoying player.
Perhaps it's time to be slightly more specific about the game mechanics. I mentioned about that one of the primary activities is leveling your character. In a minimalist sense this involves running around the virtual world attacking and killing things, usually at the behest of a computer-drive, programmed "Non Player Character" (NPC) who specs out a series of tasks for you to perform (a "quest"), the performance of which is rewarded with gold, loot and/or experience points ("XP"). As your character gains experience points it moves from one "level" to the next, opening up more difficult, more rewarding quests. In other words, your character grows up, gets better at what its doing and ends up with gear rewards to help it keep pace with the increasing difficulty of the questing. Play and quest and progress long enough and your character will hit the level cap, which is when the so-called endgame begins. All I want to say about the endgame now is that it's more complex than the leveling process, in some ways it's more interesting, in other ways it's more tedious. In any case, the game doesn't end at the endgame; to a great extent, the endgame is when it all begins because this is when your character enters the deep waters of establishing reputation.
All throughout the game there are activities which are isolated from the greater multiplayer universe. In technical terms, these are referred to as "instances" (a single instance of the game, isolated and unaffected by those outside the moment) or, historically, and for self-explanatory reasons, "dungeons." While your character is wandering around the greater virtual world space (questing or gathering or shuffling icons from bag to bank) you encounter other player characters; when you wander into an instance, you only encounter the other players who entered that instance with you at a specific point and time. It's a game within a game. Small instances within the WoW universe are geared toward player teams of five people, larger instances ("raids") require ten or twenty-five players (forty or more in the old days and other games). Other players are necessary because the tasks to be accomplished are more difficult than the ones commonly encountered outside an instance. In literal game terms, there are big mean monsters that can only be killed by coordinated teamwork. And those big mean monsters, when killed, leave behind big awesome gear which your character can potentially loot and equip and thereby improve.
So in order to fully experience the game, to "run an instance" and to "raid," your character needs to play with other players. Your chances of gathering together or being invited into a group of players is dependent on your player reputation. This shouldn't be difficult to understand because it works exactly the same way that picking (or being picked for) dodgeball teams worked back in kindergarten. If you're a good player, people want you on their team. If you're nice or funny or in the clique or someone trusted personally recommends you, again, you're on the team. Or maybe no one knows anything about you whatsoever but you're so large and scary that it's pretty clear that having you on the team is going to guarantee a win, well, you're pretty much a shoe-in for the team. This is exactly how WoW works. People know you from personal experience playing with you in the past, or they know people who know and vouch for you, or they know you run with a clique (a "guild") with a positive reputation, or, lastly, they just take one look at the gear you've got equipped and you're in.
There are any number of ways to become the kind of player who gets picked for a team, but what it comes down to in a nutshell: in order to play the game, you have to play the game. Play well and you're given more opportunities to play. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, the recipe for success -- and also addiction.
Explaining WoW is probably going to be something like dissecting a frog. ("Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you understand it better, but the frog dies in the process." -- Mark Twain, according to the internet.) Perhaps that's not the right metaphor. But blah blah gestalt: the sum is greater than the parts. If it's like anything it's probably most like a religion, in that you can examine the theology, the ritual, the history, the demographics, the sociological behavior of the believers, but whatever lens you use to examine one aspect of the whole necessarily obscures one or more other crucial elements. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Schrödinger's Cat, dissected frogs all around.
One way of describing WoW is to say it's just about icon management. A less demeaning way of describing the game is to break it down into activity categories. Looked at through a certain lens, playing WoW consists of leveling (improving your character), raiding (teaming up with other players to achieve a game-defined goal such as defeating a big mean monster), pvp (player vs. player) and crafting (what it sounds like). This four-point categorization is as reductive as it is universally applicable to other MMOs. It's worth noting that I haven't actually played any other MMOs, but I've spent a great deal of time talking to other gamers and reading up on other games and to one degree or another these categorical activities are available in most progressive multiplayer games. In any case, the end goal of these activities is, ironically, the perpetuation of said activities, with an emphasis on repeated raiding or pvp, both of which involve the presence of other players -- it's not called "multiplayer" for nothing.
WoW isn't a game that ends, it's more like a sport: some people spend their weekends golfing, other people raid or pvp (yes, it's a noun and a verb). Playing the game is to engage in a never-ending cycle of activities devoted to character improvement, customization and differentiation in order that your character might perform well in a group activity. It's not possible to win, it's only possible to succeed. Think of it like high school (and truly the parallels are myriad): no one "wins" at high school, but everyone experiences success and failure within the context. Valedictorians, MVPs, the yearbook committee, class clowns, degenerate gangs, cheerleaders, geeks and freaks and dorks, oh my!
WoW might be a tad heavy on the geeks and freaks and dorks, but the analogy holds up, particularly when you begin to look at reputation. WoW is not a game that's played alone. It can be done ("solo'ing," again a new verb), but the constant presence of other players simply imbues your character with a loner vibe or reputation. While being a high school loner might be a solid survival strategy, it's not particularly enjoyable and within the WoW context, that approach sort of misses the entire point. To begin with, you can't even play or experience the more interesting content on your own because that's not how the game is programmed (i.e., your character would be killed instantly).
Not having a reputation is effectively impossible. A lack of reputation is itself a kind of reputation. I have no idea what the dictionary definition of "reputation" is (nor am I going to find one and paste it in here -- no matter how much time I spent in the high school environment that is the World of Warcraft, I'm not going to cave into using such a sophmoric writing device), but it's clear that it's something one "has" only in the sense that it's completely out of one's control. Your reputation is that which others perceive about you, your actions can create and change it but it never belongs to you. The only way to completely lack a reputation is to avoid all interaction with other people. Taking as an assumption that WoW is about playing with other people, this means your character has a reputation
Leaving aside for a moment the factors which effect player reputation, I can't stress enough the critical role reputation plays in WoW. It's unlikely that most players are acutely aware of their reputation as such (if anything, they're more likely to conflate it with "identity," which, given the context of the game, isn't far off from the truth), but the maintenance of reputation or identity is a crucial cornerstone of the game's addictiveness. The drive to establish and maintain one's reputation is what brings many players back day in and day out, whether or not they actually think of it in those terms. To play WoW is to expend effort on your character, to develop skills and acquire gear that augments those skills. These skills are then brought to bear within a group context where they influence the success or failure of the group endeavor. Perform well or poorly and other players are likely to remember you because the game itself encourages this sort of memory. Technically speaking, all players can create a "friend's list" which, thanks to recent changes in the game, sports a very useful note field. However, even before the friend's list note field was implemented, players were motivated to keep mental notes simply because the game revolves around group dynamics. No one wants to waste their play time with an incompetent or annoying player.
Perhaps it's time to be slightly more specific about the game mechanics. I mentioned about that one of the primary activities is leveling your character. In a minimalist sense this involves running around the virtual world attacking and killing things, usually at the behest of a computer-drive, programmed "Non Player Character" (NPC) who specs out a series of tasks for you to perform (a "quest"), the performance of which is rewarded with gold, loot and/or experience points ("XP"). As your character gains experience points it moves from one "level" to the next, opening up more difficult, more rewarding quests. In other words, your character grows up, gets better at what its doing and ends up with gear rewards to help it keep pace with the increasing difficulty of the questing. Play and quest and progress long enough and your character will hit the level cap, which is when the so-called endgame begins. All I want to say about the endgame now is that it's more complex than the leveling process, in some ways it's more interesting, in other ways it's more tedious. In any case, the game doesn't end at the endgame; to a great extent, the endgame is when it all begins because this is when your character enters the deep waters of establishing reputation.
All throughout the game there are activities which are isolated from the greater multiplayer universe. In technical terms, these are referred to as "instances" (a single instance of the game, isolated and unaffected by those outside the moment) or, historically, and for self-explanatory reasons, "dungeons." While your character is wandering around the greater virtual world space (questing or gathering or shuffling icons from bag to bank) you encounter other player characters; when you wander into an instance, you only encounter the other players who entered that instance with you at a specific point and time. It's a game within a game. Small instances within the WoW universe are geared toward player teams of five people, larger instances ("raids") require ten or twenty-five players (forty or more in the old days and other games). Other players are necessary because the tasks to be accomplished are more difficult than the ones commonly encountered outside an instance. In literal game terms, there are big mean monsters that can only be killed by coordinated teamwork. And those big mean monsters, when killed, leave behind big awesome gear which your character can potentially loot and equip and thereby improve.
So in order to fully experience the game, to "run an instance" and to "raid," your character needs to play with other players. Your chances of gathering together or being invited into a group of players is dependent on your player reputation. This shouldn't be difficult to understand because it works exactly the same way that picking (or being picked for) dodgeball teams worked back in kindergarten. If you're a good player, people want you on their team. If you're nice or funny or in the clique or someone trusted personally recommends you, again, you're on the team. Or maybe no one knows anything about you whatsoever but you're so large and scary that it's pretty clear that having you on the team is going to guarantee a win, well, you're pretty much a shoe-in for the team. This is exactly how WoW works. People know you from personal experience playing with you in the past, or they know people who know and vouch for you, or they know you run with a clique (a "guild") with a positive reputation, or, lastly, they just take one look at the gear you've got equipped and you're in.
There are any number of ways to become the kind of player who gets picked for a team, but what it comes down to in a nutshell: in order to play the game, you have to play the game. Play well and you're given more opportunities to play. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, the recipe for success -- and also addiction.
I miss the icons
All my talk of paradigm-shifts aside (not that I have actually talked about the MMO emphasis on teamwork and social relationships and math and so forth), what I miss most right now isn't anything I can intellectualize or extrapolate into a positive life-altering growth experience. Mostly, in my current withdrawl, I miss the futzing.
And futzing there was. Glorious, endless, omnipresent futzing. World of Warcraft is a futzer's dream game. Most people have a futzing weakness. Most of us have more than one. I have no idea what the dictionary definition of futzing is, or even if there is an accepted dictionary definition, but from my perspective it all comes down to some small, easily-accomplished task which has a minor but immediately fulfilling reward. Like mopping. I have been lucky enough to have lived with roommates who like to mop. When they're stressed out, they clean. I can identify with this because the simple act of, say, realigning stacks of paper so that their corners all match makes me happy. Maybe I can't open my mail, pay my bills, read the letters, but boy can I make them stack up all nice and orderly. Neatly stacked bills hardly helps my credit rating, but it gives me a quick fix of accomplishment: my bills are organized! they are all stacked! at ninety degree angles! I am together! Hear me roar! /rawr
Anyone who's ever deleted old email, alphabetized a music collection, weeded a garden, ironed a shirt, thrown out old food from the fridge, wiped a countertop -- it's all just futzing. Tiny activities with tiny rewards. We feel as if we've accomplished something because we've imposed order. I can more readily find my favorite album, the flowers have room to grow without all those weeds, I don't look like a street person if my clothes aren't wrinkled. There are tangible rewards for most futzing which conveniently rationalize the futzing itself. I'm sure there are a lot of nice academic articles which attempt to explain the phenomenon from an evolutionary brain survival perspective or whatever, but I don't need science to tell me it's a behavior that I, as a human, am biologically determined to engage in.
The defining characteristic of futzing is that it is both is and isn't a total waste of time. It's productive but always misses the larger picture. It's a half step, leaving the futzer with a sense of completion -- after all, every half-step is halfway closer to the end goal -- without all the grueling work of true accomplishment. (Like a blog! But we digress...)
What I miss most today about the World of Warcraft is the quick-fix of success that all the in-game futzing brought me. Futzing is addictive because things which easily reward are always addictive -- presumably someone much smarter and more credential'd than I has said that elsewhere, probably in a really large book. And oh did WoW reward the futzing. I'm sure other games reward futzing but I haven't played that many so I wouldn't know. What I do know is that WoW took futzing to an entirely new level of pointless, gratifying, addictive faux-accomplishment. And I miss it the way a crack-addict misses the crack.
If you've never played the kind of game which involves the collection of objects (aka "loot") let me try to open a window into the crack-like beauty and complexity that is icon accumulation and organization. To play WoW (or any game of this ilk) you begin with a customized character (a "toon" in the parlance) who is armed and dressed and toting a bag. Clothing and weapons ("gear") are nothing more than icons filling up an icon slot on your character panel. The major linguistic difference between "loot" and "gear" is that loot is an icon in your bag and gear is an icon you've relocated from a bag slot onto a character panel slot ("equipping gear"). Ah context, ever the most important thing.
In other words, what the game comes down to is collecting icons moving them from one place to another. Over and over and over again. After playing the game for untold hours you have a mind-numbing array of icons all of which are hogging up icon-receiving slots. And because you've played the game for untold countless hours, all these icons matter to you! They have magical, mystifying really really important powers! They are worth gold (which is another icon). They need to be organized, sorted, consumed, traded, sold, transformed!
By the time you've played long enough and your original noobie character has become a maxed out ubertoon you are just brimming with icons. You've got icons in your equippable icon slots, you've got icons in your usable bag icon slots, icons in your storage bank icon slots. So many icons that you rolled another toon to get more bag and bank space in order to store the extra icons. Congratulations! You are the proud owner of hundreds of different icons! Woot, you win! Except it isn't enough, you need more! Different icons! Better icons! So you run around the the icon world slaughtering monsters (which drop icons) or fishing up fish (which are icons) or killing animals (which you can skin for icons) or picking flowers (i.e., icons) and then, even though you aren't nearly sated by all the icons, you've run out of icon spaces so you have to get rid of some in order to make space for for more (yes, you got it) ICONS!!!
If WoW is more than icon management, it's only in the sense that hearing is more than the molecules hitting your ear drum. Every icon ultimately represents a decision that needs to be made. Icons can be equipped, sold, stored and utilized. Making a decision and then acting upon it is always satisfying, it's an exercise of volition, of creation. You choose to mop your floor, you mop, the floor is clean, voila, accomplishment; you choose to vendor your trash loot, you get gold, voila, accomplishment. You can certainly argue that the former has more real world value than the latter, but the latter is easier. If you want a clean house, fine, get out a mop; but if all you really need is to flex your will to power, go play a game.
And futzing there was. Glorious, endless, omnipresent futzing. World of Warcraft is a futzer's dream game. Most people have a futzing weakness. Most of us have more than one. I have no idea what the dictionary definition of futzing is, or even if there is an accepted dictionary definition, but from my perspective it all comes down to some small, easily-accomplished task which has a minor but immediately fulfilling reward. Like mopping. I have been lucky enough to have lived with roommates who like to mop. When they're stressed out, they clean. I can identify with this because the simple act of, say, realigning stacks of paper so that their corners all match makes me happy. Maybe I can't open my mail, pay my bills, read the letters, but boy can I make them stack up all nice and orderly. Neatly stacked bills hardly helps my credit rating, but it gives me a quick fix of accomplishment: my bills are organized! they are all stacked! at ninety degree angles! I am together! Hear me roar! /rawr
Anyone who's ever deleted old email, alphabetized a music collection, weeded a garden, ironed a shirt, thrown out old food from the fridge, wiped a countertop -- it's all just futzing. Tiny activities with tiny rewards. We feel as if we've accomplished something because we've imposed order. I can more readily find my favorite album, the flowers have room to grow without all those weeds, I don't look like a street person if my clothes aren't wrinkled. There are tangible rewards for most futzing which conveniently rationalize the futzing itself. I'm sure there are a lot of nice academic articles which attempt to explain the phenomenon from an evolutionary brain survival perspective or whatever, but I don't need science to tell me it's a behavior that I, as a human, am biologically determined to engage in.
The defining characteristic of futzing is that it is both is and isn't a total waste of time. It's productive but always misses the larger picture. It's a half step, leaving the futzer with a sense of completion -- after all, every half-step is halfway closer to the end goal -- without all the grueling work of true accomplishment. (Like a blog! But we digress...)
What I miss most today about the World of Warcraft is the quick-fix of success that all the in-game futzing brought me. Futzing is addictive because things which easily reward are always addictive -- presumably someone much smarter and more credential'd than I has said that elsewhere, probably in a really large book. And oh did WoW reward the futzing. I'm sure other games reward futzing but I haven't played that many so I wouldn't know. What I do know is that WoW took futzing to an entirely new level of pointless, gratifying, addictive faux-accomplishment. And I miss it the way a crack-addict misses the crack.
If you've never played the kind of game which involves the collection of objects (aka "loot") let me try to open a window into the crack-like beauty and complexity that is icon accumulation and organization. To play WoW (or any game of this ilk) you begin with a customized character (a "toon" in the parlance) who is armed and dressed and toting a bag. Clothing and weapons ("gear") are nothing more than icons filling up an icon slot on your character panel. The major linguistic difference between "loot" and "gear" is that loot is an icon in your bag and gear is an icon you've relocated from a bag slot onto a character panel slot ("equipping gear"). Ah context, ever the most important thing.
In other words, what the game comes down to is collecting icons moving them from one place to another. Over and over and over again. After playing the game for untold hours you have a mind-numbing array of icons all of which are hogging up icon-receiving slots. And because you've played the game for untold countless hours, all these icons matter to you! They have magical, mystifying really really important powers! They are worth gold (which is another icon). They need to be organized, sorted, consumed, traded, sold, transformed!
By the time you've played long enough and your original noobie character has become a maxed out ubertoon you are just brimming with icons. You've got icons in your equippable icon slots, you've got icons in your usable bag icon slots, icons in your storage bank icon slots. So many icons that you rolled another toon to get more bag and bank space in order to store the extra icons. Congratulations! You are the proud owner of hundreds of different icons! Woot, you win! Except it isn't enough, you need more! Different icons! Better icons! So you run around the the icon world slaughtering monsters (which drop icons) or fishing up fish (which are icons) or killing animals (which you can skin for icons) or picking flowers (i.e., icons) and then, even though you aren't nearly sated by all the icons, you've run out of icon spaces so you have to get rid of some in order to make space for for more (yes, you got it) ICONS!!!
If WoW is more than icon management, it's only in the sense that hearing is more than the molecules hitting your ear drum. Every icon ultimately represents a decision that needs to be made. Icons can be equipped, sold, stored and utilized. Making a decision and then acting upon it is always satisfying, it's an exercise of volition, of creation. You choose to mop your floor, you mop, the floor is clean, voila, accomplishment; you choose to vendor your trash loot, you get gold, voila, accomplishment. You can certainly argue that the former has more real world value than the latter, but the latter is easier. If you want a clean house, fine, get out a mop; but if all you really need is to flex your will to power, go play a game.
Day Six
So the grand pathetic total comes to six. Six (6) WoW-free days. Sigh. I haven't not played WoW for this long since I went to Mexico last Thanksgiving. Not even WoW could have won a duel against napping, tacos and marguaritas. Not that I tested that assumption what with leaving my computer at home for the duration.
Can't say I'm proud of this. But neither will I say I'm entirely ashamed. Nor am I a going to promise never to play again because I'm almost certain that would be a lie. Plus, the expansion comes out in less than a month. Hah.
The addiction, any addiction, is bad. But the game, the playing of it, was good. Having never been much of a gamer, I can't even begin to describe how much I learned. At the age of forty, I had no idea that there was even that much left to learn. I mean, okay, I don't know squat about wine, or geopolitics, or car repair or adult responsibility or, heck, all the things I still don't know which induce that panicky feeling upon walking into a really good library and thinking, "I'll never be able to read all these books in time!" You know, in time for death.
I'm a learner. I really am. Moreso, I'm an autodidact. I mostly know how to teach myself the things I don't know. Find a book, a website, a text, read it, practice, rinse, repeat, learn. It's a process I comprehend and have mostly mastered. I like learning, I love reading, museums, talking to people who know things I don't know. If I sound defensive about it, it's because I am. But cut me some slack, I'm coming out of a year of game addiction which my educated-person persona finds embarrassing.
Smart girls don't game. Except that's a total crock. Smart people do game. And having now gone into the world, seen it, played it, lived it, I feel pretty strongly that the whole gaming thing marks a fundamental shift in the sorts of things which experience fundamental shifts -- culture, society, education. There are enough of the smart-people-types out there writing obtuse academic tracts on all of this to back me up. Smart people game and will continue to do so in increasingly large numbers. Gaming may even make people smarter.
Which isn't to say that everyone needs to run out and start playing games. In the same way that no one needs a television, no one needs to play interactive video games. And just as television has been a certain evil, so too with gaming. Of all people, I'm certainly the last person to downplay the evils of too much gaming. Me with my grand total of six game free days in a year? Yeah, I'm not going to be denying the negatives any time soon.
But the positives, and the just-plain-interesting neutrals, can't be discounted. With the numbers of people playing these sorts of games, the numbers of games being produced, and the sheer, raw, crazy amounts of money being made by the industry (note to self: find facts to link to sometime soon), it's safe to say this isn't some trivial fad that we're going to grow out of. Interactive games, specifically of the sort labeled MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online), are, like television and the internet, a pervasive (or soon to be pervasive) fact of modern life (give or take the standard 'developed world' disclaimers).
I regret having become a major addict, although I suspect that might have been unavoidable, but I can't regret finally becoming aware of and participating in that world. It's a world that millions of people live in now, a world that millions more will be entering soon and most importantly a world that today's kids will be growing up in. Whether or not the next generation games for some fixed, parentally-supervised three hours a week or are given open access to full-blown, sleep-depriving, school-destroying, unmonitored playtime, they'll be growing up in a game culture unlike anything my pong-playing, video-arcade generation ever saw. Furthermore, the networked aspect of these games makes the landscape fundamentally different from that of the gaming generations younger than mine despite their wide-scale access to and fluency with console and handheld games.
It's all about the network. The web began by connecting a bunch of isolated, marginally interesting text files via hyperlinks and suddenly the whole internet exploded in ways pretty much no one ever expected it would. I can't even venture a prediction about what networking will do to these isolated, vaguely three-dimensional, entirely cartoonish, marginally interesting game worlds, but I've lived through enough technological surprises (MySpace anyone?) to safely say that Something is going to happen. It usually does and I like to be prepared for these technology-type changes.
I can only hope that my decent into MMO space taught me more than how to equip a weapon, organize my bag space and script macros. At the moment, the only skill I'm really proud of is my newfound ability to resist launching the application. While I learn to perfect my mad, not-gaming skillz, I expect I'll be extensively revisiting the exciting world of full sentences, punctuation and possibly communication with the real world. The irony that the wide world of blogging has become the "real world" is something I hope we can all take a moment to stop and ponder.
Can't say I'm proud of this. But neither will I say I'm entirely ashamed. Nor am I a going to promise never to play again because I'm almost certain that would be a lie. Plus, the expansion comes out in less than a month. Hah.
The addiction, any addiction, is bad. But the game, the playing of it, was good. Having never been much of a gamer, I can't even begin to describe how much I learned. At the age of forty, I had no idea that there was even that much left to learn. I mean, okay, I don't know squat about wine, or geopolitics, or car repair or adult responsibility or, heck, all the things I still don't know which induce that panicky feeling upon walking into a really good library and thinking, "I'll never be able to read all these books in time!" You know, in time for death.
I'm a learner. I really am. Moreso, I'm an autodidact. I mostly know how to teach myself the things I don't know. Find a book, a website, a text, read it, practice, rinse, repeat, learn. It's a process I comprehend and have mostly mastered. I like learning, I love reading, museums, talking to people who know things I don't know. If I sound defensive about it, it's because I am. But cut me some slack, I'm coming out of a year of game addiction which my educated-person persona finds embarrassing.
Smart girls don't game. Except that's a total crock. Smart people do game. And having now gone into the world, seen it, played it, lived it, I feel pretty strongly that the whole gaming thing marks a fundamental shift in the sorts of things which experience fundamental shifts -- culture, society, education. There are enough of the smart-people-types out there writing obtuse academic tracts on all of this to back me up. Smart people game and will continue to do so in increasingly large numbers. Gaming may even make people smarter.
Which isn't to say that everyone needs to run out and start playing games. In the same way that no one needs a television, no one needs to play interactive video games. And just as television has been a certain evil, so too with gaming. Of all people, I'm certainly the last person to downplay the evils of too much gaming. Me with my grand total of six game free days in a year? Yeah, I'm not going to be denying the negatives any time soon.
But the positives, and the just-plain-interesting neutrals, can't be discounted. With the numbers of people playing these sorts of games, the numbers of games being produced, and the sheer, raw, crazy amounts of money being made by the industry (note to self: find facts to link to sometime soon), it's safe to say this isn't some trivial fad that we're going to grow out of. Interactive games, specifically of the sort labeled MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online), are, like television and the internet, a pervasive (or soon to be pervasive) fact of modern life (give or take the standard 'developed world' disclaimers).
I regret having become a major addict, although I suspect that might have been unavoidable, but I can't regret finally becoming aware of and participating in that world. It's a world that millions of people live in now, a world that millions more will be entering soon and most importantly a world that today's kids will be growing up in. Whether or not the next generation games for some fixed, parentally-supervised three hours a week or are given open access to full-blown, sleep-depriving, school-destroying, unmonitored playtime, they'll be growing up in a game culture unlike anything my pong-playing, video-arcade generation ever saw. Furthermore, the networked aspect of these games makes the landscape fundamentally different from that of the gaming generations younger than mine despite their wide-scale access to and fluency with console and handheld games.
It's all about the network. The web began by connecting a bunch of isolated, marginally interesting text files via hyperlinks and suddenly the whole internet exploded in ways pretty much no one ever expected it would. I can't even venture a prediction about what networking will do to these isolated, vaguely three-dimensional, entirely cartoonish, marginally interesting game worlds, but I've lived through enough technological surprises (MySpace anyone?) to safely say that Something is going to happen. It usually does and I like to be prepared for these technology-type changes.
I can only hope that my decent into MMO space taught me more than how to equip a weapon, organize my bag space and script macros. At the moment, the only skill I'm really proud of is my newfound ability to resist launching the application. While I learn to perfect my mad, not-gaming skillz, I expect I'll be extensively revisiting the exciting world of full sentences, punctuation and possibly communication with the real world. The irony that the wide world of blogging has become the "real world" is something I hope we can all take a moment to stop and ponder.
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