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.