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.