Mr Pinchy the Magical Crawdad

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.