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.