Digitally Disillusioned

Back in November of last year I began a series of articles entitled the 30 Year Old (MMO) Virgin to chronicle my immersion in Blizzard Entertainments smash success World of Warcraft. Though doing so I hoped to explain the genre to those, like I, who had avoided it and provide a commentary style review as to what the uninitiated could expect from the game. Running six chapters long, my conclusion was overwhelmingly positive and I continued to play the game long after the free trial that inspired me to start.

Six months have passed since I started, and it seemed an apropos time to revisit the issue and take another look at the game, my experiences with the game, and my thoughts on the MMO genre. However do not be mislead at the semi-anniversary time frame, for indeed the impetus for this reconsideration is not the time but that I’ve canceled my World of Warcraft account. The question this article serves to answer is a simple one: why?

My original take on this series concluded with a statement that would be nigh on impossible to go back on: “despite the total cost of ownership being excessive, World of Warcraft may be the best gaming dollars I’ve spent in an extremely long time.” Indeed, at the time, this was very much the truth. World of Warcraft is an immaculately presented and deftly constructed adventure game set within and incredibly detailed an interesting world. Elaborating on the formula that made Diablo II an incredible success, World of Warcraft started as an unquestionably fun experience.

But the enjoyment I was enraptured with then seemed to evaporate over time. It was not a quick decline, but it was steady and unyielding. The game was inexorably drifting towards tedium and I was forced to question why and see if it could be redeemed.

First, the game is tremendously repetitive. The plot of the game is composed of quest lines that originally seem to bear the mark of careful design and balance. However, as you plow through the game, you begin to see how the same quest is repeated over and over and over with just the difficulty and flavor text revised. Quests degrade to a simple exercise in experience acquisition, and what was once the immersive plot degrades to a painfully superficial task that unveils the simple skeleton that the game is hung on. It doesn’t make the game innately un-fun, but it utterly abolishes and plot related driver to experience the content the game has. While deftly composed, animated, and written, the game is the same task over and over and over and over with very few changes.

This places the emphasis squarely on the gameplay, and this is where we find the truly devious aspect of the MMO genre. Just like the single player adventure games - like, say, Diablo II - your adventures are rewarded in both experience points and material goods that improve your characters abilities. However, the loot in World of Warcraft is deliberately scaled to demand an excessive play regimen to get anywhere in a timely manner. You will never, ever, ever obtain an item that substantially advances the abilities of your character as that progression is intimately tied to the time you spend in the game. This is managed through the rarity system - where the better items are only obtainable through exhaustive tasks - as well as rigorous level based requirements to items. Even if you find something really good, you’ll need to achieve a certain level of success to be able to equip it, ensuring that no character ever actually achieve a significant degree of relative power compared to another. This is essential for two reasons: to keep play balance in a PvP setting, and to keep your membership dues rolling in. But it does also create a few noteworthy dynamics that deserve explanation.

First, the auction house. It is a burgeoning place of trade as players try to maximize their item acquisition, selling unwanted goods and buying desired ones. This is the heart of the World of Warcraft economy, and it is incredibly boring, tedious, and prone to exploitation by people you’d rather not admit you were sharing a game space with.

There exist plugins to the World of Warcraft interface that will exploit the system, harvesting data and creating a repository of statistical knowledge for you to maximize your transactions. I don’t give a damn if you can automate it, its still flamboyantly dull. Occasionally you’ll find a gem of a buy in the auction house, but 99.5% of your transactions will be selling, and doing my taxes is only slightly less entertaining. And this is all with the pre-requisite plugin to control the system: without it the whole thing is roughly about as much fun as a root canal.

And then there is the guild system, which serves as the primary social underpinning of the entire game and the framework for managing your loot acquisition plans. Full disclosure demands I confess I never actually joined a guild. However, its prominence and the details surrounding the day to day life of a guild member were not hidden from me, both within the game I experienced and by proxy via my friends who spent more time in the game than I did. Basically, it exists as a utility to matchmaker the necessary parties required to complete a dungeon and obtain the most interesting loot possible for a level. It is also a critical instrument to minimizing the amount of time it takes you to run through the levels, which is one of the most important measures by which you can measure success in the game. It of course also serves as the instrument through which in game relationships are created, which is a noteworthy redeeming grace.

And just as how the item drops are stringently regulated, the challenges one can face never really get out of hand and one has to be reckless in the extreme to have any real problems with anything. Dungeons and zones are fairly clearly delineated on level, and group composition is imposed by those who’ve overcome these problems countless times. There seems, at the core of it, to be very little opportunity for a flexible exploration of the game space unless you feel like you want to run off half-cocked into a scenario that obviously leads to your imminent death. Your quest log is color coordinated by difficulty, within the social space - guild or casual - you will be inundated with people who have done all of this countless times. Thus the path to success is fairly linear, especially if you spend any time in out of game social communities that orbit the World of Warcraft universe. A exhaustive maximized build for your character is just a click away.

Thus, the problem for me is one of motivation - or the complete lack thereof. What started as an exciting adventure became a race to get to 60 (and then, with expansion, 70) as fast as possible. Gaming became a mathematical equation rather than a recreational experience. And the ultimate reward seemed to be the honor of creating a new character and doing it again. But before you think I hate the game there is an essential truth that must be understood: I never didn’t enjoy playing the game. World of Warcraft is built on solid principles, is well balanced, and has many parts that are a simple joy to experience. But the challenges are excessively recurring and progression is obviously architected to require both hours and dollars. The primary goal of elite players is simply to minimize time spent reaching the high levels. This, to me, is by definition pointless, is rather stupid, and is completely removed from why I chose to spend my time with interactive entertainment. It blends the sort of idle-mind stimulus something like solitaire or Bejeweled attempts to scratch with the standard risk/reward cycle of a single player game, the net result being both seductive and all-encompassing, but to me - after deep though - pretty much entirely objectionable. The only thing that enriches the game is the social system, but you’ll be constructing a social tapestry of people who’ve discarded the critical attention to detail that prevents me from continuing the game. What is the point? To say one came, saw, and conquered? To establish some status in a clique of digital friends? Or just to waste time?

It was the wasting of the time that really got to me in the end, as playing World of Warcraft meant my time was not spent playing other games; games with plots, and challenging goals, and different experiences. Games that fill my need for idle entertainment. My game time became monotonous in that it was always the same experience, the same grind, and any desire to shelve the game for a time was punished by an inability to maintain my social relationships so key to the enjoyment, as well as a recurring price tag. When I was playing it regularly the price was extremely reasonable, but I have stacks and stacks of unplayed games, and the lack of diversity in World of Warcraft was a deal-breaker as I simply had other games I wanted to play. Understand that as an older gamer with a job and family and a life my time is extremely precious, and combined with the lack of a reasonable progression model I basically reached a point where World of Warcraft was a chore and a burden rather than fun. Indeed, the only people I saw having fun with the game were those devoted to daily play. While I can objectively see how it plugs into certain satisfaction centers in the brain, I can’t play any game daily, and that inability really threw the problems - which were always there, which those daily players even see - in sharp relief.

The MMO gamespace is an incredibly interesting and seductive idea that I don’t feel has yet reached the necessary degrees of subtlety to appeal to anyone but the hardcore gamer. Like the collectible card game industry, the game design is deliberately slanted to ensure that you keep spending money on the product at the cost of enjoyability and flexibility. Indeed, something like Second Life seems to me where we will find the real future of the genre, one where participation is the only requirement and a tried-and-true game system isn’t abused and stretched out to serve as artificial justification for a recurring fee. All this is meant to tell you is why World of Warcraft is not right for me, because of course the criteria of enjoyment is very personal and millions and millions of gamers are very happy paying for World of Warcraft. I’m not trying to change their mind.

But if you are, like the person I imagined when I started this, curious about the gamespace I advise caution: it is repetitive, artificially contrived, and not nearly unique enough to merit the hundreds and hundreds of hours some people like to pour into it. If you have a void in your life you need to fill, this perhaps will provide your fix. But there are far too many absolutely fantastic games out there, if you ask me, for this sort of habitual gameplay to have any place in the modern gamers home.