Progression

In "Paying to be the hunter", Tobold made the point (with respect to MMOs):

Many other games don't have character power levels or gear, so it is totally possible to create a game in which playing a lot would only make you stronger in as far as you become more skillful in the game

As 8f and Samus pointed out in the comments, there are plenty of games which require player skill, such as Call of Duty; but one of the unique features of virtual worlds is that we players are more like actors than athletes. Our skill lies not in dexterity, but in playing a role.

The premise of virtual worlds is the same as in D&D. It is the character that progresses, not the player. The fun is not in improving your keyboard skills, it is simply in acting the role of the character, and seeing the challenges from her point of view. As a player, I'm still rubbish at casting fireballs, but I act the part of my character, who is expert at it through the effort she has put into improving her magic abilities (not my keyboard abilities).

Of course, given equally powerful characters, player dexterity will matter if both are in competition. But it be the end, we players do not play these games because of our superb keyboard dexterity, or we'd be playing games in which keyboard dexterity matters more, and the second-by-second and minute by minute game-play was more attractive. We play these games for the epic stories told (and our part therein), whether player generated or developer generated; and for the personal development of our characters within that world.

It so happens that in most virtual worlds, character progress only happens when the player is in-game. That's not a law of nature, though, and I can quite imagine games in which characters are set skill-building tasks that progress while the player is offline. Skills in Eve online are trained while the player is offline. In WoW, followers level up by doing missions that progress while we are offline. In fact, the legendary quest is progressing through such naval missions. It would be interesting to see what could be made of a game in which our characters could train while we players are elsewhere.

Blaugust, day 21.

We Flew Spitfires

Gordon of We Fly Spitfires asks "Do MMOs Make You Feel Old?" I wrote quite a long reply on his website to this, but grrrh! Yet again, a Wordpress-based blog ate my homework. Undaunted, I know at least that I can respond here.

Gordon mourns the passing of his once-nimble dexterity, and feels old when faced with bleeding fingers caused by the game mechanics of today's MMOs. In days of yore, combat mechanics were much more straightforward than they are today. Even Syncaine, when not bashing WoW for being too easy, is praising Ultima Online because it's combat mechanics were basically semi-afk auto-attack.

It's hard to see the logic of Syncaine's position, since WoW combat is much more complex. And yet there is some merit behind what he says. In earlier times, MMORPGs were virtual worlds where we played the role of an adventurer, exploring these worlds, helping the people we met and occasionally slaying monsters. Today's MMOs are combat-based games, so it makes sense to improve the combat mechanics to make them more interesting. Virtual worlds are shrinking. Non-combat game-play is disappearing.

Travel, for instance. Once upon a time, we would venture forth from a city to find a distant wizard living in a dark tower in a darker forest to ask him for arcane help with an enchantment. The fun you could have on such a journey was great. Nowadays, there is no need to find him. Just look up his location on wowhead. No need to do any venturing forth, either. Just fly, teleport or zone in. And anyway, we now automatically learn the enchantment without needing to visit a trainer.

In bygone days, we would find concealed entrances to mystical dungeons deep inside caves high on lofty peaks, or in submerged caverns below the sea. It was a rare moment to come across these thresholds to adventure. We would ride for many leagues, o'er hill and dale, for three days and three nights, back to the city where, in a basement beneath a beer-swilled, sawdust-carpeted tavern down a narrow winding lane, our guild of adventurers holds its secret deliberations. There, we would raise a party of trusted comrades to investigate the dungeon, map it out and discover what lay within.

Today, no investigation is required except on Google. Nothing in the dungeon is unknown, except the location of its entrance¹. Instead, all we need to do is click the Dungeon Finder's "Enter Dungeon" button along with four other strangers and congratulate ourselves on how streamlined getting into dungeons is nowadays compared to the old days, and how bored we are to be doing them for the 50th time. Still, at least the tank knows a route whereby we can skip half the instance. Meantime, we've missed all that game-play of the imagination, and Blizzard has had to make the combat more complex to make up for it. The big old world we used to find adventure in is reduced to a city background that acts as a lobby to the discrete combat games we queue for.

So, do not mourn the passing of your dexterity, Gordon. Mourn the passing of your virtual worlds.


1. The only time the location of the entrance is needed now is when the group wipes and the players have to find their way back to their corpses from the graveyard. Many a player has dropped group rather than having to actually find the entrance! Blizzard, take note. Put the Spirit Healers inside the instance, preferably every 100 yards.

A Second Life

Syncaine is quite right when he says that the first rule of MMORPGs is that they're for the long term. If you don't keep playing, if you aren't forming connections with your fellow adventurers, then you aren't getting the best out of the game, and perhaps MMORPGs aren't for you.

However there is a second leg that Syncaine is missing, even in the title of his piece: RPG. An MMORPG is not just a team game where as a team you work to achieve a particular goal. It's also a simulation of a world. If you are not immersed in that simulation, then again you aren't getting the best out of the game, and perhaps MMORPGs aren't for you. If the game to you only involves learning the right sequence of keys to press in response to changes in graphics on your computer screen - if you aren't inhabiting that world - then perhaps you'd be better off playing Tetris.

As Nils says (in an article on randomness), "As long as the player is immersed in the simulation part of the game, everything's fine". At some level, you've got to believe you are a mage or a starship captain or a pirate or whatever. Once you start to bring into the foreground of your mind that you're just sitting in a small room pressing buttons, not casting spells or launching missiles, nothing's fine.

And one of the biggest breakers of immersion, for me, is other players (which might help explain to Tobold why some people prefer to adventure in quiet zones) .

RP means playing a role. It doesn't  mean you should start talking stiltedly as if you were in a bad play about Henry VIII, but it does mean you should assume the role of the character you are playing. This is something that sRPGs are very good at: in Skyrim it's easy to stay in character, because every other character you meet treats you as a character in that world. In MMORPGs, the biggest strength - the many players - can also be the biggest weakness, as other players constantly jolt you out of immersion.

Of course, the best of both worlds is to find a guild that you are comfortable with, whose members have a similar world view to you. I love that on many servers, alliance guilds outraged at the bombing of Theramore took it upon themselves to go to Orgrimmar and bring Garrosh to justice. If only we could make a permanent change to the world.