World of Warcraft (Windows/Blizzard)  1/2
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh 20050515
I've stopped playing World of Warcraft. Actually, I stopped a few weeks ago; I only turned the game on twice in the last few days, to buy that orange tabby that I couldn't name and to see if I had reason to pay money I didn't have for another month of forgetting the game was installed on my hard drive and downloading a hundred megs of patches whenever I chanced to start it up.
Until I got to level twenty, I enjoyed the game. I wandered around, I improved my skinning and my leatherworking. Maybe those weren't the best choices for a mage, since I couldn't wear leather. Why be tidy, though.
It started out well enough. I found a nice role-playing server, where I presumed I would have less bullshit to put up with since everyone would be concerned with etiquette. The Internet is backwards that way. Give a real person a fake identity and he'll use that as an excuse to go wild. Get into strip clubs preternaturally. Rent videos with no intention to return them. Speak in tongues, go to ren fairs, and wear fursuits. It's a trap door from the monotony and the conformity of the suburban right-wing hate media spewing public school adolescence we all carry into our thirties.
Give an Internet person an identity, it becomes an anchor. It's fake, and you know it's fake. Deep down they know it too. It's one of those lies you live with, comfortable lies, to grease the gears and keep the project moving. You all know you're there to escape, so why rock the boat. Let's pretend, they say. Don't remind me of my real life. And it's fair enough. We all have our problems. We all need to be someone, even a fake someone. The role-players are harmless and a little sad. They want to play the game right, and that sounds good to me. Let's do it, I figure.
I spent the next two weeks chasing quests. They were standard quests: deliver this, talk to this person, kill so many of these monsters. It was varied enough to hide how boring it was, and it got me wandering around the map. Some of the places were downright beautiful. One of the first places I went, when I was strong enough, was a huge rolling tullock of amber grass trenched by centuries of passing wagons, all blowing, all rooted with harvest grains and plowed shares mediated by possessed scarecrows that weren't as tough as they looked. I spent hours wandering there, accomplishing little, even when I wasn't busy looking for my corpse.
Sometimes, when fighting something too big for me, another player would jump in to help. He would hit the monster with me, maybe heal me or revive me if I died and he had the power. If we had a common objective in that area of the map, we might stick together for a while. Then we would move on. The people who play this game tend to be polite, and helpful where they can be � especially if you present yourself well and you know your emote commands. The community reminds me a little of the first two or three months of Phantasy Star Online, before the hackers took over and no one dared play in an unlocked channel. They mean well enough.
The thing that struck me, though, is that aside from these chance encounters I never really saw much communication going on. Everyone was off in his own universe, playing his own game at the same time everyone else was playing hers. If he and she crossed paths, then swell. If not, then ih. It was the same with me. Every time I had a pleasant encounter, I would add my temporary companion to my friends list. Then I would never see her again. Even if she logged on, she would be in a completely different part of the game world, doing something of her own. I had no reason to pester her, and she had no reason to send me a message. Interaction in WOW is fleeting and practical � to the extent that I sort of wonder why it's there.
You see. WOW wants to be a one-player game. Let's say Frank the Butcher asks you to find his prized butcher knife, that the evil Gelfy McDrool hid in the nearby mine. Fine, you say. You feel strong and brave enough, so you go spelunking. Maybe you die a couple of times, knocking your soul back to the last graveyard you saw, and you have to spend ten or fifteen minutes holding the �W� key to get back to your body. Eventually, you find Frank's knife, and you return it to him. He's happy; he gives you a reward, and you move along to allow the guy behind you to return Frank's precious knife.
...
Nothing you do matters in the slightest, because the game has to allow everyone the same experience. Anyone and anything you kill will respawn in a couple of minutes. You cannot affect the gameworld itself even as far as dropping a gum wrapper on the ground. Everyone gets the same quests, and the same general rewards. The only real difference is in what your character's specifics will allow you to wear, learn, or otherwise use.
Initially, that seems like a lot. After a few levels, though, I started to feel my character's limits. There's just not much variety to what you can do in this game. You're only allowed to learn a couple of major skills. If you learn how to skin and work leather, you're not allowed to fish or sew. If you learn to fish and sew, you're not allowed to mine or make potions. You can always unlearn a skill. After all the work and money you will sink into your skills, though, I don't know how attractive that sounds.
There's a reason for this: it's to ensure that people play with each other. This way, you see, no one player can do everything. If you know leatherworking and not skinning, you need to get the skins from somewhere � and the only real source is other players. So whenever you go to town, half the messages you will see flooding the channel will be along the lines of �WILL TRADE WOOL FOR LIGHT LEATHER PLZ WILL THROW IN BONUS!�
Of course, all of the skills are there, available to learn. The only impediment is a message informing you, with regret, that you cannot learn to fish because you don't have enough job slots.
I'm willing to learn! She's willing to teach! I have the money! The fish are right there! I'm doing nothing else at the moment! I'm not busy, really! And... I can't. Because someone else has to catch the fish for me. That makes the game fun, because, see, you have something to talk about. And unless you have reason to talk, you might as well just be playing by yourself.
So. At this point we have a wide, interesting, very pretty world with lots to do, not all of it boring. Nothing you do matters, because the game has to allow for other players. (Must keep the theme park tidy.) We have tons of skills to learn, tons of ways to amuse yourself by building up your character. Most of them are artificially fenced off because otherwise you wouldn't have much reason to talk to other players. Now, for the sake of argument, let's flip things around. Let's pretend that in place of a gameworld that registers that we exist, we're really just playing this for the sake of meeting other people and fooling around with them in a virtual space.
Let's say that, like me, you have no immediate inclination to run up and talk to people just for the hell of talking to them. If you interact, it will be a situational thing. Maybe if you hit it off well with someone, the two of you will hang out for a while. If you run into the same person over and over, you'll become familiar and start to actually watch for each other. That's the way it works, meeting people � right? Let's say yes. Given that, you'd think a good communication game (as WOW wants to be) would build around the way that people think and behave, socially.
So you can only specialize in a couple of skills. Even so, using the available skills, most players can eventually make almost any item you might find in a shop. Ideally, forcing players to focus on one or two skills would ensure that they spend a bunch of time refining those skills, to some greater purpose in the gameworld. To some degree of subtlety and nuance. A good leatherworker could give up hunting and questing and open up a leather shop, where he could make to order just about anything you imagine a person might make out of leather � given the materials and money. The rate he charges for his work is the rate that leather goods go for in the game world. People who want leather gauntlets would be forced to go to this player, to talk to him. He would be forced to talk to the other players, to take their orders and their challenges. You would get a ton of situational interaction, which could lead to anything, really.
Instead, the game has set shops. If you want to hock your wares, you can scream over the airwaves and annoy everyone in the region. Maybe someone will pay you, to shut you up. Or if you're feeling nice, you can give your stuff away. Mostly what you'll do, though, is you'll just sell your gloves and your padded mail and belts and boots to the NPC shopkeepers, for more materials to prepare more boots to sell more boots. Unless you feel like being obnoxious, you've got little motivation in this regard to even talk to anyone real. And unless you've got motivation, you probably won't bother.
Adventuring fares a little better than commerce, if only for the strength that comes in numbers. If you want to get your quests done quickly, you will do well to team up with someone nearby, with similar goals. You don't need to talk to him, really; just heal him if you can, when he needs it, and defend him if he's in trouble. Let him have roughly half the loot. Then you can ditch him when the quest is over, which is just as well because you both know that you're just using each other, and it's probably kind of awkward. As I noted earlier, you're unlikely to ever see each other again, simply because you've each got your own things to do, and you're each playing your own game.
There are guilds, to foster a sort of clannishness. One of the first things that happened to me was some gnome contacted me and made me one of the higher-up members of a new mages' guild he was forming. In our free moments, we spoke somewhat in-character, asking general sort of advice about the gameworld. It was nice for the first couple of days, until he got bored and passed control of the guild to someone else, who passed it to someone else and someone else still. Now I was a high-level �advisor� to a group which consisted entirely of people discussing internal power levels, and what people had to do to prevent themselves being �demoted�. People began to bitch loudly about the names of the ranks, the abilities granted them, the symbol on the guild tartan, duties and responsibilities. Although the guild started in all good faith, when you get people together in a tiered clan, you get bureaucracy. I took to just avoiding Stormwind altogether. I have enough jazz in my life that I don't need petty power struggles in my videogames.
What it comes down to then, is that WOW doesn't work as a multiplayer game because it's not built like one: it's built for the individual user, with interaction thrown in as an afterthought. It doesn't work as a single-player game because it's neutered in order to allow thousands of people to play it at the same time � crossing the same ground, doing all of the same things you are. There is no real sense of progress outside of exploration. And exploration is crippled because this ain't an adventure game; it's an RPG. That means you have to level up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up before you're strong enough to tackle the next area, and the next set of fetch quests. Then you have to level up and up and up to move on again. It's got nothing to do with skill; just with how long you're willing to stroll around and whack wolves.
It's a damned shame that this game is so boring and generally ineffectual, because there's a lot to see in it. And it's obvious a lot of work and care went into making the game look and feel unreasonably attractive for a Western game. You want to like it. I want to like it. For twenty levels, I tried to convince myself I was having fun. It's just like Morrowind, I told myself, except streamlined! And pretty! And you've got other people there! It's not dead!
No, it's not dead. It's not alive either. It's just a framework. After you put in a few dozen hours, ultimately a pretty flimsy one. Now, my character, Melexandra, is gone. I've canceled my subscription, so all of my work has been for naught. Since the world doesn't record my achievements, since I've had no effect outside of my own character, it's like I've never even played it. The only evidence is my memories. And all that time and energy, all the care I put into my character's appearance, abilities, personality, is gone forever.
Aside from PSO, the last online RPG I think I've played to any depth was Legend of the Red Dragon. Despite my churlishness, the major problem I have with online games is not so much the other people who play them as how inane the games themselves tend to be. I would just as well play NetHack as EverQuest. It would give me more options, and generally have a sense of humor about itself. And it'd sure as hell be easier on the eyes. I understand that the reason people are so wild about WOW is that it feels like a tremendous step up from its competition. From a critical perspective, though, that says more to me about the genre as a whole than about the game itself. As pretty and sincere as this game is, there are some serious issues of design and psychology that need to be addressed here. On a basic level, it just doesn't work.
There might be ways to make it work, if you already own the game and you feel the need to make something of your purchase: mainly, taking a hint from Sonic Team and playing with a small, dedicated group. Before you even start playing, know who you're going to play with, and plan out your characters accordingly. Never play without your partners, as tempting as it might be to level up a little or try out that new pattern for a red shirt that you got last night. Impose your own limits, in other words. There's enough stuff there to fill in the blanks.
If you don't already have the game and you want a good multiplayer experience, you might as well just play PSO. There is no single-player mode to speak of; all the game consists of is a dungeon crawl through large, hollow corridors, designed for two to four simultaneous players and arrays of chat bubbles. As the game is specifically designed around cooperative play, it's both easier and more enjoyable with two or three companions. That makes the game focused: four people with one collective mission, each with his or her role within the context of the other players. You have reason to talk, to attend to each other. You have reason to remember people. To actually care.
If you want a good single-player RPG, wait for Final Fantasy XII or Dragon Warrior VIII. Or hell, play Knights of the Old Republic. Although it's BioWare's weakest game, it plays a hell of a lot like how I think WOW would play if it were offline. That is to say, it plays a lot like how I think a single-player mode might have worked in Phantasy Star Online.
If all you want to do is waste time on the Internet, there are cheaper ways to do it. Download an IRC client or Trillian. Browse Wikipedia. Get a LiveJournal. Join the Gaming-Age Forums.
If you're looking for an identity, maybe you'd best just avoid videogames altogether. Go for a walk. Try drawing with charcoal, or playing the mandolin. Learn to cook a nice lasagna. Take some philosophy classes. Things that aren't applicable to any career you can imagine. Follow what interests you. Videogames aren't a replacement for life; they're just a nice diversion. Something that maybe, at best, can inspire us a little, can give us a little more abstract understanding of how the world works. They can't give you a life; that's your own responsibility.
There are better things to do, even within the realm of videogames, than play World of Warcraft. Do them instead.
Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh hates the Internets almost as much as videogames.
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