Compromise and Conceit

I played World of Warcraft for a month recently, while I was wasting time between finishing my studies in Japan and moving to London. It is a pretty world, and it’s fun to run around in, and I chuckle to myself every time a peon says “ready to work!” but ultimately it seemed like a rather soulless experience. There are two reasons for this soullessness, and I would like to discuss them in some detail now, because I think it might represent an interesting fundamental problem of MPORGs.

The first reason for the soullessness of WoW is just a design problem, inherent to the attempt to make very large or scalable games, and I think Neverwinter Nights (NWN) had it too : everything is the same. The adventures all had the same plot, that simply scaled up as you gained levels. It was just killin’ and returnin’. NWN had this problem in design too – those damn panels meant that every single scene looked the same, just had a different colour. I think this is an inevitable consequence of designing an extensible game, and for example Baldur’s Gate 2 doesn’t have this problem at all. This made the game boring to me but one expects it and it’s no big deal (though I will talk about this again in the future, as I think it’s avoidable).

The second reason that WoW was soulless was, paradoxically, the consequence of its being populated by people, who in general (Dick Cheney being the obvious exception) have souls. In order to make an MPORG which can accommodate millions of people, much of it has to run itself. You can’t have game designers tailoring things for lots of users, it’s too much work. Partly this leads to the extensibility problem, since in a non-MPORG game, one usually expects to come to the end of the campaign and thus the game. But MPORGs like WoW aren’t meant to end, so they need to be self-perpetuating. And naturally the simplest way to make an MPORG self-perpetuating is to give the people within it the ability to form communities. But since in a computer world there really aren’t many ways for these communities to flourish, the easiest (and I bet, the only) way to make these communities work is to give them the ability to harvest resources, produce things, and barter them. i.e. to introduce a market.

And this is what makes WoW seem soulless to me. You are basically running around doing the same adventures over and over, with different opponents, so that you can have money, resources and items to barter and turn into goods that you exchange in a market. In order to make the world self-perpetuating the purpose has been shifted from a story-arc to a community interaction, but the community interaction isn’t the whole and complete interaction of human worlds, but the 2-dimensional interaction of a 2-dimensional world.

But most of us do that during the day, in our meat-lives. When I am in the digital world, I don’t want to be doing that stuff. I want to be following a tight and complex plot, with an interesting character (preferably group of characters) to a fascinating conclusion, and I want it to happen in interesting places with unique NPCs. If I have to buy and sell shit, I want to do so solely for the purpose of being  more powerful and better able to complete my earth-saving mission. I don’t want it to be the purpose of the thing.

It seems to me that, by loading humans into a self-perpetuating and extensible digital “fantasy” world, we have actually chained them to the least interesting, most simplistic and most boring aspects of the real world. I don’t know if this represents the limits of virtual adventuring or just the limits of most human beings’ imagination (including the game designers’), but I have a suspicion it is the former, and until we are better able to add complexity to digital worlds, MPORGs will remain bland simulacra of the worst parts of our daily lives – compete, harvest, sell, compete, harvest, sell, until you reach retirement level…