World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things?

Gamasutra has a 'Soap Box' editorial up discussing the bad lessons World of Warcraft teaches. From the article: "1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien."

Comments

Formulae

[daeley]

The very idea that time > skill is alien.

Ah, but time = money, therefore, in what is quickly becoming the "Formulae of WoW," money > skill, which I think everyone will agree is a lesson modern America teaches pretty much every day. ;)

This is also substantiated by the original axiom, WoW = Golf.

Oh jesus

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Here are some other life lessons games teach us:

- Killing cops and prostitues is funny
- In war, once you die, you come right back to life (or maybe there is a slight delay)
- etc

Re:Dear article writer

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

Computer games aren't supposed to teach values!?

fuck! I bought my kid GTA a few years ago and haven't bothered to check back since! I thought it would be okay!!

Re:He doesn't really seem to get the "point" of

[ph4s3]

antifoidulus wrote on Wednesday February 22, @01:10PM

What he neglects to take into consideration is that chess and Street Fighter have very clearly defined goals: checkmate in the former, and beating the crap out of your opponent in the latter.

No wonder no one ever wants to play chess with me. I had that backwards. Oops.

Re:Perhaps it's just me ...

[Neoprofin]

I'm sure fighting the cyberdemons tought you that sometimes gung-ho brute force looses out to finesse and patience.

Pitting cacodemons against hellnights shows you that if two people hate you but hate eachother more there's no reason that you need to deal with either of them.

And the game as a whole teaches you to always stock up on any and all valuable supplies because you never know when shit might get rocky.

Re:Perhaps it's just me ...

[Rei]

Ah, LPC, one of the most fun languages ever when combined with the interface. Being able to go up to someone and call functions on their player object (or your own) was great. I loved doing things like impersonating a message board.

Coding wars upped the ante quite a bit. So, another wizard has a habit of desting (destroying your player object - kicking you off, usually with fanfare) me? I dest them back when I see their dest start. So, they modify their dester to create an object in my inventory that eats my keyboard commands as soon as they start their dest. So, I create a "counterdest" object that immediately dests them whenever it sees their message and destroys any unknown objects in my inventory or my room (this was later expanded into an "AT-field" object). So they make one-line dests, where the player gets kicked off first thing. On and on it goes -- it was such great fun :)

Even when not "combatting" each other (or actually being productive), there were so many fun things you could do. An alchemical "bread shop" that performed alchemy based on hashes of the objects put into the bread and picked a result for the bread from a large table. A chat analyzer which would pick the most frequently used words on the wizard chat line and compiled statistics on them (net result: wizards became fond of inserting their own names in inappropriate places all throughout conversation ;) ). Oh, and the ever-so-fun and overly elaborate soul commands. :)

Letting players ultimately code is a nice reward indeed.

Re:Dear article writer

[ameoba]

Ifby the age of 16, your daughter hasn't been exposed to the idea of manipulating men with sex, she's led a painfully sheltered life.