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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."
Good thing it is a video game, otherwise I would be upset at the useless life lessons being promoted here.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
... but I've never transferred any skill I've learned in video games to real life.
At an early age, my demon hunting skills were top notch in Doom but I never took the extra step to transfer those to the playground.
Probably because video games are a virtual reality meaning that different laws apply there. I have learned never to use the same strategy when different rules are in effect. That's been pretty useful.
My work here is dung.
World of Warcraft wasn't designed to teach you anything. It was designed to entertain you.
A lot of the enjoyment I get out of a game is in progressing - in feeling like I'm becoming a more capable player. In some games (eg. Tetris), this is a big part of why I play: I enjoy getting better and breaking that old high score.
Levelling over time is a way of introducing this element of "getting better" artificially. It's not perfect, but it's very controllable. Developers who mete progress out in time-based levels can control how long it takes to reach the "flat", unsatisfying portion of the curve (where many will quit playing). When you get paid by the month, it's in your interest to have the most control possible of the progression curve (and thus how long you get paid) - and that's why pretty much all MMOs end up with time-locked progression.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
The author's main complaint seems to be that everyone doesn't enjoyed playing games the same way he does.
He is an introvert, so he disapproves of needing to play with groups. He doesn't want to play too many hours a day, so he disapproves of any rewards that encourage excess time.
So? Some people want to get a reward for time. Some people want to play with their friends without getting lower quality loot.
The amazing power of Wow is that you _can_ play any way you want. Solo, group, 24/7, infrequently. Do whatever you want, and the game will remain fun. Just don't be annoyed if not everyone wants to play the same way you do.
-Cassia
Vericon is coming!
World of Warcraft(and by extension ALL MMORPGs). He compares them to games such as chess and street fighter(because we all know that Chun Li is a modern day Confucius, only hotter!) and saying that in those games you don't have any material advantages over your opponent so they make better games. 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. However, a lot of games such as MMORPGs don't have such clearly defined goals. Yeah, you can build your character up to level 60 and be the mightiest warrior of all time if you want, but you don't have to do that in order to enjoy the game. There are many other goals you can take on which don't require that you "beat" your nemesi so to speak.
Me thinks this guy doth protest too much...
Monstar L
The article misses the point in a big way by comparing WoW with Street Fighter. The latter is indeed supposed to be all about a contest of skill. But in fact the huge popularity of RPG-style games with many gamers lies precisely with the fact that they can gain a feeling of progress from simply playing the game.
It's not about hardcore vs casual either - some very serious gamers play only RPGs and absolutely do not want their "skill" tested too much.
Ask any talented musician and they will tell you that talent/skill comes with a lot of work.
I think it is. It's called being paid by the hour (or by the year, if you are salary, but it's the same thing). It's vastly more popular than paying by measuring the quality or quantity of the actual work done which would be more fair but much more difficult to implement; skill is very hard to measure objectively.
I can write a program in 2 hours. Joe in the next cubical would take 10 hours to write the same program while Frank might only take 1 hour. Guess what, we all get paid nearly the same amount. Maybe the more skilled people get 10% or 20% more per year but there's no way Frank gets paid 10x what Joe makes. Only in some very specialized jobs (pro sports, lawyers, doctors) subject to direct control of the free market does skill frequently have any reasonable correlation to pay and then usually only for the top few percent.
The Street Fighter lessons might be all warm and fuzzy and represent the world you'd like to have but the WoW lessons reflect reality, sad as that may be.
I've learned that pretending to be a girl gets me free money, and can pay for my mount.
/ignore them, and never have to deal with them again.
I've learned that sometimes killing your friends can be hilarious.
I've learned that Alliance are whiny bitches, and are Kill On Sight, and don't pull thier weight to open those damn gates.
I've learned that living in a more colorful world then reality is very comforting. A world where my physical limitations don't apply. Where I'm a giant on the field, instead of an ant under the magnifying glass of real life.
I've learned that it someone does something you don't like or hurts your feelings, you can
I've learned that people like me more in this fictional world, and people like me less in reality.
I've learned that I am a WoW Addict, and that maybe I should get some help. I've spent all my money buying gold in this fictional world, and that maybe it's time I....
Hang on, my MC raid is starting...
There are no gods but ourselves.
It's a long list, here's a snippet:
....
1. It's always ok to Kill The Bad Guys (*almost* every game ever made)
2. I'll get the girl in the end, by just being myself, regardless of my deficiencies [most every JRPG]
3. I can't kill certain bears, they will give me bad druid faction [Everquest]
4. Stealing cars & beating hookers is OK, because the government is out to get us [GTA]
5. It's better to be part of a gang, because they can protect me from urban violence [UO]
6. The only important factor in building a great plane, is being a great pilot and having a dream [Grandia 3]. Oh yeah, also something nebulous about being able to cut out portions of wing "if it weighs too much"
7. Befriend your enemies, so that you can subjugte them militarily or culturally when you are resource starved, but not have to defend yourself in the mean time. Other people are my pawns, move them with skill. [Civilization 4]
8. Working Harder >> Working Smarter. I will eventually obtain all my goals if I spend a long time at it, while using my brain is always cheating. [Every MMOG ever made]
9. High twitch skills designate me a superior person who Gets Laid Often [FPSs, and a few MMOGers who don't get it yet]
10. Ancient relics are always of higher quality and provide better AC/DMG/Mana than new goods bought from modern vendors [Most RPGs]
Lesson Infinity +1 - Perhaps video games are not exactly a good place to learn life skills after all
I think there is a lot of missing the point in this thread.
The objection is not that someone who works hard gets rewards. The objection is that there IS NO WORK involved in advancing in MMO games beyond the timesink.
And that's why it isn't fun.
If I want to get good at Street Fighter, I can practice because the rules do not change. If the person playing against me has been practicing more, he does not get Super Chun Li. He has to use his skill. There is a chance that I can advance due to effort and luck.
Now imagine if every time you wanted to play Street Fighter, someone playing Super Chun Li and another person playing Super Guile could come in at any time and not only kick your ass, but steal your special moves so you couldn't use them any more AND they could block off access to Bosses like Bison. In fact, only huge 'guilds' would even have a chance at getting good moves or winning the game.
Fun, right?
Oh, and all they would have to do to get the Super Status would be to drop out of school and press "Fierce" 6000 times a day. Just playing so much would be enough to get the 'gold' and 'experience' they needed to get upgrades to Super status. They wouldn't really have to use any skill- 40 hours a week of crappy play would be enough to do it. Even better, they could go on eBay and BUY Super status from someone in Malaysia hired to get 'gold' for them.
Wow! Sign me up!
Anyone want to sign up for a Counterstrike game where I get Nuclear Weapons, Phasers, and Invisibility Cloaks because I am a Level 60, and you have to play in teams of 40 or you can't advance beyond Private First Class otherwise?
Or, let's play Mario Kart. I get a much better car and a 5 minute head start because I put a lot of time in, and you didn't. Wheeee! Fun!
It's been covered before but there are plenty of reasons to argue against this. One is that, if you allow the sale of in-game items the in-game items aquire value. If the items are of value, you open the possibility of getting sued every time you nerf an item or rollback a server.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
"2. Good raid-quality gear *should* be better than easily obtainable gear you can get while soloing"
why?
There is exactly no logical reason for this.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Or it could be worse. You would get paid for 2 hours work, while Joe would get paid for 10 hours work. So in the long run you and Frank get penilized for being better. (Don't laugh, I've seen it happen.)
Actually America teaches that skill = freedom. The skill to analyze opportunities, and the skills to take them. If you are a serious person who can identify the opportunites around you, you can live your life by doing things you enjoy. Over and over you see talented people applying themselves making a living off doing things they enjoy while the less opportunity wise folk will grudge through doing things the only way they've had the imagination to.
There's opportunities to be had all over the place, and if you don't see them you may want to consider brainstorming ways to build that analytical skill. Find someone who has it and study their algorithms.
when I say, "yeah, that's why I quit, too." It's one thing to be stuck in the slow lane because you "only" play 25 - 30 hours per week; it's another to know that many of the in-game rewards are completely out of reach, forever and ever, no matter how smart you play or how skilled you become. After about 10 months, I just gave it up.
How is this not like real life? One guy can learn some impressive martial arts skills. However, that person will always fall to to the one with superior time, technology, or numbers. It is for this reason that police forces are comprised of mostly normal individuals and yet are able to maintain order for the most part. It is also for this reason that warfare has become a matter of who can build the most planes and bombs. Certainly, WWI era fighting aces may have been more skilled, but that ace will always lose to a guided missle.
In fact, all of the key points in TFA seem to be rejections of the world we live in:
My conclusion is that the author of TFA has a problem with the way the world actually is. While I've never played WoW, from the description it sounds to me as if WoW teaches truths far more universal than Street Fighter and it's ilk. The world of Street Fighter is the world of the action movie where The Hero can overcome All Adversity and Live Happily Ever After. Games that teach that sentiment seems to me to be far more dangerous to their players than WoW.
From the author's bio:
So this guy has twitch skills, but no time. And he's written an article complaining that WoW rewards time more than skill. I can't help but feel that the complaint is really only a valid complaint for the author. So then the question is, is the author raising a valid flaw in WoW's game balance and to answer that we have to ask "How many of WoW's players feel the same way as a multiple-time national Street Fighter champion?" Pretty few I'd imagine.
I haven't played WoW, but I've played DAoC and Raph Koster's Star Wars Galaxies. I had a lot of "fun". I'm glad that my progression was not linked to my ability to compete in joystick twitching contests against Street Fighter Champions.
At some level the author seems to be suggesting that in the real world, skill is more valuable than time. If we ignore the fact that the author is ignoring the many skills of WoW players, e.g. social skills, marketing skills, leadership skills, and accept his premise, do we find agreement in the real world? Honda makes many more cars than TVR. Honda's are assembled by people with less skill than the TVR engineers. Is an individual Honda worth more than an individual TVR? No. Is Honda as an entity worth more than TVR? Oh boy yes.
To teach anyone that maximizing one's personal skill is the way forward in life would be to fail to acknowledge that humans achieve much more in groups.
As much to the dismay of gamers, Blizzard and every other major game developer out there exist to fulfill their primary goal: to MAKE MONEY.
While it would be nice to have more of skill based element in WoW, they are constrained by a few variables:
1: Technical limitations, for example: Latency. I've been playing WoW for quite some time now, and I remember when they released the pvp honor system patch. The first day I loaded up the game, it was a lag nightmare. I was at the fort in Stranglethorn Vale, along with roughly 80 fellow horde members. My chat log start spamming with ppl yelling "THEY ARE COMING!!", and I roughly 200 alliance started to steam roll us. It was beyond laggy. We crashed the server. Several times. The server was Mannoroth. Massive pvp raids are not that massive in WoW, which is a shame.
2: Appeal to a wide audience. This generally means the Lowest Common Denominator, as in your average run of the mill gamer. If you cater too much to the hardcore gamer, guess what: someone else will create a game that WON'T and will take your subscribing members away. You wanna tell that to their investors?
3: Appeal to the narrow audience. I.E. the hardcore gamer. Or in this case, the hardcore group of gamers. You know who they are: the ones that got to Onyxia the first 2 weeks of release. The ones that killed Nefarious the day Blizzard released the 'cockblock.' These are the ones that generate the most noise in the gaming community, the ones that make the game alive. These are the players that average players look at in awe at the type of gear they are wearing (2nd tier epics), the title they hold (High Warlord Someandsuch) and the mounts they ride ("What the hell is that? That doesn't look like a wolf at all!"). They are what the average player looks up to and goes "Wow, I wanna be just like that someday.." and drives them keep playing (and keep paying). What do you think will happen when the hardcore group 'beats' WoW the first two weeks of playing? What's their incentive to continue paying the monthly fee? It's not called the Treadmill (or the Grind) for nothing.
The World of Warcraft did not create the beast, it was created by it.
I think the article is, in a sense, objecting to where that skill is stored. The author of the article wants the joy of learning and improving himself - the skill is stored in him, in his mind and his relfexes. WoW externalises skill acquisition and a lot of the "skill" is stored in the character in the form of levels and bonuses and items etc. In this sense the individual playing need not learn or acquire skill, instead they can simply let their character do so. As a side effect of this externalisation "skill" is acquired at a uniform rate for everyone because "skill" is administered largely by a server and divorced from the individuals playing. This means that time directly correlates to skill and effort at gaining skill is almost purely a function of time - not of thought, nor effort to learn, nor natural talent, or anything else. The game does the learning for you and absolves you of a certain amount of responsibility for thinking. Moreover "skill" is now something that individuals no lonmger possess - it is something that "game characters" possess and can be bought and sold as a commodity; it is no longer something unique and special to you that you can always retain. This is, I feel, the real reasons for his objections. Whether you agree with them or not you should at least realise that there is something significant at work here.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Hmmm. You haven't discovered anything new... I think it is. It's called being paid by the hour (or by the year, if you are salary, but it's the same thing). It's vastly more popular than paying by measuring the quality or quantity of the actual work done which would be more fair but much more difficult to implement; skill is very hard to measure objectively.
I know Slashdot hates MBAs, but let you share with you something called piece work. Many people are paid by the job (or "piece") Think of flat rate vs. hourly mechanics. Piece tes used to be fairly common. It is just that with a service economy it is tough. With fungible goods, if you make 10 and I make 1, it is fairly simple to say that you should be paid 10 times as much. But with a service economy it is different For example, if I write ten buggy programs, and you write 5 flawless ones, how would you pay?
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Why don't blizzard and others create servers for players who prefere to play less than 1h a day ? Since they don't make money on the actual number of hours you play, they shouldn't care.
Knowing that I'd have to compete against hard-core players is definitely one reason I do not even try MMPORPG ...
Funny, I've seen that attitude (time invested > skill/talent) from people most of my life -- long before WoW existed.
Consider two people, let's call them Alice and Bob. Alice picks things up quickly, and is able to get an A in a certain class with a minimum of studying. Bob has to go to more effort, and while he can pull off an A in the same class, he has to do several hours of studying each night to get there.
Which is more valuable? Alice's facility with the subject, or Bob's ability to invest time? Both got to the same place -- mastering the subject to the extent needed for the exam. As far as the school is concerned, both are commendable.
But I've never heard someone like Alice disparage Bob's achievement as being worthless because all he did was study, while I certainly remember hearing people like Bob disparage Alice as being lazy, because "I worked for that A, and what did she do?"
The attitude is out there, and it's hardly new.
It's almost impossible to come up with legitimate puzzle-solving missions that won't be listed on websites with full, step-by-step solutions 20 minutes after they go live.
Yes, you can decide to forego the web sites, but you're back to the original article's thesis: You'll still be standing there with less quality items than those with the time and magical ability to avoid bed sores on their @$$.
And he's right. There was that study last year where top programmers are 4x as productive as the average ones, and there were problems they could solve that average ones could not no matter how much time they were given.
Yes, an RPG is the exact opposite of reality in that respect. Yet you cannot put in intellectual challenges because people will just go to Allakazham and get the answers.
The only intellectual challenge that was never solved in an RPG of which I'm aware was the original way for a paladin in EQ to gain the Fiery Avenger supersword. After six months in which the company swore it was in the game and that the quest was tested to work, but nobody on any server had gotten it, they changed the quest to make it easier.
Of course, whether the quest was due to intellectual difficulty or only partly that, and partly that someone, somewhere on some server would stumble across something at some stage (or multiple stages) remains to be seen.
There used to be rumours of a giant clockwork dragon in or under the gnome city, and a gnome-donated tower in one of the human cities. Nothing. And what's up with those various strange alters and whatnot all over the EQ planet (one, for example, is where the two named beetles in Mountains of whatver hang out, others in NRO.) Nothing.
And people are cleverer than the game designers could possibly imagine. The "clockwork dragon" theory was shot down when someone figured out how to load up all the zones in the tutorial application and you could go exploring. Nothing, not even in any of the normally unvisitable god zones.
Still, one can get a good feeling of accomplishment, say, beating all 125 levels of the original Lemmings without looking up solutions. Yeah, that guy with a giant L on his forehead finished first because he looked up the answers. Woo. Hoo.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"My emphasis added, which answers your question."
no, it does not.
The premise is based that the game is competitive, which is does not have to be.
You want special gear thats just for PVP cmobat, swell; But there is no reason someone who only plays a few hours a week can't have an orange item, since we will not be in competition with the people that raid.
If you are raiding for the sole purpose of getting rare stuff, then you are Blizzard's bitch.
Persoanlly, when I raid I get the same thrill finding a rare item that I do when I solo,but the number one reason I raid is to have a good time with other people online. I don't raid much, but I have had some great times in a raid and not getting any item of significant value.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In real life, I am alice or was like alice.
Being like alice is great, until you hit the wall. The wall being the subject, or as in my case several, you can't quite grasp at once. Up until this point I had never studied a subject at home for more than an hour.
Hitting the wall happened to me a couple of years into college, pretty much the worst time possible. Suddenly I didn't get it and then there I was without a tool to get past the wall.
Now years later, I have got that tool. The ability to sit down and study something.
When things get hard enough we all become Bob...
I just wish school would have given me the tool of a Bob sooner...
I quite caught that point, and this is pretty much how things are in real life: The person who goes it alone is not going to have the success of people working in groups. Even if you're talking about (say) a solo recording artist, you're talking about a huge support network surrounding that person, including the producer, studio musicians, promoters, the works. If you're talking about a pro tennis player, the big successes have their entourages including family, coach, trainer, someone to manage the money to make sure they don't go broke, a business manager to deal with the licensing, and for women's tennis, a tutor so they don't miss out on the 9th grade. If you're talking about a hacker, you've got the folks who wrote the compiler, editor, libraries...
In real life, you'll be locked out of the best things trying to do it all yourself, and justly so. The ability to work with a group is more valuable than gold, and you don't have to become an extrovert to learn how.
People like Alice don't know what to do when they actually ARE challenged. I certainly didn't. Thank god I glided through college with minimal turbulance. But there were times when I thought, "this is hopeless," rather than, "well, if I study, I can do this."
I can't set my own goals. I let others set goals for me, and then I achieve them or fail them, but I never struggle as hard as anyone else. If I set my own goals, I let them slide.
All in school, I would (unconsciously, almost naturally) detect how much work a course needed within a couple weeks. Then, I would set cruise control to that altitude which satisfied my academic success.
People who aren't naturally intelligent learn to set goals, to complete tasks through hard, annoying work... you'd have to restructure the school system so that each student gave their maximum potential.
The question is - do we want a society where everyone is constantly working harder and harder, until everyone has either burned out or given up?
I think over-achievers are a necessary evil, otherwise nothing would get done in a timely fashion. And under-achievers are necessary as well, for they keep everyone chill and don't end up setting the bar too high.
Or something like that. Just thinking out loud and nobody will read this post.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.