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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."
... 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.
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!
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
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.
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.