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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."
If they were to say that, as a whole, MMORPGs teach that time > skill, I'd be willing to agree with them 100%. Trying to say that WoW teaches it is sort of unfair. I learned that time > skill back in EQ, and nothing's happened to change that lesson.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I've worked at a few places where seniority trumped skill. Thankfully, I've also worked at several where it didn't. The sad truth is that the "lesson" that WoW teaches is in fact real in many places.
This guy's the limit!
Why not look at it as the flip side of a coin? Up until recently, the only really popular multiplayer games were fighters and first person shooters. Now you can choose to build up skill over time (or have it innately), or plod the way of monotony in an RPG. More options is always gooder.
Since when was the purpose of WoW to teach the fundamentals of life and fairness?
Look, it's a video game. It's not a job interview, a checkout line in a grocery store, a pay-scale within a company. It's a video game. Act accordingly.
And if you still insist on trying to learn lessons from it, at least consider all of the lessons. For example, getting used to and interacting with a variety of classes and races without discriminating based on each characters appearance. And that a womans appearance does effect how you treat her. And that age doesn't matter, maturity of mind does.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
How much time did your star programmer spend learning his skills? I'd assume quite a bit. In WoW you spend massive amounts of time getting gear so you can kill off mobs quickly and effectively. In the real world you spend massive amounts of time learning a skill so you can tackle your job quickly and effectively. In my opinion the OP is looking at it from the wrong way.
That was one of the coolest things of MUDs (for youngster, the text-based MMORPGs of days gone by, though some still exist): in most of them, once you reached a high enough level, you could join the programming team and create your own new areas for the game. I learned more practical coding skills from nights of hacking LPC than from my computer science study.
Designing new areas would be quite the cool endgame for WoW lvl 60s. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that it takes too much skill and training these days to create good enough content for games like that.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
The problem with MMORPGS is not that it benefits those that put in more time, but that there is no detriment to failing. People keep talking about how everyone has the same opportunity and those that put in more time deserve better things, and then the loosely equat it to reality. The classic example is that a good "drop" will happen every so often, so those that play more are more likely to get that good "drop". The problem with this, and how it deviates from reality is that there is no draw back to failure. You could say that given enough tries even I can knock out Mike Tyson (yes it is possible). Problem is I would probably die, or be irreversably damaged in my first fight with him. In an MMORPG you just fail and get up again, probably even keeping all your expereince and property. If there were perma-death or a significant loss in experience or property then those with skill and patients would be able to catch up with less skilled players who happen to have more time.
Yes, that sort of thing. :-) And we couldn't resist trying to cheat...
We were players, we used to also have an "illegal" wizard character, but it got banned. We knew someone else from our uni had one, and hadn't used it for a year... login as Guest, send one mail saying "Hi, I'm Cobra, I want to code again but forgot my password, could you set it to 'sven'?" was all it took... then we went to a meeting in England, and while we were in a taxi with some admins who had picked us up from the station, they asked something like "Do you know if the Cobra who's logged in recently is the real one? Because we've got someone else claiming that _he_ is Cobra and his wizard was stolen..." Managed to bluff our way out. Years later we gave the account to someone else, who didn't know the history, and it happened some months later that the real Cobra was on the computer next to his when he logged in, and went ballistic... Fun times.
Or make an item that you can move into someone's inventory; it did something like 'add_action("", "funcname", 1)', which meant that each and every command that person did (and wasn't handled by the room object) would be passed through funcname() (executing with his permissions), and if that function returned false, the MUD would look at the next item in the inventory to see if that item perhaps implemented the command, so the person would never notice anything odd. So we'd move an item into an admin's inventory that added a line to the serialized savefile of another admin (changing his password), then destructed itself. We didn't login as the admin (too obvious), but we did have ftp access to absolutely everything... we changed the then Law admin (who annoyed a lot of people) into a lvl 16 playerkiller _player_ (attackable by almost everyone) and removed all traces of what we did. Admin died rather quickly after he logged in, utterly confused.
But it does make the code I write today more secure than most people's :-)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
David Sirlin (www.sirlin.net) is currently a Producer / Game Designer at Backbone Entertainment. He's a multiple-time national Street Fighter tournament champion, author of the book Playing to Win, co-organizer of the Evolution Fighting Game Championships national tournament series, past member of Street Fighter Team USA (representing America at an annual international tournament held in Japan), and one of the main subjects of Bang the Machine (a documentary film about the competitive Street Fighter scene). He also did a two-year stint in the World of Warcraft.
Somehow I think that Mr. Silin's competitive accolades have blinded him to the fact that WoW is only...a game. And perhaps it's just me, but the best life lessons that I've received have been from, well, life.
-h-
You're making your comment in jest, I know. You actually have a good counterpoint to his article: His claim is that the life skills WoW teaches are bunk, and you point out that "making money" is a life skill in the USA.
:)
:)
Why not look at his points one by one? He repeats himself twice, so he really just has 3 objections:
Time > Skill
He's right that a great talent can do as much in less time as a mediocre talent. That's just to get the same quality of work.
My best friend is in a band. He and I both admit that I have more musical talent in my left arm than he has in his whole body. The difference is that I'm a slacker, and he's constantly working at it. The result is that he has more and better CDs than I will ever make. His Ability far exceeds anything I've ever accomplished in any context.
And that's how it goes: Ability is a combination of effort and talent, and the coefficients favor effort: The mediocre talents who put in great effort always get ahead of the great talents who put in a mediocre effort in the real world.
I also feel that this is more fair; God has not seen fit to distribute all talents evenly, so claiming that talent is the most valuable thing (moreso than effort or ability) is tantamount to saying that blond hair and blue eyes are more valuable than black hair and brown eyes.
So here, I have to agree with what WoW teaches.
group > solo
I'm an introvert, just like the author. I am not a hermit. A few years back, I took the Dale Carnegie course -- you know, that Dale Carnegie?
The knowledge I gained changed my life. Learning the skills of how to get along with others didn't mean abandoning the introverted lifestyle. The main thing to realize is that people skills are learned skills, not inherent abilities. Even if you're an introvert, that doesn't mean you want to be a hermit or die alone -- and it also doesn't mean you can't learn how to deal with people effectively.
Your so-called "superior" may be an idiot jerk to you, but he got his position because he isn't a jerk to the right people. And if you look at the superiors who are great managers, they aren't great because they know more about your field than you. They're great because they are easy to get along with and know how to let you do your job well.
Take a look at the great bands that were great together, but when they split apart the solo acts all seemed wanting. Or how your family is not just a number of people, but seems to have a life of its own. Very few people really want to be completely alone, but some of us are just not very good at it; it would be a problem, except that anyone can get better at it. I know that I did -- or at the very least, I recognize my mistakes when I make them now.
So once again I find that WoW is teaching the right things with real life.
Terms of Service
I don't really have an opinion on this, because I am not a subscriber.
Work, in the real world, is more valuable than skill, and it also seems more fair that it should be that way. And well-made groups are more valuable than the sum of their parts -- especially families. In the end, I'd say the top two lessons he says WoW teaches are very important lessons and are the right things to teach.
Funny, I always thought that time *is* what gives you rewards. What percentage of your typical slashdot geeks are paid by the hour?
I think you'll find that "skill at the job" is, ultimately, what determines the size of that pay check. If you're highly skilled you will probably be paid a lot more for your time than someone who is just starting out. The main reason that time is used is that time is a lot easier to measure than skill - unless the job has a lot of very clearly defined tasks and milestones it is far more effort for the payroll staff to try and measure the results of your work and pay you accordingly than it is to set an hourly rate based on a general assessment of your skill and assume that the results of your labours are roughly equal to their initial estimation of the amount of value you can produce in an hour multiplied by the number of hours you worked. It is that estimation of "amount of value you can produce in an hour" that really determines how much you get paid, and that is solely determined on their best estimates of your skill.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Ahh dest wars :P I had forgotten about that thanks for the memory trip!
Another wizard forces you to...
mark self
dest 1
You have been disconnected...
"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.
My emphasis added, which answers your question. Really the OP is just dodging the point though. There is some sort of implicit acceptance of the idea that anything that can be done soloing must necessarily be easy in comparison to the difficulty of doing something in a group. Certainly there is no reason that "gear you can get while soloing" need be "easily obtainable". As it happens in WoW that is the case, but Blizzard could quite conceivably create tasks that must be done alone but are exceptionally difficult.
I think the real issue here is that for a difficult soloing task to be fair it needs to be restricted to a soloing task - otherwise a group will simply come and, with their combined might, pick up easy loot. Certainly that can be done, but it means tasks that only one player at a time can engage in. To manage to get the sort of throughput required to keep large numbers of players happy you either need to be creative in designing soloing tasks so they can suitably parallelised, or you simply make tasks group based to up throughput. Apparently Blizzard chose the latter.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
For everyone who argues that WoW, or any other MMORPG, is a game only for hardcore gamers, and that they alienate the casual fanbase, which has been argued over and over, I can only say that while I feel their pain, the people at Blizzard are not stupid. This is just standard marketing strategy.
I can tell you that the core base of WoW, from a marketing perspective, will always be for the hardcore segment of the population. This is because they are the ones who will always pay, month after month, for the service, and who will continue to remain loyal to the game for years. This is their core profit center, like it or not. If you look at customers of any industry there are four types of customers:
1. short term, high paying customers - These are casual gamers. They play maybe several months but don't stay on. They lose interest or are alienated by the hardcore players. This is me, btw.
2. short term, low paying customers (they try the trials but never pay for the service)
3. long term, low paying customers Also casual gamers who might start and stop, or decide to play some time later when a trial comes along.
4. long term, high paying customers (hardcore gamers). These guys generate the most profit for the company. They will be around for years after the casual players have decided they don't want to play.
Marketing strategy dictates you make the game most enjoyable for the hardcore gamers, because they will stay on long after the casual gamers have left, and they pay the most. They make the most money for the company, so they will be the ones that are cared for the most. Once the hardcore segment has left, you might as well put a dagger in the project. This is one of the reasons MMORPGs, which unlike most games, require a monthly subscription, will remain the boring levelling treadmill many people detest. Subscription models state that hardcore clients are the best center of profit. Hence the continuance of levelling treadmills. End of story.
Well, the fact that your daughter was playing a game with sexual innuendo and even nude (or near-nude) images is completely the fault of the ESRB for applying the rating "Teen" (13+?) to the game rather than the "Mature" (17+) rating. This is *not* the fault of the game designers or yourself. While it could be argued that every parent should be responsible for what their children are watching/playing, it is not truly feasible for most employed parents to test everything prior to allowing their children to use/view it. The same goes for R-rated movies.
On the other hand, most (if not all) 16 year-olds are either involved in sexual activity or have friends who are. The idea that sleeping with a professor can raise your grades is not new among 16 year-olds. While it may be the case that your particular daughter was unaware of this kind of thing at the time in discussion, it is very likely that she would have been introduced to the idea by her friends or any of a number of TV shows either during the week prior or during the week following. It is impossible to shelter a child from all forms of potentially harmful knowledge. But it is our job as parents to help guide our children through those times when they are confronted by such knowledge.
If you like doing big raids, but there is no special reward for it, so what? You are having fun doing big raids.
It makes just as much sense for me to demand uber high quality gear for acting solo because I prefer that to raids, and I think they should encourage solo play...