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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.
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.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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!
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
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?
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
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.
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.
Personally, i know that i have almost no artistic talent at all, and my attempts at art throughout high school usually prompted ridicule. According to the WoW (or more genreally, ORPG view) If i keep drawing crap for a long time, suddenly i'll be a better artist than someone who may have had no lessons or anything, but turns out to be the next monet.
If i'm awful at sports, yet i've played a lot, will that make me better than a natural athlete?
Sure, practice at a skill can make one better, but the amount of practice doesn't completely overwhelm natural ability, like the WoW model seems to say it does. That's what the author seems to have the most problems with. If I were to play someone in another game like starcraft, warcraft, street fighter, counter-strike, etc. Yes, it's probably the person who has practiced the most who is going to be better, and going to win. But the reason they win is because they are the better player, and both people go into the game on an equal footing, and it's not the practice itself that determines the winner, but the skill that develops as the result of the practice. Compare this to WoW, where if you have played longer, you have a "better" character.
Sure, for a lot of jobs, if you put enough time into something you can do it well, but only the people with natural gifts are going to become famous athletes, musicians, artists, etc. and the way WoW works is the oppposite of that, it's not the people with the most skill who become the best at what they do, it's people with the most time.
If there's anything more important than my ego around, i want it caught and shot now.
Cry more, noob.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
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!
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.
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
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.
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...