Are our actions in WoW meaningless?

As those of you who found my blog through wow.com know, I am currently reading World of Warcraft and Philosophy. Though the book as a whole is very interesting, there is one point in it that has stuck with me ever since I read it: we give our lives meaning based on how we change the world, and because the world of WoW is almost impossible to change in any meaningful way by player action, everything we do in WoW is meaningless.

I think the most poignant example of this point is the Argent Tournament daily quest You've Really Done It This Time, Kul. For those of you who do not have access to this daily, it involves killing members of the Cult of the Damned for keys to unlock the cages holding Kul the Reckless and four other crusaders whom he has taken with him to fight the Cult of the Damned. Unlike the other Silver Covenant Argent Tournament dailies, this one is not on a rotation with any others, meaning you do it every day. Every day, you go free Kul from his cage, and sometimes he says, "Thank the Light. I'll never do anything this foolish again." And then, the next day, he is back in that cage, and you need to rescue him again.

Many dailies are the same way. No matter how many times you do Taking Battle To The Enemy, the number of cultists in Icecrown is never reduced. No matter how many times you do The Ghostfish, Marcia will never discover the secret of that Phantom Ghostfish, as evidenced by the fact that she will likely send you out to do the daily again. No matter how many times you do Vile Like Fire!, those buildings will never actually burn down. Dailies pretty much involve players doing things over and over again with no perceivable impact on the game. Not one. The Argent Colosseum was built in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure no one did the dailies that involved collecting materials for their construction. The obvious exception is how the Sunwell Plateau dailies unlocked the next round of dailies as people completed them, but this is the only exception I can think of.

Think, also, about quests that send you out to kill an enemy that is threaten the town. I am sure many players will be familiar with the quest Wanted: "Hogger", in which you set of to kill a gnoll who... well, the quest never exactly makes it clear why he is a threat to Stormwind, but he must be. He is an elite, after all. Anyways, you get together with your friends, you kill this guy, and you go to get your reward. And yet, if you go back to that area, who do you find? Hogger! Yep, he has respawned, and your efforts to do Stormwind a favor have yielded nothing. Look at the first quest human receive when they start out: Kobold Camp Cleanup. You go kill those kobolds as Marshal McBride requested, and yet they are still there when you return for the next quest. I could go on and on, but any quest you do will have no real effect on the world around you, save the Wrathgate questline in Northrend and the series of quests in the Death Knight starting zone. (Both of which, you may notice, are often considered the best questlines in the game. Coincidence? I think not.)

Instances are almost identical in this regard. Suppose you and four of your friends go through Deadmines. After much trial and tribulation, you kill Vancleef. It was hard work, but you now have the satisfaction of removing that threat to Stormwind. Or do you? The next day, you see some people talking about how they are looking for more adventurers to help them go into the Deadmines and take down Vancleef. But I already killed him, you may say to yourself. Curious as to what they mean, you decide to follow them into the instance. The reappearance of the henchmen you killed before him gives you the impression that something is amiss, and lo and behold, there he is. The man himself, standing as if you have never killed him. Substitute any boss in any raid and it is the same case.

In short, almost nothing we do in WoW actually impacts the world itself, and thus, it is meaningless. We do get gear and experience for what we do, but that only affects our characters, not the world around us. Keep in mind that meaningless doesn't mean pointless. Our actions in World of Warcraft are fun and enjoyable, and for that reason, they have a point. I am only arguing that within the world of WoW itself, they are meaningless.

Is that a bad thing, though? If it weren't for all of the mechanics discussed above, WoW could not exist as a game. Dailies need to be repeatable by their nature. Enemies killed for quests need to respawn so that other people can kill them and complete the quest. Instances need to reset for the same reason. If instances were one-time things only, then it would be more and more difficult to find groups for them as the years went on. How many alliance players do you know that haven't run Deadmines? In other words, our actions in WoW need to be mostly meaningless, or else WoW couldn't exist as a game.

But is WoW doomed to meaninglessness? I think not. There are certainly things Blizzard can do to make our actions feel like they are having some effect on the world. Having more questlines like Wrathgate would be a start. Then we would feel like our efforts are actually changing Azeroth in some way. As for dailies, perhaps the number of enemies we need to kill or the number of objects we need to collect could go down as we do the daily. Imagine, for example, you go into the Argent Tournament area, and you pick up Taking the Battle to the Enemy. After you do it for five days, you notice that the number of cultists you need to kill has gone down to fourteen. After five more days, it goes down to thirteen, etc. Heartened by this fact, you keep doing the daily until, after twenty five days, you only need to kill ten. When you reach this point, the quest text itself changes. When you first started, the quest text read like this:

The coliseum is perched in the most dangerous part of the world, adventurer. The territory we've taken from the Scourge has been paid for in blood and misery, yet the enemy continues to strike back with a seemingly limitless army. To make matters worse, this undead army is supported and assisted by mortal sympathizers, the Cult of the Damned.

Go forth into Icecrown and slay any cultists you encounter.

Instead, it now reads like this:

When we first came here, adventurer, we were under constant threat from the Scourge and its mortal sympathizers. Thanks to your efforts, however, we have managed to reduce the threat they pose. Our work is still not done, though; go forth into Icecrown and keep killing those cultists.

Once again, you are further motivated to keep doing the daily. After fifty days, you now only need to kill five cultists to complete the daily (it wouldn't go any lower than that). Now the quest text has changed again.

We can't thank you enough, adventurer. Thanks to your tireless efforts, the Cult of the Damned is hardly a threat to us anymore. Still, we cannot rest, for if we stop our efforts now, they will only regain strength. You know what to do.

So you keep doing this daily, but you soon grow bored with it. You stop doing it each day, and upon going back to do it after thirteen days, you are horrified to discover that the number has gone back up to seven. After all, if you aren't keeping those cultists in line, who will?

To make this more general, I think it would give our actions some meaning if dailies rewarded you for doing them by becoming easier as you do so. However, to keep things fair, they would become more difficult if you neglected them. They would never go over their original amounts, though, which would never be made unreasonably high to account for the fact that it would eventually be reduced.

What about raids? Can anything be done with raids to make them feel meaningful? I doubt it, unless you are ok with running a raid only once. Perhaps a boss could say things like, "This time, I will not fall!" before you fight him, but there is no way to give raiding meaning without changing it in some fundamental way. If you make the bosses easier after they are defeated (this makes sense, since being defeated would, in fact, make them weaker if they needed to use all of their resources to come back to life), then players would complain about not being able to face the "real" boss more than once. It's a shame Blizzard nixed the old model of unlocking new dungeons by completing old ones, since that would give your character's actions in raids some sort of meaning. Perhaps they could make the final bosses in each raid drop an item that starts a quest to become attuned to the next dungeon, and it would be lootable by everyone. I would consider that a happy medium between the old system of attunement and the new system of accessibility.

Before ending this post, I want to bring up again that just because our actions are meaningless within the world of WoW doesn't mean that they are meaningless in our own lives. They bring up happiness, they allow us to socialize with people while playing a fantastic MMO, they provide a diversion from life's drudgery, and they allow the creation of a greater community of WoW players. Any time spent playing WoW is only meaningless from your character's perspective; it is not meaningless from your own.