Overarching motivation, in-universe and out

One of the things I'm sure most of us love about the world of World of Warcraft is just how open of a world is it. There's so much to do with so many classes and races to do it with, and it's this scope that has kept me playing the game for what will soon be five years. But with this kind of open world comes the risk that it may be too open. A game like WoW runs the risk of becoming a quicksand box (a play on the term "sandbox game", which describes a game like WoW where there are tons of things you do and you can choose what you do), in which a sandbox game becomes so open that the player has no motivation to play, usually due to a lack of goals to accomplish. I know many of you will probably say that WoW's extensive array of quests prevent it from becoming a quicksand box, and as much as I may agree with you, quite of a few of my friend has tried WoW and stopped playing because of an overall lack of general motivation. There are quests, but for what purpose do we complete these quests? How does me helping a drunken gnome with his buzzboxes relate to defending Darnassus? Most of us probably get too caught up in these little intermediary goals to really think about our characters' lack of overall motivation (art reflects life, indeed), which is why we are able to overlook it.

But as with life, for some of us, our lack of an overall motivation can only last so long before we begin to ask, what for? Our characters get to explore this huge world, fight impressive and intimidating monsters, earn great rewards, but why? After all, there are a finite number of quests in the game, so those intermediary motivators will eventually run out, and then we will be forced to face the question again, what for? Though the introductory cinematics that play when we make a new character do give us an abstract motivation for our avatar, we have almost no way to follow up on that motivation for any extended period of time. Take the Night Elves as an example. Our motivation is to "defend Darnassus and the wild children of nature against the Legion's encroaching corruption." Ok then, so I do the quests in Teldrassil to help protect our tree from any sort of corruption it may be suffering from, but when those run out (as they do around level 12), what then? I'm apparently supposed to protect it from the Legion's corruption, but where is this Legion? How are they corrupting our tree? What am I supposed to do to stop them? Sadly, the game gives us no answers until higher levels, when we are no longer concerned with the motivation the cinematic gave us.

While WoW may not have very practicable main motivators for our characters, it does have quests that send us to new zones once we have outgrown the quests within an old zone, such as What's Wrong at Cenarion Thicket?, which sends players in Outland from Zangermarsh to Terokkar Forest. WoW abounds with these kinds of quests, and they allow us to make sure there are always quests for us to do, people for us to help, etc., so our character is never lacking in motivation Problem is, they still don't give our characters any overall motivation. They help give our characters overall motivation about as much as adding more quests to our starting zone would; they simply delay the realization that our characters don't have a larger purpose or goal.

As you can probably tell by now, I am mostly considering this issue from a lore/in-universe standpoint. We players have plenty of overarching motivators to keep us playing: leveling up, getting loot, experiencing content, overcoming long and difficult challenges, etc. How much story matters to us is something that varies from player to player, but you can't deny that the story of Warcraft truly is an amazing story, and it's a shame for a player to play without any thought for the lore whatsoever. After all, a player who plays with no thought for the story is really playing only for the numbers (be they gold, experience, stats, or whatever), and I would think that most of us would like to think of ourselves as more than people pushing buttons to make numbers bigger.

But though we would like to think that we have larger goals in mind when we play WoW, I think the current state of overall motivation in the WoW universe mirrors our own motivation for playing. Sure, we may have goals like getting more money, more levels, better gear, etc., but when you think about it, those motivators are a lot like our characters' seeming motivation (doing more quests): they give the illusion of a larger, overall purpose, but are really comprised of a series of smaller, nearly identical goals. In-universe, our characters really just do task after task for other people in exchange for money, experience, and occasionally gear. Expanded into the real world, this model still holds. Those of us who play the game to level up are really just chasing a series of milestones that result in a number increasing by one (as well as our characters evolving to become more powerful). Those of us who try to get better gear are really just chasing a series of small upgrades that have the larger effect of increasing some numbers on our character panel. I could go on, but I think you get my point.

But we players do have an overarching motivator that keeps us playing, something grander and deeper than increasing numbers: fun. We play this game because we enjoy it, plain and simple. Everyone has different definitions of fun, so I won't write a long expository paragraph of examples of ways that WoW is fun, and I don't think I have to. With rare exception, I'm sure most of you who read this won't need to be convinced that you play WoW because it is fun.

So if we players have an overarching motivator that isn't explicitly shown in the game, can our characters have one, too? I think so. It's a motivating factor that can't be found in our quests, our introductory cinematic, or maybe even our lore. It's something that may not even be able to be summarized in one word, but I shall try regardless. That motivating factor is what I would call honor (not that kind). You can call it whatever you like--dignity, valor, integrity--they are all words to describe the same thing: that sense of doing what is right. We help those in trouble because it's the right thing to do. We accomplish to intermediary goals because, by doing so, we are helping other people and making their lives better. Obviously I am talking about our avatars, though the same priciples apply in real life, as well. Considering how ephemeral our accomplishment in Azeroth are (different people can help the same NPC multiple times, and they'll still need our help when we roll a new character; gear upgrades never last forever; level gains are only as impressive as they are close to the level cap, and we can always do away with those gains by rolling an alt), something intangible like honor may be closest thing our characters have to a practicable, overarching goal.