The curse of being genre savvy

This post contains spoilers revealed during the Lich King fight in Icecrown Citadel. At this point, I consider said spoilers to be fair game, but if you are trying to avoid them for some reason, you have been warned.

On my recent post about the seeming lack of panic in our post-Shattering world, Tesh of Tish Tosh Tesh left a comment which gave me quite a bit of food for thought:

"What strikes me as odd in the whole thing is that yes, it's later, but instead of prioritizing defeating the dragon, Varian and Garrosh are playing the whole "Orcs vs. Humans" game again.

I want a third, neutral faction for playable characters. The Horde and Alliance are both being led by dimwits."

Preach, brother! As I have said before, we can't influence our leaders in WoW the same way we can influence them in the real world, which leads to some very frustrating results as we see Azeroth suffer for their incompetence. In the face of these disappointments, it is tempting to wish we could strike out on our own, ignore this destructive faction conflict, and actually do some good for the world. It's tempting to wish such a thing, because we players are cursed with being genre savvy.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, genre savvy usually describes a character in a fictional universe who, if not knowing outright that they are in a work of fiction, at least know enough about the rules of that fictional universe to avoid some of the most common pratfalls characters in that universe would otherwise make. Scott from the Austin Powers series is a good example of a genre savvy character, endlessly mocking his father's overly elaborate plans, constantly asking why he doesn't take the simple routes that would guarantee him success. The Lich King is the closest thing World of Warcraft has to a genre savvy character (aside from the players, of course), in that he knows that if he lets "Azeroth's greatest champions" get stronger and more powerful by facing his best minions, they'll simply become even more powerful minions when he eventually kills them and enslaves them, making them even more useful. You can find more examples on the page linked to above if you still are a bit iffy on the concept.

So how does the idea of genre savvy play in to our frustration when we see the leaders of the Alliance and the Horde ignore the significant threats in favor of old conflicts that serve no purpose? As I mentioned briefly just now, we players are extremely genre savvy, pretty much by definition. After all, the definition of a genre savvy character is one who does all of the things the viewers know are the intelligent things to do in a given fictional situation, so you can't get much more genre savvy than the viewers themselves. As such, we knew that the conflict between the two factions is largely pointless and serves only to distract us from the more important threats, like Deathwing's return. We know this, and thus we are genre savvy, but our avatars do not, and thus they are not.

As I said in my post about the doomsday cultists who showed up before the Shattering, what we players know and what the characters we control know are two entirely different sets of knowledge, and this includes our knowledge about faction conflict. We know that the there is no reason to fight the Alliance or the Horde (depending on what side you play), because we know players on the other faction and know that they are good people too. Our avatars, however, are not privy to this knowledge, and their only experiences with the other faction are in battlegrounds, hardly the place for building camaraderie and friendship. It is this disconnect between our knowledge and the knowledge of our characters that creates the frustration we feel due to being genre savvy. Though we know what we know, we cannot impart our knowledge to our characters and make them act in a way that would be more conducive to a beneficial outcome. In other words, we cannot make our avatars genre savvy.

Now, this is typical of 99% of media. Most media simply doesn't contain particularly genre savvy characters, because those characters would know how to circumvent much of what creates tension and conflict in those universes, and the same can be said for WoW. And yet, as we control our characters going through this evolving world, we wish we could make our characters genre savvy. We wish we could do things like break off in to our own faction and make the world right again by disregarding faction conflict entirely. Yet this is not something I see as often in the communities surrounding other games. There are plenty of other video games that are story driven, with equally dedicated communities surrounding them, following their story lines with bated breath. Why don't they have the players of those games have the same reaction to genre-blind characters as we WoW players do to our game?

In my eyes, the biggest reason for this difference lies in the way that story is presented to us. Most games don't constantly evolve the way WoW does, with constant updates to the game and the story. In most games, the story is written, put together, and shipped complete to the customer, climax and all. All console games are like this; players simply experience a story that has already been written, and if they don't like it, tough, it's already been determined. In WoW, however, the story is constantly evolving right in front of us, and with as big of a community as WoW has, we often find out about changes to the story long before their consequences have been fully realized. If Cataclysm were a console game, we would boot it up, find out that Garrosh and Varian are acting really stupid, then experience the consequences of that as we play. As it is now, however, we see them being genre blind, and it pains us because it is happening now, and we know the consequences are going to be bad, but we can't do anything about it. Playing a console game with a plot determined long before the player starts playing is like watching a news story about an event that has just happened; we may not like what happens, but there's nothing we can do to change it. Watching the evolving story of WoW, however, is like watching live coverage of a tragedy half way across the world; we want to do something about it, and we think we can, because it is happening right now, but we are really powerless to change the course of events.

So not only are we cursed with genre savvy while our characters are not, but we are cursed to watch the story take place right before our very eyes and be unable to do anything about it. That is the true tragedy of being a WoW player who is invested in this game's storyline; we can only watch as the world goes to hell right before our very eyes, for we are powerless to do anything about it.