Justifying the limits on player influence

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned; it has been three months since my last confession. In the past few weeks, I have not been faithful to World of Warcraft. I have been cheating on WoW with another game, and I am a bit ashamed of it because it has meant less inspiration for topics I could write about for this blog. Who is this mistress who has pulled me away from the game, you ask? She is a tempting one, one who has caused many to falter from their chosen paths. She is the indie game sensation... Minecraft.

It's understandable if you haven't heard of Minecraft, but the fact that it is the most successful indie game of all time, and it's only in alpha, should say something about the phenomenon it has become. I could never do the game justice with my own explanations, so I'll just direct you to YouTube user SeaNanners, who explains the game quite well in his "Welcome to Minecraft" series. You can start with part 1 here and go on as you please. I invite you to watch his video (or even a few of them) if you aren't familiar with the game, since it will give you a better idea of where I'm coming from when I talk about these two games, World of Warcraft and Minecraft.

Minecraft is an interesting game. It's a sandbox game, a game that answers the question of, "What do you do in this game?" with "Whatever you want to." It's similar in that respect to games like Dwarf Fortress or Animal Crossing, especially the latter, in the much of the fun that there is to be had is driven by the player's creativity, rather than things like missions or other objective goals. This may sound boring to players used to games where what you do in-game is entirely driven by what the game designers want you to do, but once you adjust to this freedom and all of the possibilities it provides, some pretty amazing things are possible. I, for example, built in my Minecraft world, complete from scratch, a volcano which is continually erupting. Someone else has built a sixteen-bit computer in Minecraft, and a group of people worked together to build York Minster Cathedral to scale in the proper size. It's pretty amazing what one can do in this game.

But what does this have to do with WoW, you ask? Well, playing Minecraft has made me realize just how little freedom we have in WoW, even when it seems like we have so much. Sure, there is plenty to do in this game--raids, leveling, battlegrounds, crafting, fishing--and yet, we are very limited in how we can tackle all of these options. If we wanted to try to take Warsong Gulch by destroying our opponents' entrance into the battlefield, rather than just capturing their flag, we couldn't do it. If we wanted to try taking Icecrown Citadel by just flying to the top of the Frozen Throne, we couldn't do it. If we wanted to finish a quest where we act as a double agent by converting over to the other side, rather than by returning to the side we were working with before, we couldn't do it. Though there are many things we can do in WoW, how we go about those activities is really pretty linear. We can choose how we fight Blood-Queen Lana'thel on our way to Arthas, but we can't try using deception, espionage, or even diplomacy to get past her. When starting a death knight, we can't choose to remain an agent of the scourge and play on the side of evil if we want to. What we do and much of how we do it is all decided for us.

This kind of limited freedom is something I have discussed before, such as when I discussed how we players really don't have any power to change how the plot of WoW progresses, and when I discussed how we players can't use the knowledge we have to change our character's actions, for their actions are dictated by the plot of the game. Having given it some thought, though, I can now see why our actions in WoW are so limited and so inconsequential: for a game of this scope, they have to be.

In terms of justifying the lack of consequences of our options, one of the things that makes WoW, in my opinion, great, is that everyone gets to have the same great experience when they play, as long as they are willing to put in the effort. Someone who started playing five years ago and someone who started playing five months ago both have equal objective odds of being able to complete the Wrathgate questline or take down the Lich King, as long as they are both willing to put in the same amount of work. Now, if our actions had greater consequences for the game's world, some of these experiences could be lost, and new players would have no chance of experiencing them. Without the use of phasing to show the consequences of our questing in Dragonblight, new players would come to the zone and see that every significant thing that needed to be done had been done. If a player completing the Wrathgate questline caused the changes that are currently phased to happen permanently to the zone, newer players would have no chance at seeing this amazing questline. And if killing the Lich King permanently crippled the enemies in Icecrown Citadel (as killing their leader should), then newer players wouldn't experience the satisfaction of beating that raid when it was as difficult as it could be, and their satisfaction would be shallower for that reason. Or even worse, if players killing the Lich King killed him for good, players who were just a bit behind in getting to him wouldn't be able to fight him at all. In short, WoW must remain a static world so that new players can experience it and all its majesty the same way veterans get to.

As for the limitations on the kinds of choices players can make in how they tackle the game, suffice it to say that WoW is a huge game. Blizzard has enough on their hands trying to make a game as expansive as WoW is now; imagine how much work they'd have to do if there were multiple ways of going through it. If, for example, death knights could decide to stay with the scourge, Blizzard would need to design an entire set of quests to see those death knights to level 80 (soon to be 85), and that would take away from time they could spend developing more content for the rest of us. If the game didn't include so many different areas of play, perhaps there could be options like this, but because we have so many options in terms of what we do, we can't have many in terms of how we do what we do. It's just not feasible.