After putting it off for a week or so, I have finally broken down and joined a guild. I didn't join one to raid or anything like that; as you learned in Monday's post, I am a happy solo-er and have no desire to change that fact. So rather than join a raiding guild which would level up quickly and need to live a lie every time I log in, I posted the following message to my realm's trade chat:
Solo-er looking for guild. I'm not looking to raid or PvP, but if you let me into your ranks, I will help your guild level and earn guild achievements. PST, but please don't just send an invite; I want to get to know you before I join.
And so, the serially guild-less player has joined a guild, all because he couldn't resist that 10% mounted speed increase or those items awarded by the guild achievements. What have I done differently since joining this guild? Well, I've killed a lot more critters and had a conversation about archeology... so really, not all that much has changed. As I said in my post on Guild perks and the death of the independent player, I was happily guild-less until Cataclysm came out, so when I joined a guild, I didn't plan on changing much about my playstyle. Still, considering that I have enjoyed the conversations I have had since joining the guild, I suppose this change to my playstyle has been, overall, positive, and also fits my prediction as to why Blizzard seemed to be targeting us solo players with these guild perks.
See, in my post that I mentioned above, I theorized that part of Blizzard's motivation for putting in these guild perks was to get willingly guild-less players like me to join guilds (or, at the very least, it was an unintentional positive side-effect). This would be good for Blizzard because being guilded makes a player less likely to quit should he/she get bored. If it's a raiding guild, the player risks losing his spot or falling behind in the progression if he/she takes a break. If it's just a social guild, that social element could be what keeps the player playing after he/she has stopped finding the game itself interesting. But in my searching for a guild, I found many people who had come up with some ways to obtain these guild perks that didn't really mesh with Blizzard's seeming intentions in putting in these guild perks. I found people who had created guilds comprised of only their characters. I heard tell of people who had created guilds for the sole purpose of avoiding being asked to join guilds, guilds which didn't even have a chat channel, and which would now also serve the purpose of giving members the guild perks, but served absolutely no other purpose.
These guilds seem to me to be a sign that some people would rather work around the encouragement Blizzard is providing to join guilds and would rather just go for the rewards. In other words, Blizzard is encouraging players to play one way and giving them incentives to do so, but players would rather work around the system put in and try to get those incentives without conforming to Blizzard's pro-guild ideals. If these perks were put in to encourage players to join guilds, the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds exist shows that not all players are willing to play as socially as Blizzard wants them to.
Now, I'm sure that encouraging guild-less players to join guilds wasn't the only purpose of these guild perks. The fact that it takes a long time to level up a guild means that these perks reward guild longevity, as well as discouraging players from reacting to guild drama by breaking off and starting their own guild, instead encouraging them to actually work through their issues. The fact that leveling up a guild actually requires the members to do something (questing, PvP, raiding, etc.) means that the guild perks rewards guilds who seek out members who are active participants, rather than seeking out large numbers of players just to have an impressively sized roster. And if nothing else, the guild perk and guild achievement systems breathe some life into what has long been a very stagnant and simple system. Still, one can't deny that those perks also discourage players from remaining guildless; the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds are popping up prove that they do. Whether these other benefits to the perks system actually materialize remains to be seen, but if, as I theorized, Blizzard wants players joining guilds because it will discourage them from quitting, than the "for guild's sake" guilds show that they haven't exactly been successful in that goal, because those guilds don't provide any incentive to keep playing after the game has gotten boring.
All this makes me think that the guild perk system has failed in its purpose of bringing guild-less players into guilds, simply because it hasn't meaningfully changed their playstyle or made them more likely to keep playing when they get bored. What does this say about the system as a whole? Well, it's entirely possible that it was never Blizzard's intention to change the playstyle of us serial solo-ers, so perhaps it hasn't failed because it was never trying to do that in the first place. It also says something about us players, something which I don't think will surprise anyone: some of us are quite stubborn. You can see this stubbornness in the refusal of some people to adapt to the new methods of play required by this expansion (crowd control, triage, etc.), but if these guilds for guild's sake have shown us anything, it's that that resistance to change applies outside of combat as well.
But if it was indeed Blizzard's intention to use these perks to make us guild-less players join guilds, then the fact that they have failed shows that some of us aren't going to change that easily. We players who don't look to play WoW socially may be rare, but we do exist, and we don't like being told how to play. It's bad enough when other players and our friends try to "convert" us to a more social playstyle ("Raiding is fun, you just haven't found the right guild yet!"), but when Blizzard does it too, that's especially infuriating. But perhaps that's just Blizzard's way of saying, "This is our game, and we get to tell you how to play it. Now be social!" Fine, Blizzard; you have won this round, because I have indeed joined a guild and started being more social. Just don't think you can push this much farther.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
How linear is Cataclysm, really?
Larisa has a post over on her blog in which she remarks on how linear Cataclysm's quest design is. Rather than allowing movement between the various parts of the zones, we are restricted to a set path by which we can progress through the quests. She compares it to "the moving walkway in the room where they keep the royal jewels at The Tower of London. The only way you can see them is by standing on that walkway, and it passes those jewels at set, nonnegotiable pace." And though I have only just completed the quests in Mount Hyjal and am thus ill-equipped to judge the expansion as a whole, I have to agree that the quest design in that zone was indeed very linear. It could have been worse, though; there were sometimes two quest hubs one could choose to go to, and you could choose which order you did the quests in each "round" of quests at each hub. Yes, it could have been a lot more linear, but for an MMO, a genre supposedly defined by an open world, it was indeed pretty straightforward.
Why did it take me so long to get through one zone, you might ask? As I mentioned in Friday's post, questing is not the only thing I have been doing since Cataclysm came out. I have done the fishing and cooking dailies every day, fished in Hyjal's lakes and rivers, searched the world for archeological fragments, and even taken some time just to fly around the old world (oh the flying, oh how I love it) and see the changes wrought by Deathwing's return. After all, questing isn't the only thing that has been changed or added in this expansion, and it would be a pretty poor way to experience it to focus solely on that aspect of this new Azeroth. But what's this? Choice in what I play when I play WoW? But I thought this game was supposed to be linear? (That's not a personal jab at you, Larisa; just a jab at the idea of WoW being linear.)
This is where I take issue with the idea that WoW has become "too linear", an idea I have heard elsewhere, aside from Larisa's blog. Yes, the questing has become more linear, but as the commenters on Larisa's post that I linked to earlier have pointed out, that's a necessity for phasing to be as prevalent as it is, and phasing is a necessity for us to think that our changes are having any effect on the world around us. But questing isn't all there is to World of Warcraft. There's PvP, dungeons, professions, secondary professions, and even just exploring the world to see what can be found. And even if some of these things themselves are pretty linear (professions especially; gone are the days of searching the AH for recipes or the world for vendors who sell them in a limited stock; we get our recipes from a pretty limited selection of sources these days), we are completely free to choose which ones we engage in and when. There's no "negligence punishment" mechanic put in to keep you in one part of the game when you'd rather be doing something else, outside of the fear of falling behind your guild.
Now, this does mean that in order to experience the true non-linearity of WoW, you need to take the initiative to do something other than what the game will direct you to do; the quests won't tell you to take a break and go try out archeology or PvP or fishing. The best you'll get is an occasional quest that will direct you to a dungeon of the appropriate level. I bring up this little detail because, in the past, I talked about the decline of Wrath of the Lich King heroics and the players' reacting to this decline by being more creative about how they ran heroics. In that post, I concluded that the player's running the heroics in unconventional ways was indeed a sign that the heroics had gone into decline, because players were running them in ways they weren't intended to be run. The implication of the conclusions I came to in that post was that if the game doesn't tell you specifically to do something, and you have to do that something to make the game interesting, then the game is a failure. If we apply this logic to Cataclysm's design, then that would mean that the fact that game can only be non-linear if players do something of their own accord to make it so--rather than because the game told them to--then the game fails at being nonlinear.
But the reason I concluded that players doing things in Wrath's heroics to spice up their heroic runs was a sign that heroics had declined was that the heroics weren't designed for that kind of play. Wrath's heroics were designed to be run in particular ways, and that fact that players weren't running them in those ways meant that they had failed. Cataclysm, however, is designed to support players doing things other than questing. If it weren't designed that way, archeology and all of the other things we can do aside from questing wouldn't be in the game. Cataclysm-era WoW is designed so that it can be played in a non-linear way, if the player chooses to do so. And therein lies the crux of the problem: WoW's linearity is inversely proportional to how much initiative you take to seek out other things to do within the game. Someone without that initiative will probably limit themselves to questing and the occasional dungeon run, and in doing so, they'll find WoW to be a very straight-forward game.
But in a way, I don't mind WoW being designed this way. It reminds me of the way that the story was told in the GameCube game Metroid Prime. In that game, you collected bits of the story (similar to the way we collect bits of lore through archeology) with your scan visor, including logs by space pirates and stories told by those who inhabited the planet where the game takes place before they were wiped out. You can also find vanity text aplenty by scanning various things in the environment, which adds even more to the atmosphere of the game. The beauty of this system was that it allowed players to experience exactly as much of the story as they wanted to. If they wanted a straight shoot-em-up, they could eschew the scan visor completely and just go in with gun ablazing. If they just wanted the background story but didn't want to hear all of the little details about the world itself, they could keep an eye out for the red scan nodes which would indicate a lore entry that would reveal the background of the world, while ignoring the other ones that just added to the atmosphere of the present situation. And if they wanted as many details as they could sink their teeth into, they could scan everything, which would tell them a lot about the story and about the world itself.
In a way, the non-linearity of WoW's design is like the depth of the story in Metroid Prime; both are at the control of the player. Just as players of Metroid Prime chose how much of the story they cared to experience, players of WoW choose how linear they want their experience to be. Are you looking for a game with a wide variety of things to do? Go out and find them; they're there for you. Are you just looking for a straightforward quest-based adventure? Fine, just follow the quests and do what they tell you. You'll miss out on a lot, but if that's how you want to play, who are we to say no? And if you don't want a linear experience, but you haven't taken the initiative to check out the other things there are to do in WoW? If that's the case, then who's really to blame?
Why did it take me so long to get through one zone, you might ask? As I mentioned in Friday's post, questing is not the only thing I have been doing since Cataclysm came out. I have done the fishing and cooking dailies every day, fished in Hyjal's lakes and rivers, searched the world for archeological fragments, and even taken some time just to fly around the old world (oh the flying, oh how I love it) and see the changes wrought by Deathwing's return. After all, questing isn't the only thing that has been changed or added in this expansion, and it would be a pretty poor way to experience it to focus solely on that aspect of this new Azeroth. But what's this? Choice in what I play when I play WoW? But I thought this game was supposed to be linear? (That's not a personal jab at you, Larisa; just a jab at the idea of WoW being linear.)
This is where I take issue with the idea that WoW has become "too linear", an idea I have heard elsewhere, aside from Larisa's blog. Yes, the questing has become more linear, but as the commenters on Larisa's post that I linked to earlier have pointed out, that's a necessity for phasing to be as prevalent as it is, and phasing is a necessity for us to think that our changes are having any effect on the world around us. But questing isn't all there is to World of Warcraft. There's PvP, dungeons, professions, secondary professions, and even just exploring the world to see what can be found. And even if some of these things themselves are pretty linear (professions especially; gone are the days of searching the AH for recipes or the world for vendors who sell them in a limited stock; we get our recipes from a pretty limited selection of sources these days), we are completely free to choose which ones we engage in and when. There's no "negligence punishment" mechanic put in to keep you in one part of the game when you'd rather be doing something else, outside of the fear of falling behind your guild.
Now, this does mean that in order to experience the true non-linearity of WoW, you need to take the initiative to do something other than what the game will direct you to do; the quests won't tell you to take a break and go try out archeology or PvP or fishing. The best you'll get is an occasional quest that will direct you to a dungeon of the appropriate level. I bring up this little detail because, in the past, I talked about the decline of Wrath of the Lich King heroics and the players' reacting to this decline by being more creative about how they ran heroics. In that post, I concluded that the player's running the heroics in unconventional ways was indeed a sign that the heroics had gone into decline, because players were running them in ways they weren't intended to be run. The implication of the conclusions I came to in that post was that if the game doesn't tell you specifically to do something, and you have to do that something to make the game interesting, then the game is a failure. If we apply this logic to Cataclysm's design, then that would mean that the fact that game can only be non-linear if players do something of their own accord to make it so--rather than because the game told them to--then the game fails at being nonlinear.
But the reason I concluded that players doing things in Wrath's heroics to spice up their heroic runs was a sign that heroics had declined was that the heroics weren't designed for that kind of play. Wrath's heroics were designed to be run in particular ways, and that fact that players weren't running them in those ways meant that they had failed. Cataclysm, however, is designed to support players doing things other than questing. If it weren't designed that way, archeology and all of the other things we can do aside from questing wouldn't be in the game. Cataclysm-era WoW is designed so that it can be played in a non-linear way, if the player chooses to do so. And therein lies the crux of the problem: WoW's linearity is inversely proportional to how much initiative you take to seek out other things to do within the game. Someone without that initiative will probably limit themselves to questing and the occasional dungeon run, and in doing so, they'll find WoW to be a very straight-forward game.
But in a way, I don't mind WoW being designed this way. It reminds me of the way that the story was told in the GameCube game Metroid Prime. In that game, you collected bits of the story (similar to the way we collect bits of lore through archeology) with your scan visor, including logs by space pirates and stories told by those who inhabited the planet where the game takes place before they were wiped out. You can also find vanity text aplenty by scanning various things in the environment, which adds even more to the atmosphere of the game. The beauty of this system was that it allowed players to experience exactly as much of the story as they wanted to. If they wanted a straight shoot-em-up, they could eschew the scan visor completely and just go in with gun ablazing. If they just wanted the background story but didn't want to hear all of the little details about the world itself, they could keep an eye out for the red scan nodes which would indicate a lore entry that would reveal the background of the world, while ignoring the other ones that just added to the atmosphere of the present situation. And if they wanted as many details as they could sink their teeth into, they could scan everything, which would tell them a lot about the story and about the world itself.
In a way, the non-linearity of WoW's design is like the depth of the story in Metroid Prime; both are at the control of the player. Just as players of Metroid Prime chose how much of the story they cared to experience, players of WoW choose how linear they want their experience to be. Are you looking for a game with a wide variety of things to do? Go out and find them; they're there for you. Are you just looking for a straightforward quest-based adventure? Fine, just follow the quests and do what they tell you. You'll miss out on a lot, but if that's how you want to play, who are we to say no? And if you don't want a linear experience, but you haven't taken the initiative to check out the other things there are to do in WoW? If that's the case, then who's really to blame?
Monday, December 13, 2010
The roots of my soloist tendencies
A recent shared topic over at Blog Azeroth has asked us about the ways that how we handle our real-life jobs affect how we play WoW. Considering that I am still a student and the ways I handle my part-time jobs don't exactly speak volumes about who I am as a person, I consider it fair to instead look at how I handle school and whether that might say something about my play habits in WoW. And after some reflection, I realized that is does say something about how I play WoW, and could reveal exactly why I'm a solo-er.
Back in high school, group projects were the bane of my existence. I feared any assignment where I would be forced to work with other people and put together something decent, because I simply had higher standards for my work in high school than most of my pears did. I have always been something of an overachiever, and my grades in high school were no exception, so I tried my hardest to get the highest grades I could possibly get in all of my classes. The thing is, the people I was grouped with usually didn't share this attitude, so I would be put in groups with people whose standards of what is acceptable work were lower than mine. I grew to detest needing to put my name on something that wasn't up to my standards, especially because these projects often contributed a significant amount to our final grade. So I often ended up as either the overbearing leader or the person who did the whole project himself (usually the latter), just so I could be sure it would be up to my standards. To this day, I still detest working with people on something where we will be judged as a group, rather than by our individual contributions and efforts, for the very same reason.
This anecdote illustrates something that has long been one of the defining aspects of my personality: I do not like depending on other people. Perhaps I'm jaded because I have many experiences that show just how undependable people can be. I've had dozens of friends not keep their commitments to social plans, sometimes showing up hours later than they said they would with the flimsiest of excuses and without even a hint of repentance for keeping me waiting, twiddling my thumbs (I have learned since then to always have something to do if I'm waiting for a friend to hang out, or to go to their place instead). I took a bus to school all four years of high school, and though the bus was usually dependable, the numerous times when it wasn't has made me hesitant to let a person be the linchpin in my plan to get anywhere. Point it, because of my less-than-solid faith in others to always come through when they say they will or when I need them to, I became a fiercely independent person in many aspects of my life. I took up biking so I wouldn't be dependent on others to give me rides places. I opted for solo-projects whenever they were an option so that other people wouldn't drag the quality of my work down.
WoW has been no exception to the general rule that anything I do that involves other people will invariably show me that people aren't dependable. I've seen people miss raids and provide no explanation afterward. I've seen people ragequit and leave the raid stranded in the middle of an instance, then come back the next day as if they had done nothing wrong and owed no one an apology. I've seen people leave their computer in the middle of a boss fight, then come back after we had managed to just barely kill the boss without their help, and simply say that the phone rang. After some time, I just grew sick of it, and the truth is, I didn't enjoy raiding enough to put up with this nonsense or up my game enough to become worthy of a top-end guild that wouldn't put up with those kinds of shenanigans. So I gave up on this supposedly integral part of the game, and I have never been happier.
The beauty of the solo-er's world is that whether you succeed or fail, whether you rise or fall, is solely dependent on you. In raiding, you can bring your A-game to every raid, but if other people aren't bringing their A-game too, you aren't going to succeed. Effort put in does not always scale with the quality of the results. In the solo part of WoW, however, that is completely different. When I decide to go solo an elite for fun, whether I succeed or die will be determined solely by whether I bring my A-game to the fight. If I decide to go on a long grind for some purpose or other (like getting Guardian of Cenarius), whether I succeed will be determined solely by whether I have the perseverance to see it through. And should I fail, I have no one to blame but myself, which means I can examine my playstyle and potentially find the flaws that lead to my failure, and either fix them or remember them when considering future endeavors. I am dependent on no one else for my own success, and that makes me very happy.
That said, the question I get asked most often when I tell people that I don't raid or PvP in WoW is, why even play a massively multiplayer online game if I'm not going to play with other people? The answer is quite simply that the solo content is good enough to hold my interest. I may be a square peg in a round hole, but that hole is big enough to contain my supposedly incompatibly shaped playstyle. As long as that fact remains true, I see no issue with playing this game the way that I find most fun, and should I stop finding it fun, I'll simply stop playing. See, that's another beauty of solo play: social obligations won't keep you playing if you don't enjoy the game anymore. I know some people who kept playing long after they had lost interest in the game simply because their guild depended on them, and they really grew to hate it. Yet they still spent a lot of time playing WoW, when they could have been doing something they enjoyed, because their guild needed them. No such conundrum faces us soloists, which is one more reason why I like this playstyle.
Back in high school, group projects were the bane of my existence. I feared any assignment where I would be forced to work with other people and put together something decent, because I simply had higher standards for my work in high school than most of my pears did. I have always been something of an overachiever, and my grades in high school were no exception, so I tried my hardest to get the highest grades I could possibly get in all of my classes. The thing is, the people I was grouped with usually didn't share this attitude, so I would be put in groups with people whose standards of what is acceptable work were lower than mine. I grew to detest needing to put my name on something that wasn't up to my standards, especially because these projects often contributed a significant amount to our final grade. So I often ended up as either the overbearing leader or the person who did the whole project himself (usually the latter), just so I could be sure it would be up to my standards. To this day, I still detest working with people on something where we will be judged as a group, rather than by our individual contributions and efforts, for the very same reason.
This anecdote illustrates something that has long been one of the defining aspects of my personality: I do not like depending on other people. Perhaps I'm jaded because I have many experiences that show just how undependable people can be. I've had dozens of friends not keep their commitments to social plans, sometimes showing up hours later than they said they would with the flimsiest of excuses and without even a hint of repentance for keeping me waiting, twiddling my thumbs (I have learned since then to always have something to do if I'm waiting for a friend to hang out, or to go to their place instead). I took a bus to school all four years of high school, and though the bus was usually dependable, the numerous times when it wasn't has made me hesitant to let a person be the linchpin in my plan to get anywhere. Point it, because of my less-than-solid faith in others to always come through when they say they will or when I need them to, I became a fiercely independent person in many aspects of my life. I took up biking so I wouldn't be dependent on others to give me rides places. I opted for solo-projects whenever they were an option so that other people wouldn't drag the quality of my work down.
WoW has been no exception to the general rule that anything I do that involves other people will invariably show me that people aren't dependable. I've seen people miss raids and provide no explanation afterward. I've seen people ragequit and leave the raid stranded in the middle of an instance, then come back the next day as if they had done nothing wrong and owed no one an apology. I've seen people leave their computer in the middle of a boss fight, then come back after we had managed to just barely kill the boss without their help, and simply say that the phone rang. After some time, I just grew sick of it, and the truth is, I didn't enjoy raiding enough to put up with this nonsense or up my game enough to become worthy of a top-end guild that wouldn't put up with those kinds of shenanigans. So I gave up on this supposedly integral part of the game, and I have never been happier.
The beauty of the solo-er's world is that whether you succeed or fail, whether you rise or fall, is solely dependent on you. In raiding, you can bring your A-game to every raid, but if other people aren't bringing their A-game too, you aren't going to succeed. Effort put in does not always scale with the quality of the results. In the solo part of WoW, however, that is completely different. When I decide to go solo an elite for fun, whether I succeed or die will be determined solely by whether I bring my A-game to the fight. If I decide to go on a long grind for some purpose or other (like getting Guardian of Cenarius), whether I succeed will be determined solely by whether I have the perseverance to see it through. And should I fail, I have no one to blame but myself, which means I can examine my playstyle and potentially find the flaws that lead to my failure, and either fix them or remember them when considering future endeavors. I am dependent on no one else for my own success, and that makes me very happy.
That said, the question I get asked most often when I tell people that I don't raid or PvP in WoW is, why even play a massively multiplayer online game if I'm not going to play with other people? The answer is quite simply that the solo content is good enough to hold my interest. I may be a square peg in a round hole, but that hole is big enough to contain my supposedly incompatibly shaped playstyle. As long as that fact remains true, I see no issue with playing this game the way that I find most fun, and should I stop finding it fun, I'll simply stop playing. See, that's another beauty of solo play: social obligations won't keep you playing if you don't enjoy the game anymore. I know some people who kept playing long after they had lost interest in the game simply because their guild depended on them, and they really grew to hate it. Yet they still spent a lot of time playing WoW, when they could have been doing something they enjoyed, because their guild needed them. No such conundrum faces us soloists, which is one more reason why I like this playstyle.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Why I'll be taking the expansion slowly
At this point in the expansion, I have spread my time out quite a bit between all there is to do. I have quested a bit in Hyjal, played through the Worgen starting experience and gotten my little rogue to level 13, gotten my archeology to 37, leveled cooking about 25 skill points, fished a bit, leveled enchanting to 460 with my leftover Wrath mats, an through it all, gotten my druid half way to level 81. And I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But something captured my attention more than the great new quests, the fragments I find with archeology, and even being able to fly in the old world (which is, in my opinion, the best part of this expansion pack). That something was the goblins and worgen I saw questing along my side in Hyjal. Yes, characters which I thought couldn't have existed for more than a day or two, now above level 80. Seriously?
Now, I quickly realized that these particular players may have simply race changed an old character that was already level 80, and I felt very silly, but my moment of myopia did remind me of a thought that always comes up for me when new content comes out: power-levelers, and how little I understand them. Now, I'm no one to judge other people for how they play and suggest that they play otherwise; as a solo-er, I'm on the receiving end of enough of that to know better than to subject anyone else to it. So let me just say right now that I'm not writing about power-levelers to judge them, or admonish them, or suggest that they change their ways. I am only writing about them because someone choosing to race through the new content that quickly just boggles my mind.
But even with that said, I understand that there are some people who enjoy the challenge of finishing content as quickly as possible, and for them, the content itself comes second to its speedy completion in terms of what they find fun about the game. If that's the way they want to play, I'm happy to see them finish so quickly. I, however, am not that type of player; I play for the content itself. And the thing is, once you finish the content, that's it; it will never be new and exciting again. It is forever in the realm of "seen it", and you can never enjoy it as much as you enjoyed it the first time. And considering that this is my chance to "start over", to break all of the bad, fun-killing habits I formed in Wrath of the Lich King, one of the habits I would like to break is the habit of steamrolling through content and exhausting it quickly.
Now, one might say, as long as you play through the content itself a slow pace when you do play, what does it matter how much time you spend playing? If it takes me fifteen hours spent over the course of ten days to get to level 85, and a friend of mine gets there in the same amount of /played time but spends two days doing it, haven't we both soaked up the content at an equal rate, and shouldn't we have theoretically enjoyed it just as much? It is to this question that I say no, and that is the fundamental reason I am taking the expansion slowly, both in terms of content experienced per hour of play and in terms of real-world time I spend playing. There have been some games that I played through in a short amount of real-world time, and it has been my experience that playing through a game like that can ruin the game for me because I simply get sick of it faster. The rate at which I get sick of a game just seems to increase as I spend a greater fraction of my time playing it.
It is with this knowledge that I have become very deliberate about how much I allow myself to play WoW. WoW is a big part of my life, you see; I spend a lot of time reading about it online, blogging about it here, and, of course playing it. Yet WoW became stale for me quickly because of how much I played during Wrath of the Lich King. With Cataclysm breathing new life into the expansion pack in so many ways, I'm not going to allow that to happen again. I plan to play more casually than I did before (you could say I was a dedicated soloist before), and by doing that, I hope to maximize the amount of /played I can get out of this content before I stop enjoying it. If that means that I can't write about things from first hand experience until long after others have already experienced them, so be it; I'll take that fall for the sake of a game I enjoy this much.
Now, I quickly realized that these particular players may have simply race changed an old character that was already level 80, and I felt very silly, but my moment of myopia did remind me of a thought that always comes up for me when new content comes out: power-levelers, and how little I understand them. Now, I'm no one to judge other people for how they play and suggest that they play otherwise; as a solo-er, I'm on the receiving end of enough of that to know better than to subject anyone else to it. So let me just say right now that I'm not writing about power-levelers to judge them, or admonish them, or suggest that they change their ways. I am only writing about them because someone choosing to race through the new content that quickly just boggles my mind.
But even with that said, I understand that there are some people who enjoy the challenge of finishing content as quickly as possible, and for them, the content itself comes second to its speedy completion in terms of what they find fun about the game. If that's the way they want to play, I'm happy to see them finish so quickly. I, however, am not that type of player; I play for the content itself. And the thing is, once you finish the content, that's it; it will never be new and exciting again. It is forever in the realm of "seen it", and you can never enjoy it as much as you enjoyed it the first time. And considering that this is my chance to "start over", to break all of the bad, fun-killing habits I formed in Wrath of the Lich King, one of the habits I would like to break is the habit of steamrolling through content and exhausting it quickly.
Now, one might say, as long as you play through the content itself a slow pace when you do play, what does it matter how much time you spend playing? If it takes me fifteen hours spent over the course of ten days to get to level 85, and a friend of mine gets there in the same amount of /played time but spends two days doing it, haven't we both soaked up the content at an equal rate, and shouldn't we have theoretically enjoyed it just as much? It is to this question that I say no, and that is the fundamental reason I am taking the expansion slowly, both in terms of content experienced per hour of play and in terms of real-world time I spend playing. There have been some games that I played through in a short amount of real-world time, and it has been my experience that playing through a game like that can ruin the game for me because I simply get sick of it faster. The rate at which I get sick of a game just seems to increase as I spend a greater fraction of my time playing it.
It is with this knowledge that I have become very deliberate about how much I allow myself to play WoW. WoW is a big part of my life, you see; I spend a lot of time reading about it online, blogging about it here, and, of course playing it. Yet WoW became stale for me quickly because of how much I played during Wrath of the Lich King. With Cataclysm breathing new life into the expansion pack in so many ways, I'm not going to allow that to happen again. I plan to play more casually than I did before (you could say I was a dedicated soloist before), and by doing that, I hope to maximize the amount of /played I can get out of this content before I stop enjoying it. If that means that I can't write about things from first hand experience until long after others have already experienced them, so be it; I'll take that fall for the sake of a game I enjoy this much.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Identity, privacy, and secrecy in WoW and life
As I write this post, it is currently Monday night. Cataclysm is coming out tomorrow, and I know that I'll be spending all of my free time tomorrow playing WoW. I might just forget tomorrow that I even write in a blog about WoW. In anticipation of this sudden urge to play, rather than wait until tomorrow to write this post so I can write about something topical, I have decided to write about a topic whose relevance is not dependent on which expansion pack we are playing. This way, I can play on Tuesday knowing that I have filled my three-post-a-week quota and I won't be leaving my readers high and dry on this, the beginning days of a new era for WoW, and I can give myself until Friday to pull myself away from the game long enough to write something about Cataclysm itself. So here's your nice, timeless, early post for today.
I haven't told very many of my real life friends about this blog; I have told even fewer the actual name and nature of it (for they can probably find it based solely on the latter). The only two friends I have given the URL of this blog to are friends with whom I have very few secrets; were that not the case, they would probably not know this blog exists. I have mentioned blogging in general as an activity that I engage in frequently to a greater number of people, but not many people are privy to that information either, lest they wish to read what I write. You may wonder, why am I so secretive about something I should be proud of, something I should be showing off? The answer has something to do with one of the most basic rules of the internet: don't put anything out there that you'll later regret uploading.
You see this rule all the time in various forms. Adolescents are commonly told to not upload incriminating photos of themselves to social networking sites, lest someone see them. Bloggers are sometimes told to be careful of what they post, lest it be traced back to them. The general vernacular version of this rule goes something along the lines of, "Don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want to show to your own mother." It's a good rule to follow, most of the time, but it ignores one of the fundamental concepts of what makes the internet so great: spheres of privacy. I touched the concept of spheres of privacy (a term I did not coin, but I don't know who did, so I can't provide proper credit for it) in my post on Real ID and the necessity of anonymity, which was written during the "posting under real names on the official forums" scare. In that post, I discussed how anonymity is a tool that can be used for good, even though it is quite often used for less-than-good purposes. Anonymity, the state of your identity not being know, is the very thing that brings about these spheres of privacy, which is why they are so prominent on the internet.
But what is a sphere of privacy? Well, allow me to give a practical example. Suppose you had never put anything out on the internet. You had never posted in a forum, commented on a blog post; never has a word you have typed been recorded online for all to see. Now suppose you happen upon a forum; it could be any forum: a forum for fans of a tv show you like, or a forum for people who are members of a specific subculture, what have you. When you join this forum, you have to pick a name to post under, but there's no reason you can't use something other than your own name (and 99.99% of the internet-going populace don't use their own name). So you register with this forum, and in doing so, you pick your new name, your new identity that you will go by. The beauty of this system (or perhaps the ugliness, depending on who you ask) is that this new identity has no connection with your own identity. You have crafted a new identity by registering under this new name, and that opens up a world of possibilities. If you are usually not much of a talker in real life, you can use this new identity to break out of that expectation others have for you and be as wordy as you wish. If you registered with a forum centering around a subculture you belong to that is usually shameful to discuss in real life, you can discuss whatever this subculture is centered around on this forum without fear of ridicule. This latter point is the one I want to discuss today.
Let's take something we all have in common: WoW. If you bring up the fact that you play WoW in real life, depending on who you bring it up with, you could get a wide range of responses. Just today, I told a friend of mine that I was trying to get as much homework done tonight as I could so that I'd have more time for playing the new expansion pack tomorrow, and he flat out told me that he lost a little respect for me, knowing that I play WoW. In the context of our friendship, it wasn't nearly as rude as it must seem to you reading about it now, but it reminded me that WoW and other such video games still haven't been fully accepted by the mainstream culture. That's why I would never bring up WoW at my place of work; I can't risk them potentially thinking less of me for playing, and considering that I am one of the youngest people who work there by about twenty years, that's not an unlikely possibility. More generally, I usually avoid bringing up the fact that I play WoW in most conversations with other people, especially people older than myself, since the probability of them thinking less of me for it is just too high. Yet look at what I'm doing now: I'm writing a blog about the very game I seem ashamed to play.
Why does this happen? It happens because, when I created this blog, when I took up the name of "Ardol", I made sure there was no way to connect my blog to my real-life identity. I do the same thing in all online communities I join, and the blogosphere is no exception, for if it were a widely known fact that I take this game as seriously as I do, it could hurt me in a multitude of ways. Yet because there is no easy way to connect my blogging activities to my real-life identity, I can talk about WoW with no fear of the usual repercussions of being known as a serious gamer. I can even talk about personal issues like my struggle with suicidal thoughts because I know it won't be connected to me. Thus I have created a sphere of privacy around my blog, and within this sphere of privacy, I can be open about my habits as a WoW player.
We see spheres of privacy outside of the internet, as well. When you tell a friend a secret, you do so within a sphere of privacy that encompasses only the two of you. When you are out with a group of friends and you talk about something slightly more person that what you'd divulge to a random stranger, you do so within the sphere of privacy of that certain social group. When you engage in office gossip with the people you work with, you do so within a sphere of privacy that only contains the people who work in that office. And when you go on the internet to discuss a game you play, you do so within the sphere of privacy that contains the WoW-playing internet-going populace. Within each of these spheres of privacy are different expectations and assumptions about what is and isn't appropriate, what is and isn't cool, and what is and isn't acceptable.
Within these spheres of privacy, we are able to alter our identities to fit the expectations and allowances of that particular sphere. Within the sphere of privacy of the WoW blogosphere, I am someone who focuses most of his attention on World of Warcraft and discusses the game seriously. I am also someone who is more eloquent than he is in real life, as typing things out ahead of time allows me to be. But it's the former point that is more important to our discussion. Within the sphere of privacy of the online WoW-playing community, I am completely open about my WoW-play habits (obviously), which can't be said about how I am in certain other spheres of privacy. That particular part of who I am shines through brightly in this particular sphere, while it is something I keep under wraps in other spheres. This is an example of the ways we are able to shape our identity within these spheres, which is one of their greatest strengths. In the sphere of privacy of that hypothetical forum earlier, your membership in that subculture is one of the defining aspects of who you are (it is what brought you there, after all), but in real life, the same is not so.
Now, there's a chance some of you reading this might object to my usage of the word "identity" to describe the various selves we show to our different spheres of privacy. After all, who we are fundamentally as people doesn't change with the crowd we are currently in. That may be true, but the fact is that the idea of identity is meaningless outside of a social setting; a lone man has no identity. It is only when we are around other people that the idea of identity actually means something, since identity is, by its very definition, how other people know and recognize us. As such, our identity is not a solid, unchanging thing; it is something that differs with who we are spending our time around, for no one, save for the most boring person imaginable, acts the same way and is open about the same thing around everyone, no matter how open they are about themselves. I am a different person around my parents from how I am around my friends, and I am a very different person around my coworkers from how I am when I write in this blog. This isn't deceit, it isn't dishonestly; it is a simple, basic fact of socializing that we act differently around different people, and thus our identity does, in fact, change with the sphere of privacy we find ourselves within.
You might also be wondering why I keep using the phrase "sphere of privacy", when something like "crowd" or "social circle" might better describe what I am talking about. My incessant usage of the term relates to why I am so hesitant to tell the people I know in real life about this blog. You see, within the sphere of this blog, I have crafted a certain identity that would be incompatible with most other areas of my life, an identity where I am open about my WoW-playing habits. In other spheres of privacy, I am open about things I wouldn't be open about in any other sphere of privacy, as evidenced by the fact that I am not giving any specific examples. You can probably think of examples of your own of ways that one of your identities might not be compatible with a different sphere of privacy from the one it was conceived in. Maybe you're very cutthroat and efficient at your job, a personality which has helped you get ahead in the workplace but would be off-putting to most people in social situations, thus it is one you don't adopt outside of your 9-to-5. Maybe you are romantic and passionate when you are around your significant other, a personality which would be off-putting to anyone who didn't feel that way about you, and thus one you don't adopt when you are with anyone else. As should be obvious by now, spheres of privacy appear in all parts of our life, inside and outside of the internet.
So what happens when those spheres cross? When happens when your close friend brings up a secret you told him/her in confidence in a work-place discussion? What happens when your significant other tells your own friends about the romantic, if a bit cheesy thing to you said to them last night? What happens when your friends and coworkers find out that you play WoW and discuss the game seriously on a blog? You feel embarrassed, because the spheres of privacy have merged in a way they were not supposed to, and thus one of your identities has entered into a sphere it was never meant for. These spheres only work when what is said and done within them is done in privacy, with the understanding that it will stay within the sphere. That is why I keep referring to them as spheres of privacy, because it is that privacy that allows us to change who we are within them.
Which brings me back to my original point: the reason I don't tell most people about this blog is that, when I made the decision to write about WoW and join the WoW blogosphere, I was setting this blog up as a sphere of privacy where it was ok for me to be open about my WoW-playing habits. By doing that, however, I was crafting an identity which wouldn't be compatible with most of the other spheres of privacy of my life, so I ran with it. I talk about people I know in real life (I'm usually not one to talk about other people behind their backs) and things I wouldn't bring up with most people in face to face conversation, because this identity I have constructed isn't compatible with most of my other spheres of privacy, especially the spheres in the real world, so there's no need for me to take real-world considerations of what is socially right and wrong into consideration when writing; the considerations of the blogosphere are all that matter. Sure, both spheres share many of those considerations of what is right and wrong, but they differ on some key ones, which is why I have crafted this identity with no regard for keeping it compatible with my other spheres of privacy.
What this leaves me with is a blog which I can't show to most people I know because the identity I have taken on in writing it isn't compatible with the spheres of privacy through which I know those people. Now, if I were perhaps a bit more discerning in what I put up here, I could show it to my WoW playing friends, but because I use the anonymity of this blog to great advantage while writing in it, the identity I have crafted is incompatible with just about any sphere other than the blogosphere. That's why I have only shared this blog with friends with whom I have very few secrets; the fact that there is so much openness in the spheres of privacy of our friendship means that they are the few spheres where the identity I take upon when I write in this blog is acceptable. With my other friends, that's identity just isn't compatible with our sphere of privacy.
So there's your timeless, non-expansion dependent post for the middle of the week. Happy Cataclysm, everyone; we shall talk again on Friday, when I will hopefully have something to say about the expansion itself.
I haven't told very many of my real life friends about this blog; I have told even fewer the actual name and nature of it (for they can probably find it based solely on the latter). The only two friends I have given the URL of this blog to are friends with whom I have very few secrets; were that not the case, they would probably not know this blog exists. I have mentioned blogging in general as an activity that I engage in frequently to a greater number of people, but not many people are privy to that information either, lest they wish to read what I write. You may wonder, why am I so secretive about something I should be proud of, something I should be showing off? The answer has something to do with one of the most basic rules of the internet: don't put anything out there that you'll later regret uploading.
You see this rule all the time in various forms. Adolescents are commonly told to not upload incriminating photos of themselves to social networking sites, lest someone see them. Bloggers are sometimes told to be careful of what they post, lest it be traced back to them. The general vernacular version of this rule goes something along the lines of, "Don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want to show to your own mother." It's a good rule to follow, most of the time, but it ignores one of the fundamental concepts of what makes the internet so great: spheres of privacy. I touched the concept of spheres of privacy (a term I did not coin, but I don't know who did, so I can't provide proper credit for it) in my post on Real ID and the necessity of anonymity, which was written during the "posting under real names on the official forums" scare. In that post, I discussed how anonymity is a tool that can be used for good, even though it is quite often used for less-than-good purposes. Anonymity, the state of your identity not being know, is the very thing that brings about these spheres of privacy, which is why they are so prominent on the internet.
But what is a sphere of privacy? Well, allow me to give a practical example. Suppose you had never put anything out on the internet. You had never posted in a forum, commented on a blog post; never has a word you have typed been recorded online for all to see. Now suppose you happen upon a forum; it could be any forum: a forum for fans of a tv show you like, or a forum for people who are members of a specific subculture, what have you. When you join this forum, you have to pick a name to post under, but there's no reason you can't use something other than your own name (and 99.99% of the internet-going populace don't use their own name). So you register with this forum, and in doing so, you pick your new name, your new identity that you will go by. The beauty of this system (or perhaps the ugliness, depending on who you ask) is that this new identity has no connection with your own identity. You have crafted a new identity by registering under this new name, and that opens up a world of possibilities. If you are usually not much of a talker in real life, you can use this new identity to break out of that expectation others have for you and be as wordy as you wish. If you registered with a forum centering around a subculture you belong to that is usually shameful to discuss in real life, you can discuss whatever this subculture is centered around on this forum without fear of ridicule. This latter point is the one I want to discuss today.
Let's take something we all have in common: WoW. If you bring up the fact that you play WoW in real life, depending on who you bring it up with, you could get a wide range of responses. Just today, I told a friend of mine that I was trying to get as much homework done tonight as I could so that I'd have more time for playing the new expansion pack tomorrow, and he flat out told me that he lost a little respect for me, knowing that I play WoW. In the context of our friendship, it wasn't nearly as rude as it must seem to you reading about it now, but it reminded me that WoW and other such video games still haven't been fully accepted by the mainstream culture. That's why I would never bring up WoW at my place of work; I can't risk them potentially thinking less of me for playing, and considering that I am one of the youngest people who work there by about twenty years, that's not an unlikely possibility. More generally, I usually avoid bringing up the fact that I play WoW in most conversations with other people, especially people older than myself, since the probability of them thinking less of me for it is just too high. Yet look at what I'm doing now: I'm writing a blog about the very game I seem ashamed to play.
Why does this happen? It happens because, when I created this blog, when I took up the name of "Ardol", I made sure there was no way to connect my blog to my real-life identity. I do the same thing in all online communities I join, and the blogosphere is no exception, for if it were a widely known fact that I take this game as seriously as I do, it could hurt me in a multitude of ways. Yet because there is no easy way to connect my blogging activities to my real-life identity, I can talk about WoW with no fear of the usual repercussions of being known as a serious gamer. I can even talk about personal issues like my struggle with suicidal thoughts because I know it won't be connected to me. Thus I have created a sphere of privacy around my blog, and within this sphere of privacy, I can be open about my habits as a WoW player.
We see spheres of privacy outside of the internet, as well. When you tell a friend a secret, you do so within a sphere of privacy that encompasses only the two of you. When you are out with a group of friends and you talk about something slightly more person that what you'd divulge to a random stranger, you do so within the sphere of privacy of that certain social group. When you engage in office gossip with the people you work with, you do so within a sphere of privacy that only contains the people who work in that office. And when you go on the internet to discuss a game you play, you do so within the sphere of privacy that contains the WoW-playing internet-going populace. Within each of these spheres of privacy are different expectations and assumptions about what is and isn't appropriate, what is and isn't cool, and what is and isn't acceptable.
Within these spheres of privacy, we are able to alter our identities to fit the expectations and allowances of that particular sphere. Within the sphere of privacy of the WoW blogosphere, I am someone who focuses most of his attention on World of Warcraft and discusses the game seriously. I am also someone who is more eloquent than he is in real life, as typing things out ahead of time allows me to be. But it's the former point that is more important to our discussion. Within the sphere of privacy of the online WoW-playing community, I am completely open about my WoW-play habits (obviously), which can't be said about how I am in certain other spheres of privacy. That particular part of who I am shines through brightly in this particular sphere, while it is something I keep under wraps in other spheres. This is an example of the ways we are able to shape our identity within these spheres, which is one of their greatest strengths. In the sphere of privacy of that hypothetical forum earlier, your membership in that subculture is one of the defining aspects of who you are (it is what brought you there, after all), but in real life, the same is not so.
Now, there's a chance some of you reading this might object to my usage of the word "identity" to describe the various selves we show to our different spheres of privacy. After all, who we are fundamentally as people doesn't change with the crowd we are currently in. That may be true, but the fact is that the idea of identity is meaningless outside of a social setting; a lone man has no identity. It is only when we are around other people that the idea of identity actually means something, since identity is, by its very definition, how other people know and recognize us. As such, our identity is not a solid, unchanging thing; it is something that differs with who we are spending our time around, for no one, save for the most boring person imaginable, acts the same way and is open about the same thing around everyone, no matter how open they are about themselves. I am a different person around my parents from how I am around my friends, and I am a very different person around my coworkers from how I am when I write in this blog. This isn't deceit, it isn't dishonestly; it is a simple, basic fact of socializing that we act differently around different people, and thus our identity does, in fact, change with the sphere of privacy we find ourselves within.
You might also be wondering why I keep using the phrase "sphere of privacy", when something like "crowd" or "social circle" might better describe what I am talking about. My incessant usage of the term relates to why I am so hesitant to tell the people I know in real life about this blog. You see, within the sphere of this blog, I have crafted a certain identity that would be incompatible with most other areas of my life, an identity where I am open about my WoW-playing habits. In other spheres of privacy, I am open about things I wouldn't be open about in any other sphere of privacy, as evidenced by the fact that I am not giving any specific examples. You can probably think of examples of your own of ways that one of your identities might not be compatible with a different sphere of privacy from the one it was conceived in. Maybe you're very cutthroat and efficient at your job, a personality which has helped you get ahead in the workplace but would be off-putting to most people in social situations, thus it is one you don't adopt outside of your 9-to-5. Maybe you are romantic and passionate when you are around your significant other, a personality which would be off-putting to anyone who didn't feel that way about you, and thus one you don't adopt when you are with anyone else. As should be obvious by now, spheres of privacy appear in all parts of our life, inside and outside of the internet.
So what happens when those spheres cross? When happens when your close friend brings up a secret you told him/her in confidence in a work-place discussion? What happens when your significant other tells your own friends about the romantic, if a bit cheesy thing to you said to them last night? What happens when your friends and coworkers find out that you play WoW and discuss the game seriously on a blog? You feel embarrassed, because the spheres of privacy have merged in a way they were not supposed to, and thus one of your identities has entered into a sphere it was never meant for. These spheres only work when what is said and done within them is done in privacy, with the understanding that it will stay within the sphere. That is why I keep referring to them as spheres of privacy, because it is that privacy that allows us to change who we are within them.
Which brings me back to my original point: the reason I don't tell most people about this blog is that, when I made the decision to write about WoW and join the WoW blogosphere, I was setting this blog up as a sphere of privacy where it was ok for me to be open about my WoW-playing habits. By doing that, however, I was crafting an identity which wouldn't be compatible with most of the other spheres of privacy of my life, so I ran with it. I talk about people I know in real life (I'm usually not one to talk about other people behind their backs) and things I wouldn't bring up with most people in face to face conversation, because this identity I have constructed isn't compatible with most of my other spheres of privacy, especially the spheres in the real world, so there's no need for me to take real-world considerations of what is socially right and wrong into consideration when writing; the considerations of the blogosphere are all that matter. Sure, both spheres share many of those considerations of what is right and wrong, but they differ on some key ones, which is why I have crafted this identity with no regard for keeping it compatible with my other spheres of privacy.
What this leaves me with is a blog which I can't show to most people I know because the identity I have taken on in writing it isn't compatible with the spheres of privacy through which I know those people. Now, if I were perhaps a bit more discerning in what I put up here, I could show it to my WoW playing friends, but because I use the anonymity of this blog to great advantage while writing in it, the identity I have crafted is incompatible with just about any sphere other than the blogosphere. That's why I have only shared this blog with friends with whom I have very few secrets; the fact that there is so much openness in the spheres of privacy of our friendship means that they are the few spheres where the identity I take upon when I write in this blog is acceptable. With my other friends, that's identity just isn't compatible with our sphere of privacy.
So there's your timeless, non-expansion dependent post for the middle of the week. Happy Cataclysm, everyone; we shall talk again on Friday, when I will hopefully have something to say about the expansion itself.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Scattered thoughts on Cataclysm's coming
It finally hit me this weekend that this is the last post I will write during the age of Wrath of the Lich King. Come Wednesday, when my next post will go up, we will official be in the era of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and the era of Wrath of the Lich King will finally be over. There are probably some who, in response to this realization, would write a nostalgic post about their memories from Wrath and what they will miss, but I can't count myself among them. In fact, before the Shattering came, I took no screenshots of the old world, did no final tours or looks around of Azeroth before it was changed forever, did no rushed leveling of any new alts to see the world one last time, because it has simply become stale. Wrath is also something I have put behind me, as evidenced by the fact that at this point, all I do in WoW is the Stormwind cooking and fishing dailies. The cookies dailies I do to earn recipies in preparation for Cataclysm, and the fishing dailies... well, I might not need any of the loot from those bags, but I like fishing, and the quests are new, so that's good enough for me. The point is, I could not be happier to be getting new content, for I lost interest in Wrath's content long ago.
You see, I'm a soloist. I play the game for the solo endeavors, and the last time WoW received an injection of good solo content was two years ago, when Wrath of the Lich King was released. Patch 3.3 brought no new solo content, and patch 3.1 and 3.2 brought with them the Argent Tournament in various stages, which I felt did not live up to the first round of solo content brought about by Wrath of the Lich King. Two years is a long time to play the same content, so I grew bored and started leveling alts, but that too soon turned stale as I realized just how far behind the old world had fallen in terms of quest design. It just wasn't as fluid or fun as Northrend or Outland, and the classes themselves evolved in very strange ways at lower levels. patch 4.0.1. did much to address the latter point, but the fact is that we alt-aholics have been playing the same content for a very long time. Given all of these facts, is it any wonder I'm ready to embrace WoW 2.0? Is it at all surprising that I have no nostalgia for the old world and no wistful longings for the glory days of Wrath? I'm ready for the new content, both in the lower levels and the higher ones.
You'll notice I referred to Cataclysm as "WoW 2.0" in that last paragraph. It's a nickname the expansion has picked-up due to just how much it is changing the game. Come Cataclysm, many claim, the game will have changed enough that it will practically be a brand new WoW, not just an expanded version of an old one. And the nice thing about it is that we don't have to lose all of our progress we have made on our current characters. If Blizzard were to release a proper World of Warcraft 2, a different game from the current one, I'd be hesitant to leave my pets, my mounts, my achievements, my trophies from conquests past, and start from scratch in a new universe. With the way things are, everything we have already earned carries over into this new WoW and can remain with us a few more years, while we still get to experience an almost brand new game.
But does Cataclysm really deserve the title of WoW 2.0? I hit upon this question as I was walking through Stormwind the other day and realized that, though the world has changed, it is not a new world. All of the old zones remain, even if they have returned in new forms, and though there are new zones and new content being added, they are simply par for the course in an expansion pack. The fact is that we are still playing on Azeroth, just Azeroth realized in a different light. We are still playing the same 10 classes; yes, those classes have evolved in some significant ways, but those evolutions are, again, par for the course in an expansion pack. Any significant change to class design I can think of that has come with Cataclysm is just a response to the necessity of adding a new expansion pack or a logical evolution of the class as the game and the expectations of its players continue to evolve. Not to marginalize Blizzard's efforts--far from it, I imagine it must have taken them a lot of effort to get to this point--but might Cataclysm be WoW 1.5 moreso than WoW 2.0?
If it is, then I'm ok with that, because WoW is a great game. We don't need a completely new game to entertain us, because WoW has a lot of longevity. As long as it can keep evolving to continue to satisfy the players and let us have fun, I'm ok with not getting a completely new WoW. Why demand something new if the old is still just as good?
So on this, the eve of Wrath of the Lich King, I say goodbye and good riddance to WoW 1.0 and and welcome in WoW 1.5, or WoW 2.0, whatever you want to call it. Tonight, I can go to bed with the knowledge that when I wake up, a game I have been looking forward to for a very long time will be waiting for me (I preordered the expansion digitally), and though I can see us players needing to wait for some sort of server maintenance or emergency patches before we can actually play, it's good to know that Cataclysm is almost here, and I'm willing to wait that time if we need to. After all, Cataclysm was officially announced more than a year ago; what's one more day to wait? Either way, I shall see you all on the other side.
You see, I'm a soloist. I play the game for the solo endeavors, and the last time WoW received an injection of good solo content was two years ago, when Wrath of the Lich King was released. Patch 3.3 brought no new solo content, and patch 3.1 and 3.2 brought with them the Argent Tournament in various stages, which I felt did not live up to the first round of solo content brought about by Wrath of the Lich King. Two years is a long time to play the same content, so I grew bored and started leveling alts, but that too soon turned stale as I realized just how far behind the old world had fallen in terms of quest design. It just wasn't as fluid or fun as Northrend or Outland, and the classes themselves evolved in very strange ways at lower levels. patch 4.0.1. did much to address the latter point, but the fact is that we alt-aholics have been playing the same content for a very long time. Given all of these facts, is it any wonder I'm ready to embrace WoW 2.0? Is it at all surprising that I have no nostalgia for the old world and no wistful longings for the glory days of Wrath? I'm ready for the new content, both in the lower levels and the higher ones.
You'll notice I referred to Cataclysm as "WoW 2.0" in that last paragraph. It's a nickname the expansion has picked-up due to just how much it is changing the game. Come Cataclysm, many claim, the game will have changed enough that it will practically be a brand new WoW, not just an expanded version of an old one. And the nice thing about it is that we don't have to lose all of our progress we have made on our current characters. If Blizzard were to release a proper World of Warcraft 2, a different game from the current one, I'd be hesitant to leave my pets, my mounts, my achievements, my trophies from conquests past, and start from scratch in a new universe. With the way things are, everything we have already earned carries over into this new WoW and can remain with us a few more years, while we still get to experience an almost brand new game.
But does Cataclysm really deserve the title of WoW 2.0? I hit upon this question as I was walking through Stormwind the other day and realized that, though the world has changed, it is not a new world. All of the old zones remain, even if they have returned in new forms, and though there are new zones and new content being added, they are simply par for the course in an expansion pack. The fact is that we are still playing on Azeroth, just Azeroth realized in a different light. We are still playing the same 10 classes; yes, those classes have evolved in some significant ways, but those evolutions are, again, par for the course in an expansion pack. Any significant change to class design I can think of that has come with Cataclysm is just a response to the necessity of adding a new expansion pack or a logical evolution of the class as the game and the expectations of its players continue to evolve. Not to marginalize Blizzard's efforts--far from it, I imagine it must have taken them a lot of effort to get to this point--but might Cataclysm be WoW 1.5 moreso than WoW 2.0?
If it is, then I'm ok with that, because WoW is a great game. We don't need a completely new game to entertain us, because WoW has a lot of longevity. As long as it can keep evolving to continue to satisfy the players and let us have fun, I'm ok with not getting a completely new WoW. Why demand something new if the old is still just as good?
So on this, the eve of Wrath of the Lich King, I say goodbye and good riddance to WoW 1.0 and and welcome in WoW 1.5, or WoW 2.0, whatever you want to call it. Tonight, I can go to bed with the knowledge that when I wake up, a game I have been looking forward to for a very long time will be waiting for me (I preordered the expansion digitally), and though I can see us players needing to wait for some sort of server maintenance or emergency patches before we can actually play, it's good to know that Cataclysm is almost here, and I'm willing to wait that time if we need to. After all, Cataclysm was officially announced more than a year ago; what's one more day to wait? Either way, I shall see you all on the other side.
Friday, December 3, 2010
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.
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.
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