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.

Don't you know there's a Shattering on?

When I logged in to my server for the first time after patch 4.0.3 dropped, I was struck by many things, not the least of which was just how much the world had changed. Though I was excited to see those changes, I decided to wait on giving them a really good look until I could fly around old-world Azeroth, since that would be much more efficient and freeing than walking around on foot. So plopped myself in Stormwind, waiting in the main city until Cataclysm came an unlocked that very basic amenity. From there? Who knows. Maybe I'll focus on Archeology, maybe I'll try to level my fishing and cooking skills, maybe I'll go right for the quests in the new zones, or maybe I'll just fly around a lot and see just how much our world has changed. But as I walked into Stormwind, I knew there would be no time for these considerations; there's a dragon on the loose! And he has torn our world asunder! We must rush to assess the damage, to rescue the innocents, to... wait, why is everything so quiet?

Yes, as I walked in to Stormwind for the first time after the Shattering, what struck me the most was not the damage to the city or the upgraded design of the city or the newly unlocked areas; what struck me the most was just how quiet everything was. The world had just been ravaged by the aspect of death, and everyone's walking around as if it is just old news. The guards aren't rushing to help anyone, the citizens aren't running for safety; people are just going about their daily lives. Were I in this world myself, I wouldn't be able to help but say to these people, "Look, I know it takes a lot of courage to see the world destroyed and not even bat a lash, but this is kind of a big deal. Why aren't you panicking? Don't you know there's a Shattering on?"

The answer as to why they were not panicking came to me while I was in the middle of catching some supposedly hard-to-catch fish for Catherine Leland just to prove I was up to the challenge. ("Really, Catherine? The world has just been torn apart by a dragon who could end all of our lives if he wanted to. I should be going out and helping people recover from this calamity, and you want me to go catch you some fish... for the sake of catching you some fish?") The answer as to why these seemingly brave citizens were not panicking lay in the fact that this World of Warcraft we inhabit now is not an immediately post-Shattering WoW; it is a WoW that we will experience now, that our alts will experience a year from now, and that future players will experience a few years from now, unless Blizzard decides to change the old-world again. All of these theoretical players will experience the same WoW I am experiencing now, because though the time when I logged in was immediately after the Shattering in real-world time, it was not immediately after the Shattering in in-game time.

As I have said before, WoW is really a very static game, and the lack of panic I saw in the citizens of Stormwind that day proves it. We are not playing a game whose timeline is moving as time itself moves in the real world; we are playing a game shown to us as a snapshot of one moment of its universe's timeline. By playing, we advance that moment a little bit, but if we roll a new character, we start from the beginning. The fact is that what those citizens are doing now, they are going to keep doing for a very long time, until Blizzard sees fit to change the old-world again. So suppose they were panicking; because that snapshot would continue to define the world of WoW for the next few years, players years from now would run in to Stormwind and see citizens running around, shouting that it's the end of the world, when that end came and went eons ago. It would seem silly, really.

What this means for us and the seeming bravery that these citizens show in the face of the end of the world is that we can explain their seeming stoic-ness with the simple fact that we are not experiencing an immediately post-Shattering WoW. We are playing in a world where some time has passed between the Shattering and the present time. Though the recovery process is by no means complete, things have started to settle down. Those who need to go out to help have done so, and will soon call upon the heroes of Northrend (us) to assist them in their tasks. Everyone else who isn't in immediate danger has gone back to trying to make the best of what has happened and live out their lives as best they can. And for some of them, that means inviting daring adventurers to try their hands at fishing in a nearby lake, to see if they can catch a rare elusive fish.

So yes, Catherine, I am up to the challenge of catching some Hardened Walleye, and I shall prove it to you. Sure, Robby Flay, I'll swim in the Stormwind canal and pick up some crabs so the King can have is crab legs. It's good to see that you both have found a way to keep on keeping on, ever since that... well, you probably don't want to talk about it, do you? I understand. The past is the past, and we have to move on.