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| Re: On Bungie and the Value of the Player's Time | |
| Posted By: Beckx | Date: 12/14/10 3:28 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: On Bungie and the Value of the Player's Time (cheapLEY) : He was : simply making a point about player investment systems, and WoW is one of : the most extreme examples of such a system. You can't even really argue : against that point. If you read his post as simply saying "WoW has a player investment system" then you are correct, I couldn't argue against that. Of course, that's not what it says. He writes that "The insidious part of all this, is that through this manipulation, players are misled to believe their time has real value....far more players are addicted to WoW, because the game uses psychological tricks to make players feel as if they are accomplishing something and having fun." Which I can argue with, in that it's assigning nefarious motive where an alternative explanation seems far more likely. The original WoW design was not intended to "trick the player" but rather achieve the much sought after holy grail of bringing a communal RPG experience to a massively multiplayer computer gaming audience. Something RPG players wanted - and sought in various forms from MUDs to UO to EQ - for a very long time. We wanted real quests. Real story content. We were sick of games trying to pass themselves off as RPGs while offering no RPG elements outside of character creation and leveling. Are pen and paper RPGs insidious, manipulative games (as contrasted to what, I wonder?) because you spend months or years building characters and playing together? Yeah, they may not be cool, but Jesus, if that's what we're talking about here... He also says that "The Starcraft player will be able to play well, making good decisions and winning a lot of games. The World of Warcraft player will have a mastery of spells and skills, as well as a high level and good gear." Which I can argue with as well. What he's done here is say that Starcraft requires skill, while WoW requires time and items. High level WoW and StarCraft play are far more similar than Cody lets on - they both require mastery of a multitude of hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts; they both require a high rate of actions per minute; they both require intensive mouse work; and they both require memorization. Gear in WoW is important, but - most obviously in PvP but also in PvE once you're outside the basic content and into heroics and raids - player skill remains the primary ingredient in success. What do you think the determining element is when you put two players in the arena of the same level with similar gear? Hint: it's not generally random luck. There was a player - guy who went under the name Famine in UO and Kalaran Windblade in EQ. He learned EQ inside and out and gained fame by hitting level 50 within a month of EQ's release - dashing all of Sony's marketing about how it would take a year to get there (let's leave aside, for the moment, why people in 1999 thought that was desirable). He and his guild went on to absolutely own all of the EQ content, world first conquests and the like. He understood the mechanics and the boss encounters better than Sony did themselves, I think. Ultimately Blizzard hired him as a senior boss encounter designer. (Don't know if he's still there, but you want to talk egos - he put his old Kalaran character into the game as an uber-powerful NPC.) The point is: annoying as he might have been, Kalaran had skill, skill that most players couldn't duplicate with items. (Note: I haven't played WoW in over a year and don't see myself going back anytime soon. But the reasons for that are not related to whether it's a skill game or employs tricks or whatever; it's because of the time requirement & the "chores" that I think the game requires - and these are issues that persistent world games face and have to conquer. But that's a post for another time.) Anyway, in sum, there's a long line of games that promote what's now being called "player investment" and those systems are not inherently bad or "insidious." What I'd rather see Cody address is the reasons why PI systems are shoehorned into releases. It's not about a failure to "respect the player." It's an institutional failure that affects most industries in the last 30 years. There are systematic pressures on gaming companies that are, in my opinion, resulting in a cynical review of popular and compelling games to harvest the things that make them popular and compelling, and then force those elements into every release to increase profits. (Consider EA and DICE; they took risks in 2008 and incurred massive losses; now DICE sticks to churning out COD-competition and Mirror's Edge is nowhere to be seen....) On point, a Bungie persistent world shooter with character building elements married to the tight gameplay and intricate world building they are known for sounds great to me. A product from Bungie (or anyone, for that matter) with these elements thrown in cynically to increase player time spent in game or the other ills Cody cites - that I do not want.
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