My experiences with World of Warcraft
I've only recently come to know this game, drawn in by labels of social phenomenon and the multi-million user subscriber base. Because if millions of people are doing it, it must be good right? When a friend of mine I'd never pick to be a World of Warcraft player announced he'd reached level 60, I decided a game with such apparently universal appeal had to be worth a shot. I'm not going to present to you an exhaustive analysis or review or anything like that. I'm just going to make some observations, some are aspects of the gameplay I think are crucial to the success of the game, others that I find inherently evil, others just benign observations. I'm writing these down while the game is still sufficiently novel so that I haven't yet become desensitized to them.
- You have to run everywhere - on the one hand this is a step forward in realism and certainly brings to the table the same enveloping realism that GTA3 pioneered. WoW takes it to the next level providing, in lieu of a living breathing city, a whole series of seamlessly connected living, breathing cities. In GTA3 travel between each city is handled via the action that becomes second nature of jacking a car and using your ill-gotten vehicle to transport yourself from point A to point B. Here travel between locations is handled via mechanisms appropriate to the setting - giant bats, zeppelins, griffons. Convenient and kind of awesome right? While these devices are all very well the majority of self-displacement is done on foot, over very long distances. This leads to running, more running and unsurprisingly even more running. The running puts you into a trancelike state. Even getting from one side of a sprawling city to another is painfully slow. Imagine if you'd had to run between missions in GTA3. It would have reduced the enjoyment factor somewhat right? That's definitely the case here although I suspect the motives behind maintaining running as such an integral part of play as less than simply adhering to realism. Running becomes much less important after level 40 when a player is given the opportunity to buy a 'mount.' This takes a significant amount of play time to achieve and one could cynically infer that such an irritating part of the gameplay is preserved to get people to play to level 40 and hence keep paying blizzard. I know as a mid 20s level player I'm strongly anticipating my ingame avatar ticking over level 40 just so I can stop plodding and start riding and I'm sure numerous other players are compulsed to perservere too.
- The game is addictive.
- The game has no distinct end. You can pour as much time into this as you want and you'll only keep progressing, you'll never reach the 'game over' screen.
- 'Timesinks'-a-plenty. see wikipedia reference.
- One of the things this game has succeeded at is causing gamers to realise the ultimate futility of their chosen pursuit. This isn't really so much of a problem when you play casually for an hour here and there and finish a game in the recommended 10-20 hours. The experience ends and real life sets in again. This game can easily gobble up days upon days of game time. In order to reach what could be considered an out point (level 60) a gamer must invest upwards of 500 hours. The addictive qualities of the game and the feeling of emptiness experienced by gamers when reflecting on their hollow time investment has spawned the site http://www.wowdetox.com. On this site, there are many thousands of regretful anonymous confessions testifying to gross timewasting inherent in levelling a character all the way to 60. The typical post-WoW refrain is 'What skills could have I learnt, practiced and damn near perfected in my 500 hour WoW accumulated play-time?'
In spite of the seductiveness, the apparent evil-ness of World of Warcraft doesn't distract from the fact that this is a fun game. The social interaction of the game is great (for the most part), exploration is a guilty pleasure (it's not real, but the environments are still compellingly explorable) and Blizzard have done the impossible and made a MMORPG that's extremely accessible. The process of writing this article and formulating and distilling my thoughts has probably made me more aware of the darker side of WoW than most but I've just gotta play... one... more... session...
- You have to run everywhere - on the one hand this is a step forward in realism and certainly brings to the table the same enveloping realism that GTA3 pioneered. WoW takes it to the next level providing, in lieu of a living breathing city, a whole series of seamlessly connected living, breathing cities. In GTA3 travel between each city is handled via the action that becomes second nature of jacking a car and using your ill-gotten vehicle to transport yourself from point A to point B. Here travel between locations is handled via mechanisms appropriate to the setting - giant bats, zeppelins, griffons. Convenient and kind of awesome right? While these devices are all very well the majority of self-displacement is done on foot, over very long distances. This leads to running, more running and unsurprisingly even more running. The running puts you into a trancelike state. Even getting from one side of a sprawling city to another is painfully slow. Imagine if you'd had to run between missions in GTA3. It would have reduced the enjoyment factor somewhat right? That's definitely the case here although I suspect the motives behind maintaining running as such an integral part of play as less than simply adhering to realism. Running becomes much less important after level 40 when a player is given the opportunity to buy a 'mount.' This takes a significant amount of play time to achieve and one could cynically infer that such an irritating part of the gameplay is preserved to get people to play to level 40 and hence keep paying blizzard. I know as a mid 20s level player I'm strongly anticipating my ingame avatar ticking over level 40 just so I can stop plodding and start riding and I'm sure numerous other players are compulsed to perservere too.
- The game is addictive.
- The game has no distinct end. You can pour as much time into this as you want and you'll only keep progressing, you'll never reach the 'game over' screen.
- 'Timesinks'-a-plenty. see wikipedia reference.
- One of the things this game has succeeded at is causing gamers to realise the ultimate futility of their chosen pursuit. This isn't really so much of a problem when you play casually for an hour here and there and finish a game in the recommended 10-20 hours. The experience ends and real life sets in again. This game can easily gobble up days upon days of game time. In order to reach what could be considered an out point (level 60) a gamer must invest upwards of 500 hours. The addictive qualities of the game and the feeling of emptiness experienced by gamers when reflecting on their hollow time investment has spawned the site http://www.wowdetox.com. On this site, there are many thousands of regretful anonymous confessions testifying to gross timewasting inherent in levelling a character all the way to 60. The typical post-WoW refrain is 'What skills could have I learnt, practiced and damn near perfected in my 500 hour WoW accumulated play-time?'
In spite of the seductiveness, the apparent evil-ness of World of Warcraft doesn't distract from the fact that this is a fun game. The social interaction of the game is great (for the most part), exploration is a guilty pleasure (it's not real, but the environments are still compellingly explorable) and Blizzard have done the impossible and made a MMORPG that's extremely accessible. The process of writing this article and formulating and distilling my thoughts has probably made me more aware of the darker side of WoW than most but I've just gotta play... one... more... session...
posted by james at 12:02 AM
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