Tag: MMO

I'm writing this post in response to, or as an extension of, Doone's "The Ethics of Game Design," an article into which Doone poured a lot of time and thought, and might be one of his greatest.

In his article Doone discusses the ethical responsibility of developers in the face of the addictive side of video games, a side that we often withhold from discussion because it seems to belong to the laity, those unacquainted with our medium and unable to pass judgement. But addiction is not exclusive to young Asian men collapsing after a 28-hour session of WoW. In a lower degree, it affects almost everybody. Many games are designed with addiction techniques in mind. The language of addiction is lavished in opinion articles and reviews: "addictive mechanics", "time flies while playing this game", etc.

Doone holds the developers accountable for employing mechanics that are not meant to make the game "fun" but "addictive". I agreed with that diagnosis, but wrote to him that developers are not only able to do so, but also encouraged, because our society values that particular kind of entertainment. Or rather "entertainment" as a whole, a concept which I'd like to challenge.

Some weeks ago I wrote a personal post on how I struggled with my hobby because I realised the way in which I made use of it — not as a fun activity, but as something to keep me entertained, secured from my thoughts. When Doone discusses fun and notes the six characteristics that constitute a game, he then proceeds to assign some games the label of "something else", a "non-game", because their goal is not to provide fun, but to addict, and I venture: to entertain.

Etymologically, "entertainment" is something that "holds". Employment of addictive mechanics "hold" your intellect and reduce you to a passive engagement with the game, providing you with entertainment. My definition of entertainment diverges from the accepted one, or rather engages with it more consciously. To entertain is to provide amusement. Note the passive voice. In the same way Doone questions the concept of "game" that we have come to accept, and addiction mechanics as providers of fun, I question the idea of entertainment as a positive notion.

It is now commonly accepted that society conditions our identity and that we hold the opinion superimposed on us, until challenged. Common sense are those axioms that ought not be questioned: that democracy is the lesser of evils, that love conquers all, that you must indulge in entertainment. Period. What I propose instead is thinking that we must engage in rest periods of a limited duration in order to recuperate from high CPU usage: one cannot play Planescape: Torment for 28 hours. The problem is, entertainment is not understood as that, and we are encouraged, through addictive mechanics and other pressures, to misuse our leisure time, throwing it away at mindless dailies as our parents threw it away at the TV.

The addiction that Doone talks about is not the extreme, blatant case of twelve-hour daily sessions playing WoW. He is concerned with the pervasiveness of a design that focuses not on fun, and the intellectual engagement required for it, but on passive entertainment and artificial attachment, the fuel of MMOs. As proof of the effectiveness of the genre in creating dependence, RPG elements have now become the trend in non-RPG games, as a means to appeal to the subconscious desire of progress and achievement rather than immediate fun. Shooters with levels and hats.

I am concerned about the little value we give to our time, the little value we are told we should give it. In a little dosage, as rest, engaging and fun entertainment should be praised. What we get instead is long hours of numbness and detachment from our intellect in the form of artificial loops that, upon jumping, reward us chemically. And we comply because it is the easy way, the path of least resistance. A thoughtful engagement with reality is hard, production is hard. But its rewards are what constitute our humanity: reason, creativity, happiness.

Some weeks ago we installed Lord of the Rings Online. We needed a change of scenery for our roleplay, and I remembered the Shire fondly. I wanted to take my partner to Tom Bombadil's house and search the forest for Goldberry. Upon entering the game, I felt a dread that had something in common with the sight of a ringwraith. In order to explore their game, I would have to jump those "fun loops", and I might become conditioned to keep jumping them for more numbers and pixels of pretty clothing for my prideful elf. Why must I subject myself to that addiction in order to have fun? Is that the ultimate goal of MMOs, or will they ever challenge the Skinner box techniques and provide real fun? I don't want to become entangled in your game, I want to have fun for a while and get back to my life.

In 2010, Clay Shirky coined the term "cognitive surplus" to define the productive outcome of our leisure time. Wikipedia and Lolcats are examples of cognitive surplus. He uses it to account for collective products freely given away, but we could also add individual produces such as blogs. And if we stretch it more, any individual productive activity. Shirky believes that the internet has allowed us to become more productive. And yet most of us are eminently consumers. Most of us will seek to be entertained instead of seeking to create. There are so few John Galt's in our world. It probably has something to do with the perils of an active, intellectual population. Game developers introduce those maligned mechanics, but we ask for them and comply with them.

P.S.: I received some weeks ago a request for assistance with a psychological study on avatars and gender. This is what the research is about, if you are interested and would like to share your experiences:

“We are conducting an Internet based psychological study at Charles Darwin University and are seeking male and female participants who are over 18 years of age, are able to read and write in English fluently and who use avatars. The study will examine participants' identification with their avatars as well as explore why people may use, or not use an avatar of the opposite sex. The study will examine psychosocial functioning in the real world, personality factors as well as sex role identification of the participants' and their avatars, and will take around 20 minutes to complete. Please go to http://cduhes.asia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_brQ0uYKeagINqo4 for more details. You are not required to provide any identifying information in order to participate. All information given will be anonymous and protected. Ethics approval has been obtained for the conduct of this study. Thank you.”

Kiting a rare spawn.

While everybody is busy commending GW2 for its social breakthrough, I went back to vanilla WoW and marvelled at the tools that we have relinquished over the years. I scoured specifically for community-regulating tools, as it was the concern of my previous post, but also paid attention to the quality-of-life improvements that are not so beneficial as they may seem. I will comment on those latter first and analyse what we can learn from 2006+ MMOs.

For starters, I had been missing the longer casting bars when mining, skinning, etc. Preposterous!, you may say. Still, if you have played LOTRO, you may have realized how differently that game plays from other AAA titles. LOTRO is more concerned with the journey than with the endgame: professions take a longer time to skill-up, its recipes are much more complex, and the resource nodes are more spaced out and take longer to harvest, which is key. Vanilla WoW was like that as well. One of the instruments that the developers employed to quench our endgame anxiety was this deceleration of gathering. Gathering in vanilla WoW is less frantic. Everything is less frantic.

The actual journey to level 60 takes as much time or even more than the path to 85, and is indubitably more rewarding. The joy of the first green after that infested pit of furbolgs that is Ban'ethil Barrow Den. It was soloable, but a very dangerous venture due to the high respawn rate. In retail WoW, I cannot bring myself to level up any alts. My characters are insultingly overpowered in relation to the mobs, and the quests are a mockery. Then, I need to check my heart rate before I queue for any instances, because I know that there is a huge chance that I might end up spitting fire for great justice.

In the beginning of Wrath I took up the job of managing and leading a raiding guild, and I used to feel very pessimistic about the new recruits that we were receiving. These people had not gone through the learning process that vanilla and TBC WoW forced upon new players, and had no idea how to play their classes since the game had waived the responsibility of teaching them. Vanilla WoW has so far (at level 12) taught me that kiting with Hamstring may be a wiser strategy than face-tanking; that pulling three mobs is inadvisable when your priest is catching butterflies far away; that aggro is a vital mechanic that saves my heroic clothie. My priest learnt very quickly the 5-second rule of mana regen, because he had to make use of it. But not only does harder content work to show you your class' toolkit, it is also a goal in itself. Quest rewards feel like rewards. Every level is a conquest, not a bureaucratic procedure to be filled to reach endgame.

Another quality-of-life improvement gone awry was the addition of flying mounts that reduce Azeroth from a world to a province with huge terrain dissonances. The process of travelling added to the slow pace of the game, although it was at times a bit too much. The journey from the night elven area to Stormwind involved a ship trip, a walk through a crocodile-infested zone, a pass below the mountains guarded by 20ish-level orcs, a pleasant road walk through Loch Modan up to Ironforge, its awe-inspiring gates and melody, and the gnomish tram.

Remember the degradation of epic loot? When something is handed to us effortless, we develop a sense of entitlement, and regard the object without the admiration that a hardship produces in us. Same with world locations. That trip was wondrous because it was not a mere vista splurged on our screens. For our two night elves, it was a wonder we had pursued with effort. A dwarf greeted us at the entrance, asking what were two elves doing in his lands. Spontaneous rp ensued, in a normal, non-rp server.

PD: Actually, I am currently playing TBC, Vanilla and retail WoW, Argent Dawn, at the same time. Emerald Dream is a server run by the same team that developed the TBC server (Archangel), and has just released ED to start progression from scratch. It is the stablest server I have experienced yet, and mostly bug-free. Absolutely recommended, specially now that they have just started, so you can hop on the bandwagon of raid progression. I have edited the Contact Page if you want to reach me in-game.

PD2: For more vanilla-based blogging, you should check out this blog, whose writer records his renewed experience of vanilla in a different emulator to the one I'm subscribed to.

PD3: Vanilla WoW, how much of my enjoyment do you think is related to nostalgia?

One of the novelties of GW2 is the way this game handles potentially irritating activities that are related to the competition aspect in MMOs, the result being a minimisation of conflictive points, and perhaps a masking of human nature. In a comment with Azuriel on a previous post, we delved on the surface of philosophical thought for a moment, he stating that the repetition of an action creates a habit (“We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” -Aristotle), whereas I remain skeptic: Should not a positive, mature attitude come from ourselves, not incentivised by the system? Well, if that does work as Azuriel and our old buddy Aristotle state, perhaps we will see a new breed of more social-conscious players educated by the MMO genre. And that is something we really need right now.

Grumpy Granny Milady: "Back in the old days, people behaved because they had no other option if they wanted to engage in high-end content. The community could regulate itself by ostrasizing harmful elements such as ninjas, slackers and jerks. And what do we have now? A system that eliminates any rough areas so that we can ignore that we are actually playing side by side with a bunch of jerks! I dissent! People should learn that bad behaviour is not tolerated, not that there is no possibility of behaving bad! Etc, etc."

Perhaps it is too late for that, given the trend MMOs are following. WoW is implementing a looting system in Pandaria that completely eliminates the need-greed dichotomy when playing with strangers. The players saw that nobody could be trusted in an anonymous lawless situation and played the same game the ninjas did, rolling for everything as a self-defence. That system was aberrant and a solution had to be tailored for it. Instead, they removed the system completely. One more social aspect gone down the drain, and the Massive Multiplayer is dismantled little by little until we have dispensed with every social aspect that fostered that community which used to be generally good, spiced up by one or two jerks, gankers, etc. These patches into the Multiplayer areas of the genre strike me as a blindfold, so that we can play alongside jerks and their like without actually engaging with them, challenging them.

Some time ago, there was a post by Stubborn in which he told one particularly obnoxious LFD experience. That is the usual way of things these days, the anecdote was nothing new, but the way he reacted to the situation was. He stood up for what he believed instead of resigning to play under the conditions the jerks had established. Check it out, it is a good read and the comments are also diverse and insightful.

This post led me to reinforce my belief that each one of us can, and should, challenge the system. We have been overrun by jerks, not just in MMOs but all over the internet. Trolling is the expected response to almost anything said on the public sphere, specially when a sound discussion is attempted. On the internet, it falls on moderation and a combination of engaging and ignoring those trolls depending on the issue. I am more concerned with the trolls and jerks that populate our MMO space.

It falls on both the developer and the player to ensure that the MMO community is healthy. The former must at least provide the latter with tools to fight undesirable behaviour, and make sure that the system works properly and is not exploited. We could consider GW2 and Pandaria's approaches as an attempt to fight the jerkish community, but I actually see them as a way of rose-tinting the community. Perhaps social and good behaviour will breed good behaviour, so I will not complain too loud about GW2. Although I suspect that the intended result of this is that players do not have to deal with human-internet nature, and thus will not have to challenge its failings.

I prefer tools that encourage us players to deal with the trolls with some effectiveness, such as LoL's tribunal. But since we do not have such tools available to us in our MMOs, we will have to make do with what we have been given: reports, tickets, and being loud about respect and rights. Setting an example. Trade channel, or whatever its iteration is called in other games, has always brimmed with trolls, jerks and spammers, who have taken over a channel that is supposed to be the agora of commerce and grouping (and sometimes Hellenistic debate). Three or four trolls will sour a common spot for the whole server. The other day I read a very ill-intentioned joke along the lines of "The difference between football and rape is that women do not like football." Not only did I report that, but I also wrote a ticket to make sure that it would be looked into by a human being (this is the GM response if you're curious), and then I stated on that same trade chat that I had done so, for other players to know that it is in their hands to do something, and for the perpetrator to know that it is not an accepted behaviour.

Some people will say that I place too much importance on things most people do not care about. Well, I bet that that joke was read by a rape victim, and that it must have hurt her/him. I am also certain that most people, that silent majority, are sickened by the troll/jerk behaviour, and that they only need a little push to begin working against it themselves. Players should try to foster a healthy game environment and stop heeding the trolls who will tell them that "this is the internet." No, the internet is you, me, our neighbour. We are part of the problem if we do not engage with it. Silence sadly equals to agreement. I assure you, confronting the trolls on the public spaces does very often yield results in the manner of public support and troll-silencing, but someone has to step up for her beliefs.

I would rather work with other tools than the ones we were and will be given. I would like to see a player tribunal, some sort of reputation system that was carefully tailored to avoid exploiting, and more power to the game masters. It is needed more than ever because the community can no longer enforce respectful behaviour since players are more individualistic than ever.

An essential read on the topic of trollhood: "Racism, Harassment, Griefing, Bullying, Trolling…whatever you call it… just stop."

PD: I will be abroad for three weeks and might not be able to check the internet so much. I hope I can still post and comment around, but do not think I have been murdered by a furious troll if I don't.

This post is in direct response to Syl's "[GW2] Tired of Trinity Whining. Or: As if!", and a counter at that. Not very common, since I tend to agree with Syl on many topics. In this case, I believe some of the misgivings on the subject of roles are valid. The problem might be as well one of concept. Syl (as well as the proponents of the Trinity) talk about the three roles of healer-tank-dps, instead of the notion of "role" itself, which is what I found lacking in GW2. Mind you, not from direct experience, since I decided upon not buying a beta, but from footage and the report of other bloggers.

The topics that Syl's post covers are too broad to have received such a diminutive treatment in one post, but I will do my best to answer them. The issues of cooperation and communication are tackled, and mixed up, but they actually encompass many more issues than that of the roles, such as the server-wide "groups" and the incentivising of social actions such as cooperating for a quest or ressing. I will refer to my previous post on the topic because I do not think I can add anything else to it, I still feel the same way about this issue. TL;DR: Automating or incentivising what was a social act of yesteryear does indeed avoid some unpleasant events, but eliminates a choice of acting manifestly socially, and a way to distinguish the more social-oriented players. I expand upon this topic much more on the post, please check it out if there is a conversation to be had on that particular subject.

That part cleared, the Trinity itself has to be analysed for what it does or does not in the game. The arguments of the proponents of the Trinity as listed by Syl are the following:

a) No holy trinity means there is no cooperation anymore! *GASP* b) No holy trinity means people do not coordinate / communicate in groups! c) No holy trinity means zerg-mode and needing no strategy! d) No holy trinity means there can't be difficult combat!

A) Is wrong. The Trinity is not the issue with cooperation, as I discussed above. What the Trinity is, is a system that subscribes a class to a specific function in a party, making it more clear for all the participants the way to tackle the challenges. A "crutch", as Syl herself called it. The problem is not with a Trinity-less system, but with a role-less one. The Trinity is just one possible arrangement of roles, and the one we have learnt to expect, and translate into many other games which are not MMOs. I'll expand upon that later.

B) Coordinating and communicating are different acts, and thus have to be considered on their own. There is some sort of coordination in WoW's PvE content, even in randoms, although it is automated by the Trinity itself. The tank pulls first (or if a dps does, I let them eat the mob and go on my merry way), the healer keeps them all topped, and the dps do their thing and once in a blue moon CC some mob. This type of coordination is so ingrained in our gaming habits that we no longer see it as a coordination, which is why 5-man randoms work so well. The Trinity does the coordination for us, selecting the role we will be filling. The problem is, Guild Wars 2 has not created an alternative to the Trinity that involves any more complex cooperation than the one that we have automated.

C) That would depend on how the developers tackle the issue. We do not know yet if high-end combat will require more cooperation than the ascertained easy content that dynamic events are. In the end, we might be seeing fights like Aran in Karazhan, a favourite of some friend of mine, and that model will succeed. The concern that many people have is that high-end PvE will involve the same zerging that dynamic events are. You die, you get ressed or run back, and people pew-pew away; strength in numbers, no penalisation to chain-ressing, etc.

D) Same as above. It depends on how the encounters are designed. Zerging is the lowest-resistance path, but the qualms against zerging are only partially related to the difficulty of the encounters. In a zerg-rush, nobody stands out. You are the lowest common denominator, an expendable DPS helping the bar get lower a bit quicker. That is why zergs are not interesting.

When people deplore the loss of the Trinity, what they really miss having is a particular role in the combat, a role which may enable them to outshine through their performance. People do not miss the Trinity, they miss fulfilling a role. That role could be aligned with the Trinity (I felt proud of one-man healing Karazhan), or be something particular assigned to the individual at a given moment (Mage-tanking Maulgar, Warlock-tanking one of the Twin Emperors; Hunter-kiting in Maulgar again). If ANet is cunning enough, they will be able to pull these off in high-end PvE, and the lack of role-based performance will be diminished by an individual-based performance, but I am skeptical about it, given that there has been no instance of that in low-end PvE.

It is extremely difficult to replace the Trinity model with something completely original. No matter where you look at, people will be arranging their groups into roles similar to that of a meatshield, plus healer, plus damage dealer or control. Diablo 3: The multiplayer is so inefficient and unbalanced because classes are not designed to complement each other. A workaround in the vanilla game (before many nerf patches) which allowed one of the top WoW guilds to defeat Diablo in Inferno was to create a pseudo-Trinity with a Barbarian tanking, two Monks healing, and a Wizard dpsing. In Diablo 2 it was possible to play with friends without feeling hindered because the game was much more forgiving, and thus there was no need for a Trinity, or any role-based system. Team Fortress 2: One of the basic strategies to advance the line was to shield a Heavy or a Soldier and bring down the enemy's turrets while healed and invulnerable. Healers were key to the survival of the team, but there also existed other roles which are not easily translatable into the MMO environment unless there is a major paradigm change in the way encounters are designed. These roles were that of the Spy or the Engineer, the former to take out key targets and the latter to defend a position. Conclusion: There ought to be a major change in the way encounters are designed for other role-model to become viable in the MMO setting. Either that, or have a role-less system, which in turn does have those negative effects the Trinity-supporters claimed: loss of the individual performance, zerging and zerging-designed encounters, chaos.

Sorry for the hiatus! I am finally free of exams and the like and will come back to the blogosphere. I have missed you all :).

I've been following the discussion on attunements for a while now and, surprisingly, I have seen my initial stance on the topic bouncing from one extreme to the other. For some time I considered that, perhaps, it is wrong to prevent people from accessing content they way they want (singleplayer MMOs with LFR, for instance), since we can raid as well without attunements. Then I did away with my "empathy". Attunements had a reason to exist which benefited us all, despite their inconveniences. But it is clear that they are not coming back in any way we might conceive, according to Blizzard.

I can relate to Doone's sentiment about the magic behind attunements, although I have not experienced that golden first period of discovery and secrecy in which only a few chosen participated. Once they were common knowledge (at the same time as encounters and quests were available on thottbot and relatives), that initial magic vanished and they became tools for other purposes: as a barrier of entry arousing a due sense of anticipation, a concealed path to gearing up, a lore dispenser also. For Blizzard, as well as for some fellow bloggers, all of these can be achieved separately through different, potentially less frustrating means. I believe they are right, but they do not take into account one aspect of the MMO genre that we bloggers cling to, and which has been progressively diluted over the years, as the genre intersected with the mainstream culture: elitism.

I do believe most of the bloggers that have written on the subject of attunements were part of a successful guild, and participated actively in the community: they were elitists. In a good sense, do not pick up your pitchfork just yet! It is a truism often mentioned that bloggers (as well as forum posters) are a meagre segment of the population that does not really represent the average player. In fact, had it not been said multiple times that raiding, that activity which used to be barred by attunements, was undertaken by a minority? It was the advent of the LFR which finally introduced most of the high-level population into raiding. As a hardcore player (hardcore in the sense of time-investing and dedicated), I have always wondered what these people did in the game. Probably questing, alting and collecting pets - Blizzard acknowledged this "underground" population by giving them access to the same content as everybody else through an "epic" singleplayer experience, LFR, and now Pokemon. Disclaimer: I would love a Pokemon MMO, but Pandaria is not it.

Attunements are closely tied to the now-vanishing social strata that constituted the original MMOs: the elite raiders on the top, then the medium raiders and nest-guilds which formed and geared the players, and then the rest of the population which played the game their own way. You would have in-between the PvPers who also raided for gear, the RPers, and pet collectors who had intuited the advent of Pandaria. These strata have gave way to labels, informing what the player likes doing (PvE or PvP player), but not establishing any difference in quality beyond 'hardcore' or 'casual', which nowadays have little meaning beyond "I did this on HC and my item level is 10 points higher than yours." The strata were interdependent, with elite guilds depending on the low-level ones for viable recruits who had done their attunements and geared from starting raids. Attunements had the same function as the raids themselves, which had to be done in a particular order so that progress could be made: it ensured that only those worthy had access to the promised land of Sunwell. They also, as it has been discussed, ensured that the community had to work together and behave like a community instead of a pack of trolls.

All of this was related to the idea that raiders were an elite who had access to the most epic portion of the game, that which gave them the rightful label of heroes and associated them with the pantheon of lore figures. There was also the loot. For us, attunement-utopists, this elicited a sense of elitism, or earned reward, that we have seen stripped from the games due to the much-maligned accessibility. Elitism is a cringeworthy concept for us real-world working classes, since the elitism of offline society is barred by attunements which are well-beyond our possibilities. The MMO landscape resembles the American Dream of sustainable capitalism in that everything, with pertinent effort, can be achieved. This fictional elitism is not bad, merely naïve if we are not aware of its ingenuity. In the MMO Dream of Vanilla and TBC, everybody had the opportunity to become a hero, if she did her homework in the way of attunements, gear and consumables.

Why, then, had that healthy elitism had to be wiped out from the game? For a late newcomer or an aspiring guild, it was a difficult path to tread, perhaps too steep for some. But the same reason why wiping is an integral part of the raiding experience, the difficulty of acquiring the gear and attunements to be admitted into a raiding guild, or the difficulty of assembling a reliable group, are inseparable from the sense of achievement. Yes, it was rough for a guild which did not succeed keeping a rooster of geared players to compete with the elite guilds... but this was not coincidental: they did not strive for top-level raiding the same way other guilds did. In this elitist society of old MMOs, if you worked at it enough, you could be a top guild as well, with much less effort than any similar enterprise in the real world would take.

Now remove those attunements, and remove the natural barrier that was the difficulty of the encounters themselves - everybody can come in, but it is not fun for anybody. And I do not consider doing an encounter in heroic mode a solution: raiding would no longer be the key to the epic portion of the game. Only by questing you are already the Hero (no matter the devices they give you to cheat your "singleplayerness" and two-hit elites). Naxxramas in Wrath was the most unexciting raid I have ever done, even in heroic. Exceedingly easy, but not because we were that awesome: anybody could do it. Sunwell: I never stepped on it at the appropriate level, and I cherish its aloofness. It gave something to look forward to. What does an heroic mode provide, which the normal did not? What is more: if anybody, attunementless, gearless, can raid, what happened to the sense of accomplishment?

Current MMOs can no longer bar the path to "epicness", which unsurprisingly deems the whole concept of epic rather shallow. I acknowledge that attunements, as most of the artificial barriers that had been set to separate elite raiders from budding raiders or casual players, have their issues, like having to farm content for guildmates over and over again; but they were part of the reason why raiding felt epic. You had to be part of the elite, yes, but unlike in the real world, you only had to work at it and you were in. There was no need to make it any more accessible.

First of all, excuse my inactivity over the past few days; I'm in the middle of my exams and I have essays to deliver, so I haven't been as active around the blogosphere as I would have liked, especially since very interesting discussions sparked. One which caught my attention was the opinion of a few bloggers expressing their concern on soullessness of some games. Implicitly stands the idea that, in ye olde days, MMOs used to be pregnant with brushes of something not entirely definite, which made them more life-like, or world-like if you wish. These might be related to the concept of Easter eggs, but not entirely. What exactly is the "soul" of a game, and where is it located, if games have one? In the lore tidbits scattered around the world? Inside the Maelstrom (when it was not a game location but a symbol)? Correct, and for the following reason:

The soul of a game lies where its players cannot reach, it lies beyond what is the "game" and into what becomes the simulation of a world.

MMOs are more prone to be deemed soulless than other games because of the expectation that MMOs need to fulfill in order to be deemed worthy of their title - MMOs need to render a world for the players to inhabit, whereas your average RPG needs only to deliver an experience (which is why a cinematic experience such as the Mass Effect series is considered a good game, while SW:TOR attempt at the same thing detracts it from constituting a world). The Elder Scrolls titles are also required to deliver a world, since their main appeal is that same sense of bigger-than-you space which an MMO ought to convey in order to attract us. That which we can easily master, like the storyline in most RPGs, will not haunt us afterwards with promises of more secrets to unveil, with the infinite possibilities of a world to grasp.

In order to create a life-like world, developers have to stuff it with elements unrelated to the game itself. Take for instance the signature books of The Elder Scrolls series: they do not hold a direct relation to the game but to the world, not being part of any quest, although clarifying certain game events in the light of the world's history. They confer TES a background which adds another layer of meaning to the players' own experiences, but also convey the idea of a world which is independent of the individual player's input.

But the soul of a game must not be contained exclusively in the books, or other lore sources one may come across. It can also be imprinted in the locations and NPCs, when those exist in its own sake and not to deliver a game-experience (such as a quest). In Morrowind, the player would come across many dwarven (Dwemer) contraptions and artifacts, ruins and chambers, which were there to convey the idea of a sudden vanish of an entire race, which undoubtedly would produce awe in the player's mind, since the Dwemer were out of her reach inside the game. No quest to bring them back, not even a goal for most of those ruins scattered across Morrowind; their purpose was to produce a world. They were the soul of the game.

The soul of the game lies in the sense of a world produced by events, locations, characters, objects which are not made for the purpose of providing content for the player. They must be independent of the game activities (such as questing, raiding, etc). They could even be part of a quest, provided that it is a) full of non-game content such as lore; b) not immediately accessible to everybody, like class quests, or quests belonging to a chain. They could also be locations: the soul of Karazhan was Medivh's chambers, accessed through the staircase to Prince Malchezaar. It makes sense that there would be a room where the proprietor of the tower lived, doesn't it? Yet that is missing from many game locations these days, even in TBC WoW (Karazhan was actually developed during vanilla). The soul of Skyrim was those locations in the game world which told a story on its own, without being linked to major player-controlled events (an abandoned mage tower, a cellar infested by demons, each and every NPC which had a unique dialogue but no quest to account for it).

The idea for this post originated from an Easter egg I found in old Dire Maul in this private TBC server. I had gone there with a guildmate for the sake of exploring that old and lore-sated instance which was one of my favourites. We searched for the library and for the Highborn prince (whose background always fascinated me), and came across a named skeleton on the floor of the library: "Skeletal Remains of Kariel Winthalus" Who was this man? Apparently, he was the author of some of the librams which you may turn in for the head enchants, and in his librams you may learn that he supported Kael'thas and Illidan, and sought knowledge from the Highborne in Dire Maul to aid their cause. Not only that, the character is also a reference to a legendary individual who came to be a WoW developer.

World of Warcraft is (was?) full of references like that. That constituted its soul. It is not merely the impression of a newbie MMO player from their first game, although that might have an impact for sure.

A game with a soul remains bigger than any one player, since it is not completely devoted to tell her story, but that of the world itself. I am concerned that the upcoming games might be forgetting about that world aspect and place too much importance in the game, gamifying the entirety of a world which ought to stand on its own. Azeroth achieved this, becoming bigger than the game -WoW- itself. I wonder if Telara will accomplish this as well. It requires a development team who will cherish their game enough to care about bringing life to it, not only new and shiny features. This might clash with the F2P business model, though. We shall see. I am eager to explore a new world which does not respond to me personally, but to my expectations of a place to inhabit.

The Elder Scrolls Online never ceases to amaze me with its ridiculous development decisions to cater who knows whom. No matter how preposterous they might seem, what makes me most uncomfortable is that TESO is not alone in this, and that it is merely following a particular trend that I will never be able to make sense of.

MMOs were -and should be, if you ask me- a world bigger than any one particular hero. The sentiment of bigger-than-you is better achieved when you actually cannot overcome everything on your own, when the world resists your individual influence, just as the real world does. That is why for me the world of Warcraft is more real than Tamriel or the Mass Effect universe, because I participate in it as an individual, and I am at no point the demiurge of it all. In Skyrim you could be at some point both the hero of the world and the cruellest assassin, while hoarding such a big pile of money that the next reasonable step would be to open a bank. Yes, it can be fun and engaging; but those stories are singleplayer for a reason.

Whereas in MMOs we are sometimes involved in quests that require our suspension of disbelief to work (how many times does The Missing Diplomat need rescue?), in general terms, none of the world-shaping events fall on the hands of one player. At least it wasn't that way prior to Cataclysm, after which you were fighting along with Malfurion, shoulder to shoulder. That would be to the detriment of the integrity of the world as something bigger than one hero. That would also harm the mystique of the major lore figures. Nevertheless, I don't mind being in someone else's story, so long as I can shape my own.

The last part is essential: I need to be able to shape my own story. For RPers, it'd be a more straightforward process, as they usually consider the career of their characters in narrative terms. For non-RPers, the story that surrounds their characters tells about their accomplishments, events they participated in, PvE content they downed on that character, PvP rank they obtained, the professions they took, the recipes they found, pets and cosmetic items, etc. Even the zone you quested in establishes a connection between that virtual entity and the image you have of her. The more you cull from a character's resumé, the more homogenised they become, the more blurred her individual story.

So what does this have to do with TESO and singleplayer content? For starters, the quest of the lonely hero does not make sense in a multiplayer environment, no matter how much phasing you shove into it. Even if said quest is brought forward, the developers need to understand that the career of a hero is not the very rigid quests they experienced, but rather the way in which they interacted with the world, and which distinguished them from another players/another characters they have played. The hero quest is fun the first time you undertake it, on the second playthrough you will notice how little of a special snowflake you really were (Bioware's latest innovation, the choose-your-path story, does not stand against the test of a second playthrough, as the choices were merely cosmetic). My father, who is an altoholic, enjoyed very much questing until Cataclysm, when he was forced to play through the exact same questline with all of his characters. There was no choice, no possibility of shaping his own story ("I did Nagrand on this character, skipped Blade's Edge, and went to Shadowmoon").

Then we have the example of GW2 and its personal stories. I am not entirely sure how these work, but I hope that they will not tell me who my character is, or develop my character's personality for me. If they are a development of the traditional class quests, I'm fine with it. If they on the other hand provide a very narrow path for me to necessarily walk, I might shun them. As I am not sure of what they exactly are, I will hypothesize: a) if they constitute a very personal narrative, through which your character will grow (Bildungsspiel?), I will not like it unless plenty of choices are provided. b) If they are just a questline which is freely available but does not shape your character, all is fine.

I want to define my character based on what she did in that giant bigger-than-her playground, not on what the developers write about her. If I wanted that, I would play a regular RPG, a singleplayer hero's quest.

Bethesda, please respect your world and your players. The persistent world of an MMO should not be plundered by any one lone hero, but shaped by the community. I want to see more elites roaming the world, more Fel Reavers that step on you while you humbly quest. Do not let me kill the Daedric Princes, the evil gods of Tamriel, on my own; that would make a very poor story. By all means, give me solo quests and epic storylines that my hero can tackle on his own, just do not lie to me about being the unique hero that will save us all, since I prefer to savour victory with my friends (and strangers-potential friends).

I'm having a blast at the TBC private server. Some people attribute our delightful remembrance of the past to nostalgia, and our desire to relive those moments as an ultimately futile one. For most people it might be the case, I won't deny that, but what does it tell you, the fact that I feel completely realized in, literally, the past? I would think that it means that the past was rightfully better than the present in the case of the MMO genre.

The MMO genre has evolved into an "alone together" singleplayer theme park from which there seems to be no turning back. Bethesda's latest endeavour is a horrifying mess that bespeaks of the little idea the developers have of what appeals to MMO player and Bethesda's own fans. They are aiming for a WoW-clone, not even from the time WoW was successful; similarly to SW:TOR, they will draw from the current design of WoW, lacking its polish and long career, adding some uninformed features that innovate very little and in the wrong direction.

In this hopeless climate, what can MMO gamers turn to? Perhaps GW2, although I remain sceptic. On the other hand, we've got projects like Psychochild's, who could have been a great contribution to the genre, but that haven't gotten as much attention as they deserve. All other AAA-MMOs are drone-like following a trend that I will never understand, and that has proved to be a failure.

And yet there seems to be some appeal about the solo part of MMOs, as Azuriel and Bernard argue. Nevertheless, I think that catering to that huge demographic that visits an MMO for its singleplayer content will neither give the company as much money as fostering social ties, nor be healthy for the genre itself, which would turn into a three-monther as SWTOR did. I remember the time where solo play was a choice which did not hurt the multiplayer aspects of the game. Having singleplayer (leveling, farming), multiplayer (dungeons, raids, arenas) and alone-together activities (battlegrounds) meant that people who wanted to play alone could do so, as well as those who are more social but need some time for themselves. What we cannot do is espouse the current design which polarises casuals and hardcores and forces most of the playerbase into alone-together activities (LFD, LFR).

The problem is that, although I can think as alone-together MMOs as a valid choice, especially for that demographic that can't participate in the social part of them, there is no such choice when all are designed this way. I wouldn't count EVE, it makes me very uneasy. There are no multiplayer MMOs anymore (some years ago, the epithet would have been redundant, now it is a necessity).

What about old-content servers? Officially supported vanilla, TBC, even Wrath servers. This has been discussed multiple times, and Blizzard would never agree to it because it would mean implicitly admitting that their game has been led astray. Nevertheless, 2.4.3 is their game too, why not offer it along with Cataclysm and everything else? I am certain that it would attract a lot of veterans back into the game. Some of them might give it a try and discard it altogether, as time passes and nothing leaves untarnished, but many others would, like me, enjoy their second ride (as we're talking about MMOs as theme parks). Most of my guildmates at Feenix agree that they would definitely pay a subscription to Blizzard if they would open "nostalgia servers." After all, nothing beats Blizzard's server stability (at least that's what I thought before error 37) and customer support.

What could they win from this deal? There seems to be a much larger number of people who have played WoW but not any more, than people who are currently playing. Some of them are people who have tried the game/genre and didn't find it appealing enough, but many others are veterans who are dissatisfied with the current course of the game. Most of the newest additions to the MMO market are either PvP-centric (GW2), or repeating the model of 3.0+ WoW. I don't know yet what to think of the oddity of The Secret World, but the emphasis placed on the quests makes me suspect of a one-time ride kind of MMO, much like SW:ToR. Another big win for Blizzard would be that these servers could be self-sustained. They wouldn't need to add any content, and shouldn't force any patches in either, to keep the experience the most genuine. The players would have to admit some inconveniences for the sake of not disrupting the experience. For instance, although the double specialization is much cherished, I would not allow it into TBC, just for the sake of immersion. These servers could provide a huge amount of money too if Blizzard implemented paid migrations from older content into newer. Imagine a player who starts in vanilla and, one year later, has finished all the content. She might want to keep advancing with the same character, and could do so paying for a migration into a TBC server. How can Blizzard not hear the ka-ching! of this idea!?

There has to be something that prevents them from carrying out this project. What could be the potential losses? Well, I am not sure about financial losses, but there would be some major consequences to this undertaking. Blizzard would be admitting that their game was more appealing in its earlier versions, and that could finish off the moral of the company. For WoW to keep going, they have to maintain the illusion follow the idea that what they are doing is the best course for their game. There would be certain difficulties at the pacing of the patches in the nostalgia servers. Nothing that a good brainstorm couldn't solve, nonetheless. Shall they open the servers with all the content, pace it, keep opening new servers for those who missed the first wave? It might be somewhat costly, but I am fairly certain that they would recover their inversion on the first week.

Would you want to see something like this happening? Or do you think that perhaps there will be a messiah-MMO around the corner soon enough?

Based on the conversations about incentivized social behaviour here and at Sheep the Diamond, and Stubborn's post on the issue of morality, I want to take a look at what exactly games can tell us about behaviour as opposed to other real life platforms. My argument may also be applied to any system in which anonymity is carefully maintained.

Morality has always been an elusive thing to point at, probably because its sighting without any other factors is rare in most circumstances in real life. Morality is comprised of a set of rules defined by society which we have internalized to such an extent that they are no longer viewed as those external impositions rooted in early childhood, in our parents' teachings (or rather punishments). As adults, we no longer require such punishments and have apprehended 'good' and 'bad', desiring to foster the former and to prevent the latter. Of course, all of these rules of morality, often considered of 'common sense', are highly subjective. Nonetheless, most of us can share some basic moral tenets, like the Golden Rule of treating others as you would like them to treat you.

The Bushido Code is a very interesting read on the subject of morality. On many other topics it might be ridiculous and outrageously misogynistic, but one thing that they did well was distinguishing between doing right because one is compelled to it by his morals, or because of shame of doing wrong -under shame, there are two degrees: the first one, if you do right because you are wary of feeling guilty and ashamed if you did wrong, you are still on the right path towards true Courage (for the samurais, doing right was being courageous); the second one is if you did right because other people would judge you if you did the wrong thing - that is shame in relation to others. The true test of Courage was to do right without witnesses. The examples in the book (pages 18-21 of Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido Shoshinsu) have to do with gold and its retrieval to its rightful owners. I have devised another example to show you morality at work without its usual strings and fetters to keep it in place.

Imagine you were a test subject identified with the letter E. No name, no picture is given to the researchers, you have been told you are anonymous. Only some psychological and financial details are referred to them for the study. You have been told that other twenty people are under your same circumstances. You are to be placed in an isolated cell, completely unwatched, in front of a table with only a conveyor belt which crosses all of the other cells, transporting a single note of five hundred euros. You are free to take it, they tell you, but then your neighbour, who is poorer than you, will not receive it. They have placed you so that the most well-off individual comes first, and the most miserable, last. There is no punishment for your actions, no others-shame experience, because nobody is watching you; the only thing that keeps you in check is your bare morality. Those five hundred euros might help with your dog's veterinary or your kid's tutor this semester, but they might save a family if you let them go. Five hundred euros won't change your life in any case, but what about five thousand, or fifty thousand? You may pay your mortgage with them. The poorer cell neighbour will keep living in that filthy caravan, you let your imagination loose.

What does this have to do with morality in video games? Well, as in the above example, and the one used in the Bushido code, there is a factor of anonymity. Anonymity disables the many strings that are attached to us in case basic morality is absent: punishment is without target and shame is without face. The only thing that remains is internal shame, our conscience, which for the samurais was still not the desired motivator of a just person. The true just acted following the tenets of rectitude, not the bite of a guilty conscience.

All of those jerks, the venomous community of the community-less MMOs of these days - they are the ones not shackled neither by a guilty conscience nor by aloof morality. Before the dismantle of the social binds and constraints of ye olde MMOs, communities acted as the judges of wrong behaviour by excluding the pernicious citizens from their social circles. Of course, for that punishment to be effective, one has to feel shame by an external account and/or be concerned with participating in the social aspects of the game. I remember that hilarious post from Big Bear Butt concerning an "asshat" he met in an instance, and how her guild was compelled to remove her after Bear's accusation because it tarnished the guild's reputation. That is one kind of punishment that may come to people behaving in the wrong way. Still, it is very light, and most online jerks would just shrug it off - it is no real punishment for shameless people with an immature morality.

That is why in real life we don't encounter as many jerks as in online games. It might also be because of the conception that most of them have about MMOs as "just a game", and players as "the enemy". Every time I hear somebody saying that they gank the opposing faction in revenge for the ganking they suffered, I shudder. Two things are happening here: misdirection of anger, and failure to see other players as people outside the game. Then there are those who gank for sport and fun; those, they are lost to the Bushido code.

I wonder, have you ever met somebody who acted jerkish in online games, and was an excellent person in real life? I don't know about you, but it tells me a lot of a person if she shows no morality in an anonymous environment, and then acts just right in real life. I may think that she is following an external code in real life which is absent in video games, not her morality at all.

Can games be an accurate tool for assessing morals? Perhaps it wouldn't be the most accurate, because of the many circumstances that surround games - such as the idea of games being a platform where real life rules should not be allowed ("it is just a game"), the competitiveness, and the violence. Still, when I witness a kind act, I can be sure that they have not done it due to external pressure, and that is reassuring.

The Elder Scrolls series is renowned for its sandbox gameplay, which I doubt that will be translated well into the upcoming MMO they are planning. It might have to do with the early date, or the inexperience of the studios that will undertake the challenge. Many other bloggers are also wary about the transformation of a beloved singleplayer series into an MMO. Most of the clamor is focused on the failure to deliver the true sandbox experience of the original game. Themepark MMOs have proven their finiteness, while one of the most successful MMOs of these days is EVE Online. It might not be for the mass audiences, but it cannot be argued that it is more healthy than any other subscription-based MMO.

We players like to have some freedom to play the game the way we want - a sandbox. As with many things in life, the two concepts, sandbox and themepark, are not exclusive and do blend in most games. Almost in any game we have those activities which are alternative, which help us express ourselves and wander off the beaten path. In fact, the achievement system Blizzard implemented is merely the expression of that alternative way of engaging with the game - which, for me, is entirely redundant, but that might go to another post.

Even if your MMO is heavily invested in the themepark model, you can find a way to step away from that and construct your individual experience. Challenges such as leveling up with the bare minimum equipment or in a peaceful manner, without killing one soul, can be such alternative modes of playing which would make a sandbox out of your themepark of choice.

Today I wanted to make a list of a couple of sandbox-like activities which you can perform in your MMO of choice to break with the routine of gearing up, making gold, ganking the Alliance, etc.

1. Roleplaying.

The sandbox activity par excellence.

There's a very interesting post on TL-DR about the typical case of phobia about roleplaying. That is due to the depiction of the roleplayer in the mass media which make apocryphal assumptions based on very superficial observations. The first thought that may come to our mind on the topic of roleplaying is likely to be that introvert and unsuccessful geek which lives through her imagination. Tinged with negative connotations. Completely unrelated to the actual definition of roleplayer.

What roleplaying in fact is, is an activity which stimulates our creativity, demanding from us both a more intimate relationship with the virtual world we inhabit and its lore, and the prompting of our own narrative preoccupations. By telling a story with some friends or strangers, we are forced into a position of co-authoring, which may be even more stimulating than the traditional introvert authorship. It is a delight for the mind.

It might take a while to find your roleplaying voice and your ideal roleplaying companions. It might not be fluid the first time you attempt to roleplay. You will make mistakes (according to the etiquette of the other roleplayers). But you shall make memories that will last, and your character would no longer be "my dps warrior", he would be Sir Dpswarrior (or any permutation thereof). Joking aside, you'll forge memories about your characters and that of other people which will go beyond "I went once with her to this dungeon." Me, I will always remember all the plotting, the lying, the duelling; the weddings, the alliances, the shadows.

2. Exploration

Exploration is not restricted to the grand discovery of hidden locations, you can also explore the more immediate things that often go unnoticed. Go into a first-person perspective, enjoy the details. Craft a story perhaps about that dwarven room full of explosives. A bench overlooking a particularly inspiring landscape. That poster which has a quest, has a neat drawing of the Wanted criminal!

This kind of immersion in the world would need the same mindset in which you find yourself (or you induce yourself in) when reading a book you have found in that bandit's cave in Skyrim. You cannot play to fill a quota of xp or gold, you must be playing to enjoy the scenery. I assure you that it is not an easy task, to lay down your MMO urges and become the recipient of the subtle and the evocative.

Maybe you can combine this with roleplaying? Bring a friend along, show him how beautiful is.

3. Guild-bonding stuff

This is one of my favourite activities. I love coming up with ideas on how to interact with my guild mates which do not involve the stressful, blinker-like end-game. The aim for those is to get to know your partners in a more relaxed, friendly environment, and to have fun while at it.

Have you done any event of this type? I will share my own experience and see if it might prompt you to do something similar.

My favourite guild-bonding event was an idea I had for a calendar that would be delivered to those players which made a little gold donation for our gearing process. There would be two calendars, one with the female characters of the guild, and the other one with the males. I started with the second one and never got to the ladies', we couldn't find anybody skilled enough in photoshop and we finally parked the initiative. I have lost some of the pictures, but most have survived and will be featured here, in debut, for you ladies, (and gents, if you like semi-naked Night elves).

The event involved not just regular toon-dressing and stage-setting, I would take the participants (and often the whole guild, which would tag along for the giggles) to the most bizarre places, and ask them to pose in all kinds of manners, making the most of the spell effects and event items that we had at hand to construct a particular narrative.

Here are the pictures that survived.

See the gallery in full size.

Now, I would love to hear some examples of this kind of alternative stuff that you have done with your guilds. I have just joined a new one in this private TBC server and I would want to make the most of it. If this post has inspired you to make any off-the-grid events, or if you think you could manage a photography session to get the whole guild involved in something more personal than the PvE dance, then by all means, take a chance at it and tell us about your experience.