MMOs could tell us more about ourselves than we thought possible - and the key to doing so could come from a pastime even geekier than WoW.
Like many people (11.5 million at the last count), I like to spend my weekends immersed in a fantasy world. Swords, magic and grand battles are the order of the day, though with less weapon upgrades to stop my spare room getting filled to the roof with the damn things, and at 2am we all get to stop what we're doing and hit the pub.
Yes, I am a LARPer, and like many of its participants my preferred style of LARPing involves the same orcs, goblins and stupidly named spells as the finest half-baked Lord of the Rings knockoff. On paper I'm a perfect candidate for WoW, which is why I was surprised when I sat down with the free trial several months ago and loathed every single minute. The animations were horrible, the monsters identikit and the combat was the most dull and dreary thing I had ever performed in a video game ever. EVER. And like many, I take the not unreasonable view that a game should be basically entertaining from the get-go, not when I've invested enough time to read the whole of the Narnia Chronicles. But the truth is that MMOs are never really going to sit with me right, at least not the way WoW plays it. Because as much as I love the world of Warcraft itself, its denizens and mounts and scheming dark lords, what I hate is the progression.
In LARP, your character defines your skills. Skills are the means for enabling the fantasy persona you want to be. A good LARP system is slow-burning, letting all players mingle without too much of a power gap, extra skills augmenting your character and letting them flourish in new directions. It's all a bit Eastenders, if the cast were elves and wielded foam sledgehammers.
In WoW, by contrast, your skills define your character. You can call yourself whatever you want, pretend to act however you will, but a rogue is a rogue and that is what defines him and makes him useful to the party. Moreover, the Alliance vs. Horde fluff that window-dresses the story is thrust on you for no particular reason beside backstory and squaring the players against each other arbitrarily, and with just as little room for expansion.
This is my problem with WoW, and MMOs in general, that makes LARPing so special to me. While perfectly linear LARP exists, essentially aping the average MMO dungeon raid, larger events with hundreds of people and days of in-character time are at their best when they give the player choices and let the resulting catastrophe unfold. Imagine that at the end of a gruelling, 10-man dungeon, the players aren't given treasure or loot. Instead, they are given a choice, represented by a switch or similar. Pushing it one way gives priority to the big hitters but leaves the scouts and rangers out in the cold, while the other gives the magic users a boost but leaves physical attackers in a tough spot. Perhaps it changes something in the nearby town, one decision flooding the street with law enforcers, thus making the streets safer for more scholarly types but preventing thieves from plying their trade, while the other choice causes more chaos but more potential for the opportunistic. Essentially, MMOs should be squaring friends and allies against each other, not dumping different coloured football shirts on each other just because they picked the wrong species.
Imagine what would happen. Arguments would start, fights would break out; friendships would be tested, perhaps even prompting an EVE Online-style retaliation, with one disgruntled member hightailing over the horizon with the guild's earnings. Even if the team worked things out amicably, what would they do next time? Prioritise the ones who lost out before? But the choices would change, and you'd never be able to satisfy everyone; even a simple, three-way system of fighter, magic user and ranger would allow this. You don't need to script an explosive and satisfying climax when the players will do it themselves, and no experience is as personal as one that directly affects you and the time you've invested in the game. Why tread the same path that every other player has when you could be helping to shape your own?
It needn't be difficult to achieve, but MMOs would have to lose certain assumptions; Warcraft and its ilk already sport enormous social spaces, but they are based on camaraderie, not conflict. Clinging to the idea that player conflict is a matter of forcing arbitrary rivalry on differing groups stops MMOs from seeing the fountain of friendship, tension and stroppiness that underpins our own lives. A more robust system of progression could make MMOs a genuinely personal affair, where your input can be stunted by your own teammates and tension comes from reconcilling the differences between you and your closest allies, where progression isn't simply a linear stride up the mountain of progress and requires compromise, bargaining and sacrifice to achieve. The possibilities extend far beyond these examples, but I doubt that Star Wars: The Old Republic or Activision-Blizzard's inevitable WoW-successor are going to even consider them.
Until that happens, I'll be sticking to my LARP. It may be cheap and my lizardman may just be a rubber snout with face paint, but no massively multiplayer game makes each character and its goals more meaningful. Take note, developers: now is the time to turn MMOs from a pleasant social pastime into something meaningful.
Like many people (11.5 million at the last count), I like to spend my weekends immersed in a fantasy world. Swords, magic and grand battles are the order of the day, though with less weapon upgrades to stop my spare room getting filled to the roof with the damn things, and at 2am we all get to stop what we're doing and hit the pub.
Yes, I am a LARPer, and like many of its participants my preferred style of LARPing involves the same orcs, goblins and stupidly named spells as the finest half-baked Lord of the Rings knockoff. On paper I'm a perfect candidate for WoW, which is why I was surprised when I sat down with the free trial several months ago and loathed every single minute. The animations were horrible, the monsters identikit and the combat was the most dull and dreary thing I had ever performed in a video game ever. EVER. And like many, I take the not unreasonable view that a game should be basically entertaining from the get-go, not when I've invested enough time to read the whole of the Narnia Chronicles. But the truth is that MMOs are never really going to sit with me right, at least not the way WoW plays it. Because as much as I love the world of Warcraft itself, its denizens and mounts and scheming dark lords, what I hate is the progression.
In LARP, your character defines your skills. Skills are the means for enabling the fantasy persona you want to be. A good LARP system is slow-burning, letting all players mingle without too much of a power gap, extra skills augmenting your character and letting them flourish in new directions. It's all a bit Eastenders, if the cast were elves and wielded foam sledgehammers.
In WoW, by contrast, your skills define your character. You can call yourself whatever you want, pretend to act however you will, but a rogue is a rogue and that is what defines him and makes him useful to the party. Moreover, the Alliance vs. Horde fluff that window-dresses the story is thrust on you for no particular reason beside backstory and squaring the players against each other arbitrarily, and with just as little room for expansion.
This is my problem with WoW, and MMOs in general, that makes LARPing so special to me. While perfectly linear LARP exists, essentially aping the average MMO dungeon raid, larger events with hundreds of people and days of in-character time are at their best when they give the player choices and let the resulting catastrophe unfold. Imagine that at the end of a gruelling, 10-man dungeon, the players aren't given treasure or loot. Instead, they are given a choice, represented by a switch or similar. Pushing it one way gives priority to the big hitters but leaves the scouts and rangers out in the cold, while the other gives the magic users a boost but leaves physical attackers in a tough spot. Perhaps it changes something in the nearby town, one decision flooding the street with law enforcers, thus making the streets safer for more scholarly types but preventing thieves from plying their trade, while the other choice causes more chaos but more potential for the opportunistic. Essentially, MMOs should be squaring friends and allies against each other, not dumping different coloured football shirts on each other just because they picked the wrong species.
Imagine what would happen. Arguments would start, fights would break out; friendships would be tested, perhaps even prompting an EVE Online-style retaliation, with one disgruntled member hightailing over the horizon with the guild's earnings. Even if the team worked things out amicably, what would they do next time? Prioritise the ones who lost out before? But the choices would change, and you'd never be able to satisfy everyone; even a simple, three-way system of fighter, magic user and ranger would allow this. You don't need to script an explosive and satisfying climax when the players will do it themselves, and no experience is as personal as one that directly affects you and the time you've invested in the game. Why tread the same path that every other player has when you could be helping to shape your own?
It needn't be difficult to achieve, but MMOs would have to lose certain assumptions; Warcraft and its ilk already sport enormous social spaces, but they are based on camaraderie, not conflict. Clinging to the idea that player conflict is a matter of forcing arbitrary rivalry on differing groups stops MMOs from seeing the fountain of friendship, tension and stroppiness that underpins our own lives. A more robust system of progression could make MMOs a genuinely personal affair, where your input can be stunted by your own teammates and tension comes from reconcilling the differences between you and your closest allies, where progression isn't simply a linear stride up the mountain of progress and requires compromise, bargaining and sacrifice to achieve. The possibilities extend far beyond these examples, but I doubt that Star Wars: The Old Republic or Activision-Blizzard's inevitable WoW-successor are going to even consider them.
Until that happens, I'll be sticking to my LARP. It may be cheap and my lizardman may just be a rubber snout with face paint, but no massively multiplayer game makes each character and its goals more meaningful. Take note, developers: now is the time to turn MMOs from a pleasant social pastime into something meaningful.
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