Face Me And Scream

Written by: Michael Enger

Man, am I tired of looking at this…The MMO market has exploded since Ultima Online first paved the way for commercially-feasible persistent worlds. From the simpler days where text-based MUDs were the closest you could get to an online rpg, we have now moved on to complicated internet societies with their own self-reliant economies and where the digital avatars have become true representatives of the personalities that drive them. Whereas Second Life allows people to live out their fantasies online and Eve Online allows for complete control of your interstellar empire, it is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, with its seemingly tired setting, that is leading the way and setting an example for all MMO games to follow.

The World of Warcraft was released in 2004, straight into the hands of the screaming crowd of Warcraft fans. Even I was eager to venture into Azeroth and the collectors edition, bought when the game was only a few days old, still sits on my shelf like a giant amongst ants, clearly dwarfing the other games in my collection. I remember playing for hours on end with a friend, whether it be at home or sitting in a café with my laptop, slowly but surely working myself towards the coveted 60th level. I never made it, though. Now, three years later, my highest character is only level 30, far away from the level cap (which has been raised to 70). The reason for this is that my interest in the game dissipated as the hours I poured into the game increased and I slowly but surely began to realize that the rewards was not worth the endeavor.

Click to enlargeI still love this effect!In conventional games, like Doom³, you are driven through a storyline which gives you a reason to divert many hours of your precious life on precisely that game. A lot of time is spent in purely moving forward in the game, but you are tested every step of the way. Hordes of monsters are trying to kill you and it is only by combining quick reflexes, finger dexterity and heaps of luck that you get to the end of the game and can proudly say that you stared Satan in the face and then shot him. World of Warcraft works a little differently in the sense that it does not reward your skill as a player, it simply rewards the amount of time you are willing to waste on the monotonous motions needed to play the game. It doesn’t force you to react quickly, solve puzzles or even strategize your movements, it simply requires that you are willing to do the same thing for hours on end for diminishing amounts of experience points.

Now, I am still a fan of World of Warcraft; I play it now and then with some friends of mine, but the concept of the massive task that getting to level 70 is has killed any aspiration to ever complete it. Other games, if you can surpass the insane amount of force against you, reward your time and effort with story progression and the feeling of self-satisfaction that you get from completing a difficult task, whereas World of Warcraft’s only means of keeping you playing is the promise of more skills/spells and harder creatures, creatures that you defeat by doing the exact same thing you have been doing for hours on end.

I have tried a lot of MMO games and none have fit as well as World of Warcraft, which is something I cannot explain. You are a meaningless peon in a world of clones, your actions have no consequences and reap no true rewards and even if you get to the end and reach the highest level possible you aren’t even given a pat on the back; the game just expects you to keep going. Too bad I can’t stop playing.