Retro anything
I was sent over to chez Koster to read about treadmills, and that got me to thinking about retro gaming, and how to learn lessons from popular games.
Here’s an assortment of statements I’ve heard or read, all of which make the same mistake.
“That change will WoW-ify the game.”
“The game used to seem interesting, but the devs keep making it more and more like WoW.”
“I’m looking for a game that’s nothing like WoW; I hate WoW.”
“D&D isn’t a real roleplaying game.”
“Braveheart was a really terrible movie.”
“Everything Stephen King writes is crap. He could get his laundry list published.”
“American Idol is the dumbest thing on television. I can’t believe anyone watches it.”
[Anyone who rates any movie that isn’t Manos: Hands of Fate a 1 at IMDB, or a book that isn’t Magic: The Gathering: The Arena a 0 at Amazon]
The mistake is failure to learn from the successful. When something succeeds, there are reasons for its success. Even the most pandering piece of pop-culture crap, if it attracts a mass audience, has something that makes it appealing — and has a lesson to teach. I usually find that people who hold some piece of pop culture in contempt have never read/seen/listened to that pop culture.
Let’s come back to gaming, though. I want to share an anectdote (friends of mine can skip ahead; this is the Ars Modern story) about tabletop gaming, and an important lesson I learned.
Back when I was in high school, and later in college, I was very fixated on ‘meaningful’ gaming. I didn’t want to run a game unless it included transformative emotional experiences. I thought that gaming should delve, get people to truly invest in their characters, and wrench heartfelt emotions from them. I read the original Vampire: The Masquerade rulebook like it was the Bible, looking for ways to squeeze every ounce of profundity from my gaming group.
It was with this attitude in mind that I started work on a post-college game, based around the idea of a covenant of Magi from Ars Magica in a modern-day setting. Sort of a dark and gritty Sailor Moon. The concept and its implementation just reeked of profundity from every pore. I wrote arcs exploring the nature of power and the abuse of power, the dehumanization of the weak, and fragility of love. Serious stuff.
It was a miserable failure. Not because I didn’t meet my goals — quite the opposite. I managed to run a game that had good friends so angry that they stopped speaking to each other. I ran a game that required frequent calm-down breaks so that the people involved didn’t explode from the stress. It worked like a charm — and it was terrible.
I’d lost sight of something important along the way to building this game: people want to get together and sit around a table pretending to be elves and so forth to have fun. They want to be entertained. It doesn’t matter how affecting or moving the game is; all that matters is are the players entertained by it? I took a hiatus from tabletop gaming for a while, and when I came back, it was with the (newly-released) D&D 3rd Edition in hand, and a resolve to run games for the purpose of having fun.
Inside me, a little whiny goth shriveled up and died. Dungeons and Dragons?!
D&D takes a lot of shit from the gaming intelligentsia. Check out The Forge for lots of folks who consider D&D an abomination, a blight upon the art of the roleplaying game. And yet the difference between the two games I ran was extraordinary. The D&D game was fun. It was empowering to the players, it was full of opportunities to solve straightforward problems with a clear right answer, it had very little moral ambiguity, and it was fast-paced.
You are allowed to like popular things; success does not mean poor quality. You’re even allowed to like them for the same reasons other people do, rather than out of some twisted sense of ironic detachment.
It should be clear how this applies to WoW. Let’s count the sins, shall we? It features a treadmill grind, with incessant killing of similar monsters to advance in power. It’s a Monty Haul game, with ridiculous extremes of loot that overshadow player skill and character skill alike. It’s got sub-grinds off the main grind path, such as faction farming and instance farming. It has almost no mechanical support for roleplaying; there are few interesting non-combat clothing options, a rudimentary set of non-interactive emotes, and very little character customization. There’s no real ‘endgame’ aside from more PvE farming for more PvE power.
And yet, even without digging into why it works, it has subscriber figures that demand attention.
This probably isn’t the post to dig into why WoW works. I have lots of theories, some of which contradict each other. But given that it clearly works, it probably warrants some consideration. It’s time to retire ‘WoW-like’ as a supposed insult. Not that I think any serious developer considers it an insult — but the fans clearly do, and so do some of the commentators.
The original discussion Raph tangents from was related to LotRO, which gives me an excellent starting point for an important qualification to the above discussion. In LotRO, I’ve got 5 bags, each of which are opened independently. I don’t seem to be able to manipulate these bags, except for opening and closing them; they don’t appear to have any real identity outside of ‘container’. So why, pray tell, are there five of them, in slots in the lower right of my UI? Answer: Because WoW has five bag slots in the lower right.
There’s learning important lessons, and then there’s slavish imitation to no purpose. Nothing is accomplished in LotRO by having separate bags, instead of a single inventory. Where it counts, in shops, I interact with my inventory as a total unit; why have the imaginary division of bags elsewhere? It seems to me that they simply imported the idea of the bag slots without consideration; ‘How do we handle inventory? Well, what does WoW do?’ There are other minor elements of the game that are similarly imported from WoW with little purpose.
The lesson of LotRO is the lesson of the cargo cult. The trappings of a thing do not make the thing. Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. If you take a lesson from a successful product, be sure you’re taking the right lesson. You can write horror fiction set in Maine all day long and never produce a bestseller, because ‘horror’ and ‘Maine’ are trappings of Stephen King’s writing, not the core appeal of it.
Instead of talking about a treadmill, let’s instead ask ourselves why the incremental achievement structure works so well to keep people engaged. Instead of talking about powergaming, let’s ask why people like to feel empowered, and how we can make them feel empowered. Instead of talking about shallowness of content, let’s figure out why the Azeroth setting appeals to people.
And instead of ever, ever saying ‘they only succeeded because of polish’, or ‘they only succeeded because of the IP’, let’s instead accept that while these things may have had an impact on WoW’s success, no game has WoW’s longevity or broad appeal without doing something very very right at the design level. The sooner the rest of us learn the right lessons from WoW, the sooner we’ll all make games as fun and successful as WoW.