j.wartooth:I don’t see why someone is a n00b just because he doesn’t know a term?

BUT YOU MADE FUN ON THE PS3 PLAYERS TOO AND DID NOT APOLOGISE!

- TELLING PS3 OWNERS TO ‘STFU’ WHEN AN XBOX 360 PLAYER WAS FOUND GUILTY OF KILLING HIS PARENTS FOR CONFISCATING HIS XBOX 360.

- ANNOUNCING A PS3 ‘PRICE CUT’ ONLY TO LAUGH AT THEIR FACE AND SAY ‘APRIL FOOL!’

- SMASHING A PS3 CONTROLLER IN YOUR STICK VS. CONTROLLER’ VIDEO.

YOU HAVE APOLOGISED TO WOW PLAYERS, WHAT ABOUT PS3 PLAYERS HUH?

GaX is guilty always playing on stereotypes. This can be funny once. But when the whole world is stereotyping gamers as nerds, we have the gaming media strengthening these stereotypes. All these gay jokes, nerd jokes, basement dwellers… have some better taste, and be a bit more responsible – the media has its role to play in making gamers not seem like a bunch of kids.

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Having said that, there are cores of truth within what he is saying. First, you do spend alot of money. WoW (though it is the most popular) may not be the best example here (unless you buy gold, like a certain other gaming writer across the causeway, in which case you are the scum of the virtual earth), but in games where there is a cash shop system, then entire game becomes an excuse for you to spend money on things that you don’t need. There are tons of Chinese and Korean MMOs that can be pointed to. And for that matter, even WoW, with its pet shops, server transfers/faction and race change has elements of this extra spending. And if you play Second Life, you’d know that in those scenarios, RL money and virtual money are almost indistinguishable (a favorite discussion on mine, that belongs elsewhere)

I cannot really agree with the second reason, since Xbox Live is a huge cesspit of bad English as well. Not to mention that “Zerging” is a term originating from Starcraft. Still, I suppose that MMOs are very susceptible to the perpetuation of bad English. First because people play it a lot, and second it requires communication in short spans of time. Unless you are using a voice chat program, this means that you are going to use abbreviations galore, and inevitably bad English.

On a deeper level, I’m not sure if even the bad English used in MMOs/computer games generally is inherently a bad thing. A comparison can be taken with Singlish – Puah Chu Kang never really threatened anyone’s English standards so long as people are able to code switch between when is it appropriate to speak colloquially and when you have to be formal. And if you can’t make that switch, the problem is really with you and not Puah Chu Kang. In the good old United Kingdom, our colonial masters consider cockney English as part of their culture, and aren’t trying to stamp it out like the government is doing with Singlish. So maybe a more enlightened approach to 1337 speak (as much as I personally hate it) is appropriate.

Reason 3 is a sore spot for me. If you try to RP (outside a role-playing server, and even in these “safe zones” you have your trolls and greifers) you’re probably going to get all kinds of insults hurled your way. On a game design level, the problem with MMORPGs is that they exist (more or less) in perpetuity, meaning that they are always the same. This is necessary for a variety of reasons, like newbies being able to expereince the same (albeit old) content, as well as the sheer difficult that exists in constantly updating the world. So what results is a game design where you do the same things over and over, without any apparent effect. Killing Nerfarian and bringing his head to Thrall means that Thrall is just going to be there next week staring into empty space and acting like he never met you.

And while this is the case for WoW and other “theme park” (a term used by Blizzard to describe the MMO design that is top-down, with content coming from designers to players), “sand box” (meaning the opposite) or player run MMOs don’t face this problem. The best example on the market right now is probably Eve Online, where players have so much power that they almost run certain parts of the game.

Perhaps there is something to be said about the emphasis on the genre of MMORPGs at this point. RPG purists will say that the role playing part is the most important. But really it should be the MMO part. Players make the MMO what it is, and it is what players do with other players that make MMOs fun. So you might not role play as a Night Elf in wow. That’s fine. So long as you are able to distinguish the real point of MMOs (playing with people online) and the distractions (phat lewt), you are okay.

Reason 4 sort of ties back to reason 3. The fundamental MMO design is to keep you playing for as long as possible. There is no “end” in the traditional sense, but just more and more stuff to do. A lot of this is simply lazy design – MMOs can have more proper story arcs (as LOTRO did), but because of the effort involved, most, in particular WoW just use the boring “carrot and stick” method that leads players from quest hub to quest hub, from collect X quests to kill Y quests. True, Blizzard is trying to clean all this crap up, but so far the whole system remains entrenched in the WoW design.

As for reason 5. That is wholly true. Unless you’re unemployed that is. The fact is that gaming right now is developing at such an amazing pace, that you miss out all kinds of AA titles while keeping up the time investment needed for an MMORPG. Although this has to be qualified by reason 1, in that unless you’re a game reviewer, you dont’ really have enough money or time to play a lot of games anyway.

Finally a word on skill. Some mentioned that WoW arenas are competitive. Well, wow areans are also a complete joke. Did you see the recent MLG live casts? one of the announcers called a game that laster 5 minutes “long.” If you really think that skill can be measured in that 2 minutes of chaos, think about how a football game would be like if it were condensed into 20 minutes. Some wild shots, and whoever has a lucky break wins. The simple notion is that the shorter the time of each match, the more things like luck will play a role since these factors are traditionally averaged out if matches are longer.

On top of this, you have all that nonsense about buffs and nerfs, class imbalances and forum whining, that i’m not sure how anyone can seriously call arenas competitive in the sense that a competitive FPS is competitive, or how Virtual Fighter is competitive. The reality is that WoW is just a huge money earner, and so no one wants to lose out, which is why we still have this silly competitions.

I would however argue that MMOs if played correctly do need skill. It is a different skill set from the twitch reflexes of a CS team, but skill nonetheless. Call it a social skill, or managerial skill. Skills that you’ll need to run a guild, and make 40 complete strangers to work together and accomplish something even though the rewards of the accomplishment can only be enjoyed by a few. Skills that you’ll need to exploit and in-game economy and be rich. The cool things about these skills that even if only 1% of it is exportable to real life, it is likely to be more useful to your RL pursuits than having twitchy fingers.

So there. I think I ended up with a whole post of my own, but I can’t post here anymore anyway. The bottom line probably is: there are lots of things that are wrong with MMOs generally but this does not mean that there aren’t a lot of things that can be done right. Exceptional examples already exist, just don’t be blinded by the huge WOW in your rear view mirror.