On gaming…

[Originally a post on the SW:ToR General Discussion/Suggestions board.]

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I quit WoW a while back. It had become stale, boring– an obligation more than a pleasure. No, it wasn’t the first time, nor am I alone in feeling this way.

However, for weeks, a nagging question plagued me. Something in some lobe of my brain was pulsing away, firing synapses in an effort to construct a question and send it to the forefront of my conscious thought stream: WHY CAN’T I STOP PLAYING THIS FCKING GAME?!?

When it did fire, I tried to justify it– I’m a social person, at least on the Internet. I have good guildies, good friends. They provide decent conversation, and I can turn them off whenever I don’t want to listen to them anymore. These are all truths, and contributors, but they were feeble. They were the twigs around whatever humongous superstructure was holding up my gargantuan addiction.

Fast forward to today. I’ve discovered a website, moreintelligentlife.com, which is associated with a magazine called [I]Intelligent Life[/I]. The last few days I’ve been reading its archives, from oldest to most recent, and found it incredibly interesting. Then I came to an article about the game Braid. The article itself was an excellent read, but more importantly, it linked to another article, this one specifically about the dev and his thoughts. Ironically, it appears on a site affiliated with MTV.

Buried inside this article, I found this excerpt:

For example, I feel like unearned rewards are false and meaningless, yet so many people spend their lives chasing easy/unearned rewards. So there is a very conscious decision that you only get collectibles in “Braid” when you solve a puzzle, and you only get one per puzzle. Some of the puzzles are easy, some are hard; but you did something very explicit to get the reward. It’s not like “Mario” and every other game since then, when there are gold coins sprinkled everywhere, and you get them just by walking along a path or jumping up to some blocks, and that satisfies your reward-seeking reflex for now and pacifies you into continuing to play the game. I actually think that Skinnerian reward scheduling in general (which you see in most modern game design, MMOs being the canonical example) is unethical and games should not do it… scheduled rewards, to keep the player playing, are a sure sign that the core gameplay itself is not actually rewarding enough to keep them playing, and thus you are deceiving your players into wasting their lives playing your game.

Eureka! Using a fun little psychological compulsion (look up “Skinner box”), WoW has been able to keep its subscribers while masking a frustrating, hollow game. Don’t get me wrong– it was revolutionary, and it still does a lot right (controls are tight, customizability, etc) but really, the only thing keeping it going is the eternal quest for purples and maybe something new. Look at how easy it is to make gold nowadays… I think it’s fair to say it’s about one step above Mario jumping into a block in difficulty. Moderate PVP gear? Go BG grind. Sure it’s repetitive, but it’s not difficult, unless you’re prone to nerd rage and smashing things.

I say these things with two caveats:
1_) “deceiving…players into wasting their lives playing your game,” I feel is slightly inaccurate, in that it implies that it takes away our choice. Deceiving, yes. Manipulating, yes. Forcing, no. I’m a firm believer that if we do, in fact, have free will, then we are ultimately responsible for all of our choices, and the actions that follow. Having been a WoW addict for three years, I can understand the difficulty in leaving, but people have quit far worse things. Actual crack, for instance.

2_) WoW is not the only game guilty of this. It’s a staple of RPGs, honestly. We watch our XP totals, hoping for new skills, new gear, new areas. What WoW has done, really, is pulled the wool over extremely effectively and on such a large scale that it’s worth applause, followed by disappointed sighs. Everything is a grind. The only challenge left in the game belongs to the high-end raiders and PVPers. I should specify gameplay challenges, in that writing a coherent RP event script or backstory in that universe, at this point, might need a degree. But I digress.

You need loot? Grind. You need a recipe? Grind. You need rep? Grind. Yes, they are grinds of different flavors (quest, mob, instance, BG, Arenas). Perhaps the most hilariously brilliant implementation of this was the introduction of Achievements, which have no real use except for having proof of having done something. Yes, grinding sucks. However, it’s not hard. It takes no more conscious thought than a mouse in a box who can figure out that if he presses the button, his food appears.

Even outside the game the system thrives. You want a cool item? Go buy a few packs of TCG cards. You want a cool pet? Do some Dew. Wanna hear what’s coming up for your character next? Go read patch notes! (This was my particular addiction– I was like the WoW reporter, which also fed my theorycrafting min/max role as a class lead). Seriously, patch notes are scoured and proliferated like tabloids that we all buy into, and frankly it’s brilliant.

[truncated final paragraph. this is where the second post starts]

The logical next step, I think, is to determine what makes games FUN? What makes people keep coming back to play things like Geometry Wars, Braid, Halo, BioShock, Half Life, Guitar Hero, etc?

The Skinner tease is a factor, yes, but it’s not the predominant motivation. No, it’s not going to be completely removed from TOR, that would be nigh impossible. I personally hope BW respects its clientele more than enough to not use this device as its sole incentive to its players.

What causes the adrenaline rush? What makes us want to play, rather than feel like we should be playing?

Story is going to be a big part of the game, and it’s a welcome change. Most of us are here not because we want WoW with Lightsabers, or because we want a SWG revamp. We want something different, and story is going to be the biggest difference in TOR. Not just the depth, but the level of immersion, via choices (shallow and consequential) and the massive VO.
While I believe enough in BW’s storytelling to know that if I log off in the middle of an arc, I’ll be wondering “what happens next?” until I play again and find out, I’d hardly equate that to a Skinner device. That may be my personal preference, tho, as gaining information and thinking about things is really my greatest pleasure, haha.

So what else is there? What makes arcade fighters fun? Racing games? Sidescrollers? Tactical shooters? RTSs?

Think carefully, and contribute, eh?

Off to ponder…

[X]

Where do we fit in?

[This is carried over from my Facebook (www.facebook.com/eoneill). Originally posted on 30 March 2009.]

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Yesterday a man in Massachusetts stabbed his 17 year old sister to death, and then decapitated his 5 year old sister. He then stabbed his 9 year old sister until two officers who had arrived on the scene after she called 911 shot him to death. She’s now in the hospital.

Humanity is full of the cruelest, sickest beings on the planet. Only in humanity do we see such waste of life, such sadism, such sickness.

Why? What’s the difference between us and the other creatures on the planet?

Sentience seems to be the only factor. We’ve been given the capabilities to reason, and it seems that comes with a cost. We have the ability to reason ourselves into terrible things. We don’t see animals go on murderous rampages, save perhaps cases of genetic defects or sickness. We don’t see insects rape.

There’s a pair of giant landfills in the Pacific Ocean, collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Together, their size is estimated as twice that of Texas. Texas. The second largest state in the US. Perhaps those of you who’ve taken long road trips can imagine sitting in a car on a highway for two thousand miles and driving through a landfill. That’s how big it is.

On top of this, most of the trash there is plastic. Not only does plastic take millenia to degrade, it soaks up any and all toxins it happens to be submerged in. Small bits of toxin-filled plastic are eaten by small animals, who then become ill and either die or are eaten by larger animals, who then become ill and may die.

Why do we, the smartest beings on the planet, do these heinous things?

More importantly, why are we allowed to do them?

It’s been said many times that Earth would get along fairly well on its own, without a thinking brain on it. Food chains and ecologies would function as nature guided them, animals would become extinct naturally rather than by being over hunted or by having their habitats razed for whatever reasons.

But would it? Would things be greener, cooler, or more orderly without humanity?

What I’m really asking is, “Where do we fit in?”

We exist, unlike any other creature on Earth, at the top of every food chain. Literally. We have no predators to fear. You can start at bacteria and work your way up every conceivable path of consumption, and we will never be below an animal the way they’re below us.

We have the ability to tailor our environments to suit us. Take the desert I live in, for example. By all natural rights, this place should be nothing more than a dust bowl in most areas. However, through engineering and an IMMENSE amount of water, we’ve turned some of it into farmland. We have green grass wherever we choose and tend it. We have lakes and we stock them with fish.

We are apparently the stewards of the planet. We subdue and master it. We progress by making the world fit us. We evolve the nature, the nature does not evolve us.

It seems, though, that it comes at a cost. Humanity’s foresight has not kept up with its innovation. We’ve made countless species extinct for a plethora of reasons. The odd thing, though, is that it’s never been, “That species needs to die because they’re harmful.” It’s usually more along the lines of, “That species is in my way, but they can’t stop me, so I’m going to do what I want anyway, and whatever happens happens.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fatalist. I don’t believe mankind has the capability to wreck our planet thoroughly right now, save for our retarded amount of nuclear weapons.

However, think about this: in a thousand years, the United States will not exist. Your bloodline will have either died out or merged with families not even started yet. For all we know some malignant genius could create an airborne HIV variant and spread it to every human on the planet, making us extinct.

And all that plastic trash in the Pacific will still be there, floating in circles, kept aloft by the currents that dragged all of that waste from our coasts out to the middle of the ocean. It will still be there for eons after.

That will be our mark on the world.

Slowly, over geological and evolutionary time, the plastics will break down to whatever compounds they break down to. Some creature’s fifteen thousandth descendant will have evolved to consume and break down those products, and excrete them as urea and gases and perhaps degradable solid wastes.

The planet will recover. Much like that little girl may, after her brother killed two of her siblings, one right in front of her, and then stabbed her. The problem is that she shouldn’t have to. You ask anyone why she should have seen those terrible things, why she should have been stabbed, why she should have been scarred physically and emotionally, and you will be met with silence.

Animals, plants, insects, bacteria… none of them can scar the planet or one another the way we do. We are unique in that we have the ability to do so. We are unique even moreso because we know better.

However, what makes humanity TRULY unlike any other life form is that we do it anyway.

So where do we fit in?

[X]