I’ve been thinking about what to do for a while.  I’ve experimented with drawing the project inward to become more analytical, or exploding it outward to reach the larger internet.  I’ve divided the entries into categories and modified the formulae and whatever and whatever.  None of the above really suited my core interests of capturing what’s of interest about games while recording my journey through them.

This right here is my 100th post, discounting links and photo galleries and things.  I’ve been dissatisfied with the “work” this requires for some time, with the inefficiency of what I set out to do.  I have zero interest in being a video game reviewer or journalist.  I don’t have much at stake in the larger, contentious conversation about games except that everybody involved in the polemics are causing a lot of PR problems for the rest of us.  I want to reach people who are on the same wavelength about games, but that doesn’t mean I have to approximate the output of a major enthusiast press site in order to do so.

My personal time and lifestyle is about to change in such a way that precludes any kind of comprehensive reviewing system.  I’ll have less time to finish games that don’t absolutely keep me riveted, and already I’m making the best of incomplete or broken experiences on my massive PC game backlog.  I’m still really interested in exploring what makes these experiences appealing, but I don’t feel like I need to or even should do this in a systematic manner anymore.  It just doesn’t make sense.

So this is what I’ll be doing: exploring moments inside of games, rather than the games as a whole product.  I may still organize them according to game for purposes of indexing, but the writing itself will be about contained, provocative and hopefully resonant experiences that just happen to occur within a particular game I’m engaged with at the moment.

This accomplishes a handful of positive objectives: it frees me up from having to complete every single game or lament profusely that I could not; it refocuses the energy on capturing very specific conundrums, effects, feelings, or dynamics that would otherwise elude a full-featured “review” post; it removes the onus of having to “pretend” I have any authority on this subject beyond the weight of collected experience itself, as the rhetoric of reviews senselessly demands.

This blog will be a story about small moments connected to big feelings, across the tapestry of video games.  The last 100 articles will still be available, but I’m moving forward with fresh notions from here on out.  I suspect, as well, that it will be a lot more entertaining as a result.

The above scene adequately depicts what happened to me over the weekend as I gingerly stepped into the acid pools of the larger internet.  Despite my own reservations about it, I posted my longform reflective commentary on the embarrassments of MMORPG culture on a subreddit called “true gaming.”  A smaller shard of the internet’s most massive aggregation site, I reasoned that if I was going to find an audience interested in discussing these ideas, it’s there.

Well, I found an audience all right.  Two days later, my post wound up with a score of 308 (514 upvotes / 207 downvotes / 71% approval).  And I think that score is stable, since two days is a lifetime in internet time and ample opportunity for me to sink safely back to obscurity.  I was really heartened to see my intentions become reality in the comments, as people started discussions or remarked that they enjoyed it.  Even one of those comments fundamentally made the experiment worth the risk of enduring the downsides.

In hindsight, of course I should have known that posting a 3200-word commentary to a community expectant of bite-sized information would draw some ire.  I got a lot of responses like “this is verbal diarrhea” and “using analogies and a thesaurus don’t make you a good writer.”  There were tons of desperate calls for concision.  But mine is not the first longform personal commentary to exist on r/truegaming.  I should know.  I’ve been reading such pieces on there all year.  If I ever encounter something I’m not willing to read through entirely, I just move on.  I don’t stop and post hostile comments about the author’s ability to parse and refine his internet writing.

But then I started figuring it out.  This negativity was coming from somewhere specific.  My piece talks about how the “toxic contract” of subscription-based online gaming encourages players to act in all sorts of unsavory ways, and this damages the community (and the industry) as a whole.  Now there are all sorts of holes in my logic and I hoped this could be deconstructed in meaningful ways.  Instead, my article about hordes of anonymous internet crazies predictably offended a horde of anonymous internet crazies.  They fought back, perceiving an attack, instead of the call to reason I suggested.

They stumbled upon a personal commentary piece and tried discrediting or destroying both the person and the comment.  They mistook humility for mistaken admission of ignorance.  They cued into the fact that I’m not a teenager and lambasted me for being an out-of-touch adult.  They got scared of a parsed and logical longform work and played armchair English teacher with me.  They did everything they could to not engage with the subject matter, ostensibly because it terrifies them.

But the truth is, it is embarrassing to be a part of gaming culture right now.  These people with their egocentric hostility masked by the fog of internet war are making trouble for the rest of us who just want to engage with interesting experiences.  If you are “passionate” enough to send death threats to BioWare because of Mass Effect 3’s ending, you are the problem.  Truth is, companies like Blizzard and BioWare have been using “passion” as loose euphemism for “unhealthy emotional involvement” for a while now.  This whole thing looks a little ridiculous to the outside world, and that perception is precisely what I’m worried about.

Anyway, I truly appreciate those people who took my work in the spirit it was intended and built interesting conversations out of it.  The majority did so, which qualifies this experiment as a resounding success.  I felt a lot better after reading the many kind words people left for me.  But I guess I don’t have the thickest of skin, accustomed as I am to simply writing for my friends and kind strangers.  This direct experience with so much unnecessary hostility really affected me negatively, and I doubt I will reach out to reddit again.  But as for the rest of you, it did feel really great finding other people tapped into my wavelength, and I will look into other ways to find you fine folk elsewhere over time.

I deleted it all: the account, the post.  Why the account?  I didn’t want to deal with an inbox full of anonymous hatred.  Why the post?  Despite what these detractors think they know about writing, there’s a lot of value to variety in styles and approaches — more than the five-paragraph college essay these guys were so fervently expecting.  I think this community failed to realize that I was testing its suitability, and not the other way around.

Something has happened.  Not only is the magic gone, but it has replaced by unctuous corporate cynicism.  It’s like Cypher aboard the Nebuchadnezzar looking at the Matrix and seeing blondes and redheads instead of computer code.  You hang around this genre long enough, and all you see is hollow contrived manufacture for commercial purposes.  Even with all that potential to reinvent human interaction in virtual spaces, or to redefine what large-scale human collaboration could mean.  I think Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games have collectively become a predatory genre.

I haven’t played all of them.  I missed a large chunk of the history of their evolution, a foolishly stalwart Apple loyalist for the decade of PC game development that produced EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI and Star Wars Galaxies and Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars and EVE Online and like dozens more early MMORPG experiences.  So there’s this whole missing narrative, how the pioneers of this genre worked earnestly to reinvent the online game.  Maybe that was a golden age and I missed it.

The World that Won

So of course I played World of Warcraft, like millions of other people, because like all Blizzard games it was Mac-compatible.  And, just like those millions of people who still play the game even today eight years later for $15 a month, I found that it was tapping into something psychologically primal.  One might argue that I was already primed for its effect, because games like Eye of the Beholder, Dark Cloud and Diablo II had turned me into a bona fide dungeon delver.  And I had been following the story of WarCraft (it used to be capitalized like that by the way) since the original in 1997, blissfully unaware for three iterations that it had all been appropriated from Warhammer Fantasy Battle and shaped onward into palatable Tolkienesque generica.  At the time it didn’t matter.  I was a “fan.”

But this mixture was potent.  It showed us that a sufficiently developed persistent world can take months, even years to explore to its fullest — and that those experiences could be meaningful and self-revelatory.  At the time it felt like a real place in virtual space.  It was a place we collectively and cognitively understood as existant.  I remember that feeling well.  Meeting at random a real person at the bottom of a mineshaft and helping them fight tooth and nail back out to the open air of the entrance.  Wandering about sheer crags atop crashing waves at the end of the world to find a broken hermit who knew the secrets to defeating a terrible demon.  Descending into the superheated stone causeways above bubbling, molten rivers at the heart of Blackrock Mountain, standing nervously with four other real people, wondering what dread tasks await.  I want to say this game offered me thousands of affecting experiences like that.

But wait.  The smell of open air?  The sound of crashing waves?  The tactile heat of molten stone?  Why do I remember something that was clearly supplied by my own mind, by inference and imagination?  And then it starts making sense.  It’s just pixels after all.  World of Warcraft was robust enough to provide an interconnected framework of experiences that required our minds to “fill in the gaps” and thusly flesh out a fully-realized virtual reality experience.  It was wishing that made it so. But we gave Blizzard too much credit for their creation.  It was we who fully realized it.  It was we who delivered so much significance to the maps of Azeroth in our minds.  Some reason — zeitgeist?  right place right time?  the immediate accessibility of its generica? — this world out of all worlds was adopted by the masses and persists today as the juggernaut of MMORPG spaces because of those customers who support it.  Not the other way around, right?

When Wonder Becomes Work

But eventually you walk every road, and find every nook, and see all there is to see.  And I perceive this as a divergent nexus point, the do-or-die moment for a so-called “population” of these worlds.  For those motivated by narrative, it becomes an exercise of reading the same pages over and over — the occasional new insight, but altogether uninteresting for the lack of novelty or variety.  For those motivated by combat, it becomes a rote pattern-memorization exercise every time you repeat the same encounter in the same dungeon — again, variable in the sense that you might get more savvy at the encounter, but essentially never presented with new or unexpected stimuli.  In either case, there is a staleness to the experience that creeps up from underneath the compulsion to continue, whether you feel you’re invested in your progress or enamored with the enormity of the phenomenon or simply happy to log on and talk to people who have — in the intervening years — become meaningful friends.

The divergent point, then, is the collective moment when the novelty of the game’s stimuli wears off into that staleness, and players must make a choice: (A) to continue in the face of repetition, consciously or implicitly accepting that the benefit of the psychosocial factors involved with the experience outweigh the cognitive staleness and opportunity cost of not seeking new stimuli; or (B) get the hell out while the getting is good, presumably because the psychosocial factors present minimal or zero benefit to the player and the opportunity cost for sinking finite time into infinite timesinks is too unpalatable to bear.  This is the phenomenon you hear of often, where “the game becomes a job” — a job many are unwilling to do.

These psychosocial factors — feelings of prestige and self-worth, community involvement and meaningful social experiences, and being part of something greater than yourself — are not unique to video games.  In fact, I’d say that altogether these factors are to an extent illusory in virtual spaces, certainly to the extent that they cannot be translated to value or meaning for others who do not play MMORPGs.  But these factors are the very elements fueling the juggernaut, compelling millions of people to pay subscription fees each month.  It is the reason World of Warcraft is a “success.”

To Catch a Predator

So let’s take a look at choice (A) above, shall we?  The player (consciously or otherwise) accepts that illusory self-actualization and community benefits contingent on continuous gameplay are preferable to — to what, the uncertainty of moving onto other unknown activities that contain the risk of not providing the same known satisfactions?  Is it fear of change?  Is it anxiety of having to elevate one’s own context out of safe anonymity?  Is the the feeling of ritual and routine comfort, a “safety net” for however bad life gets, you’ll always have this?

I want to posit this as sensitively as possible.  Those who choose such extensive repetition over novelty must do so out of some compulsion informed by anxiety or fear.  And don’t misunderstand me: this is absolutely their right to do this.  But this does mean that these players represent a vulnerable population.  That due to their deeply personal psychological needs, they can be more easily manipulated by game developers who so readily provide safe and encapsulated psychosocial benefits to them.

It represents a volatile power imbalance that keeps players paying both with real money ($180/year, plus  potential “micro”-transactions for expanded content, account services and virtual goods) and real time (my average daily playtime during peak periods of enthusiasm was often around 6 hours per day, every day, and I was on the lighter end of the scale).  At the end of the day this is a corporation looking to maximize profits.  It’s like a casino or a drug dealer.  It wants you plugged in and tuned out, subjected to maximum distractions about the intricacies of your personal behavior.  It wants you to outwardly justify your decisions to stay with fervent rhetoric and overcomplicated justifications, just as a problem smoker or problem eater would.  It needs you self-deceivingly entrenched in a way of thinking that benefits the company instead of your own life.  Its very survival as a thing depends on it.

The Engine of Destruction

We see this all over the world when it comes to corporate entities and the products they shill.  All of popular radio is owned by like, six companies that collude to sell you the same sanitized and homogenized pop music.  The television, movies and music industries coexist uneasily with creative forces, insisting on aging delivery mechanisms and irrelevant/illogical public standards.  And they really don’t care.  They just want you to fall in line and fill up the bottom line.  There is an amorality to it all, an ethical void space, an army-of-robots inevitability to it all.  The fact that you are engaged with something creative and wondrous and imaginative is only relevant to some suit-and-tie metric that predicts your continued financial support.

If they can sell you swill, they will.  And at some point, even the finest wine on the planet turns to acidic mush when left out too long.  And this is what I’ve been driving at: MMORPGs are designed to last a very long time in order to make back the colossal development costs and then maximize profits over a long tail.  But think about it.  I loved Defense Grid: The Awakening, but I didn’t play it for thousands of hours over eight years.  In any healthy entertainment experience, it’s time to move on and let the finished experience be truly finished.  Maybe come back to it in fond nostalgia and rekindle a few challenges, but then placing it firmly back on the shelf.  But a “success” in this MMORPG genre depends on a large number of people drinking stale wine.  It defies the encapsulated experience and purports to be a dynamic arena for endless gameplay.  But the gameplay is not endless.  It ends, and then you repeat it over and over again.  It’s like a novel trying to convince you it’s a football stadium.  It doesn’t make any sense.

So a “successful” MMORPG, due to its corporate mandate of being massively profitable, must be predatory.  It must suck in vulnerable risk-averse and socially anxious players by the literal millions, and then continually feed this population with just enough sameness dressed up in nonthreatening minimal novelty while this essentially abusive contract between parties exists.  But okay, if Blizzard is delivering safely packaged psychosocial experiences to a population that is willing to pay for it, is anybody really being harmed?  What’s my business getting in their business anyway?

We All Pay the Cost

The problem is this: everybody’s affected, in a number of dangerous ways.  First and foremost, the continued existence of our present pay-to-play MMORPG models validates this long, stale tail as though it’s not a problem in the first place.  It’s clearly been profitable for Blizzard, so other companies will continue to attempt to churn out “WoW-killers” with the same nonthreatening treadmills drenched with tired old tropes in order to secure their piece of this massively depressing pie.  Millions of people are voting with their wallets each month to continue this tired, repetitive homogenized “gameplay.”  Developers and their corporate overlords are paying close attention to this, and will be encouraged to move forward with the bare minimum of innovations required to set its product apart without offending the target population’s emotional and compulsive demand for safe sameness.  It’s a rut that is being driven ever deeper into the roadway.

Second, it drives development energy and innovation away from other genres or hybrid genres that could serve the content matter better.  In other words, a great idea might instead be shoehorned into an MMORPG framework simply because the big-risk-big-payoff financial element appeals to the suit-and-tie of the day.  Star Wars: The Old Republic could have been a single-player masterpiece the way it was built, with its engaging dialogue and its shining narrative arcs that leverage the medium in ways that cinema simply can’t do.  It could have been released in full-priced episodes, even, and I would have purchased them because they are excellent.  But instead, it was funneled into an unnecessary MMORPG wrapper with hundreds (thousands?) of other people who similarly did not care about massive multiplayer in such a tightly produced single-player experience.  Similarly, I was worried about 38 Studios’ incredibly unnecessary upcoming Amalur MMORPG after seeing how wonderful their single-player ARPG brawler epic Reckoning really was.  That game really doesn’t need to be massively multiplayer, let alone perpetual and persistent.  My favorite thing about Reckoning was how satisfying it was to complete and how my engagement with its vast world felt “finished.”  And now ZeniMax Online has announced an Elder Scrolls MMORPG?  Why do we need a massive persistent offering from a story world best known for its solitary and personal explorations of vast, lonely worlds?  See what I’m getting at?  We, as a world, are losing great ideas to an unnecessary genre.  

Third, either consciously or otherwise, the core MMORPG player population knows it is being taken advantage of.  It’s a fine line, but they’re aware on some level that they’ve subscribed to a metaphorical magazine but keep receiving the same issue over and over each month.  And so what has emerged over the last years is a disgusting mass mentality of entitlement in the so-called “video game enthusiast” population.  These are the same spoon-fed tools who actually successfully forced Bioware to rewrite the ending of Mass Effect 3 as free DLC, or who rushed to every online outlet to spam negative reviews of Diablo III in the first hours of its midnight launch because its overburdened servers, or who engage in unsettling schadenfraude at the financial catastrophes at 38 Studios because Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning didn’t get a Field of View patch post-launch.

A Band of Bozos

Why is this acceptable behavior now?  These gamers have been trained.  Whenever any pay-to-play MMORPG releases a new patch that contains broken features or new bugs or overzealous balance changes, there is real consumer anger from these people.  They pay good money every month for a particular experience and damnit, they’re gonna get it one way or another.  And because the developers are taking this money every month, they are bound to respond to each of these ridiculously overblown complaints and address them somehow in long forum posts or future content updates.  They’re stuck in this spiral, predatory developers and entitled consumers.  I don’t understand how that’s worth any amount of money or trouble.  But this entitled-ness is getting worse, and I submit that it has been influenced and engorged by the inherently predatory practices of massively online subscription-based gaming.  They are the ones setting the precedents and reinforcing it with results.  And that’s a real problem for the rest of us who just want to relax and play some games.

Back in 1991 I played a game that you could only beat if you typed in “free beer” to a bustling throng of adversaries.  Yeah, I was like 11, so guess who didn’t get to beat DreamZone?  Did I call up the customer service reps at Baudville Entertainment to complain about the lack of value in my (parents’) purchase?  No.  I went on to spend the following year wandering about and translating runes in Drakkhen, a game I most likely beat by accident since the whole damn thing was completely incomprehensible.  Back then, games existed on their own merits and we interacted with them as wondrous objects that simply didn’t care about our criticisms.  Many, like Shadow of the Beast II, were insurmountable after the first five minutes.  Do you think the developers at Pysgnosis gave a crap?  Back then these games were cryptic, with secrets to be shared amidst pre-internet user group meetings and computer magazine columns.  Discovery was real, and tangible, and a potent thing back then: in the late 80s, knowing a secret in Zelda or Metroid got you a special place at the lunch table.  That knowledge was hallowed.  You were respected for a thing like that — almost as much as the games themselves were respected.

Today, all you need to do is type a poorly-spelled complaint about a boss or level and you’ll be flooded with video walkthroughs, step-by-step reviews, cheats and multi-layered detailed collectibles maps, theorycrafting databases, and more.  Are we even playing these games anymore?  A sense of collaborative community is fine.  But this entitlement is a big, big problem, for everybody.  It’s encouraging these people who might otherwise live normal or meek lives to become raging crazies on the internet who through sheer strength in numbers influence the decisions of developers and publishers and journalists and eventually mass perception of a community that is teetering on the embarrassing edge of perpetual adolescent petulance.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Laypeople ignorant of the depth and richness of interactive media at best dismiss video games as a child’s diversion, citing Wii carnival games and disposable franchise cash-ins made for preschoolers.  At worst, they rail against other predatory genres like annual iteration first-person shooters (Call of Duty, etc.) and call these monster-closet man-shoots “murder simulators.”  Thing is, in both of these scenarios, they have a point.  These are the extremes on each pole, but it still rings true that these above examples are valueless timewasters.  There are people in this world who will never be convinced that there’s anything else to it, either.

In between each pole, however, there’s an incredible wealth of cognitively enriching, emotionally riveting, interactive and sensory experiences coming up from all levels of game development, big and small, far and wide.  And I think if this medium is to thrive and excel and rise, its community of appreciators has to rise to meet that level.  Real discourse has to occur.  Instead, we’ve got level 85 hunters gathering online petition signatures about rapid fire nerfs and organized mobs sending death threats to Bioware employees because they believed their in-game choices should more intricately influence the ending of the game (this is real, not a joke).  It is mortifying and embarrassing, but it’s more than that.  It’s damaging.

At some point games are going to have to grow up.  And in order for this to happen, gamers are going to have to grow up.  I have so much life-long love for video games.  I’m thankful to live in an age where they not only exist, but also got their start.  But I think MMORPGs have gone wrong, and it’s turned players wrong, and it’s turning the industry wrong.  I’m already starting to qualify my involvement with the medium in ways that suggest I’m “not like the rest of these guys” when I really shouldn’t have to.  But I do qualify my interests in games, quite a bit now.  Because the alternative is to falsely relegate video games as a whole into the category of “things we grow out of” and impossibly move on from the rich and wonderful tapestry of my upbringing.

Instead, something sinister is on the horizon here.  And those of us who just want to play games and experience new ideas and take part in this emerging new medium for all it is worth — well, here’s to hoping it’s still worth what we think it is in the near future.