Challenge Accepted: The virtues of easy
Why play this instead of something harder? I can think of dozens of reasons.
If you can’t understand why someone would want to play an easy game, I don’t think you understand why people play video games at all. I’m not saying you have to want to play one, I’m saying you have to understand why someone will do that. No, saying “because they can’t play well enough to be at the top” does not qualify as understanding.
I like talking about challenge in games – a lot – but I also can’t stand the chest-pounding portion of the general gaming audience who seems to collectively believe that if you’re not turning every game into an arduous challenge then you’re obviously unworthy of purchasing any more games over the course of your life. As if there was no way to enjoy a game that tried just being easy, as if there was nothing to be derived from a game that’s not terribly deep, as if there was no modulation or middle ground between people who enjoy challenges and those that enjoy challenges. Or, for that matter, as if every game wasn’t easy in the right light.
Spoiler warning: all of the above are true.
Where did World of Warcraft go wrong?
I should not be looking at an expansion filled with draenei and not be excited. This is literally everything I’ve ever wanted.
Something is rotten in the state of Azeroth, and it has been for a while.
The problem of talking about World of Warcraft‘s decline is that no one is interested in doing so. The game’s fans are eager to point out that the game still has an impressive number of subscribers rather than talking about the fact that, on average, the game has been losing more than a million subscribers per year since the launch of Cataclysm. The other side of the coin likes to forecast the game’s death, neglecting to acknowledge that even if the game keeps bleeding off subscribers at this rate it’s got several more years of life left in it while discounting spikes.
But there’s a frank discussion to be had, one that doesn’t invest itself in hyperbole, and it’s obvious that the game is on a downward arc. Over the past four years (Cataclysm launched at the very tail end of year six) the game has lost an extraordinary number of subscribers. Its growth has stalled. This is a stark reversal when the game was in an upward trend for the first six years of its lifespan. Why is that? What’s changed its fortunes so thoroughly? I wonder about that a lot, and I think a lot of it comes down to learning the wrong lessons from its height.
Telling Stories: And I’ll form the head
When you trust people, you’re usually willing to let them borrow your things. Your books, your movies, your roleplaying characters.
I’ve seen various people share their characters in the years that I’ve been roleplaying, ranging from fully shared accounts to versions of characters being controlled by multiple different players. (I’ve also seen players controlling multiple versions of the same character, but that’s a discussion for another day.) The idea is that it can form a shared experience, both players getting some of the fun of roleplaying in theory. In practice…
Look, I’m not one to say that this is something that can never work. But there are a lot of really big hurdles to climb here, ones that I don’t think are necessarily easy to surmount or even suggest a methodology. So before you even consider it, you need to really think about what you’re doing and why, especially if you’re talking about your main character and not an alt.
Zones of death!
“Oh, let’s build a little cottage up there!”
– No one, ever, in the history of the world
Do you know what the top of Mt. Everest is called? The Death Zone. Well, all right, to be really technical the Death Zone is any region in climbing which involves going so high that human beings can’t get enough oxygen to live. It’s a region wherein every moment you stand there brings you closer to death, because you cannot get enough precious, life-giving oxygen.
Why in the world are you going to the Death Zone? Do you want to die? This isn’t the Maybe Sort Of Possible Death Zone If You Know What I Mean, Wink Wink. It is the Death Zone!
Not that this makes the average climber any dumber than the average video game character, or for that matter, the average gamer. We get a lot of laughs out of watching characters do stupid things that we like to say we’re smart enough to avoid, but the fact of the matter is that we’re in the same boat as the horror movie fans who go wandering around int he dark without a flashlight without thinking about it.
No, I don’t like Star Wars
It’s Hoth. It’s always Hoth. Because it was in the movies, and how can we possibly avoid referencing the movies over and over? So let’s slowly erode the idea that Hoth was this frozen backwater in the middle of nowhere and just keep going back to Hoth. (And somehow it’s still doing better in this regard than Tatooine.)
One of those things that always sticks in my craw is the result when I mention around people I don’t know that I don’t like Star Wars. Because someone always doesn’t believe me.
There’s a little twitch in the eye, a stare, an odd expression. “Really?” they ask. “Not even such-and-such? Does that mean you don’t like this or that?” It’s a request for elaboration, like there has to be some caveat, it can’t be as simple as just the fact that I would be much happier to live in a world where there would be no more Star Wars.
What I do like that intersects with Star Wars is a very thin list that I generally enjoy in spite of its association, not as a result of it. I would much prefer if Star Wars: The Old Republic was based on literally any other property in the world. I have to consciously distance myself from the name when I attempt to enjoy the original trilogy. I don’t like Star Wars, and I think there’s a lot of good reason not to like Star Wars.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 