Now We Craftin'

Tipa at Chasing Dings put up an exceptionally interesting post about crafting in MMORPGs today.  She managed to draw Domino (aka Pentapod aka Emily Taylor aka best crafting dev ever) into the discussion on Twitter. A coup if ever I saw one.

I started replying to the lengthy and heartfelt conversation taking place in Tipa's thread but I had to stop when I realised I probably had too much to say for a comment. So here we are.

It surprises me, a little, how infrequently I seem to have posted about crafting on the blog, given how much of it I do in most of the games I play. It's a topic that offers every bit as much potential for analysis as any other aspect of the hobby. The mechanics are often at least as complex and nuanced as anything in the combat systems and we all talk about those often enough.

The fine detail of how crafting is implemented across the genre is a topic for another day, though. What drew me into the discussion Tipa and her followers were having wasn't so much the "how" as the "why".

Both the premise and the problem posed in Tipa's post are summed up perfectly in its provocative title: "Does Crafting have any place in modern MMOs?". There's an underlying assumption there that I'd immediately want to challenge, namely that things need a reason to exist beyond being what they are.

Tipa opens her argument by making a comparison between crafting and dance emotes: "Can’t play your gritty, realistic Knights of the Round Table MMO without dance emotes!" Naturally, that immediately made me think of Spamalot, which goes some way to making my point: genres are malleable. In order to make that analogy fly you have to employ adjectives: "gritty" and "realistic".

Adjectives in this context are limiters. You apply them to close down possibilities. Add enough adjectives and you can define your limits with precision. There are MMORPGs that try to do that, to keep focus, but they are, I would contend, exceptions. The genre is fundementally inclusive, not exclusive. Yes, that can become a tick-box exercise as Tipa suggests but it's also one of the key strengths of the form, that it offers something for everyone.

In her tweet-essay, Domino concentrates her defence of crafting squarely on its role in providing "non-combat" options for MMORPG players. Tipa, in her post and her replies, returns frequently to the point that crafting needs to be "for" something or, as she puts it, to be "as meaningful as combat".

I think both of those positions underplay the fundemental purpose for which crafting exists so commonly in MMORPGs. It's there for the same reason as those dance emotes; it feels good to do. Crafters - real crafters, the ones for whom, as Nimligimli puts it, "crafting is really important" - craft because crafting feels good.

And that's enough. MMORPGs are not, primarily, either social networks or entertainment. They're spaces in which social networking and entertainment can happen. It's the job of MMORPG developers to maintain the space and provide the framework. In a sandbox there are tools and in a theme park there are rides but the fun? That only happens in your head.

This is where I run into difficulties with Tipa's list of reasons why developers might choose to include crafting in their games. Here's the list:

• You want to drain money from the economy
• You want to encourage players to spend longer online, grinding
• You want to allow non-raiders a path to get near raid-quality items
• You want to give players another way to interact

Leaving aside the likely possibility that any of us could probably add another dozen or so items to that list, there's one glaring omission:

• Crafting is fun

I know. "Fun" is a slippery concept. We've all tossed that conker around over the years. The evidence, though, is that people like to craft and I'm happy to accept, for the purposes of this conversation at least, that if people choose to do something and profess to enjoy it, they are de facto "having fun".

Not all of them, I'll give you that. Some people do craft because they want to use the things they make or because they feel doing so gives them some kind of in-game advantage. I would contend, all the same, that many just do it because doing it feels good. And that's a good thing. Actions in a video game don't need to have any purpose beyond the pleasure of carrying them out.

Crafting in many MMORPGs, EverQuest II for example, involves what I consider to be a repetitive, calming, pleasurable sequence of actions. The on-screen animations, the audio cues and the rhythmical key-presses alter my brainwaves in a pleasing fashion. In this way I suspect it ressembles both ASMR videos and real-life crafts like knitting or whittling. As with those physical processes, the intent can be to produce an object of use, worth and value but it doesn't need to be. It can be to calm the mind, relax the body, change the nature of perception.

Many people knit for the pleasure of knitting, then unravel what they've knitted and re-use the wool to knit again. People whittle wood until there's not enough wood left to whittle, then discard and start over. In games, I frequently craft things for which I have no use or desire. I do it because the mechanical process involved is pleasurable to me.

By questioning the validity of crafting as a concept I worry we may be moving perilously close to questioning the existential purpose not just of MMORPGs but of all video games. By excising an element, crafting, and examining its reason for existing, we're calling into question every element of the structure that  supports it. When Tipa expresses her wish that crafting should match combat in terms of meaning , the inevitable corollary is to ask "Yes, but what does video game combat mean?"

Pulling back from that cliff-edge, I also feel the need to question the definition of "crafting" as we're applying it. Tipa complains that crafting in MMORPGs offers no equivalent outlet for creativity to that afforded by real-world crafts. "Crafting in MMOs is just the opposite of that — you press some keys and out comes an item".

True. And then you take that item and use it to create something. That's what crafters in EQII and Rift and Wildstar, just to name three MMORPGs I know reasonably well, have been doing for years. (Well, not in Wildstar any more, sadly). That's what we did in Landmark and it's what, I would contend, Tipa herself did, to incredible effect, in Neverwinter's Foundry.

And here we come to the crux: crafting in MMORPGs isn't only about pressing buttons. There's plenty of that, for sure, and as a tactile process it has immense value, but when we call it "crafting" we misspeak. We should call what we do at the craft stations by its true name: "manufacturing".

The manufacturing process, which exists in one form or another in most MMORPGs, if seperated from its tactile, emotional and psychological impacts, can indeed be rendered amenable to deconstruction along cost-benefit lines. It can serve all of the purposes in the bullet-point list above, although even the most limited and conventional manufacturing processes offer many more reasons to exist in game than just those.

Manufacturing, though, cannot readily be parted from those aforementioned effects. As implemented in many games it does provide an analogous experience to the kind of non-productive, physical, craftlike processes I talked about earlier. And, like those seemingly functionless pastimes, it has every bit as much of a reason to exist.

It's a feel thing. Feel things don't have to have a purpose that those who don't feel them can readily understand or explain.

As for what we might choose to call true crafting, where skill and practice combine to turn imagination into reality, it's alive and flourishing in MMORPGs, despite what can sometimes seem like the developers' best efforts to stamp it out. Long may it continue!