Foundations And Identity

Following yesterday's unscheduled rant I return you today to our scheduled programming, a meditation on the purpose and function of mmorpg gameplay. Or, then again, not. 

I was going to make some observations on how I look for different experiences from the games I play depending on what's going on in my non-gaming life. After a couple of years when, for various reasons, I've spent considerably more time at home than at work, when the time spent playing games has varied from much-needed downtime to something approaching house arrest, I thought I might have some perspective from which observations might be made and conclusions might be drawn.

And then Shintar asked a very purposeful question in the comments to yesterday's post. Actually a series of questions:

"It seems strange that you feel so compelled to play GW2 even though you find it stale. Is it just because of Mrs B? It seems like an odd juxtaposition that there are apparently a hundred games you'd like to play and for which you don't have enough time, but you play GW2 every day even though it annoys you now? Or is it still genuinely much more fun to you than any of those other games despite the annoyances expressed in this post?"

And Kaylriene gave a long explanation of his decision to leave his guild and how that might lead to his not playing World of Warcraft any more, in which he invoked the "sunk cost fallacy". And Wilhelm posted a digression on the definition of immersion , how we fall under a game's spell and how certain changes might or might not be enough to break the magic. And Redbeard concluded a lengthy analysis of Burning Crusade's Karazhan raid by invoking buyer's remorse with a terse "I busted my ass for this?"

All of which led me to conclude I probably ought to have a bit of a rethink. Why people play play the games they do, why they go on playing them and why they stop is a complicated process. Why I thought I might have a handle on it beats me, now. I wasn't thinking, obviously.

So, I'm not going to trot out a neat little piece about how sometimes you want thrills and sometimes you want to be sedated. Life isn't a Ramones lyric (probably just as well). I'm just going to dig into my own motivations a bit and see what I can find. No universal principles, just some self-analysis. Everyone else is going to have to work on their own stuff. 

Shintar asks some very good questions. Why do I play Guild Wars 2 just about every day, then complain about what an unambitious, repetitive, stale game it can be? How does that fit in with my regular complaints about not having enough time to play the ever-growing number of mmorpgs I wish I was playing? And how is playing a game and calling it "stale" in a blog post any different from being one of those people I've called out in the past for logging into a game just to tell everyone how bad it is and how bored they are?

I thought about all of this when I was replying to Shintar. I came up with a number of true and accurate reasons why I've played GW2 almost every day for ten years. It's easy, it's familiar, it's comfortable. It does feel great to play, physically. Plus, something I didn't mention, it's gorgeous to look at.

Perhaps most importantly of all, it's right there, all the time. It's a staple, like a loaf of bread. And just like bread you can still eat it and enjoy it when it's gone a little stale. You just need to toast it a little.

And that's pretty much what ArenaNet do. It's what most mmorpg developers do. They bake their loaf and when it starts to get stale they toast it a little to bring back the flavor. That's what all these endless holiday events and minor updates are: a little heat applied to bring the flavor out.

Okay, I think that's as far as I want to stretch that analogy. Trust me, I had a couple more paragraphs along the same lines but they weren't making things any clearer. Very much the opposite, in fact.

 

My point is, just because something isn't at absolute peak freshness doesn't mean you throw it away. Stale is very much not the same as spoiled. If the air in your room starts to feel a little stale you open a window. You don't move to a new house.

Ah, yes. Moving home. Here comes another analogy, although come to think of it it's barely an analogy at all. Swapping allegiance from one mmorpg to another is moving home, in a virtual sense. Or perhaps it's more like starting a new job. Let's not get bogged down in analogical analytics.

In twenty years, how many times would I say I've fully "moved home" in mmorpgs? It's a much more complex question than it seems on the surface. For the first decade I played there were homes within homes. It wasn't only which game I played, it was which server I played the game on. 

Moving server in EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or EverQuest II was very nearly as big a wrench as changing games. It meant starting from scratch, leveling new characters, making new friends. It meant leaving behind any and all resources other than your knowledge of the game itself and sometimes even most of that. Adapting to the original Firiona Vie ruleset in EQ, for example, or changing from Albion to Midgard in DAOC meant a learning curve comparable to starting a new game.

I changed servers a lot in the first ten years I played mmorpgs. I mean really a lot. I started new characters on almost every fresh server in EverQuest throughout the period when demand meant new servers were coming up all the time. I changed realms in DAOC twice in six months. I swapped servers four times in EQII in six years and that's not counting server merges.

All of that churn served to keep the games very fresh indeed. There wasn't much time to worry about things getting stale when the focus was always on managing change. The coming of server clusters and megaservers all but put an end to that. When GW2 began, servers were very much a thing but for what seems like the longest time, GW2 has just been GW2. It's a loss and it adds to the sense of staleness but we wear it.

Such a degree of internal churn makes a nonsense of the linear sequence of "main mmorpgs" my timeline would list but I'll take a shot at one anyway. I'm limiting it to games I played continuously for six months and I'm not looping around to the ones I came back to and played for another six months or longer, which would only be EverQuest and EQII anyway, I think. Also I very much doubt these are in exact chronological order. 

For what it's worth, then, my main sequence mmorpgs have been:

EverQuest

Dark Age of Camelot

EverQuest II

Vanguard

Rift

World of Warcraft

Guild Wars 2

Of those seven, GW2 has the longest unbroken run as main game. I've played a lot more EQ and EQII in total, not least because I'm still playing them both now, but there have been plenty of gaps along the way. GW2 I have played very close to every day since it launched back in 2012.

Why? Such a good question. Is "because it's there" a good enough answer? Clearly not. All of those other games, plus many others that were my main game for a few weeks to a few months (Guild Wars, Wizard 101, Lord of the Rings Online, Allods, FFXIV, WoW Classic, Star Wars the Old Republic, Rubies of Eventide...) are also still "there". I could be playing any of them every day but I'm not. I'm playing GW2. Why is that?

I think it's because I have some deep-seated, almost unconscious need for a base. A foundation. A solid platform from which to explore other things. In the very few, very brief periods during my twenty years in this hobby, times when I've not had such a foundation, when there's been no single game I was able to think of as "the game I'm playing", I've felt rootless, adrift. 

It's an uncomfortable sensation, significantly more uncomfortable than playing a game that feels a little bit stale. Guild Wars 2 may not be the most exciting, innovative, amazing game out there but it's my game, the game I'm playing. It's part of my identity. I am a GW2 player.

For now. That's the thing. All of the games on the list above were "my" games at one time. I would have identified then as "a DAOC player" or "a Rift player". 

Some of them make comeback bids now and then. There's an argument to be made that my main game right this minute is actually EQII, not GW2 at all. I'm probably putting in more hours there at the moment, doing my Overseer tasks every day and leveling my Vah Shir to 120. Maybe I should install that app people run that tallies up your exact playtime in every game. That might tell another story altogether.

As I said in yesterday's post, GW2's current status as Main Game benefits hugely from lack of competition. I don't much want to go backwards and replace it with a game I used to play and none of the newer games I've tried have been able to supersede it. It remains at the top of the heap through inertia and by default.

What's likely is that one day a new game will replace Guild Wars 2 and GW2 will take its place on my "other games I'm playing" list. I would bet serious money I won't stop playing it altogether, no matter how wonderful the new game might be. I might, if I'm really lucky and the new game is something special, take a hiatus from GW2 for a few months but you can bet I'll be back.

Again, why? I think it's all down to that identity thing. After twenty years I'm still an EQ player. I'm still an EQII player. I'm still a Vanguard player. But I'm not a WoW player or a Rift player. I'm someone who sometimes plays WoW. I'm someone who used to play Rift.

I'm about as sure as I can be that I am and will always be a GW2 player. I may not always enjoy being one, I may not always choose to be one, but I will always be one. Whether I'm currently playing or not.

Which, right now, since there's nothing better on offer, I am.