#3. World of Warcraft
Between today’s migraine and the impending Wrath of the Lich King release, let’s take an easy one today.
What can you say about World of Warcraft that hasn’t already been said? It’s the 800-pound gorilla. It’s EverQuest taken mainstream and to the non-gaming public. It’s nearly a billion dollars of good design that changes continuously as the players and playstyles change. It’s at once the last gasp of opera and the harbinger of things to come: I can’t imagine a bigger MMO in the same vein, and I don’t think there is such as thing as a “WOW-killer” in development anywhere. The next one will be radically different, because it will have to be; Stravinsky and Schoenberg after the excesses of Wagner and Verdi.
As a self-professed altoholic, I usually sign off of a given character by saying “Im’a go be someone else for a while.” I’ve been a shaman, a warlock, a hunter, a blacksmith, an alchemist, a master fisherman, a full-on raider, a good Samaritan, and once an accidental ninja-looter (bane of the serious player). Hell, even the ads say you can be anyone you want, and then ask “What’s your game?” In terms of digital identity, WOW is fascinating for its first fundamental assumption – that rather than lengthening the game to keep players playing, it encourages players to try out all the classes, all the professions, to explore the entire world, and to enjoy the game however they want. Casual players are rewarded with rest XP. New players are quickly brought up to speed. I’ve seen more Everquest players bash the game for being “too easy” – and yet this is a design that works. There’s no assumption that everyone’s ultimate goal is a complete set of epically-difficult-to-attain raid gear, and Blizzard is just fine with that.
In my book, WOW gets to be the big dog in MMOs for that and for its second fundamental assumption: that nearly the entire game can be played solo. Historically, it seems that once we had the ability to make these huge, graphical online worlds, there was this idealistic sense that players would rush together to play in online worlds all the time in some fantastic explosion of social gamey togetherness. In the wise words of the Blizzard dev team, sometimes none of your friends are online and everybody else is a dick. My mother could play this game, and yet there’s still enough to keep the hardest of the hard core interested – and both of these kinds of people can find each other. More than that, I have useful, goal-oriented, and above all fun things to do in Azeroth that I can do all by myself, whether my mother or my raid guild feel like signing on excatly when I do.
I’m constantly surprised that I’m still playing the game. For me, WOW is truly casual – I tend to play in 15 to 30 minute spurts, apart from the few times that I choose to run an instance with friends. It’s a game I understand, it’s easy to sign in and sign out, and it’s something to do with my morning coffee and crossword puzzle. And I’m the target demographic.
But that’s not a surprise. You’re the target demographic too. Only Nintendo swings their net wider these days, and WOW is much easier to find than a Wii.
Leave a Reply