Posted by Gravecat at 4:21 am under Gaming, Rambling, World of Warcraft. Comments (1)
And there it is, after countless hours of boredom and frustration, after trawling mindlessly through mountains of outdated content I cared little about, at last the reward — and with it a new title, Loremaster Squick, a way to show the world that I truly have nothing better to do with my life than sink hours into tedium and repetition for the hopes of a hollow reward of coloured pixels. Despite that, I don’t regret a moment of it.
That’s what got me thinking about gaming as a whole, and the bizarre system of effort and reward that we as gamers seem to impose upon ourselves. Of course achievements in games like World of Warcraft or on systems such as the Xbox 360 and Steam — or a rose by any other name, such as “trophies” on the PlayStation 3 — are the perfect example of this mentality in action, I feel it’s only a relatively new coat of paint on the surface of something much older. Remember when you were a kid hanging out in the video-game arcades of the 80′s and 90′s, marvelling at the high-score tables populated and dominated by those elite few with the seemingly unattainable skills needed to occupy such a throne? Or as a more domestic example, something every gamer should be familiar with: The urge to beat the level, defeat the boss, to press onward and explore new territory, or simply to beat a score and achieve some measure of satisfaction from the knowledge that your skill and dedication could be quantified by digits glowing on a phosphor screen.
This, I feel, is something endemic and intrinsic to the gamer mindset, and yet the intangible appeal fails to make any logical sense in my mind. We push ourselves to incredible lengths for the sake of achievement and improvement in an artificial system which exists solely for the sake of providing challenge where there would otherwise be none. An extreme case of this would be the Korean gamer who quite literally killed himself by playing too much StarCraft; more common examples can be seen all around us. Who out there wearing the moniker of “gamer” can honestly say they haven’t spent a weekend or more shut away in a darkened room, hunched over a screen, thoroughly absorbed in one of these faux-simulacra?
Is it simply human nature to constantly push ourselves further, so desperate for self-improvement and so eager for accolade that we are inherently drawn to such a medium? The overwhelming popularity of gaming as a whole on a worldwide scale would seem to imply a certain truth in this logic, though I can’t help but feel as though something is missing. Can it really be that simple? In the end, are we still just a bunch of apes who’ll push a button all day long if it means we’ll get a bunch of bananas and a pat on the head?
Lu — May 16th, 2010 @ 5:02 pm
This gives me the perfect opportunity to describe my relationship with games as of late!
When I first started this degree, I was all “yay games, games are fun”, and would still indulge games in hours of play, forgetting work entirely. In the second year, after making and theorising and reading on games construction for so long, they’ve devolved into nothing but sets of rules, clear parameters and little simplistic, goading rewards. I just can’t play games for any length of time because they no longer draw me in, because some in particular just look like nothing but pointless and bizarre rules and rewards slapped into a graphical engine.
WoW, in this case, is the perfect example of a Skinner Box, only with humans. The ‘game’ in my eyes has been stripped of any kind of play, and is just a series of keypresses for instantaneous reward. It’s more addictive than drugs because you are always improving, and always being rewarded for a menial non-task. It exploits the desire to achieve and do things, while giving nothing in return but a little graphic. It also fails to challenge you, and you’re constantly doing things you can already do, with greater reward each time.
And the sad thing is, this is all I see when I play just about any game, particularly on my own. And I sit, and I play, and I pull triggers and push buttons and all the while, I know I could be doing so many better things, so many more enjoyable things, and so many more actually tangibly rewarding things with my life. I see rules, rewards, and every time I get a little pat on the head, I flinch.
Because at the end of it, I don’t want to be an animal in a cage who gets fish bits and a ruffle for slapping a few buttons, a fact I’m aware of each time I play games, WoW in particular. No risks, all rewards.
And that’s why I can barely play games, and have no ability to get addicted any longer.