[MUD-Dev] Soapbox: World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things by David Sirlin

[David Love]

There's an excellent rant focusing on the lessons of World of Warcraft
(as in, what is it teaching people?) by David Sirlin an Gamasutra.
Everyone who likes to implement forced-grouping mechanics in their
engines would do very well to read this carefully.  

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml

In classic mud-dev style, here it is in plain text:

          Soapbox: World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things

Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft has over 5 million
subscribers worldwide, as of this writing. It's the most successful
massively multiplayer game on Earth right now. This well-crafted game
has put other games in its genre to shame. Blizzard is a great company,
and I might even end up there some day, though this article probably
rules out that possibility.

Before we get to World of Warcraft though, let's pause to learn from
Raph Koster. Raph is no stranger to MMOs, as he was the design force
behind Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He wrote an excellent book
called A Theory of Fun that you all should read. I tend to put "fun" in
quotes, because it's a pretty nebulous thing that I don't know how to
define. Fun is like pornography; I know it when I see it. Raph was brave
enough to attempt an explanation of "fun."

Fun is learning in a safe-environment.

Those few words have a lot of implications. Games are mini-worlds where
we can try out all sorts of ideas and possibilities, and see what works
and what doesn't. Games let us fail with little penalty and then let us
try again. Games teach us how to time our jumps, how to aim, how to
solve puzzles, and how to manage resources. They teach us strategy: when
to attack, and when to avoid a fight. It would be great if they taught a
wider range of lessons, but as Raph says, that's up to us game designers
to make it happen.

Reflecting on Raph's ideas, I was initially very happy because it
explained a lot of things. First, a lot of parents complain about what
impact games have on children, but those parents are generally only
seeing the trivial surface of the game, rather than what the game is
REALLY teaching. Chess appears to be vaguely about war (it has knights
and castles and kings), but it's really a game of controlling space, of
reading the opponent's mind, of trickery and tactics and so on. Grand
Theft Auto appears to be about shooting cops and hookers, but it's
actually a game of exploration and freedom. There is value to exploring
a virtual world that lets you do things you can't do in the real world.
Don't be fooled by the gangster facade.

Even more to Raph's point, I reflected on what Street Fighter taught me:
an awful lot. Where to even begin? For starters, there's tactics and
strategy. When should you attack and when shouldn't you? You have to
understand the critical points in a match, the situations that blow the
game wide open. If you are winning, you need to avoid these situations,
if you're losing you need to create them. Street Fighter taught me about
yomi: knowing the mind of the opponent. You can't just play the odds and
do the textbook-correct responses, you have to adapt and anticipate your
opponent's moves. The game is merely a medium through which you play
against the other player. Some players develop skills in planning, while
others develop their skills at improvisation and adapting to any
situation they are thrown into. I learned first hand that when all seems
lost, if you push, push, push and never give up, it's still possible to
win.

And yet all that is only a tiny fraction of the lessons I've learned.
Street Fighter is a one-on-one game, so you must rely on yourself to
win. You can't mill around while your friends do the work for you.
Self-reliance and continuous self-improvement is the only successful
road. And yet, I also learned that no man is an island. Our tournament
structure has always been open to all comers, so that an undiscovered
talent from Idaho who trained secretly in his basement can show up to
our biggest tournament and win it all, if he has the skill. No need to
qualify or be level 60 in an RPG or any of that. And yet, this mythical
person never ever materialized in my 15 years of playing the game. The
only way to become good is to play against others who are good. It takes
a village to make a champion. You can't turn your back on the whole
world because you NEED the community to improve. You must learn and
train with them. It's pretty hard to do that without making some friends
along the way, too.

Another very important lesson was that winning at Street Fighter is a
meritocracy. Your race doesn't matter. Your religion doesn't matter. The
only thing that matters in a tournament is your ability to win. The
community looks up to those who can win, regardless of ethnicity. There
is no substitute for growing up in an environment that cares about
results, rather than race. Nothing a teacher or parent could ever say
measures up to that life experience about race-relations.

There are also a lot of things us Street Fighter players take for
granted. They are truths so self-evident, that we never talk about them
because it never even occurs to us that these aren't givens. Here's a
few examples: 

      * A fair game does not give material advantages to one player over
        the other 
      * A fair game gives each player equal opportunity to bring
        whatever legal materials he wants (in our case, you can choose
        any character you want, no need to grind him to level 60. All
        players have immediate equal access to all characters.) 
      * It's ok (and the entire point!) to bring to the game a) more
        knowledge than your opponent about the nuances of the game, and
        b) more skill than your opponent. 
      * Time invested should count for nothing in a fair game. It might
        take me 1 hour to learn a few nuances and gain a certain level
        of skill and you 1000 hours. The hours don't matter; only the
        knowledge and skill matter. 
      * I'll say it again: winning is a meritocracy. 
      * Finally, playing a fair game is what it's all about. It would
        never occur to us to play a game where one player gets to do 50%
        more damage because he has a level 60 Chun Li. 

Raph's theory is really holding up for me. Street Fighter was so fun for
me because there so many things to learn. Looking back, these are life
lessons that I couldn't do without. From the strategy of the workplace
to reading the mind of others, to a sense of fairness, I am rich with
reward from my gaming background.

But lately, Raph's words have really started to scare me. I started to
think "What is World of Warcraft teaching all these kids?" I've played
the game since the "Friends and Family" alpha test two years ago, and
I've read the forums ever since. I have a very good idea what the game
is teaching, and it's downright frightening. Unlike the uniformed
parents who are afraid that GTA is going to ruin our youth, I'm not
afraid of the silly facade of World of Warcraft: I'm afraid of what's
it's really all about, deep down! That's a much more powerful and
influencing thing than the mere surface (Street Fighter isn't about
cartoon fighting, that's just a surface, too).

So let's put the cards on the table. Here is what World of Warcraft
teaches:

1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill.
If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People
who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson
that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user
interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an
artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more
hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time
> skill is alien.

2. Time > skill is so fundamentally bad, that I'm still going to go on
about it even though I started a new number. The "honor system" in World
of Warcraft is a disaster that needs to be exposed for health and safety
reasons, if nothing else. This system allows players to work their way
through the ranks, starting at rank 0 and maxing out at rank 14. Winning
in pvp gives you honor points, and at the end of each week, your
performance is compared to that of other players, and you gain or lose
ranks. Now, losing also gives you points, but not as many. The system
overwhelming rewards time spent playing, rather than skill.

What is the health and safety danger I spoke of? You might think that if
you waltz into this honor system, and perform better (which in this case
mainly means you played longer) than everyone else on your entire
server, that you would become rank 14. Not by a long shot. Your gains
are capped each week, so it will take months and months to gain rank 14.
Once you get up to rank 10, you are now competing against people who
play the game 10 hours per day and up. There is no limit to how much a
person can play, so players are driven to play every waking moment
(forget having a job or social life) for fear that if they don't, some
OTHER player will do so and be ahead in rank.

The idea that time > skill has gone from a merely fundamentally bad
idea, to being actually dangerous, addicting people to the point of
fatigue and death. No wonder China's new laws about MMOs are addressing
this problem. MMO games must only award players full experience points
for the first three hours of each day, half experience for the next two
hours, and no experience after five hours. (Logging off for at least 5
hours will reset the system.)

3. Group > Solo. You can forget self-reliance, because you won't get far
in World of Warcraft without a big guild. By design, playing alone (even
if you are the best player in the world) will get you worse loot than if
you always play in 5-man dungeons. If you always play in 5-man dungeons,
you'll always get worse loot than if you play in 40-man raids. The
player base has been hit over the head for so long with this notion of
40-man raids, that players are taking that as given. I see so many
people who have been fooled into thinking this is justified, that it
actually scares me. They think that you shouldn't be allowed to get good
loot unless you do something with 39 other people, because that's
harder. Coordinating 40 people is hard, but so is winning a Street
Fighter tournament, which you have to do by yourself. Some personality
types want to do things with 39 other people, but my personality type
certainly doesn't. I have to wonder why the 40 person raids have good
loot at all. To me, doing something yourself is far more valuable, and a
much more interesting test than getting 40 people to coordinate fairly
mundane tasks.

Unfortunately, the game offers no difficult solo content leading to good
loot. (Note to picky readers: there is some, but it's soooo far out of
whack with raid rewards that we can safely ignore it, the same way
Blizzard does.) The designers must be so extraverted, that they can't
fathom the introvert point of view.

4. Group > Solo. I'm not done with this yet. As an introvert, I'm pretty
outraged that this game is marginalizing my entire personality type. The
developers repeatedly confirm that 40-man raids deserve the most
powerful items. Many of the players are brainwashed by this poor
assumption, often saying "It's an MMO, of course you have to group with
40 other people do accomplish anything." Ironically, World of Warcraft
was originally founded on exactly the opposite idea. The game started
off by saying that EverQuest had that philosophy, and that Warcraft will
not. So much for that.

Here's an obvious point that is taken for granted by posters on
http://terranova.blogs.com/, but completely lost on about half the World
of Warcraft forums: playing by yourself in MMO is perfectly valid thing
to do. You are part of the player-driven economy. You see a living world
around you with people doing their business, laughing together, and
arguing. You can group with people when you like, or not if you don't
feel like it. It's an experience wholly different than a single-player
game, and no serious person could think otherwise. The best way to put
it is that it captures the concept of "being alone together" with other
people. Going to a movie by yourself so you share the experience with
the others in the audience. Going to a study hall where other people are
studying, rather than staying in your room alone. There is a very big
demand for the ability to "be alone together" in a shared social
environment that allows grouping and social interaction, but does not
force it by making almost all end-game content in the form of 40-man
raids.

Warcraft--maybe accidentally--hit upon this concept, and now seems spit on
it and all those who appreciate it. If a Blizzard developer read this,
his PR department would say they are not spitting on this play-style,
but unfortunately the game design speaks louder than words. "Spit on" is
exactly how I feel. But far worse is the idea that millions of children
are learning that doing things on your own is bad. Albert Einstein
accomplished far more in the field of physics by himself during off-time
as a patent clerk than a 40-man raid of so-so physicists ever would. I
want little Johnny in Idaho to learn that lesson, but he sure won't find
it in World of Warcraft. 40 mundane people with a lot of time would put
Albert Einstein to shame any day of the week in this game.

5) Guilds. The tools for creating and maintaining a guild in World of
Wacraft seem benevolent enough. After all, they encourage cooperation.
Unfortunately, they create a social situation totally alien to me in the
real world: a constant "us vs them" mentality. In the real world, I am
part of many different communities, and I have varying levels of
influence and seniority in each. I'm fairly prominent with Street
Fighter players, and have a lot of influence in how national tournaments
are run. I'm known by about 0.01% of Magic: the Gathering players, but I
do put my toe into their pond a fair amount. Meanwhile, in Warcraft, I
live in a world of "guild-only events." You're either with a guild, or
you're nobody to them. I can't imagine being in only one IRC (chat)
channel at a time, or choosing only one gaming community, yet I can only
join one guild at a time. It's a very weird social environment with the
same dangers as nationalism and flag-waving.

6) The Terms of Service. The very idea of using the terms of service as
the de facto way to enforce a certain player-behavior goes against
everything I've learned. A game should be a system of rules that allow
the player to explore. If the player finds loopholes, then the game
developer should fix them. It's never, ever the player's fault: it's the
game developer's fault. People who currently make deals with enemy
faction (Horde or Alliance ) to trade wins in battleground games are not
really at fault. They are playing in a system that forces anyone who
wants to be rank 14 to do exactly that. A line in the Terms of Service
saying that you shouldn't behave this way changes nothing, and teaches
nothing.

Or consider the humorous example of Lord Kazzak. He is an "outdoor raid
boss." That means he's a big monster that wanders round the world, and
you need 40 people to kill him. You don't get to go into your own
instanced dungeon to fight your own personal copy of this guy; there is
one wandering around the server and you all compete to kill him so you
can get his good loot. When Lord Kazzak was added to the game, Blizzard
also added a list of Terms of Service rules that would make your head
spin. None of these rules were hard-coded; they were all "squishy" rules
added on top of the actual game rules. And now for your reading
enjoyment, the Lord Kazzak Official Rules of Engagement (I did not make
these up; they are real!): 

        This policy is an extension of the current in-game harassment
        policies.
        
        PvE Ruleset. 
        
        When a group of players has engaged Lord Kazzak, any other
        players interfering in the encounter may be given a warning,
        regardless of faction, as in the examples below:
        
        A group of Alliance characters has legitimately engaged Lord
        Kazzak and a Horde character engages Lord Kazzak as well (Horde
        player receives a warning). 
        
        A group of Horde characters has legitimately engaged Lord Kazzak
        and a Horde character engages Lord Kazzak as well (the second
        Horde player receives a warning).
        
        PvP Ruleset. 
        
        When a group of players has engaged Lord Kazzak, any
        same-faction players interfering in the encounter may be given a
        warning as in the examples below.
        
        All other possibilities to join the battle are allowed. 
        
        A group of Alliance characters has legitimately engaged Lord
        Kazzak and Alliance character engages Lord Kazzak as well to
        disrupt this raid without any PvP solution for the Alliance
        group (the second Alliance player receives warning).
        

Here's some more things that will get you banned:

"Playing too much," using a rogue/warlock combo to lure bosses too far
from their spawn points, fighting on rooftops, entering unfinished areas
(why are they accessible at all?), buying gold or items on eBay
(eventually the courts will probably overrule them on this),
collaborating with the other faction in battlegrounds, "using terrain
exploits to your advantage," player-created casinos (that merely use the
in-game "/random" command), player-created bingo games, profanity (even
though there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free
speech), posting on forums about whether a guild is full of Blizzard
employees, posting on the forums about why you were banned for posting
about something seemingly constructive, advertising a gay and lesbian
friendly guild that's a safe haven from the endless use of the words
"gay" and "fag" in the general chat channels, having a name such as
"JustKidding," "CmdrTaco," "TheAthiest," or "roflcopter"... and a whole
lot more things, too.

These examples go on and on, but the basic idea here is that Blizzard
treats the players like little children who need a babysitter. There are
mountains of rules in the terms of service that tell you that you
shouldn't do things that you totally can do in the game if you want. Why
they don't just alter their design and code so you can't do these things
is beyond me. But this mentality is drilled into the players to the
point that they start believing that it's ok. They start believing that
it's not ok to experiment, to try out anything the game allows in a
non-threatening environment. Well--that's a dangerous thing. That's the
point at which the game stops being "fun" by Raph Koster's definition,
and it's also the point at which the game can no longer teach. The power
of games is that they empower a player to try all the possibilities that
he can think of that the game rules allow, not that they have pages of
"rules of conduct" that prevent you from creative thinking.

But we all know that World of Warcraft hasn't really stopped teaching.
Although it's ability to teach is highly impaired by the entire "Terms
of Service" approach, it's still teaching literally millions of children
that time spent is more important than ability and that group activities
are strictly superior to personal improvements and self-reliance.

This problem is so troubling, that I feel a personal need to take
action. The only thing I can think to do, though, is to design an MMO
that teaches the right things. Look for that on store shelves in 2012 or
so. For my next trick, I will write a proper Terms of Service for an
MMO. Stay tuned.



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