Work Play
July 7th, 2008As always, I have been thinking about MMORPGs. In particular the concept of work in MMORPGs. Generally this thought process revolves around crafting generally being more work than play. Typically crafting is ¾ work and ¼ play (a ration that desperately needs to be reversed). Recently a world event was installed in EverQuest 2, a world event with a quest attached to it.
The basic structure is you do a quest that introduces you to a process of “hunting”. Once you have completed the “hunt” you go back to the quest giver and turn it in for experience and coin. You then can repeat the quest as many times as you like for a specified type of currency but no coin or experience.
You then can take this currency and buy items associated with the world event that range in value from 2 units to 5 units of the specialized currency. Part of the reality of these items it that some of them, the armor in particular, are sold as separate parts. To but any armor set you must complete the given task (hunt 9 specific mobs) 15 times… that’s hunt 135 individual destroyable NPCs for a set of armor/clothes. That is about 2 12 hour game sessions solo.
The problem I see here that after the first quest this task become just that, a task. It becomes work. I have two questions. The first is how is it a game developer has come to the conclusion a player (that is a consumer, a person paying for a service the developer is supplying) wants to pay to do work? The second question is if this is the actual demand of players when have people decided they want to work in a “game” instead of play in a game?
My suspicion is that the players requested more of the particular items you can purchase through doing this task and then the developers decided it was a good idea for the players to “work” for those items. Then, when this world event was put on the test server for final debugging the players did not even think to comment on the fact that the EQ2 dev staff was giving them “work” to do rather than a game top play.
Another element lacking fun that must be mentioned id the concept of raiding. The pressure of raiding and the reasons people raid are not strictly fun. It is a grind. The term “grind” is not a term associated with fun. It is an indicator of work.
The disturbing thing about this whole topic is that most people do not even realize what they are doing is tedious prolonged, time consuming, monotonous re-tasking far more repetitive and mind numbing that most jobs players have that pay for their “work habbit” they call gaming.
In my mind THIS is a problem. It is a problem neither players or developers apparently see. To me this type of task is simply not “fun”. Rather, I think somewhere along the line both players and developers have forgotten what exactly real “fun” looks, feels, and tastes like.
Any fun activity does have work-like elements in it such as sports, reading, surfing the net, ect. However ever fun activity I have undertaken, except many elements in MMORPGs, are that reverse ration ¼ work (or less) and ¾ fun. My question to the world: what happened to fun games, specifically fun MMORPGs?