new media center_kuda.org

Soapbox: World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things

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

World of Warcraft

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

Fun is learning in a safe-environment.

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

Reflecting on Raph's guild wars money ideas, I was initially very happy because wow gold it explained a lot of things. First, a lot of parents cheap guild wars gold complain about what impact games have on children, but those cheap wow gold parents are generally only seeing the trivial surface of the game, rather than what guild wars money the game is REALLY teaching. wowgoldChess appears to be vaguely about war (it has knights cheap guild wars gold and castles and kings), but it's World of Warcraft Gold really a game of controlling space, of reading the opponent's mind, of trickery and tactics and so on. Grand Theft Auto wow gold appears to be about shooting cops and hookers, cheap wow gold but it's actually a game of cheap guild wars gold exploration and freedom. There is value to buy wow gold exploring a virtual world that lets you do things World of Warcraft Gold 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. wow gold Where to even begin? For starters, there's tactics and strategy. When should you attack buy wow gold 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. World of Warcraft Gold Street Fighter cheap wow gold taught me about yomi: knowing the mind of the opponent. guild wars money You can't just wowgoldplay the odds and do the textbook-correct responses, you have to adapt and anticipate cheap guild wars gold 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 cheap wow gold others develop their skills at cheap guild wars gold improvisation and adapting buy wow gold to any situation they are World of Warcraft Gold thrown into. I learned first hand that when all cheap guild wars gold seems lost, if you push, push, wow gold 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. buy wow gold Street Fighter is a one-on-one game, so you must rely on yourself to win. You can't mill around while guild wars money your friends do the work for you. Self-reliance and continuous cheap wow gold self-improvement is the only successful road. And yet, I wowgold also learned that no man is an island. cheap guild wars gold Our tournament structure has always been open to all comers, World of Warcraft Gold so that an undiscovered talent from Idaho who trained secretly in his basement can show up to our biggest tournament and cheap guild wars gold win it all, if he has the skill. No need to qualify or be cheap wow gold level 60 in an RPG or any of that. And yet, this wow gold 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. World of Warcraft Gold You can't turn your back on wowgold the whole world because you NEED the community to cheap guild wars gold improve. You must learn cheap wow gold and train with them. It's pretty wowgold hard to do that without making some friends along the way, too.

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

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

A fair game does not give buy wow gold material advantages to one player over the other
A fair game gives each player equal wow gold opportunity to bring whatever legal materials he guild wars money wants (in our case, you cheap guild wars gold can choose any character you want, no need to grind cheap wow gold him to level 60. All players have immediate equal access World of Warcraft Gold to all characters.)
It's ok (and the entire point!) to bring to the game a) more knowledge than your wowgold 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 World of Warcraft Gold take me 1 hour to learn a few nuances and gain a certain cheap guild wars gold level of skill and you 1000 hours. The hours cheap wow gold don't matter; guild wars money only the knowledge and skill matter.
I'll say it again: winning is a meritocracy.
Finally, playing a fair game is what it's buy wow gold all about. It would never occur to us to play a game wow gold where one player gets wowgold 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 World of Warcraft Gold for me because there so many things to learn. Looking back, cheap wow gold these are life lessons guild wars money that I couldn't do without. From the strategy of cheap guild wars gold the workplace to reading the mind of others, buy wow gold to a sense of fairness, I am rich with reward from my gaming background.

But lately, Raph's words have really guild wars money started to scare me. I started to World of Warcraft Gold think "What is World of Warcraft teaching all these kids?" I've played the game since the "Friends wowgold and Family" alpha test two years ago, and I've read the forums cheap guild wars gold ever since. I have a very good idea what the game is teaching, and it's downright frightening. cheap wow gold Unlike the uniformed parents who are wow gold 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 buy wow gold more powerful and influencing thing than the guild wars money 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 World of Warcraft Gold is what World of Warcraft teaches:

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

2. Time > skill is so fundamentally bad, that I'm still going to wowgold go on about it even though I guild wars money 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 cheap guild wars gold at rank 0 and maxing out at rank 14. Winning in pvp World of Warcraft Gold gives you honor points, and at the end of each week, your cheap wow gold performance is compared to that of other players, and you wow gold gain or lose ranks. Now, losing also guild wars money gives you points, but not as many. The system overwhelming rewards wowgold time spent playing, rather than skill.

What is the health and safety danger I spoke of? You might think that if wowgold 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, World of Warcraft Gold that you wouldguild wars money become rank 14. Not by a long shot. Your wowgold gains are capped each week, so it will take months guild wars gold and months to gain wow gold rank 14. Once you get cheap guild wars gold 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 guild wars money waking moment (forget having a job or social life) for fear that if they don't, some World of Warcraft Gold OTHER player will do so and be ahead in rank.

The idea that time > skill has gone from a merely cheap wow gold fundamentally bad idea, to being guild wars money actually dangerous, addicting people to the point of fatigue and death. No wonder wowgold China's new laws about MMOs are addressing this guild wars gold problem. MMO games World of Warcraft Gold must only award players cheap guild wars gold full experience guild wars money points for the first three hours of each day, half experience for the next two wow gold 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 cheap wow gold won't get far in World of Warcraft without a big guild. By design, cheap guild wars gold playing guild wars gold 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 guild wars money worse loot than wowgold 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 buy wow gold players are taking that as given. I see so many people who have been fooled into cheap guild wars gold thinking this is justified, that guild wars gold it actually scares me. They think that you shouldn't be allowed to get good loot unless cheap wow gold you do something with 39 other people, because that's harder. wow gold 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 buy wow gold raids have good loot at all. World of Warcraft Gold To me, doing something yourself is guild wars money far more valuable, guild wars gold and a much more guild wars money interesting test than cheap wow gold getting 40 people to cheap guild wars gold coordinate fairly mundane tasks.

Unfortunately, the game offers no difficult solo content cheap wow gold leading to good loot. (Note to picky readers: there is some, but it's soooo far buy wow gold out of whack with raid rewards that guild wars money we can safely ignore it, the same way Blizzard does.) The designers must be guild wars gold 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 o World of Warcraft Gold utraged that this game is marginalizing my entire wowgold personality type. The developers repeatedly guild wars gold confirm that 40-man raids deserve the most powerful items. Many of the players are brainwashed by this poor assumption, often buy wow gold saying "It's an MMO, of course you have to group wow gold with 40 other people do accomplish guild wars money anything." Ironically, World of Warcraft was originally founded on cheap guild wars gold exactly the opposite idea. The game started off by saying that EverQuest had that philosophy, and that guild wars money Warcraft will not. So much for that.

Here's an obvious point that is buy wow gold taken for granted by posters on http:www.wowatm.com/, but completely lost on about half the World of Warcraft forums: playing by cheap guild wars gold yourself in MMO is perfectly buy wow gold valid thing to do. You are guild wars gold 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 cheap wow gold when you like, or not guild wars money 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 wow gold that it captures the concept guild wars money of "being alone together" guild wars gold 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 cheap wow gold other people are studying, guild wars money rather than staying in your room buy wow gold alone. There is a very big demand for the ability to "be alone together" in a shared social cheap guild wars gold environment that allows grouping and social interaction, but does not force it World of Warcraft Gold by making almost all end-game content in the form of 40-man raids.

Warcraft—maybe buy wow gold accidentally—hit upon this concept, wow gold and now seems spit on it and all those who appreciate it. If a Blizzard developer read buy wow gold this, his PR department would say they are not cheap guild wars gold spitting on this play-style, wowgold but unfortunately guild wars gold 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 World of Warcraft Gold learning that doing cheap guild wars gold things on your own is bad. Albert Einstein guild wars gold accomplished far cheap wow gold 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 guild wars money learn that lesson, but he sure wow gold won't find it in World of Warcraft. 40 mundane people with a lot of cheap guild wars gold time would put Albert Einstein to shame any day of the week in this game.

5) Guilds. The tools for buy wow gold creating and maintaining a guild in World of Wacraft wowgold seem benevolent enough. guild wars gold After all, they wow gold encourage cooperation. Unfortunately, they create a social situation cheap wow gold totally alien to me in the real world: a constant "us vs them" mentality. In the guild wars money real world, I am part of many different communities, and I have varying levels of influence and World of Warcraft Gold 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 buy wow gold known by about 0.01% of Magic: the Gathering wowgold players, but I do put my toe into their pond a fair cheap guild wars gold amount. Meanwhile, in Warcraft, I live in a world of "guild-only events." You're either with a guild, or guild wars gold you're nobody to them. I can't imagine being in only one guild wars money IRC (chat) channel World of Warcraft Gold 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 wow gold terms of service as the de facto way to enforce a certain player-behavior goes against cheap guild wars gold everything I've learned. A game guild wars gold should be a system of rules that cheap wow gold allow the player to explore. If the player buy wow gold finds loopholes, then the game developer should fix them. wowgoldIt's never, ever guild wars money 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 guild wars gold fault. They are playing World of Warcraft Gold in a system that forces anyone who wants to be rank 14 to do exactly that. A line in cheap guild wars gold the Terms of Service saying that wowgold you shouldn't behave this way wow gold changes nothing, and teaches nothing.

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

This policy is an extension buy wow gold of the current in-game harassment policies.

PvE Ruleset.

When a group of players guild wars gold has engaged Lord Kazzak, World of Warcraft Gold any other players interfering in the encounter may be given a warning, cheap wow gold regardless of faction, as guild wars money in the examples below:

A group of Alliance characters guild wars money has legitimately engaged Lord Kazzak wow gold and a Horde character engages Lord Kazzak as cheap guild wars gold well (Horde player receives a warning).

A group of Horde characters guild wars gold has legitimately World of Warcraft Gold engaged Lord Kazzak guild wars money and a Horde character wow gold engages Lord Kazzak as cheap wow gold well (the second Horde player receives a warning). buy wow gold

PvP Ruleset.
wow gold
When a group of players guild wars gold has engaged Lord Kazzak, any same-faction cheap wow gold players interfering in the wow gold encounter may guild wars money be given a warning as in the examples below.

All other possibilities to join the battle are allowed.

A group of Alliance wow gold characters has legitimately World of Warcraft Gold engaged Lord buy wow gold Kazzak and Alliance guild wars money character engages Lord Kazzak as cheap wow gold well to disrupt guild wars gold this raid without any PvP guild wars money solution for the cheap guild wars gold Alliance group (the second Alliance player receives warning).

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

“Playing too much," using guild wars gold a rogue/warlock combo to lure cheap wow gold bosses too far from their spawn points, fighting on rooftops, entering buy wow gold unfinished areas (why are guild wars money they accessible at all?), buying gold wow gold or items on eBay (eventually the courts will probably overrule them on this), collaborating with the other cheap guild wars gold faction in battlegrounds, "using terrain exploits World of Warcraft Gold to your advantage," guild wars money 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 buy wow gold about why you were banned cheap wow gold for posting about something seemingly wowgold constructive, advertising a gay and lesbian friendly World of Warcraft Gold guild that's a safe guild wars gold haven from the endless use of the words “gay” and “cheap guild wars gold fag” in the general chat channels, having a name wow gold such as "JustKidding," "CmdrTaco," "TheAthiest," or "roflcopter"... and a whole lot more things, too.

These examples go on and on, guild wars gold but the basic idea World of Warcraft Gold here is that Blizzard treats the players like little children who need a babysitter. There are mountains of rules in the terms cheap guild wars gold of service that tell you that you shouldn't guild wars money do things that you totally can do in the game if you want. Why they don't cheap guild wars gold just alter their cheap wow gold design and code so you can't do these guild wars gold things is beyond me. But this buy wow gold mentality is drilled into the players to the point that they start believing that it's ok. World of Warcraft Gold They start believing that wowgold 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 cheap wow gold being "fun" by Raph Koster's guild wars money 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 buy wow gold can think of that the game rules allow, not that wow gold they have pages of "rules of conduct" that guild wars gold prevent you from creative thinking.
But we all know that World of Warcraft hasn't World of Warcraft Gold really stopped teaching. Although it's ability to teach is highly impaired wow gold by the entire "Terms of Service" approach, it's cheap guild wars gold still teaching literally millions of children that time spent is more important wowgold than ability and that group activities are guild wars money strictly superior to personal improvements and self-reliance.

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