mdlake.net

I spent this morning and yesterday afternoon at “World of Warcraft,” a morpig (from MMORPG, massive multiplayer online role-playing game) adaptation of the roundly successful Warcraft game. Eileene bought it for me for Valentines’ Day after grossly overestimating my interest level, but WoW has enjoyed much critical buzz, so now that we own it, why not take it for a spin?

A day’s experience isn’t much – I’ve only seen two regions, one being the “starter area” for gnomes and dwarves, and have only sampled one character – but it’s enough to get a feel for how the developers feel the game should play. In short, it plays like a morpig: wander around a fantasy world slaying hostile creatures and loot their corpses for cash. Slaying creatures earns experience, which improves your abilities; cash is spent on stronger equipment. Both exist only to allow you to slay bigger enemies. To add some direction to the bloody path you will walk, inert people will respond to your hail by offering to pay you to accomplish designated missions: “slay six trolls,” “carry this package to point B,” “collect materials to construct a widget.”

I have minimal experience with morpigs, but what I’ve seen of World of Warcraft runs smoothly, with a minimum of interface hassles. A well-oiled gaming engine must count for a lot, because, apart from a few clever rules designed to level the playing field between adults with little free time and teens who play eight hours a day, WoW uses every cliché of the genre. It is a thoroughly well-implemented imitation of all that players have come to expect from a morpig.

Which brings me to my point: it bores me. Immersive online games hold enormous promise, and I will continue to watch for something that meets that promise, but this can’t be it. Play is shallower and more repetitious than any micromanagement simulation game I’ve ever handled. Walk up to a monster. Kill it. Rest to full health. Repeat. Unfolding character abilities don’t broaden the game so much as increase the size of the numbers that pop onto the screen as you slug it out with some new hapless monster. (“Ooh, now I’m facing elder rockworms!”) I would love to see an online game that explored a complex system – political perhaps, or a rich trade network – but, curiously, morpig fans generally disagree. Critical praise is heaped onto games that streamline all the tedium between combat iterations, rather than those that consider fighting a dangerous risk attached to some other activity. Games, such as Star Wars Galaxies or A Tale in the Desert, which try to expand the noncombat repertoire into equally interesting subgames attract a brief flood of curiosity, but retain only a fringe of niche gamers while the rest return to butchery. The market actually discourages richer game worlds. Adding insult to injury, the very term “rich” has been twisted to mean “holding a large database;” reviews that praise a rich setting mean that you can equip more items and face more opponents than in other games, not that there are more styles of play to explore.

Since morpigs are by definition multiplayer, there should be some reason to play with others, rather than merely next to them. Although you can team up with other players around the world to take down creatures neither could singly, that’s about the limits of what World of Warcraft allows. You can also, in theory, chat with other players, but there isn’t much point. The tiny window allotted to communication isn’t good for much more than choppy dialogue abbreviated to a quickly-typed jargon. Even if you’re willing to take the time to type in full sentences, chances are slim that you’ll find a similar partner headed for the same lair of monsters. For the time being, morpigs don’t seem to offer any more than single-player hack-and-slash computer games. (I refuse to call them RPGs.)

Yet the genre remains extremely popular, and players thrilled with the current incarnation still, somewhere in the backs of their minds, are looking forward to the next one, just the same as the last one. What am I missing?