The Temptation of Warcraft

Because of the PegaSoft online game project, this month I'm taking a look at games, and in particular, the most popular game today.

Hanging on the wall of my office is a cloth map of the land of Britannia. It marks out the location of teleportation moongates and the names of cities inscribed in ancient runes. Back in the 1980's, the price of a computer game covered a lot of extras. Ultima IV from Origin Systems contained that cloth map. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from Infocom included an entire microscopic space fleet (or maybe it was an empty plastic bag). A few months ago, I bought Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition. What did it come with? One DVD-ROM...and a small booklet which said the instructions were on the DVD-ROM. "Diamond Edition?" I guess diamonds were worth more in the old days.

How about the much-anticipated Civilization IV? To maximize their profit by selling a cardboard box containing a few cents worth of plastic, there's no manual. If you want it , you have to print over 200 pages at your own expense. I ended up printing the manual and putting it in a 3 ring binder. And even after reading it, I still can barely get past a "Dan Quayle" rating in the game.

The previous version, Civilization III, was by many accounts a lousy game with an exceptional user interface. The game was so life-like that if you started with a small civilization, you were doomed. Although you could win the game through cultural, scientific or military victories, a small civilization couldn't generate enough people for a cultural win, nor was there enough money to pay for scientific discovery or large armies. And if you started large, you couldn't possibly lose for exactly the same reasons. In Civilization II, I once survived a game with only three cities by building nothing but world wonders. With a game so "balanced" as Civ III, this kind of creative thinking was not possible. The game promised a victory by strategy but usually delivered inevitable defeat no matter what a player did.

In the Afterword of the Civ IV manual, Lead Designer Soren Johnson discussed how the game was reworked to solve the problems of Civ III. One of the concepts introduced into Civ IV was that interesting decisions should be given to the player. A good example of this is Civ IV's promotion system. Instead of promoting a veteran military unit with more health, the game offers a variety of options: 10% more health, 25% jungle terrain bonus, 20% resistance to gunpowder units and so forth. The player could decide to "power up" a unit in different ways.

The problem with this concept is the word "interesting". 10% more strength means the unit is 90% the same as it was before. 20% resistance to gunpowder isn't interesting if you are randomly attacked by different enemies, most without gunpowder. In reality, the power ups promise great things but do nothing useful. In most cases, it doesn't matter what power up you chose because they have so little reward that they will not help you win. So these decisions can't really be called "interesting".

Compare this to, say, Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Plainswalkers from the 1990s. In this computer game, there are options that double a units power, or can power up both your units and your enemy's units. Now you have to decide if the benefits to you outweigh the benefits to your opponent, or if you're enemy can capture your new, powerful unit and use it against you. These are interesting decisions.

The most popular game right now is World of Warcraft (or, presumptuously, "WoW"). With over 6 million players and growing, Warcraft is the most successful Internet game of all time. When I purchased Civ IV, the checkout guy at Future Shop complained, "I wish I had time to play computer games. But I'm addicted to Warcraft."

Addiction. An interesting choice of word.

There's a lot not to like about Warcraft, including it's bugs that crash the game every few minutes, the confusing player statistics (what does 245 armour actually mean in a fight?) or the user interface that assumes every player has three hands. But more serious is the lack of "interesting choices".

• No Role Play - If you're in the Horde you should get bonus points for killing your own mother and if you're in the Alliance you should get rewarded for teamwork. Like the Nihilism of the Grand Theft Auto series, there's no distinction between right and wrong. All the classes, races and sides are so balanced as to make the choice between them meaningless.
• No Victories - You kill the boss creature but before you leave the castle, the boss reappears for the next person to kill. There's no real victories.
• No Rewards - You get your "Brutal War Axe of Power", you can't use it until you're a certain level. When you get to that level, everyone also has a "Brutal War Axe of Power" or equivalent. Your super- sounding weapon really isn't so super.
• No Strategy - Although there are "strategy guides" published by players, the truth is that there is no strategy. It doesn't matter what race you chose, what occupations you select or how you spend your talent points. Everything is too balanced to make a difference. Choice breaks the safeness of the game.

This can be compared to the popular Final Fantasy franchise. In Final Fantasy X (Wikipedia), the player moves through a pre-recorded movie. There's no where to go except forward in the storyline. Bad guys attack for no apparent reason than the movie is too short otherwise. The player moves from one scene to another without any input. This makes the game gorgeous to look at and safe for all ages. But is Final Fantasy X a game or a movie?

In David Sirlin's blog, Raph Koster, former Sony Online Entertainment chief creative officer, is quoted saying that "Fun is learning in a safe-environment." (Gamasutra). Sirlin compares Warcraft to the Street Fighter series, one of the most successful game series of all time. But when you look at Street Fighter II, the characters all had different moves: light punches break through combo attacks, Guile's hard punch countered a flying kick, but a hard punch with Dhalsim left him exposed to a counter attack. Street Fighter achieved balance through an abundance of choices that mattered, not by eliminating decisions.

With Warcraft you don't get any of these interesting choices. Only one natural order of spells for a mage to attack with. A variety of alchemy potions that do virtually nothing. Hunters that capture animals and train them to attack must face the fact that the game deletes any special attacks or unique traits that the player's won at such a high cost. In fights, the computer opponents follow a static script of "attack, attack, special attack, attack, attack, special attack...". The only real strategy in Warcraft is not to have two or more enemies get you at once because, just like Civilization III, two against one balanced in all other ways spells certain death.

In the same way with player versus player battles, the only guarantee is when two fight one, the one will lose. Because it would not be balanced for one to have the power to defy two.

The game uses an exponential difficulty scale for creatures. A level 30 character beats up Young Stranglethorn Tiger. When the character reaches level 31, he/she has to fight regular Stranglethorn Tigers. And at level 32, he/she graduates to fighting Elder Stranglethorn Tigers. If you attempt to fight creatures even a couple of levels too high for you, you'll be creamed.

Sirlin points out the game is hobbles players and doesn't offer real rewards. I'd go further and say the Warcraft the game is boring.

So why are 6 million people handing over their credit card numbers to the makers of Warcraft?

Warcraft is not a computer game at all. It's a chat room that looks like a computer game. Sure, there are quests that mean nothing and treasures that have no value. These things are only there as props to allow people from all over the world to interact with each other. They are excuses for people to walk around in a B-movie set and communicate. That's the secret to Warcraft's success...it's become everybody's hang out.

Trying to solo in Warcraft is like having a tooth pulled. After a few days of questing, you realize that there's point to the game beyond the reward of team work and the praise other players. Warcraft with a single player is boring because the game offers no dynamic opportunities, advancement, creative thinking or accomplishments. There's no way to distinguish yourself. You're just a number killing time.

It raises the question as to whether or not massive online games can every reconcile balance with meaning. One interesting project with free membership is Silk Road Online (or SRO) by the Koren company JoyMax, where player choices affect the economics of the game world. Too much wealth? Some players become thieves. Too many thieves? Some players become guards and earn bounties on slaying thieves. The rules cause the players themselves to keep the game world in balance, always trying to maximize opportunity and to distinguish themselves. Silk Road uses this in this human desire in the same way that Warcraft prohibits it.

The value of Warcraft is that it allows people to move beyond a text-based chat program and to meeting friends in a balanced, safe, goal-driven virtual chatroom environment--without the cost of a movie ticket or even getting out of a chair. Perhaps that says more about our sedentary, TV-chained society than it says about Warcraft. Socializing and networking is another tough chore that machines can do for us.

My advice to Warcraft players is not to be fooled by the temptation of the game. Temptation means being promised one thing but receiving something of lesser value. You got to get out of the chair once in a while and go out into the world: that's the original chatroom and the only place someone can truly become a world-saving hero.

Talk back on the Linux Cafe.

May 14, 2006 

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