MMORPG bad for gaming?

[Gnashvar]

I have some friends that would rather play games like World of Warcraft than play new releases or fun retro gaming. I think World of Warcraft is a good game, interesting places but nothing really interesting for me. I rather play Okami or Super Mario Bros. But that's just me.

What I have found in my limited research and non scientific conclusions is that people who play MMORPGs are very different from the regular gamers or people who enjoy collecting games and just enjoying the old stuff like most of us here do. So I think the MMORPG is player is another beast altogether.

I think that it's a weird business, players invest money in time playing, not actual media or ownership. I enjoy buying VC titles but those will be there as long as my Wii works. And if it ever breaks down in the future I'm sure we will be able to "make them playable" again. While there are private servers for those games it's not the same once they are not mainstream... FFXI comes to mind. These games draw players by attracting their compulsive or obsessive behavior, same as gambling and such instead of the overall great experience some games offer.

So what are your opinions on MMORPGs and do you think they are good, bad or could care less? I think they are bad because I saw myself wasting time at work and social life to just barely keep up with people I played with. I see my friends not have a job and make excuses about staying home all day and of course it's not the games fault it's the economy. I see friends who rather stay home and play WoW than drink beer and play Wii Bowling with the rest of us:P

What do you think?

[dlmvii]

They are fine in casual doses, which I'm sure most people play them in.
When I played WoW, I kept playing and playing, but it was more like a job than actual recreation. I don't think I really played any other games during that time, and when I played it was like all my free time was gone doing that.

[fastbilly1]

Ive met many MMO addicts in my travels. From those that go to scificonventions to play WoW with the guys sitting next to them to myself to our friendly moderator Ack's brother. I however was not addicted to an MMORPG, but an MMOFPS - Planetside infact. I use to get out of class Friday, play it for 8 hours, then go to a computer lab to play pc games with Ack and some others then back to playing Planetside until Sunday night. I lost alot of weight and missed out on alot of things, but I finally broke the addiction by running out of money to fund it and finding that because of it I became godlike in Tribes 2... There was a time, 04ish, that I had played almost every MMO on the market. My favorites were Earth and Beyond (dead but coming back), Phantasy Star Online (dead but back), Ultima Online (still kicking, but private servers abundant), and ofcourse Planetside (barely alive). And I know many people like me who have that addictive nature that should stay away from MMORPGs, but we dont. I have recovered so now I can play the games and quit whenever - typically I dont stick around more than the free month that comes with it - I did just Alpha and Beta test Global Agenda for Hirez studios (A great scifi MMOFPS/TPS if you are interested in that sort of thing).

On a recent excursion into a MMO world - World of Warcraft actually, I realized that the addicts are a surprisingly small percentage of players. The vast majority of players are people who: think it is a novel concept, play because their friends play (the friends may or may not be addicted), or play to have something to do. The last of which is something I have never understood but many I have spoken to claim they get a release from roaming the world that no other game gives them. An acquantince of mine was really addicted to WoW recently and when I asked him about it he got really defensive. It was something he did not want to talk about, like a dirty secret of some kind. The mmo world has evolved alot since I was really into it, and it is kinda baffling to me nowadays. The only reason I play them now is to crash a server, try to ruin the economy, or pull a big monster into the starting city...

Damn it now I want to play UO again.

[Jrecee]

What the hell is the point of warcraft? Do you ever reach the end? It seems just as pointless as those stupid facebook mobster/vampire games where nothing ever happens, you just recruit people and a number goes up.

[Hatta]

I could really care less about any and all of them. There's really no point to it. You're rewarded based on time spent in the game, not skill. So there's little fun in the challenge. You can't have a good story, because that requires a protagonist. When you have thousands of players, who gets to be the hero? I just don't see the appeal. Give me a good single player, turn based RPG or a classic arcade action title any day.

[Gnashvar]

I've also found that when you confront people about it with simple things like "hey shouldn't you play something else or you spent how many hours playing wow?" they get all defensive. Sorta like an alcoholic or junkie.

[J T]

I don't think they are bad for gaming, especially if you are right about the MMO player being a different type of person altogether-- different genres designed for different types of players to include more diverse gaming communities is only good for the larger gaming community.

However, your other point about them being bad for the gamers themselves because of their addictive properties is probably true. I think the media gets obsessed about the potential negative effects of videogame violence when the most destructive aspect seems to be their addictive properties. It seems we have all "lost" someone to a game like WoW or Everquest, or we know someone who has. I remember awhile back there was a support group called something like the Widows of Everquest for people that had a spouse addicted to the popular MMORPG.

These games are smartly designed to keep you hanging on. I have a friend who got really into Worlds of Warcraft, and has quit and come back to it a few times. I watched him play some and it was really interesting to watch as an observer. I study psychology. I have my Masters degree in it and am working towards a PhD. I was noticing how the game is fairly intelligently applying behavioral reinforcement to keep you playing for hours. It's structured to start out as instantly gratifying- You win your first few battles easily, you gain some loot as you need it, and you have a few fun chats with people. Not bad. Then they start to pull back on the reinforcement. You have to work longer to get your next bit of loot. It feels like the game is just getting a little more challenging, but its also getting you more invested. There are plenty of stats to also keep you aware of how well you are doing. After the time interval for your rewards has stretched out, it becomes a bit more random. I watched my friend work for hours killing spiders to gather their legs, which only dropped randomly and infrequently just so he could get enough to make some shielf that he needed for another task. In psychology, we call this a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, and it is one of the most powerful reinforcement schedules for strengthening a particular behavior, in this case, that behavior is playing Worlds of Warcraft for long stretches of time. The game slowly reduces the amount of reinforcement to better shape and strengthen the behavior of playing the game.

The most addictive aspect though, is that once you've reached a certain point in the game, you can no longer complete your quests without the help of others. At this point, you are heavily invested personally, regardless of others. The game has also started to feel more meaningful and important. This is in part because you have had fun, but I think it is also largely the result of trying to reduce "cognitive-dissonance". According to cognitive-dissonance theory, we feel a dissonance in our mind when we behave inconsistent with our own values, so we reshape our values to match our behavior so we no longer feel the aversive dissonance. In the case of World of Warcraft, you have had to invest a lot of time and energy into the game just to get to the point where you are working collaboratively in teams. Now, you feel dissonance at the idea that all of that gameplay (and monthly subscription fees) was perhaps a waste of time. People outside of the game may tell you that it has been a waste of time, but people in-game will encourage you to play further because they need your help. To avoid the feeling of cognitive dissonance, you start to value your in-game friends more and you spend more time in the virtual world.

Once you start forming Guilds and things like that, you are into an even deeper level of addiction. Now you're not just playing for yourself, you're playing for other people. You are invested not just in the game, but in your online relationships. And there is constant threat of rejection from the group, whether explicitely stated or not, that if you don't run enough raids with them and spend enough time, then you will be left behind. You won't be able to advance without them. Again, this feels dire because of the cognitive-dissonance you would have to experience if all of your work to get this far was for nothing and your journey ended because you were rejected by your online peers. Also, you have grown to see them as being like your friends and you don't want to let them down. Social contingencies are very powerful. The social contingencies in WoW are particularly powerful because they are structured and the activities are all designed to continue the reinforcement for your playing.

Additionally, you begin to gain status within the community. Status is another motivator to keep you playing. You feel a sense of responsibility, even if it is in a virtual world. The game then just keeps you in a loop, playing more to keep your status and never quitting to keep your online friends.

This game uses various behavioral reinforcement schedules that are structured over time to use stronger and stronger forms of reinforcement to get you more and more addicted. This is why many long-term WoW players feel the game is more of a job than a pasttime. I believe that this is something of a problem for the gaming world. It's somewhat (though not exactly) akin to when smoking companies intentionally made their products more addictive by including more nicotine. I think this is the real problem with games that work on a subscription system. From a business perspective, this makes it so that their job is to keep you playing as long as they can so that they can continue to rake in subscription fees. With traditional games where they only make money on the original retail sale of the game, the game companies aren't as motivated to keep you addicted. They just need a good game that will move units. Subscription based MMOs rely on getting people addicted, and so I don't play them because I know I could very easily get sucked in too.

[Gnashvar]

Thanks for that post. I experienced many of those things but I had no idea how or what the name of them were. For me the strongest thing was that I was left behind because I couldn't spend as much time as my friends leveling or getting good loot. My job, wife, personal life would not let me play as much as people who play like 9-5. Thank goodness for that. But it caused me frustration and I started researching ways of how to get weapons how to level faster instead of working, all to be able to go "along". Of course I was never able to and just became more frustrated.

What finally convinced me to give it up was spending that monthly fee on something else. Feeding my behavior in another way. I could get an old game for the same amount every month or 3 Nes games for the VC Maybe it's just avoiding the problem. But hey it's much more fun and I don't neglect my life BTW I only played WoW for about 3 months and even though my friends insist I keep playing, even letting me borrow an account so I don't make the money excuse, I'm staying away.

[Ack]

The last of which is something I have never understood but many I have spoken to claim they get a release from roaming the world that no other game gives them.

That was generally the reason I played MMORPGs right there, because I liked wandering around and finding things that almost nobody knew about. Like in Acheron's Call, I would discover dungeons, towers, or even entire castles at times that nobody knew of(then again I dressed as a monster and proclaimed myself a super hero in that game, so...maybe I'm a little off).

Unfortunately I feel there are only two games I've played that have really gotten down what I want out of an MMO: Ultimate Online and EvE. Both were open-ended, player run games, where everything was controlled and manipulated by the players. Because the economy was so important, there were people there that just focused on that aspect, and there was nothing wrong about that.

In EvE, I had a friend who made freighter runs, and that was it. And it made him bloody rich! Hell, my favorite thing to do was scout and rear guard work for my corp on large-scale operations. In Ultima Online, I enjoyed mining and dyeing my clothes. I even bought a boat, the biggest that was available, and used it to sale off into the sunset. In WoW, I didn't want to raid dungeons, I wanted to pick fights with the opposition in the wild, and wage guerrilla warfare on Alliance strongholds, not power level to the max and then farm some kind of boss-rush for "Epics". That was boring to me.

So yeah...I want an MMO that is open enough to let me do what I want the way I want to do it(and what I want to do in an MMO is run a group of mercenaries and screw with the world as much as I can).

[neilencio]

I pick "could care less". A person sacrificing hygiene/friendship/family/work to an MMORPG says more about the person than the game. He probably has issues with priorities and would just find other obsessions to waste his life on if there were no MMOrpgs.