My course: "The Art, History, and Culture of Video Games"

[Jmustang1968]

WoW has always been a relatively easy/casual friendly MMO. That's how it became as popular as it is.

Just to touch on this, I remember a lot of people jumping ship from FFXI to WoW because the latter was more friendly to players/beginners back in the early days. The draw always seemed to be that soloing to 60 was actually a practical feat, and the existence of mounts cut down travel time tremendously. To people who continued playing FFXI, WoW was for casuals. I've never actually played it, but I still have the perception of WoW as a casual MMO.

Also, Ack's earlier post pretty clearly illustrates why I prefer voluntary PvP. >_> Nothing further, your honer.

WoW can appeal to both casuals and more hardcore. This is why it was successful. There is always something to do. I played FFXI, and it is a grind fest. Plus you waste time finding a group all the time. WoW allowed solo and group play.

[pierrot]

I didn't mean to say that FFXI was necessarily better, but just that at the time, the perception among FFXI vets was that WoW was a more casual offering. (Whether actually well founded, or not.)

Also, as an aside: Underneath that grind-fest were some of the deepest RPG battle mechanics in a video game. A lot of times it was worth the hassle of finding a group just because of what was possible with the dynamics of the game. Honestly, it raised the bar for what I consider good RPG battle mechanics ever since. It can get formulaic at times, and was a slog through the early levels (I spent an unhealthy amount of time in the Valkurm Dunes) I can admit that; and even still resent the game for it at times.

[isiolia]

XI is a lot different now, and arguably, the endgame (at least) is now in the middle of a sloppy attempt to make it more vertical. Still, for a number of years there was a lot more horizontal progression, which in turn fueled more intricate itemization than I've seen in, well, any other game. Really, any job I was on I was carrying 60-70 pieces of gear that were being swapped on a per-action basis via XML (via third party tools )

When WoW launched, there was that consistent ability for people to go out and do stuff in a way that worked for them. You could just go do a quest, get good XP, gold, rewards, all that, which in XI would mean doing three different things, and probably spending a bit of time seeking for party for efficient XP.
Even endgame was like that. Sure, WoW had big raids and all that aren't necessarily casual content. They still can happen when you want them to. FFXI's earlier endgame often saw LSes competing for the ability to do something. 21-24 hour pop HNMs, that kind of thing.

Not that I think Blizzard was wrong with most of it. Just saying, it started as a game that far more people could reasonably play, versus the high bar that EQ and copies (such as FFXI) set.

[dsheinem]

The "first day" syllabus is now in the OP. This is what I'm going with!

[ninjainspandex]

I love world PvP. There's nothing more fun nor epic than a big chain event that starts from small skirmishes between few players, and ends up in a massive war between the factions, lasting hours into the early morning, with people devising all kinds of different tactics and ways to one up and surprise the other side, just for the sheer fun of it (+faction pride). I was always up for fighting just for the fun of it, and if I was bored and couldn't find targets, I'd go the the other factions main cities and kill unsuspecting players.

The problem with world pvp is that it isn't mechanically rewarding (it does not award you better gear). PvP didn't reward players before the ranking system came, and then most people who grinded to rank 14 did so by farming battlegrounds with a group. Sure you'd get honor from all those kills, but a lot less than you would get by just playing battlegrounds. Then came Burning Crusade and they introduced flying mounts, neutral cities and started casualizing the game even more and as time went on the playerbase was increasingly made up of people who had a different mindset than those who originally played the game.

Arena is a great skill test. It's from design and mechanics POV just as fine form of eSports as Starcraft 2. There's tremendous amounts of depth in the system and the skill cap is very high, although in the really high end level the RPG mechanics naturally affect the "purity" of the experience (as most competitive games don't have RNG elements in them).

If there was a MMO with no levels and no grinding that focused on World PvP, I'd sign up for it in a heartbeat. Though I think that the kind of emotional investment, character progression, sense of world and lore etc that you have in a game like WoW (or Ultima Online, Eve, Dark Age of Camelot etc) is important, so that the game doesn't feel too much like a pointless free for all deathmatch

You know there are private servers for just that, and pretty populated, at least a few years ago when I tried it. You just logged on were instantly max level had all the armor and weapons at your disposal. Not sure how active private servers are now days.

[samsonlonghair]

Despite my skepticism, I am genuinely interested in hearing how this class works out. When is the first day of the Fall 2013 semester, Dsh?

I grant you this much: playing video games is more fun than reading dusty literature. True. Playing the dullest video game is still more fun than reading Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground.

I've played Braid. I've read Notes From Underground. Old Fyodor would get my vote every time.

I am going to have to respectfully disagree with you on this point. I have a hard time empathizing with a protagonist I dislike as much as the underground man.

[brunoafh]

Notes From Underground is my favorite Dostoyevsky work and probably my favorite piece of Russian literature period. I really wonder whether or not the reader was supposed to hate the protagonist or not though, either could easily be the case. I've never found myself to like or dislike him though, I just find him more amusing than I probably have any business to. The dad from The Brothers Karamazov is possibly even more hilarious though, something I didn't think possible.

Anyway, carry on.

[Luke]

So unless someone does extra credit (that exists in a college setting?) a 90% is tops?

Five Pop Quizzes – 10%

Individual Project:
Proposal - 5%
Annotated Bibliography - 10%
Final Paper - 20%

Exams:
Midterm – 15%
Final Exam – 20%

Participation – 10%

10 + 5 + 10 + 20 + 15 + 20 + 10 = 90. Good thing you aren't teaching math.

[pierrot]

You forgot the group project.

[Jmustang1968]

Lol good thing Luke isn't a reading comprehension teacher.