Fresh from the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald comes the news that World of Warcraft, and indeed all massive multiplayer online games, is unethical.
Jonathan Blow, developer of the game Braid, recently spoke at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image's FreePlay conference. Some of the things he said about MMO's are interesting, and some of the conclusions he reached seem erroneous to me.
Developers should provide activities that interest players "rather than stringing them along with little pieces of candy so that they'll suffer through terrible game play, but keep playing because they gain levels or new items", he says.
Well, so far so good. I don't really think anyone could disagree with that statement.
Mr Blow believes developers need to think about what their games are teaching players when they reward them for performing certain actions.
"That kind of reward system is very easily turned into a Pavlovian or Skinnerian scheme," he says. "It's considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don't get bored and give up on your game. That's actually exploitation."
Somewhat hyperbolic, but essentially accurate in terms of what the system is doing to get you to keep playing. Is it exploitation? Well, clearly Jonathan thinks so. We'll come back to why I don't agree in a moment.
"I think a lot of modern game design is actually unethical, especially massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, because they are predicated on player exploitation," Mr Blow says.
He believes players will naturally avoid boring tasks but developers "override that by plugging into their pleasure centres and giving them scheduled rewards and we convince them to pay us money and waste their lives in front of our game in this exploitative fashion".
Well, we seem to be getting to the meat of things. Jonathan finds systems that reward the player with gear or levels to be exploitative, and since he finds those systems to be exploitative, he believes that games that use such systems are unethical. If you accept his basic premise, then his conclusion would be apt enough. The reason I don't accept it is because I don't believe Jonathan is looking at the entire game here, merely the part of it he doesn't like, and is acting as if the entire game is grinding.
Does it therefore follow that you are forced to grind because you've been programmed like a rat with electrodes in it's pleasure centers? Hardly. There are other rewards to be had in playing WoW which elevate it beyond mindless button mashing for the Sword of a Thousand Truths. You can spend hours in the game doing nothing at all, or even turning up all the settings and going into Deadmines just to look at all the little details on the ship and the walls (amazingly, my wife and I who have been running the Deadmines on various characters for years now just noticed the huge doors in the cavern with the ship). There are alternative reward systems in place (you can go up against other players in Arenas or Battlegrounds, you can run instances or raid, or yes, you can grind mobs for reputation or quests) but more importantly, you don't have to do any of it and the game is still a rich experience.
Quite frankly, I think Jonathan Blow is giving the artistry of the game and the immersive quality of the gameplay, the storylines one experiences, the game's stance on redemption and corruption, and much more short shrift in order to focus on a gameplay aspect he doesn't like and use it as a means to dismiss the entire genre of games as 'exploitation'. For a man who once pulled his game out of a festival to protest the festival's inability to find the artistic merit in Super Columbine Massacre RPG! I find his stance limited, either unable or unwilling to look at where WoW does succeed as art (which he clearly finds to be important in both game design and game experience) and how it transcends what he decries in its medium. Anyone who has ever experienced the Hero of the Mag'har questline knows that WoW is as much story as it is game, and for some of us, the story is just as important. When level 60 was endgame and you were in Stormwind when the Marshal Windsor event started, you know you dropped what you were doing to go watch it. It's details like these, like the swaying lamps in Darkshire, like the extended lore of dozens of questlines that unfold over gameplay that keeps people coming back to the game, and which elevate it beyond the 'Skinner Box' that Jonathan Blow sees it as.
It honestly makes me wonder if he's even played it.
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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
9-20-2007 @ 1:45PM
Azaghan said...
Hey Matthew,
You mention you just noticed the doors inside DM/VC. Ever wonder what those big doors are in STV in the NW corner?
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9-20-2007 @ 1:54PM
rick gregory said...
Ok... but look at it this way.
Sports is exploitative and unethical. You have to practice for hours and hours which can be, er, grinding. Then you have to play games, usually weekly. You can only get in the playoffs if you or your team is good enough... and only one team or individual can win the championship. All for some silly trophy!! And next season it starts all over! It doesn't MEAN anything either - it's just for your own satisfaction!!
Braid is described by Wikipedia as "His game Braid is a meditation on loss and relationships where the player controls time to solve puzzles." Um, fine, and it's good that people are trying out new game concepts and all... but that sounds more like an art project than something which people will find entertaining... and entertainment is what most of us are after when we game.
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9-20-2007 @ 5:33PM
Mosshead said...
Saying that the art of the game is what keeps people coming back sounds like a bit of self-abnegation. Maybe you aren't one of the "hardcore" players, and you instead play alts or collect questlines, etc. But there *are* a huge number of players who are pushing far beyond 100-200 DAYS of pure play time...they have multiple 70s, different sets of epic gear, lots of gold, 10s of thousands of honor points, and at this point it becomes hard to justify the amount they have played the game as pure enjoyment. How often have you entered an AV and there are players complaining about how much they "hate this map"? How many times have you entered kara (or MC back in the day) after the first clear and thought to yourself how tired you are of grinding the same zone? If at any point you find yourself repeating the same content endlessly, this is when you are being manipulated by the game's reward system (or by pressure from other players) into doing something that no longer entertains you.
What really gets to me is the pride people take in their "accomplishments". There is no skill involved in this game other than the effective coordination between players. People who don't know how to play their class are fools, or aren't actually paying attention. Arena is gear + rock paper scissors. Battlegrounds are rock paper scissors + the numbers advantage. Raiding is the ability to take your ritalin and listen to your raid leader. Other than your ability to perform basic tasks, you are being rewarded for time investment, and in this way the reward system is manipulative.
I'm not sure how many players think about the day when WoW is finally over. When all is said and done all that you have grinded for will be gone, and I think a lot of people will come out of this with the realization that they have been wasting their time. Sure, the game certainly is enjoyable, and those moments of jubilation after a first boss kill, or pulling off the victory after a 5 minute arena game, for example, are what makes it feel worthwhile to me. But we are being suckered in by the loot system, and even more than that, the experience of playing a computer game to great excess is kind of normalized by the fact that most of the people in your guild are doing the same thing. Log in at 3-4 in the morning and I bet you will still find people grinding at the elemental plateau or in AB...
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9-20-2007 @ 6:17PM
Merus said...
The idea behind the argument is that players should be rewarded for what they do in a 1:1 fashion. You kill quest mob, you get quest item. Certainly, there is artistry in the game, but if you don't have that base gameplay right, the artistry goes to waste.
There are some parts of the game which do come close to rewarding in a 1:1 fashion that aren't quite as much of a cakewalk - the Skyguard bombing runs come to mind, as they do actually require a little bit of strategy to overcome in a timely fashion.
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9-21-2007 @ 4:38AM
BenMS said...
It isn't just RPG's that reward you for time spent playing the game. Look at a FPS game - do they give you the rocket launcher and the sniper rifle first level? Halo: No. Half-Life: No. Doom: No. Could they then be termed exploitative?
All computer game developers want you to spend more time playing their game than others, and they reward you similarly. The vast majority of companies want you to work for them for a long time, and they reward you similarly. Neither of the things I just mentioned are necessarily exploitative, but then again they might be. It's up to the people who play/design/run them.
I have met Mr Blow, being an Australian myself, and he seemed to me, to be like most artists - nice guy, great fun at a party but less in touch with the way the real world works than most.
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9-21-2007 @ 3:03PM
Jonathan Blow said...
Hi guys. This is a tough crowd; I wouldn't necessarily expect hardcore WoW players to be sympathetic to my point (but a surprising number of the comments here are, which is interesting).
I want to preface my replies here by saying that I am not, in fact, trying to decree my stance on this issue as some unassailable truth that everyone must accept. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and I totally respect that.
Matthew: it is true that there are social aspects to WoW, and audiovisual art aspects. But those things are present in many other games as well, but so many people choose to play WoW instead of playing a single-player game or talking on IRC. It's because of the whole package, and unfortunately, the majority of that package is grinding for token rewards.
Rick: I don't think that all rewards are bad. Many rewards are good. There are natural rewards, and there are artificial rewards. The analogy I use for this is that rewards can be like food, or drugs. And just as with real foods, the distinction between natural/healthy and artificial/unhealthy can get very blurry (lots of natural foods have stimulants in them, for example. And to blur the line even further, in foods you can of course have artificial-and-healthy and natural-and-unhealthy). Sports I would say are like food. Yes, you work hard and you get rewards, but the rewards come because we are doing things that are healthy for us, and our bodies and minds have evolved to reward us for that kind of behavior.
When I say designs like this are unethical, I am focusing on the intent of the designers. Why did they make the game in some particular way? For example: why did the WoW developers design a game that rewards you for tasks that are mundane and don't require you to develop much in the way of skills? The reason is that they don't have to make the tasks very interesting, because they know that people will want to play so long as they pump the players with enough artificial stimulants. And in fact, if they make the gameplay require more skill or more of a learning curve, some players won't be able to do it, and some will just be intimidated, and some just don't want to think too much, they'd just rather play something where they don't have to worry about much; so if the designers create more challenging gameplay, they will lose their audience and make less money.
The problem with this is that it's about making money from players, not about giving players the richest, most beneficial experience. That's what I mean by exploitative. If you want to give players real food-type rewards, instead of fake junk-food-type rewards, then maybe you give them a little challenge. You give them a lot of opportunities to learn and grow within your game. Maybe you have fewer players, but if you care about people and not money, then that's not a big deal.
(I know that high-level raids do require a degree of skill and coordination; but I think that the amount of skill and learning that happens in WoW, when you spread it across the amount of time that people play, is spread extremely thin. You could create a game where players gain the same skills, that takes only a few hours to play.)
BenMS: Most games do add scheduled rewards in some form or another (first-person shooters are a good example). But FPSs are a very different case, because there the reward is just a bonus that adds a feeling of rising tension and a change of pacing. FPS players play because they enjoy the minute-to-minute gameplay of shooting, dodging, and reloading; they don't need the reward of getting bigger guns in order to buttress up the gameplay. (This is why multiplayer shooters, like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 are so popular, and why so many people play Halo or Gears of War multiplayer. If the bigger-gun rewards were a crucial part of the game, then people would only play the single player campaigns, and stop when they finished).
Also, Ben -- I have a pretty good handle on the way the world works, actually. I have been in business for myself for almost 12 years now, which honestly takes some doing. I think that many people put up with things that they don't have to -- they see other people putting up with some fairly sucky things, and they think "well that must just be the way the world works, so I have to put up with that too". But actually that's not the way the world really works; it's just what people happen to be accepting at this moment in time, and it can be changed.
To put it another way: wouldn't most people reading this blog enjoy a game that was exactly like World of Warcraft, with all the same character classes and monsters and weapons and art, and even all the same rewards... the difference being that the grinding is replaced by activities that are inherently fun? Wouldn't that be cool?
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for listening.
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9-21-2007 @ 4:52PM
ThorinII said...
I'll tell you what's unethical... $3/gal for gas! $3/gal for milk! $30 for a cheap pair of crappy shoes! Everywhere you look our economy is full of people exploiting NEEDS. People charging through the nose for items they know society can't do without. That's unethical!
Blizz isn't exploiting needs, they are exploiting WANTS. There is a huge difference! People choose to play video games, and select people choose to play video games that require monthly fees. They don't have to pay that money, they choose to.
I don't blame Blizz for taking my $15/mo when I offer it freely. I do blame the blood suckers who insist on charging people every penny they can get away with charging for MUST HAVE items like food and gas!
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