On WoW and discourse
I'm putting this in the general Games forum because I am not a WoW player, which is kind of the point of the thread. This is not going to be about hating on WoW, FYI.
In a lot of gaming discussion and writing I see things being related to WoW. For MMOs its impossible to avoid; it'd be like discussing Team Games Played With A Ball and refusing to talk about Soccer. RPGs tend to brush WoW territory, which is understandable.
When I hear people comparing ANY co-op experience, or ANY online experience, or really ANY gaming experience to some aspect of WoW, it starts to lose me. And I don't mean this as an attack on anyone at all, this is kind of a personal problem I guess. Our kind and generous overlords play WoW and talk about WoW on the podcast and that's OK. That's fine. It's a gaming podcast - THEIR gaming podcast - and WoW is a game that they play frequently.
Thing is, it's a little bit lost on me. At first I thought maybe it was for a reason also articulated on the GWJ podcast, that "there's nothing more boring than hearing about an MMO you don't play." I've realized that that's not quite it, though. I don't feel bored. I feel alienated.
When WoW is mentioned in the context I've described, the context of comparison to other games, it is not a discussion on WoW but a metaphor. It is the relation of something potentially unfamiliar to a familiar, shared experience for the sake of better understanding... except for me, it is not a shared experience. I KNOW plenty about WoW. I get the allusions and connections on a conceptual level. I also know plenty about and understand sky diving, but relate something to the roar of the wind in your ears and I'll only understand that on that same conceptual level, not on the emotional level that is arguably the more important part.
Am I saying we all need to stop talking about WoW? Of course not. Most people get the connection, making it an effective comparison. Do I have a POINT? Come to think of it, not really. Just kind of wondering if I'm alone in feeling like I'm missing something, not because I'm not playing WoW but because I've never stepped into a Night Elf Shaman's fuzzy shoes and had a look around Azeroth.
I fully understand the reasons WoW is brought up in so many conversations.
That doesn't stop me from hating it every time.
And I even like the game itself.
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Sounds like WoW has gotten so popular that people simply assume everyone has played it. Or perhaps their heads are just so stuck in WoW that they aren't able to articulate their thoughts without making game analogies, even to people they should presumably know have never played the game and therefore won't understand the analogy.
It's gotten to the point that I'm amazed when I find a gamer that hasn't played WoW at some level. I mean I run into people that played it and hated it..but at some point they played ~1 month+
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
85's face the truth you're too dumb.
I've never played WoW and i get where you're coming from Lobster... However, due to my intense gaming meditation every afternoon i have divined the core aspects of each and every important game to date and thus understand what people talk about when they mention something in comparison with a WoW feature or aspect......honest!
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It's still the biggest and arguably the best co-op experience you and a bunch of your buddies can have together, so regardless of whether it's an MMO or not this comparison will stand until we get a non-MMO 40+ player co-op experience. The closest I came was playing Ghost Recon co-op with 16 other Goodgers back in the day.
But yes, if you are not playing it, you want to beat your head in with a hammer whenever you see any post/blog/discussion/article declaring just how many subscribers there are. It's like if you were stopped on the street by every third person who reminds you that McDonalds also sells a billion burgers each year, in case you weren't aware. And then after talking to that person, a bundle of flyers comes around the corner, whacks you in the head, and when you stumble to brush them off, you see a massive picture of a big-mac staring you in the face.
We get it.
If anything, I can't wait until Blizzard's next MMO so I can stop using the god-awful W oh W acronym.
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WoW2 ?
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WoW has sold more than darn near any other game except maybe, I dunno, the Sims or something. So no, there's not really anything more widely understood to be used as metaphor/analogy material in discussing multiplayer gaming, Lobster.
I get the same feeling when people talk about football (the ubiquitous office metaphor/analogy material). I don't follow football. I don't care about football. I can't name half the teams, nor any of the players really. Unfortunately, I understand that working in an office populated primarily by guys, football is typically going to be the metaphor/analogy of choice. *shrug*
For the time being, WoW is the football of multiplayer gaming, the Taco Bell of tex-mex fast food, the baseball of physics classes (at least, all MY physics professors used baseball analogies for teaching physics), the chicken noodle of soups. Eh, I guess I don't see the big deal.
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I think it's a testament to the breadth and depth of the game that people can so often find parallels between aspects of WoW and other games. It's not like a lot of people who make these connections have only ever played WoW and have nothing else to compare it to. On the other hand, for the fans, it can be a rather all-consuming pastime. I'm not talking about anything as extreme as abandoning your life--though that happens to a few people.
I've often heard people say that when they play WoW they end up not playing any other games. This is not because WoW is some uber-game that has aspects of every other game, though. It's mostly that it's very time consuming. As with anything that consumes so much of your life, you start to draw parallels. Movie fanatics quote movies. Foodies associate things with various dishes. Furries... okay, let's not go there.
The nearest parallel I can draw to what the Lobster describes is parenthood. If you're not a parent, you probably don't know what it's like to be utterly responsible for the well being of another human. You can make educated guesses about how you might act, or how it might affect you. You can draw from your own experience as a child, but that's a very skewed perspective. Really, you don't know what it's like until you experience it. Sure, there are similar caregiver situations. Mostly, though, there's a gulf of experience between parents and non-parents.
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I spit out my coffee when I read that. Nice. Please write Blizzard!
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This post totally reminds me of that one quest in Westfall. You know, the one with the chicken? You guys know what I'm talking about.
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Any quest involving a chicken, and said escorting of chicken should not be uttered amongst mortal ears.
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Haha. Nice.
On a more serious note, I hear what you're saying Lobster. But on some level it's a bit like asking X360 owners to stop drawing analogies to Halo. Yeah, Halo isn't exactly "innovative", but it has a huge player base and it's the game the vast majority of X360 owners have played and understand.
WoW is the lowest common denominator, the MMO most MMO players have played.
Yeah I think anyone would feel alienated when others are talking about something they aren't into.
Well, sure. I remember feeling alienated when I started school, since my parents didn't get a tv until I was 7 or so. I had no idea what anyone was talking about half the time. You're missing one of the largest shared touchstones in PC gaming - conform, and you'll be fine.
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SpacePPoliceman wrote:
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I'm with you, Lobster; I feel left out by all the World of Warcraft talk. It's not so much that I haven't played the game as that I've already decided that I'm never going to play the game.
I really think though that people use World of Warcraft as a reference point not so much to World of Warcraft itself as to "good" MMOs in general. It's not all that different from all open-world-ish games being referred to as "Grand Theft Auto," or how all first-person shooters were "Doom" for a long time, or how all platformers were "Mario." World of Warcraft isn't just a game but a new type of game; it's a type of game that's been around since before World of Warcraft, of course, but it's never been so phenomenally successful. Right now, World of Warcraft is an easy reference point because it's the best example of a new genre to the point that the genre can easily be conflated with World of Warcraft itself. It's a genre that is populated with a fair number of clones but hasn't yet had a different enough, equally successful game of the same type that there needs to be a differentiation between MMOs in general and World of Warcraft specifically; there isn't yet a Half-Life to World of Warcraft's Doom.
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Why have you decided that? I'm genuinely curious, not being a hostile fanboy.
SpacePPoliceman wrote:
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...
I, too, feel very alone when people talk about WoW. Well, I actually feel like I'm insane; sort of an "Am I the only person in the world for whom this game is no fun?!" feeling. The fact that people are always talking about it is also a big part of why I hate it so much. I've learned recently that nothing bothers me more than absolutely mediocre things (at least in my opinion) becoming ridiculously successful, because whenever that happens it seems to hold the medium back as people keep trying to mimic the success that I feel was unjustified in the first place.
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I have to agree with Lobster on this. I would also like to add that World of Warcraft is a terribly unoriginal game that has done nothing more than to corral MMOs back into a grind-based, carrot-on-a-stick gameplay system. Ultima Online, at least in its initial incarnation, remains the best and most innovative MMO to ever grace the market.
And I thought this was a post not about bashing the game.
Regardless of your thoughts on WoW, it is a common denominator and it prints freaking money. There are always outliers in any situation or comparison but it is safe when you talk about a basic aspect of WoW people will understand what you are talking about regardless if you have played WoW or not.
Bear wrote:
My wife was in the gas station today and a couple of forty-something guys (the attendant and a customer) were going off and gushing about MMO's. It's pretty safe to say they are firmly a part of the mainstream in a very big way now. With games like W, Rock Band and the Wii, what more could we ask for? We let in the normies' - so what we do is considered way less geeky than before, which is a good thing. Now no one has to feel ashamed to talk about gaming in public!
Also, you'd be surprised how many people in high places play the game as well. My boss, as well as his boss are known to dabble in the MMOs. Maybe future promotions for some will involve giving up some uber-loot in a dungeon? Now wouldn't that be rad?
I still stand by my beliefs that what we see as MMOs now are still a foreshadowing of what's to come when it involves multiple people enjoying digital entertainment. And for that, W is going to go down in the books for ushering us in the next phase - and one can only pray it will not involve us collecting 10 of anything.
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That's what I was thinking, lot of fire in that
As for WoW, I hate to do it since Lobster hates it, but it's easily the most played MMO in a while. It got there by being well and firmly planted in the mainstream. Does it suck for those of us who haven't played it? Sure it does. But to me, I don't see it as being any different from my position having not played any one of a number of other popular games. Being excluded is simply something that happens, and when you are, it's really hard to 'get'. I've been through it with WAR, Gears 1 & now 2, Age of Conan, the list is pretty long.
Overall, I think you nail it pretty hard on the head comparing WoW to a metaphor. Because that truly is what it has become; the ultimate metaphor in the gaming community. I don't think that any game to date has enjoyed such success as WoW has, and I think it will be a very long time before another eauals it.
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I'm looking at this in the other direction. Lobster's lament reminds me of just how many times the podcasters would talk about a game that I had heard about in whispers but never had the chance to actually play. Being a relatively young gamer, I missed out on many classics that defined the gaming experience of the more senior goodjers. So when they started talking about Deus Ex or Fallout or System Shock 2, I was always left feeling like an outsider peering into a foreign world. These games are just history to me, and the podcasters old men who speak fondly of these games in sentences that start with "back in my days." Aside from echoing Lobster's experience, I suddenly realized that video game has accumulated enough history to produce a wide generation gap.
So while Swat notices the trend of gaming becoming more widespread, I see the emergence of a need for expertise in video game appreciation. We are now at a stage where there is enough complexity and variety in game design, as well as a generous supply of examples, to discuss games academically. Video game is slowly approaching a combination of depth and width that has been exclusive to the other popular forms of media. Podcasters and columnists like our very own will be the vanguard of the great thinkers to come, who are able to dissect and analyze the elements, the history, and the mystery of game design as a legitimate form of art. We are getting really close.
It's a wonderful thing.
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If you call translating text MUDs into Ultima 8's graphic engine innovation...
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I know exactly what you mean. Everything I've seen of Legends of Blighted Stars: The Eternal Reign Shines Momentarily Over Moria looks pretty sweet.
muttonchop wrote:
I have to take a moment to appreciate the shining genius of this post.