Anti-Aliased: What are we doing?

Click. 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 5, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 5, 1, 1, 3, 4, 1. /cheer

Sitting next to my friend in his room littered with Diet Mountain Dew cans, reports past due, and his girlfriend passed out on the bed, I slowly came to a very scary realization. Some of our best loved MMOs can be boiled down to not just pressing different buttons, but pressing the same button repeatedly.

What really drove this home was me and a bunch of his friends were in the other room adjacent to his room, yet he was neglecting to join our roleplaying session and hang out. He'd rather sit in his small, cluttered room and farm a raid he's done at least 20 times, somehow finding enjoyment from pressing the button "1" repeatedly.

So... what are we doing? Are we drinking the proverbial Windex because someone said it was a good idea?

Dr. Joshua Smyth from the psychology department at Syracuse University has published a little read article that I only found because I get bored sometimes and end up searching the PsychInfo database for kicks. While a few sources have taken his data out of context, I, being a psychology major and a gamer, will try to put this in the best perspective possible.

Dr. Smyth has found that playing MMORPGs (in this study's case, Dark Age of Camelot) does a variety of good and bad things to the user. On the good news side, the 25 people in the DAoC group found the game to be quite fun and said they would continue to play past the study, they reported they made new friends, and there was no statistically significant drop in their academic performance and overall well-being.

On the bad news side, get ready for it, they reported interference with studying, interference in their real life social life, worse sleep quality, and a whopping 14.4 hours played a week on average (compared to the 2.1 hour average the group playing arcade games with free tokens played a week, the 3.4 average hours a week the people playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy reported, and the 6.2 hours a week the people playing Diablo II reported).

T

he various factors that I reported are statistically significant, and I stress the word statistically. This does not mean the DAoC group was far more worse off than the other three groups; it means that the results found had a less than 5% chance of being random. Media outlets like to play up significance like the data in question is "much higher or powerful" than the data labeled as the control condition. However, this still shows that playing MMORPGs does affect you differently and, as Dr. Smyth suggested, addiction is a phenomenon that is found in many areas that aren't limited to video games. (O hai, smokers.)

So where does this leave us? Most of us know that we have a love for the MMOs and we might be addicted to them on some level, but the majority can handle when to turn off the PC. But, let's get past that. What can we do for ourselves and what can game companies do for us?

First of all, don't let the game run your life. When you start saying things like, "Oh, I can't make it because I scheduled a raid," then perhaps you should start to evaluate how much you're playing. We're aware that MMORPGs have a particular social influence of, "If you don't come, the guild can't raid." However, your true friends understand when you need a break from the game. It's ok to open your mouth and tell them to grab a friend from another guild to be the main tank for a night.

Second, if the game's not fun then stop playing. For some reason, this doesn't click for some people. (That last link is NSFW.) When a game starts feeling like you're going to work instead of being an escape, then perhaps it's time to put down that keyboard and mouse and consider which of the following about Rick Astley is true: A. He'll never give you up, B. He'll never let you down, C. He'll never make you cry, D. He'll never say good-bye. It just might be more fun.

Third, consider if what's going on around you might be more important than your MMO schedule for the night. As in our earlier example, my friend found that farming an instance for the 50th time (emphasis on farming, as he didn't need the stuff) was more fun than shutting down the computer and hanging out with the friends he invited over. I can clearly see the logic in that decision. Pressing "sunder armor" over and over is much better than socializing.

But let's approach this from another angle. What can the game developer do to aid us with this addiction problem?

I fully support the idea that developers need to make money, and to do that they need to keep us playing each month and paying each month. They need to keep us relatively addicted, but right now we're spending that addiction in intense play sessions that can last for 5 hours or more straight. I don't want to break the source of money the developers are getting, but there are alternate methods.

Players are all too content to entertain themselves when you give them the right set of tools. EVE Online is a great example of this. Because most of EVE's content is player controlled, the player can get on and determine his own time schedule. Corporations, even if they need people to be on at certain times, can set time shifts for their employees. While this goes back to the "if the game feels like work, don't play" problem, it also breaks players out of spending their lives attached to the game.

Breaking away from the concept of levelling is another great idea. EVE uses a time based skill system, which requires you to set a skill to learn and then walk away. Even when you're offline, your character is still getting something done.

Along the same lines, provide players with alternative ways to have fun that aren't levelling. Matrix Online, back when it was controlled by Monolith, ran events that were story and player decision driven. Instead of relying on a character's level and some boss to be defeated, players were put in the middle of relationships with non-player characters and played a role in how those characters interacted with one another. Because this upper level area of the game was accessible to all players, people didn't find levelling to be a main goal and didn't find the need to race to the top as much. They could still have a very powerful influence by following clues, solving riddles, and using their noggins. And, as a bonus, you didn't have to be online 24/7.

So... for the cost of a GM, you can entertain players with a scripted event and let them help shape the story of your world. I think that's something everyone can agree with. Then again, SOEbegs to differ, as they removed the majority of the MxO developer run Live Events Team, leaving one man to run it all. On the other hand, the team at Destination Games think that live events are all the rage.

Games don't have to be about how long you can play and how fast you can max out that level. With the right tweaks from both the players and developers, we can see a viable MMO that won't suck people in so much that it will ruin their lives. Yet, no matter how many changes we do make, there will be some players who will just sit there forever. However, if some of these changes are put in place, I do think we can at least make a dent in that number.

This has been Anti-Aliased, the weekly MMORPG culture column that 4 out of 5 readers agree tastes better than drinking Windex! (Warning, Anti-Aliased does not condone the drinking of Windex in any form, even if it prevents you from streaking.)