One Rogue's Journey

The games as art debate is probably one of the most popular among the video game community in recent memory. I’m not going to rehash any of that, I merely bring it up because the premise of most of what I’m about to write is that, yes, they can be art.

A good video game can provide all the emotions of a book or movie. A shocking ending can tug at the heartstrings. A well designed villain can elicit feelings of anger or even fear. You can feel the pain of a troubled hero or compelling protagonist. In short, you can connect with the story and the characters within it. You struggle with the characters from the very beginning and feel a genuine connection to them to the point where you care about what happens to them. You are invested in the story and you care about how it ends. But what happens when a story has no end?

MMOs of today have a story, albeit one that is easy to ignore (“Quest givers have text???”). But why is it so easy to ignore? Why is it that I don’t particularly care what exactly killing X of Y does for John Q. NPC? Is it some flaw in the way I play the game? Maybe. Is it a flaw in the game itself? No, I don’t think so, simply a limitation of the genre. With millions of people playing a single game it’s impossible to truly give one player a sense of control over the world. Yes there is a story going on but when you play through the same boss fight for the 20th time while realizing that there are any number of other groups doing the exact same thing and whether defeated or victorious come next week your foe will be right back where he was today. So it becomes difficult to allow the story to suck you in when no matter what you do, the tale will roll on at it’s own pace. It is hard to really feel for the NPCs plight when you know you’ll never receive the satisfaction of a true conclusion, afterall, an MMO should (technically) go on forever.

Maybe I’m looking at this in the wrong way though, just because the old dungeons still exist doesn’t mean that there was no definite conclusion to their story. I should probably be looking at it from the perspective that each block of content is another chapter, another book in the epic saga. Yeah, that is the best way to look at it. We suspend a lot of disbelief when we play games and that’s the point after all.

Don’t get me wrong. I truly enjoy my time playing MMOs, in particularly WoW; so much so that lately I’ve had to eat a lot of the words I’ve said about it in the past (they were delicious by the way). The enjoyment is just different than what I felt playing through something like Baldur’s Gate. Part of that is the limitations of the genre, part of it is my own limitations. But the differences are OK. Two different feelings, two different types of addiction. Plus, if someone were to actually find a way to combine the addictions…the world would be doomed.