People seem to have a difficult time quitting MMORPGs (that’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games to those of you living in bomb shelters who are only allowed to resurface to read Spawn Kill articles).  Warcraftrealms.com, a popular statistic site for World of Warcraft, shows that there are approximately 6.3 million people active in WoW between the US and Europe.  That’s about six times the number of any other MMORPG currently on the market, at least in the West.  Of the 6.3 million people, how many do you think have been playing for more than two years?  Three?  Since launch?  Given rerolling and inaccurate data, it’s probably not feasible to gauge something like that, but the numbers would frighten. 

So why do people play for so long?  WoW is a large game, but it’s nothing a year spent playing it consistently won’t make you an expert at.  You could probably play it for a single season and do everything there was to do.  Even the heaviest of single player RPGs (I’m looking at you, Oblivion) only rope people in for triple digits.  Yet some people have five years logged in WoW.  What have they been doing this whole time?  Is it just a colorful chat room to them?  There are still people playing the original Everquest, which I believe just had its TEN YEAR anniversary.  Ten years… of one game.  Go ahead, boggle at that.  Boggle away.  I can’t seem to stop boggling.

It might be a good idea first to look at why people play this genre to begin with.  Some gamers simply don’t understand it.  First timers to the MMO world will wonder why the hell they’re killing 20 rats for this quest.  That doesn’t seem like a quest at all.  It seems like a job.  Yet millions of people start out that way.  Many gamers don’t understand how anyone can play a game with no story whatsoever.  Many people even shake their heads in disbelief that so many people would subject themselves to the whims and aggravations of the online community.  But for those in the circle, those in the know, this is a genre that provides near endless amounts of entertainment.  In short, people play because they like interacting with people in a social environment, they like proving to those people that they are better or equal players, and they like “living” in a persistent fantasy or sci-fi world.  There are other reasons, and people might not meet all these criteria, but in general these are the reasons to play.  But why play for so long?

Whenever I talk to people still in the midst of an MMO, say multiple years in, and I ask them why they still play it, the answers can vary to a degree, but I always see the few overriding comments highlighted below.

Time Investment

To paraphrase what I generally hear, “I’ve invested so much time into this character/account, I don’t think I could give it up now.”  People think because they’ve been playing for three years, that they’re somehow giving themselves up if they cancel their accounts and stop playing.    In a way this is relatable to real life situations.  It actually reminds me of many women I’ve talked to over the years who aren’t happy with their boyfriends/husbands but feel that if they quit now that they’ll have wasted so much time.  It’s frustrating for me to hear about such incidents, obviously for selfish reasons (I’m a man with needs!), but also because by clinging to something they feel important purely based on time invested, it isn’t making them happy.  Contrary to my rigid exterior, I’m often displeased to see people not enjoying life.  And as with relationships, people clinging to MMOs makes me frown.  Anyone who has tried to play a new MMO lately has noticed a disturbing trend.  There’s no one to play with.  When one particular game has dominated the market for so long, anything new trying to break that barrier is invariably squashed under its monstrous heel unless something miraculous or truly innovative happens.

Solution:  Just let it go!  You can’t look at games as some type of life investment.  Your level 50 Elven Nightshade isn’t going to collect interest and be worth triple at the end of some ten year financial cycle.  It’s going to be the same character you rolled up 50 levels ago with better gear and maybe a few more emotes to play with.  There may have been a time when you had fun stabbing people in the back and imagining the frustrated cursing of the player on the other side of that ethernet line, but if that’s no longer the case, it’s time to move on to a new journey.  When you’ve stopped having fun, consider the game beat and move on.  Unfortunately I can’t give the same advice on relationships.  I’m terrible at them.

Addiction

You know it’s out there.  It’s ugly.  It’s horrible.  It has its mangy claws in more gamers than people like to admit.  I myself felt its sharp fangs at one point.  It scared me enough that I never repeated the occurrence (and it almost made me lose someone important).  I don’t want to dwell on this point too much because I think it’s a negative aspect of a social experience that colors that experience entirely too much.  There are addicts, and their reason for continuing on in the game is that addiction.  But these aren’t the majority of people that exist within the MMO community.  They are a large minority in fact.  Addicts exist in every walk of life, either in substance cases, obsession cases, even work areas.  Alcohol isn’t inherently evil just because a few people have no self control.  Chances are decent the people addicted to WoW would find something else to be addicted to if it didn’t exist.

Solution: Get real help or just wake up.  For me (As a recovering addict!), the simplest thing for me was just to get a grip.  But this isn’t the solution for everyone.  Some people need professional assistance to get past an addiction.  This isn’t really the place to go into such a heavy matter, but an addiction to video games isn’t all that different from an addiction to anything else.  It can be both physical and mental, believe it or not.

“There’s nothing better to play.”

This reason doesn’t make much sense to me.  Right now, I am suffering from having entirely too much to play.  Even the thought of devoting so many hours to an MMO right now gives me the chills (they’re multiplyin’!)  There are so many games today that you can literally only play the A+++ titles and still have a full plate.   I often wonder if the people who claim not to have anything better to play are either too cheap to buy a new game, or are in secret suffering from one of the prior reasons and just not willing to admit it.  It would take a pretty amazing game not to stagnate after five years, or a very thick set of blinders.  Games progress every year, and while story and often gameplay are a subjective matter, the aspects of MMOs have little to do with either of those.  The draws of an MMO are the visuals, the community, and the content.  All three of these can improve year to year, and sticking with the same one for half a decade makes little sense.

Solution:  Give other games more than a few minutes to determine if they’re great or not.  Gamers today seem to have ADHD (I know I do) when it comes to trying new games.  We play a game for maybe a demo’s length and judge it inferior.  I’m certainly not saying to give every game a full ten hours, but opening one’s mind to even the possibility of something new can do wonders for one’s gaming variety.  There are so many good games, MMO and non-MMO, that limiting all your time to just one is a disservice to yourself and to others.

“All my friends play here.”

This is a fairly legitimate excuse for why you would stay with one game for so long.  This is the reason I stuck around so long in the various games I played.  And I really have few arguments against it.  It makes sense.  I like playing games with people, and friends are in fact people.  Often they’re even preferable people!  The camaraderie that MMOs engender is an oft overlooked advantage of the genre.  I have made people that I consider close friends through MMOs.  I may never meet them face to face, but in a digital age this isn’t even that important when considering friendship.  They are people I know, people I talk to about things non-gaming related, people I actually care about.  With my heart being locked in a steel cage a thousand feet below ground and perpetually frozen, it’s a difficult thing to make friends, but somehow MMOs forced it on me.  One might even call such a thing a miracle.

Solution:  Move as a group.  This is a recent development for me, but I’ve begun playing multiplayer games with a group of about ten people, and we move as one cohesive unit from one game to the next.  When the general concensus is that whatever we’re playing has run its course, we chuck on over to whatever looks new and fresh.  Not only does it keep us quite good as a group of competitive gamers, but it also keeps everything in our gaming world interesting and vivid.  It also avoids the risk of any new multiplayer game:  The risk of not making friends! (Cue thunder and lightning sound effects).  It sucks when you can’t connect with people in a game that is meant to engender a sense of community.  It usually means a short stint in that particular game.  Getting your friends to move around with you completely axes this problem.

There are bound to be other reasons people play games in this genre for so long.  There are people who get paid to, whether through the gold farming process or because they’re part of some elite PvP team in Europe (When, oh when will these advertisers contact me for my skills?).  And I’m sure somewhere across the space-time continuum there is a little boy playing Eve Online in order to save mankind and all the history of the world.  I think for the most part people play for the reasons listed above though.  MMORPGs have a life all their own, but it is limited by content, and when content starts to look like that mangy pair of underwear you have in the back of your dresser drawer that you keep saving mainly for days when laundry gets a little scarce and you don’t have quarters for the laundromat, it may be time to move on.  Games should be fun.  They’re created to be a fun, emotional or adrenaline-fueling experience.  Don’t let them get the better of you!  Variety is the spice of life, and other clichéd phrases!

       

Tags: Editorial, MMOs, World of Warcraft, WoW

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Editorials, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.