De Rerum Natura

Getting ready for work this morning I heard this story on talk radio about a boy in Michigan who, for kicks, took the Hummer his dad bought him and ran it back and forth over some nesting ducklings a few times. The presenter, in quite understandable disbelief, wondered "Who who do such a thing on purpose?"


This presenter has obviously not met a lot of teenagers. I live mildly close to a whole building full of kids who would do something like, and with no hesitation, just for the cheering of their mates. A lot of adults make a logical mistake like this that we in the "service sector" call false consensus, assuming a logical underpinning to behavior and a moral compass that quite simply isn't there, because there is no cause and effect relationship between what one does, and what will happen to you .

Activision operates under a kind of a broken model of what their player base actually is. Since the merger with Blizzard, the audience shift has been to a crowd that could be called, charitably, "tribal", and probably more accurately "feral" - completely attracted to and kept in the game model by how much they can victimize other players, or how instantly their needs are gratified. But the legacy of the original design - more lent towards the Exploration and Socialization types - is still somewhere stuck in the gears of the process.*

The upshot? You get game mechanics centered around keeping people happy beating the crap out of each other, in a tableau that's not designed for that at all.

One good example, from when I used to test things: When doing load testing for the Hallow's End event, a whackload of us discovered that the Alliance's version of the quest giver had two very serious problems.

1. She was not flagged as PVP-enabled.
2. She was well out and away from any of the Goldshire guard patrol routes. I.e., their detection radii would never include her.

It went live this way, despite months of argument because, quote, "We don't feel that this will become a significant problem." When pressed, nobody doing the design could conceive of someone spending their whole day killing the quest giver over and over again just to deny the other faction the event.

That's exactly what happened, of course. but anyone who's met a WoW player of a certain stripe nowadays knew that before they got to the end of the sentence. The ability to wreck peoples' day in perfect safety? A kid - or someone who never stopped being a kid - with "social issues" is as likely to turn that down as free cake.

So if some of us sound to your ears "jaded", it's not because we're miserable sons of bitches who hate all people everywhere and so on. We've just met the game's new "target audience" and, yes, they're easily addicted. And that part is "working as intended." But as I used to have to drill into new game designers in the days before these games had pretty pictures, keep in mind that they'll show up to play, but not to play the game that came in the box.





*A contemporary of mine codified the types of players you'll find in this dissertation, which is useful if you're not already familiar with the sociological theory of games.