Convergence

"Dad, your warlock is walking around the city, and he sees a guy with a big exclamation point over his head. What do you do?"
"Well, what am I supposed to do?"
"You're supposed to click on him. He has a quest for you."
"OK, I click on him."
"He has a quest. There's this race of people, that used to be warlocks, only they got too much into demons and stuff, and it corrupted them. So now they're not just warlocks any more, they can be any class. And you have to go and kill their leader."

*

Wait ...WHAT??



Good question, and a LONG story.

If you know me you know I've always had a weakness for digital games. My first great addiction was Williams' Defender, but let's not forget the old Atari Asteroids, or Ultima on an Apple II, or even ... Zork. Over time the games got more sophisticated. My next great time sink was the Marathon series, programmed by University of Chicago students who later sold their game company, Bungie, to Microsoft. I played the Marathon DEMO on my wife's Mac IIsi for hours, despite the fact that lack of a floating-point chip on the 68030 processor therein caused me to play the game at postage stamp size and gruesomely low resolution. When I moved up to a PowerMac clone with real horsepower, the good times had arrived. I shudder to think how many hours I spent after work playing PvP (player-versus-player) Marathon II with my cohorts, our senior network administrator spouting streams of Belushiesque profanity as we blew each other to bits. Of course, Marathon II and Marathon Infinity were excellent as single-player games as well, not to mention Marathon:Evil, one of the best game mods ever. But I digress.

Then there was Quake! And Quake II! And a game based on the Quake engine, but far better than any Quake game, Half-Life. These were all games of the "first-person shooter" variety -- se the world through the eyes of a person with a vast assortment of weapons on their person and an endless supply of enemies.

Then there was an intriguing series of games from a company called Blizzard. These were not as addicting as the others I've mentioned, but I found them a nice, slower counterpoint. They had a series of games known as Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Not everyone likes this game style: your goal was to build up resources over time, but more quickly than your enemies. You would begin by gathering basic raw materials and slowly build infrastructure. First your peons had to chop enough wood to build a lumber mill and blacksmith. Then you could produce finished wood and nails and build a barracks. Then your barracks could produce one soldier every four turns provided the peons kept it supplied with wood and water. Etc. So there was a bit of a simulation flavor to the game, like SimCity or any of its worthy successors, mixed in with combat.

I found the Warcraft games, entertaining, but not addicting. The long resource buildups got tedious after a while, and the games seemed to get quite difficult in their later stages. I played a fair amount of Warcraft III, and it was pleasant enough in its way. There was some notable new technology there, though. For example, a 3-D engine that you zoom through the world and view it from any angle. Hmm.

Blizzard had another line of games, called Diablo, that held my interest a bit better once I started playing them. Diablo is essentially digital D&D: fantasy environments, character classes, quests, treasure, hit points -- almost entirely running around killing monsters, but in a very visually pleasing way. I played a lot of Diablo II, and a bit of the expansion module.

Then came the Xbox era. Lots of Halo, an amazing game created by Bungie, intended as a successor to the Marathon series (though Marathon's gameplay remains superior in some ways). Many hours of amusement. And a few other XBox games such as Halo 2, Fable and Burnout. All fun, but nothing too addicting. A lot of the XBox games did have an online component where you could play with or against other people. One aspect of this was competition: play directly against other people. Sometimes this was entertaing, as when playing "house rules" PvP Halo against my extravagant friend Scott. (In house rules, you can only kill the other playing with a Jeep or a hand grenade, which makes it by turns challenging and hilarious). But when playing online against other players, all too often it was a case of entering a game populated by hyperactive teens who played all day and mowed one down in a second or two, along with heaps of abuse.

There was, though,another kind of online play. Let me lay out some terminology. Games or modes where you compete directly against other humans are often referred to as PvP (player versus player). Games where you compete against the game environment (exploring a virtual world, fighting monsters or aliens) are often called PvE (player versus environment). What I thought would be interesting, more interesting than PvP vs coke kiddies, was collaborative PvE -- team up with one or more of your friends, and explore a virtual world together. This would get you much closer to a D&D-like experience.

Halo, it turned out, did have a collaborative PvE mode. Scott and I explored much of the Halo universe together, teaming up against the vast array of horrid aliens. The experience, though, left something to be desired -- we had to share the same screen, split in two, with one of us above and the other below. It was easy to be distracted by what the other guy was seeing, and your view of the game was crammed oddly into half a screen. OK, but not ideal. And you had to be in the same room, on the same XBox. Long-distance gameplay was strictly PvP.

But the folks at Blizzard had not been idle. What next to do with the Warcraft franchise? The whole resource thing was getting old. But they had a fully worked-out (if somewhat hackneyed and cartoonish) fantasy world, and a usable 3-D engine. And computers were becoming more powerful, and broadband more prevalent ....

So, to make a long story short, Blizzard created a "massively multi-player, online role-playing game" (MMORPG), imaginatively dubbed it World of Warcraft, and the entire universe became massively addicted thereto. It was released in November 2004. I began playing it about 11 months later. According to the best data I can get, I have been logged into the game for a total of about 89 days in that time span -- over two thousand hours, something on the order of two hours every day. Hmm. What's so appealing? Is this thing better than D&D? Worse? Different?

All of the above, as it turns out.

*

World of Warcraft, or WoW for short, is a very simple game in some ways. It's a fantasy-oriented agem (I hesitate to call it an RPG), with conventions familar to anyone who's played an RPG.

First, create a character. Begin by choosing a "faction": Horde or Alliance. The Horde is comprised of Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and the Undead. The Alliance is composed of Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves. A lot rests on this choice: characters (and players) from one faction cannot communicate or collaborate with the other faction. That means that if you are Alliance, and your friend is Horde, you can't effectively adventure together, or even communicate in the game except via several workarounds.

So choose a faction, then a race (see above) and a class. Classes include RPG staples such as Warrior, Mage, Priest, Druid and Paladin, along with some less obvious ones such as the Rogue (combines features of thief and assassin), the Warlock (a spellcaster with particular affinity for demons), the Hunter (a sort of ranger-beastmaster with an affinity for ranged weapons, one of the game's most popular class choices) and the Shaman (somewhere between a Priest and a Druid). Not every race may play every class, so those two choices have some interactions that need to be thought out.

Next you can choose how you look, sort of. Those accustomed to the elaborate avatar customizations of games like Second Life will find the choices alarmingly slight: you can change your character's skin color, hair color, hair style, facial feature, and one or two other slightly race-dependent attributes like body piercings. But the number of really distinct combinations is not so high, and so one can often find several characters (I will fiercely resist the in-game convention of calling them "toons") with a very similar look.



One huge difference from traditional RPGs -- though we often speak of "rolling" a character in WoW, in fact a player has no control at all over a character's starting statistics. Those are absolutely determined by the combination of race and class. When you have a subscriber base numbered in the millions, game balance becomes paramount, and Blizzard needs to tune the game constantly to make sure no particular combination of abilities, circumstances, items, etc., conveys some overwhelming advantage. One way to attain this is to allow zero variability in underlying statistics, which is the path Blizzard chose.

*

Once you have your character, the game is extremely simple. Your goal is to go up levels and collect loot. That's it. As you progress through the game, you can visit ever more dangerous areas, and finally, if your skills and equipment are good enough, you can team up with others and challenge some of the most difficult encounters in the game.

But it all really comes to just two things: loot, and experience (or XP). If you like, you can subdivide loot into cash, and "gear". Gear is stuff you wear and carry -- generally magic items that enhance your base abilities in some way.

So how do you gain loot and XP? Just two ways. The simplest way is to go kill monsters. because, you see, monsters are everywhere in WoW. As soon as you leave a settled area, you can glimpse scads of them through the woods. Mostly they'll just mind their own business, but if you get too close, they will rush at you and attach you. Defeat them, and they drop loot, of a randomness alarming even by "bad rpg" standards: wild boars do generally drop tusks and short ribs, but also the occasional magic weapon.

Besides killing monsters, you can also complete quests. To get a quest, find an NPC with a big exclamation point above his/her/its head (see above). The NPC will give you a task to complete, and when you complete it, you return to said NPC to claim a reward, generally a mixture of cash, XP and gear.

So what do you do on quests, you might ask. Well, mostly .... kill monsters. I mean, there are other goals mixed in -- explore this or that zone or dungeon, pick up this item -- but to do any of those, you have to mow your way through every manner of wandering monster. The experience has often been likened to wood-chopping. Visually appealing, interactive wood-chopping, but wood-chopping nonetheless.

Many online RPGs share this trait, known also as "the grind." The rewards you get from the game have nothing to do with being "good at" the game. It actually is possible to be "good at" WoW, but this has no effect on how quickly you progress. Your progress and rewards are almost entirely proportional to just one thing -- the amount of physical time you spend playing the game.

There. I said it.

Now, wood-chopping or not, the game is immensely appealing on several levels. Compelling scenery:





Dark entrances:



Impressive beasts, especially the rideable variety:







And immense dungeons, of which more, no doubt, anon ...



(These are all shots of my various characters, by the way, all them in real-game situations.)

*

I need to close this post. I began writing it two weeks ago. The punch line is simple. A couple of months ago I decided it was time to let the kids play some "real" computer games. Nothing heinous like Doom III, just some lightweight XBox fare. I reasoned that they were already seeing games at friends' houses, and they might as well learn more from a "safe" source. (Future posts will challenge the notion that I am a "safe" games mentor). All I showed them at first were games like Burnout (a car racing and crashing game) and Star Wars:Clone Wars (a low-violence spaceship shooting game). E. also got a bit into Morrowind, an XBox RPG. But he was so immersed in the game and so attached to his character that when a monster first killed him it was traumatic (much as it was when a monster first defeated him in D&D). He decided that Morrowind "gives me too much adrenaline," and limited himself to exploring roads and cities.

But then came Sunday 6/15/08. We were scheduled to go on a Cub Scout canoe trip. E. joined the Scouts this year because it looked fun and he had friends doing it. We've done a variety of the activities, but he didn't really latch onto it except as a monthly social event. This canoe trip, on the nearby Brandywine River, seemed like a good way to wrap up.

That is, until the large trip organizer with the torn-off sleeves and vaguely Deliverance air warned us that the river was running fast and that we needed to look sharp or we'd be flipping over in eight to ten feet of fast water on the bends. Hmm.

So it was rough. I hadn't canoed in a while, and E in the front, not at all. We grounded out often, spun out, ran ashore. I ran us straight into thickets, where E gamely took the branches in the face and fell backwards into the canoe to avoid tipping out the side. By the break he had had enough, like one other young man, and demanded we get off the river and drag the canoe back somehow. It didn't help that he knew that there was a dam near the end, where we had to look sharp and scoot to a portage point to avoid going over the dam. At the opening Q&A he had asked if there was a cage or net or something to keep people from going over. "No there is not," said Gruff Rental Man. So apparently the spectre of the Dam was making it all much worse.

Finally, after much cajoling, and assurances that it was dead easy to avoid the dam, we got back in the water. E was a trouper, toughed it out the rest of the way, did not fret much and made the very best of it. It turned out we did indeed have to look sharp at the dam. There was little warning, and we had to scoot out around some branches, turn broadside to the current only 15-20 feet from the dam and shoot to the portage point. On the other hand the dam was only 4-5 feet tall, not the terrifying drop E had been expecting. One canoe looked it over and decided to just go straight over the dam. He was happily flabbergasted at how small it was.

But still, he returned home a tired and drained kid, somewhat unhappy and discouraged. So I made the executive decision. World of Warcraft is full of sights that are supremely exciting to a fantasy-mind kid.

So I showed him the game.