Alone together.
Czeltic Girl pointed me toward this interesting article that explains why “soloing” is so common in games specifically designed to be social, MMORPGs.
Indeed, several of my friends have asked me why I bother to play the game if I’m not going to group up with other people. Particularly in City of Heroes, I was known as someone who *never* wanted to group, even with my friends. The reasons for that were clear to me, but not to my friends. When it comes down to it, the things I like about that game are not the things my friends like. It became a grind so quickly, without even thinly veiled character growth in the form of crafting, exploration or new gear. The goal in CoH is *always* just the next level.
World of Warcraft is good at giving you sub-goals within sub-goals. I can spend an entire evening exploring (and gaining XP for) incredibly well-crafted environments, seeking out rare ingredients (and gaining XP for making my way there) for some enchantment spell, seeing little plays performed by the automaton NPCs of the game, watching the environment react to itself as bunnies are ravaged by leopards and gazelle herds graze together and are suddenly spooked into running.
But I digress. I feel like WoW is a better overall game than CoH, but CoH has several major draws that I will not deny. Still, grouping in CoH may be due partially to boredom with the constant grind, partially due to difficulty, but for me it was never to be social.
In CoH, I only played in groups with real-life friends, but found the exercise too disappointing. My only task on the team was to keep people alive, but when people were prone to just having fun being reckless, it felt like I wasn’t getting anything accomplished. They didn’t blame me, and I understood it wasn’t my fault or anything so dramatic, but my role was to keep people alive and they weren’t letting me essentially. It was just frustrating when it should have just been a giggle fest at all the silliness. (Plus, I hate the concept of Experience Debt, but that’s an aside all its own.)
Groups in general are at once urgent and dull. Most of the time, groups are formed to take on difficult quests or instances. But either you end up sitting and waiting for the group to form properly before you can enter the instance, or you form the grroup on the fly right near the quest and then feel guilty when you aren’t constantly headed toward completion. So, I can’t stop to check out the Tauren Shaman and whether he will survive his battle against the three Kolkar that have mobbed him. I can’t help him out. Or, I’m just sitting, looking for more funny emotes while we wait from someone in the group to traverse what must be leagues of virtual space before we can even get started. To leave the area and take care of other things while waiting to get into an instance is considered extremely rude.
Then, there is the very low rate of individuals who are tolerable. You have ninja looters (people who abuse the loot rules to screw other people out of rewards), bad sports, homophobes and racists, 1337-sP33|<3®s, and just plain immature people. If the reward of dealing with good people comes at about a 10% rate while the asshole ratio is somewhere close to 50% with neutral filling the rest, then am I not better off enjoying my experience solo rather than getting pissed off? I know that part of the game is that other people are playing it, but I think the people-watching point made in the article provides the draw. World of Warcraft to me could easily be true role-playing. You are a hero, in a world wracked with danger and war where other people are constantly off doing their own thing and there is no *one quest* that ends your destiny. If an MMORPG could be truly immersive in language and player attitude like WoW can sometimes be on an RP server, I'm pleased as punch. But for now, I'll just group when I need to, read the General chat when it's tolerable, and enjoy the game on my own terms. Alone Together in the World of Warcraft?
I’ve been playing CoH for about 2 years now, grouping mostly with people I know. I have healers and other toons, and we have a rule — you run off and do something stupid, you get to die. If you are consistantly stupid, we don’t play with you. We’ve all discussed how we want to play, what we want in a game, and we often spend time teaching newbies how not to die.
I rarely join pick up teams because they tend to be completely disorganized and prone to idiot behavior. Every character type is prone to certain kinds of thinking — scrappers get tunnel vision and the illusion they can’t be killed untli they are, tankers live to herd, healers run all over trying to heal until they are bored and start thinking they are combatants, controllers interfere with other people’s strategies and undercut their abilities because they are enthused at their own power, blasters are either foolhardy or cowards. Our group has spent a lot of time ( a LOT of time) figuring out how to make various types and power sets work together properly. Honestly, I find that a hunk of the fun. I don’t spend a lot of time with people who just want to pound things until something dies.
Fairly often I meet up with someone else who doesn’t like stupid people and knows how to team, and it’s all fun. We spend a lot of time cracking jokes at each other, playing with the emotes, and running missions for the fun of it.
It is in no way, shape or form Role Playing. Any game with a script is not roleplaying. Any game where what you do has no effect on the world is not roleplaying. Everything has to be — somehow, by some series of choies — available to all players.
I also solo a lot, just hunting rather than running missions, just because I like the strategy of being a one hunter and having to figure out what the opponent can do and how to counter it.
Haven’t played WoW and probably won’t. So far, nothing I’ve seen in it attracts me (dunno why, I’m a sword and sorcery girl from way back). PRobably the shiny spandex and the fact you can make a great ass on a toon (if you have to stare at it all through the game, it might as well be worth staring at.)
Comment by Sherri — 2/9/2006 @ 4:24 pm
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not coming down on CoH or my friends who wanted to be reckless; it was fun and I knew they were just goofing off. I just felt like, as the healer, I couldn’t join in.
As for the role-playing aspect, I’m a long time tabletop role-player (notice I didn’t say gamer) and I think when I get involved in the exploration aspect and how my character fits into a larger world it touches on that same place in my brain that gets all tickled when I play a good tabletop game. It’s not role-playing in its best sense, but the “imagine you *are* this character and what he would do” jones can be satisfied if only in my own imagination.
I think a game where what you do has little effect on the world at large is a type of role-playing. Maybe not as satisfying — as the fantasy is that our efforts or the efforts of our characters have some effect on the world at large — but since many tabletop experiences revolve around the characters being at the center of some epic, it’s nice to role-play as simply another of the soldiers making an effort in the war. And unlike reality, the character’s hard work is rewarded in an identifiable way. I know that the *vast* majority of MMORPG players are not sharing in this experience with me, but to me the parallel does exist.
Comment by steelbuddha — 2/9/2006 @ 4:35 pm
Like you, I have the long history of table top (my jar-o-dice lives yet!) The medium of type doesn’t convey properly how I actually meant my comments. I didn’t intend to sound offended or strident, because I’m not.
I like the exploration part of any game, rolling back the map, finding something new. The biggest kicks I get from CoH is finding little things — a new npc type, a new sign, new sounds, etc. — as the world becomes more detailed. The missions and such are of a pattern. And, yes, there are things I do in roleplay that are completely not apparant to anyone but me (you want the embarrassing truth? I built into one toon an admiration of a certain fallen hero who has statues around the game. One particular statue overlooks a lake. Every time she gains a level, she has to go there and talk to him. No one knows this but me, and I do it completely for my roleplaying character.)
What’s interesting to me is our different interpretation of “roleplaying”. While I’ll agree with the idea that having little affect on the world, being a small player, can be satisfying, I also feel that in MMORPGs, a player has NO effect. Any villian you kill can be killed by everyone else. Any item you recover will respawn to be recovered. A path you wander has been wandered before and will be wandered again. You can’t even be first at something. Because it’s a script, a pay to play game, everything must be the same for all. Your choices make no difference. I feel that it is a misnomer to call such things RPGs. yes, you can create a look (from pre-selected pieces) and select abilities (in sets) and a name, but you can’t DO anything different from anyone else. Doing so would change the game, and change everyone else’s experience.
The most anyone manages is either being irritating or helpful.
Comment by Sherri — 2/9/2006 @ 5:51 pm
Well, role-playing’s in the head, sez I. Just like your character’s admiration for past heroes, I have stories for all the characters I play and I grow attached to them. My WoW druid has a penchant for ignoring his duties to simply rove and become closer to the land. He even eschews riding his mount (which grants a considerable speed bonus) when I’m in a mood to actually “play.”
I agree that I am taken out of the moment when I’m essentially in a queue to kill that named beastie, but in my head the story is different. So I’m role-playing, even if the game isn’t an RPG. I do it with Unreal Tournament, for goodness’ sake, and that can hardly be called an RPG.
In terms of the world being changed, even in minor ways, by a player’s presence, you’re definitely right. But acting is role-playing and that’s scripted and plotted out, too. So I put forth that it is the person’s mentality that determines whether they are role-playing.
By your definiton, though, Guild Wars might qualify. Everything in the world is created specifically for you to do. No other players (unless you team with them in the city before you venture out) are part of your quests. No monthly fee, either. If I weren’t so obsessed with WoW right now, that’s where I would be.
Comment by steelbuddha — 2/9/2006 @ 6:01 pm
Actually, I put acting in a different arena from roleplay. There’s more to roleplay in terms of creating the story, whereas in acting it is portraying someone else’s story. RPG has more ownership than acting does, inasmuch as (except in improv) the actor doesn’t create the character from the ground up so much as embody the charcter — rather like a costume.
For me, though, roleplay really comes into being with other people. Now I’m so jonsing for even an online RPG (like the kind I used to run in the dark ages). I’m getting too old to game with the usual types I run into — there’s something basically unsettling about gaming with someone young enough to be your kid. For them, too.
I was (and AM) a very emersive gamer. One campaign I was in, I actually wrote two years of diaries for my character of stuff taking place previous to the campaign. The GM and I got to a point sometimes with his NPCs related to my character that he actually blew his own campaign out of the water because my character died and a particular NPC got uncharicteristically upset. It was strange, weird, and kind of wonderful, although it did kill the game (the GM’s wife got a little upset but that’s a whole nuther story.)
Anyway, I like intense roleplaying, which many people find hard to maintain. That’s why I don’t really look to online games with graphics and monsters and points to score for an RPG fix. It doesn’t happen.
Comment by Sherri — 2/9/2006 @ 9:01 pm
i’ve been playing ragnarok for over 2 years and i solo most of the time. i have a guild with 30 or so other people and we’re all friends now but getting into groups doesn’t always work out. with conflicting schedules you pretty much have to plan that stuff ahead of time and frankly if you’re making a schedule for your video game playing, you’re a sad, sad nerd. tony.
i sit around in our general hangout and chat with my guild a lot but when it comes to getting down to nerd business you need to learn to do things on your own because people aren’t always reliable or around. that being said, i PREFER having company when i go around killing stuff but it doesn’t always work out.
Comment by MHG's asshole brother — 2/10/2006 @ 5:52 am
Sherri, I’m really right there with you. Honestly. I’m not giving MMORPGs enough boosting to say they are a substitute for role-playing tabletop. Just that if I’m in the right mindframe, I am essentially giving myself RPG methodone, something to kill the hard edge of the buzz, but not satisfy it completely. And like methodone, it becomes addictive in its own way.
I GM mostly, but the last characters i have played I have had to carry folders upon folders worth of background information. I just want us to be clear that I’m not someone who believes MMORPGs are going to replace tabletop. Ever.
I see where you’re coming from with the other people angle, though. Perhaps those are the two halves of true role-playing: Your mind being in a certain place and then interacting with people who are also of that mind. If either of those things are missing, then the game isn’t complete.
We’re a bit off the main topic (for good reason), but for grouping in MMORPGs, I find that I have a few people that I put on my friends list and those are the people who either are efficient and seemingly mature, or those that talk to me entirely in character.
I logged on to my druid last night, and actually found mail waiting for me in-game from an old gnome friend, wishing me well, informing me of his latest dangerous quests and hoping that fate had not ripped me from this world into the next. It tickled me pink. He and I have always conversed in character and have come up with detailed backgrounds and quests for our characters that can only really exist in our imaginations, as the game only allows for so much “real” interaction.
Comment by steelbuddha — 2/10/2006 @ 9:50 am
One situation friends of mine have run into when grouping are those people who HATE RP of any kind. I’ve one friend in particular who develops “Schtick” for toons, including figures of speech and “accent” inasmuch as one can type an accent. He’s actually been kicked from teams and left 1 supergroup because he maintains his character.
I keep thinking I should try to fire up another online, message based game. The Husband and I used to run them in the long ag0 — his ran for over 3 years, mine ran for two. We also used chat rooms to run games.
Maybe it would be worth discussing…I know at least one other person who might be curious about it. Have to think, have to think…
As for scheduling to team — it’s the same mentality required to meet up for tabletop gaming. I belong to a supergroup that has set aside one day each week to meet and play. Ifyou show, great. If you don’t, fine, but don’t whine later that no one is ever on to play when you are. It isn’t a nerdy thing to do so, because, frankly, anything that takes time out of your life because you enjoy it deserves a little coordinating. Depending on chance don’t cut it, especially if you DO have a life outside of video games.
Comment by Sherri — 2/10/2006 @ 5:37 pm