Tobold linked to an interesting article in The New York Times a couple of days ago, wherein “hardcore” marathon runners are rather dismissive of slower runners:
It’s an interesting take on things, but fundamentally flawed when it comes to gaming. At least, for some players.
To wit, not everyone cares about the rat race. (Link to Ysharros’ great article on gaming principles.)
Yes, in an era of Facebook, XBox Achievements and Blizzard’s new battle.net services, where players are competitors first, pride provokes participation, and ego is the raison d’être, the tacit assumption is that the biggest reason for playing is so that others know about it. This isn’t a surprise, but it is unfortunate. Gaming becomes less about the game itself, great game design, or even fantastic experiences, and simply becomes a way for nerds to feel like jocks.
This has all sorts of deleterious effects on sociality (the infamous Counterstrike “emotes” being an easy example) and game design (MMOs reveling in the rut of racing rats on treadmills, idiotic “achievements” that detract from gameplay). To be sure, some of this comes from reflexively being the contemptuous, confrontational CroMagnon cretins we are when internet anonymity facilitates and magnifies stupidity, but more and more, games are built around this impulse. It’s certainly profitable, but more and more, I find such a trend to be disturbing.
Perhaps there’s no going back to more innocent times when games were things to enjoy, not work at for the equivalent of a part time job that costs you money. There may not be a way to stuff the Gamer Score Genie back in the bottle. Pandora’s preening peacocks are noisy, obnoxious beasts, but we’re stuck with them. I think that it is unfortunate that they have such a significant bully platform, but perhaps that’s just the inevitable result of a society that manages to grow old without growing up.
Still, I’m sitting out this rat race. I still find much more joy in the journey than I ever would by finishing it before someone else. I don’t need someone else to feel superior to so that I can have fun in a game.
The “marathon to MMO” analogy works with the business model fairly well, though. People buy their entry tickets, and start running. They aren’t charged for each hour they run, or even for each mile they run, and they certainly don’t buy perpetual access to the route. They buy access to the complete route for a chunk of time, after which said access is summarily cut off. Is it any wonder why both the elitists and the hosts are troubled when these slower runners don’t play by the same unwritten expectations? It’s the exact same mentality as those who say that a subscription to an MMO is a “level playing field”. It certainly is, if you’re only looking at a couple of variables and assuming the rest, blithely ignorant of diverse goals. (To be fair, there isn’t financial impetus to acknowledge diversity. “One size fits all” pricing doesn’t have room for that sort of reasoning.) Slower runners don’t fit the mold, and will always be a problem for the race mentality, even though the administrators are more than happy to take their money.
Of course, such runners would often be better served by not buying into the marathon in the first place, if it’s just a race. Notably and naturally, I don’t buy into subscription games. My money would be wasted on such, since the nature of the beast runs contrary to what I want out of a game. Such oddball souls as I are better served by running at their own pace along the marathon path when it’s open to the public (GASP, Free To Play!), maybe buying lunch along the way (GASP! Freeloaders actually spending money in an environment!). Importantly, people who feel welcome have a tendency to return the goodwill, even if they aren’t running the race that the elitists define their existence by. (I cite again Daniel James of Three Rings/Puzzle Pirates fame: “Money can’t buy you love, but love can bring you money.” …as a Brit, I wonder if he was influenced by the Fab Four.)
Different strokes for different folks, to be sure, but in the end:
Not everyone is interested in the race. Some are only interested in the route and the roses along the way.
These people are not “doing it wrong”, they are not misguided souls in need of correction, rehabilitation and scorn, they are not denigrating the sport/game. If you as a game or marathon provider let them in and take their money, they are your customer. If you don’t want your experience soiled with their presence, don’t take their money and don’t let them in.
Fortune cookie version for the TL;DR crowd:
“He who dies with the most toys still dies“, “First means nothing without second“, and “It’s hard to smell the roses when you’re running at top speed“
I hear you and partially agree. Well, I fully agree about the slowing down to smell the roses part, but I have mixed feelings about the value and appropriateness of a subscription-based game.
The thing is, an ongoing fee (of some sort… more on that below) makes possible things that you don’t get with a one-time purchase. Continual content updates, in-game events, and customer support all depend on a revenue stream. Now, for me the question then becomes: sub or microtransactions?
On the one hand, microtransactions do free us up to play how we want and when we want, without feeling that we’re wasting money by having a subscription that we’re not using fully. If e.g. I’m paying $15 a month for a game that I decide to take a break from, that money is wasted, plain and simple. Microtransactions allow me to purchase new content that interests me and avoid new content that I don’t care about, which is definitely appealing.
On the other hand, subscriptions have the advantages of simplicity and equality – my monthly gaming expenses are consistent and predictable (it’ll be $15 every month for that game, come rain or shine), which is nice for people who rely on careful budgeting. I’m not one such person, but I do like knowing that I don’t have the temptation to spend silly amounts of money in a moment of drunken weakness, buying myself content and features that I don’t really care about the next day. I haven’t ever done so, but it’s an abstract theoretical consideration. Then there’s the equality issue; with subscriptions, everyone is precisely equal in the eyes of the company, meaning my feedback and my enjoyment aren’t more or less important than someone else’s. That’s appealing in a basic democratic sense.
I like both systems in different ways and for different reasons, but the upshot is that I feel pretty comfortable paying a fee to play an online game, provided of course I’m enjoying myself. That’s really the long and short of it. At $15 a month, even if I only play for 4 hours it’s considerably cheaper than going to the movies. If I’m not playing at least an hour a week on average, well, I’m probably not very interested in that game right now and don’t need to be subscribed.
Regardless of how we pay for games, and whether we play games that require expenditures beyond the initial purchase, the core idea above remains quite sound – take your time, enjoy the game(s) you play in whatever way best suits you, and don’t let anyone else tell you how to enjoy yourself. If you are a competitive person and like competitive games, good for you! If you aren’t, there’s no reason to believe the folks who tell you that competition is the only viable and valid approach to gaming.
Most people are constitutionally incapable of accepting that others’ points of view are just as valid as their own. That’s just as true for gaming as it is for sex, religion, economics, and politics.
I… have my moments :/. There’s something about achievements that makes me squeal. I need to do them. Then, after running after some, the pulsion passes. Then, it comes back later…
I don’t feel the need to race. I can’t. I have too many things I’m interested in to race everyone, so I just go at my pace. That’s why I also abandoned subscription games. It’s just not worth it.
But in multiplayer games, I suffer often when I’m not with known friends. Recently, in a Left 4 Dead game with unknown people, on survival, I killed a boomer too close to us. It’s a mistake, it happens, and it didn’t ruin our chance at this. Cost some ammo or health, yes. Well, they kicked me…
I play to have fun. Had it happened the other way around, I would have laughed as it happened to friends also. But these people wanted to best their time. Because of me, they had lost 2 minutes of their life. I had to pay for my crime…
I don’t blame people for playing their way, but their way makes me shy away more and more from online games with strangers :(.
“At $15 a month, even if I only play for 4 hours it’s considerably cheaper than going to the movies.”
That’s an argument that never washes with me. It’s apples to oranges. For my *gaming* $15, I want a lot more than a couple of hours. Apples to apples (or closer, anyway), I can get a used (or sale priced) console or PC game for $15 and potentially spend *hundreds* of hours with it whenever I blasted well please, even over the course of *years* of play. Even Guild Wars works that way. A subscription doesn’t offer me that value. Not even close.
It certainly is good for some, though, which is why I like games that offer both content purchases and time purchases, like Wizard 101.
Ultimately, though, a subscription model is most economical for those who *do* treat the game as a race and play it for insane numbers of hours per pay period. They get to the finish line, preen for a bit, and move on after spending their $60 or so. Someone who has a slower pace and who wants to see everything as they go will wind up paying several *hundred* dollars for the same content. That’s what I find unacceptable and extraordinarily undemocratic about the subscription model.
It could certainly be argued that “the slower player just didn’t work as hard at it”, but that’s also at the heart of the problem. I don’t want to work at playing these games. I want to play them at my pace. I’m very happy paying for a game I like, but I don’t want to pay *more* because of the way I play. There’s no equality to that.
That’s why I only play the lifetime sub games and the Free to play after a onetime purchase type now. You hit the nail on the head Tesh.
Tesh said, “For my *gaming* $15, I want a lot more than a couple of hours. Apples to apples (or closer, anyway), I can get a used (or sale priced) console or PC game for $15 and potentially spend *hundreds* of hours with it whenever I blasted well please, even over the course of *years* of play.”
I do understand where you’re coming from. In my experience, though, it’s extremely rare for a non-online game to offer me dozens of hours of entertainment, much less hundreds. I have high hopes for Dragon Age: Origins, but we’ll see how that pans out.
Guild Wars was an unusual game, and certainly was a good deal at the price. I struggle to think of anything comparable that I’ve experienced though.
The worst thing about the subscription model, from my point of view, is that it encourages designers to insert timesinks freely, and to rely on grinds as a means of delaying progress and thus retaining customers for longer periods. I’m not really concerned with how fast or how slowly I progress; sometimes I blaze through content, sometimes I dawdle indefinitely. But I don’t care for the basic philosophy that says, “We only have 50 hours of game but we need to stretch it out to 500 hours.” I’d be happier just playing those 50 hours of content… or maybe only the first 5 hours sometimes.
I treat entertainment as in many regards interchangeable for my own purposes, so am just as likely to spend entertainment money on DVDs or books or games. So in that sense, for me anyhow, it’s comparing choricitos to empanadillas (i.e. one tapas dish to another). I treat entertainment a bit like tapas; I’m often happiest if I can get a lot of different tastes, and least happy when it’s all the same thing. Yeah, ok, I was just in Barcelona and am still stuck on how bloody delicious their food was, but it’s a serviceable metaphor. 😉
I’ve never been a hardcore gamer per se, but I definitely agree with you in that competition often outranks what it actually is we’re competing with.
Yes, I do enjoy the occasional rankings and such, but ultimately, real life beckons and I have to put things in perspective. What did I get out of this game? Ultimately, the thing I enjoyed most is usually not the competition, but the entertainment I received from the gaming experience.
Perhaps I’m simply not a competitive person, but it does make life simpler when you can enjoy without having the condition of winning the rat race.
foolsage, tangentially, offline games can be guilty of the grind padding as well. I just call it what it is; bad design. 😉
You’re one of those players that gets good value out of subs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. My main point is merely that such isn’t the only sort of player, and the market has to reach out to others if it wants to stay healthy, both in game design and business model. That’s a recurring theme around here.
I do think that subscription games are naturally more amenable to racing mindsets, though. It’s just a core philosophy that’s rooted in the drive to get the most out of your money, and you know that the timer’s ticking. That’s not inherently a bad thing, until you start marketing to those who aren’t interested in the race but design the game around the players who are.
rk, life is indeed simpler when you’re not bothering with the race. Far less stressful as well. I know more than one person who defines their existence by how well they measure against others, and really, if left to their own devices, they are almost completely lost. I can’t help but think that’s a little sad. They aren’t *wrong* in the sense that they are terrible deviants, it just strikes me as an unfortunately hollow life if you only define your success by someone else’s failure.
Competition can indeed drive a lot of good things; it’s one core of capitalism and how it fuels progress. I’m not even against competition (I do love a great game of volleyball). It’s just that one really needs a way to fuel one’s own progress when there are no external milestones to measure against.
Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn has a great article up on perspective, by the way:
Love What You Do, Do What You Love
I wish more people treated MMO’s like a marathon.
By that I mean people would realize, like we do with marathons, that just finishing is an achievement, and people do it for many reasons. Some just love to run. Others use it to test themselves, and beat a personal best. Some want to win the race, others just want to place to show they can do it.
I agree definitely that we do need to rediscover the play aspect of games, and I have had to struggle with it myself. Free 2 Play or Sub games though both are vulnerable to it. I knew a lot of hardcore mabinogi players that leveled 1-50 every week for a year or two, and it was impossible to even compete at that level. I was not bad myself, but getting hit for triple my damage in PvP shows that even in cute, fluffy games, there are sharks.
Oh, I’m all for giving an MMO a finish line. The perpetual treadmill nature of the beasts isn’t healthy. Even so, just because there’s an END to the game doesn’t mean that everyone is interested in getting there at a certain rate, or in comparing race times. 😉
Speaking of Mabinogi, though, there’s another facet to this discussion. More than once, I’ve read about those who whine about microtransaction games because “players can buy power” or “buy shortcuts”, and that’s somehow eeeevil. That’s only true if you care about the race or PvP. If you don’t, “buying power” is totally irrelevant. Again, the contention is rooted in comparison. It’s not an argument against the *fun* in a game, or the options in a business model, it’s all about the pecking order.
That’s a level of metagaming that I’m not happy with, and that I think is deleterious to the genre.
You’re right; subscription games lend themselves well to the racing mindset. I don’t think it needs to be this way, but it certainly is for a lot of people in a lot of games.
Grind padding and treadmills are honestly a sickness in our games; I liken it to obesity and the heart disease that comes therewith. It’s perfectly understandable why designers fall back on grinds and treadmills: it’s very cost-efficient content in terms of dev time. As a player though, it’s disheartening.
I really enjoy games. I think games can provide a lot of real value to players, from education to social opportunities to plan escapism. I continue to think about games, blog about games, and design games in my spare time, though nobody is paying me for any of it. I’m by no means anti-game.
I can’t really defend grinds and treadmills though as a way for players to spend their time, when compared to all the other options in this fascinating and diverse world we live in. Grinds have to compete, not only with other games, but with other entertainment and recreation options in general, and I just don’t see any reasonable comparison there. If your gaming time is spent grinding away, like you’re working a second job (for which YOU pay THEM)… then seriously… read a book. Take a hike in the mountains. Visit some friends. Play another game, or drastically change the way you play this one. Watch a movie. Get in your car and drive somewhere new. Break out of the rut. Grinding is soul-destroying.
Personally, I’ve never understood the “racing” mindset for subscription games. I log on, I have some fun, I log off. For me, it’s about enjoying the gameplay, the adventure, playing with people I enjoy spending time with. I’ve never been motivated by “server firsts”, or “doing the hardest raid content.” I think this is why I think games are missing a sense of adventure. That sense of adventure comes when we play a new game for a bit, which is why people get worked up about new games so much.
This is one reason why I don’t mind subscription games as a player. I pay my $10-15/month, I log on when I want, I have some fun. I don’t feel like I have to log on more to “get my money’s worth”. For me, if I have enough fun during the month then the money is worth it. (I’ve written enough in support of microtransactions as a developer that I won’t repeat it.)
That said, I think if you stop for lunch in the middle of the marathon that perhaps you’re not running it in the true spirit of the event. 🙂
I believe the racing/competitive trend was started back in EverQuest when guilds would assemble their forces so they could take down a boss mode before other guilds. Then it became all about attaining “server firsts” such as the first guild to down XYZ boss.
The New York Times article is interesting as the comments of the veteran runners seems to echo much of what many of us MMO veterans are saying with regard to the dumbing-down of content and the resulting de-emphasis of challenge as being an integral part of the game.
Like MMOs, anyone can enter a marathon. Both have this open concept of who can play unlike professional sports which has a very high degree of skill as a requirement.
The main problem is that unlike marathons the casual demographic of a MMO like WoW is having a direct impact on the game. I doubt that having marathon runners that take 8 hours is cheapening the sport of marathon running at all. But I can understand where it may be eroding the sense of status that comes with being a marathon runner.
As far as subscription based MMOs, I don’t mind paying a fee as long as it is for maintenance and upkeep. A company has to make money somehow. I wonder if the pay per hour fee structure would work here in the western market? At least people would pay for what they use.
I’d like to see people pay for the content they use. Every time I suggest this I end up causing a backlash with the beneficiaries of this kind of unfair system.
Right now because I don’t raid and play hours per day like many folks, I’m not getting my money’s worth and in effect subsidizing the play style of hardcore raiders.
@Wolfshead
That’s only true if you are paying for the content. If you’re paying for access to play the game at all then you aren’t subsidizing anyone. In that case you paid for the exact same thing that everyone else paid for and what you do with it is entirely up to you.
Here’s the bit that really confuses me, I’ve listened all this time to people talking about how the existence of the not-so-serious raiders has no effect on the serious raiders… but somehow the reverse is not true. Somehow by having a different playground, by being separate and, as posited, wholly unconnected from the not-so-serious raiders it is some great detriment that must be corrected. That since the content targeted towards them exists at all it must be accessible and relevant to everyone else too.
“Slower runners don’t fit the mold, and will always be a problem for the race mentality, even though the administrators are more than happy to take their money.”
And why shouldn’t they take the money? It’s impossible for the administrators to know the motives of the person purchasing entry to the race, and more importantly is not even within their realm of responsibility. Should they instead treat their customers as children incapable of rational decision making, and instead screen for slow people so that they can warn them beforehand that a marathon may involve running and time limits? Was it not the personal responsibility of the runners to know the time limit beforehand and, if they wished to complete the race, prepare themselves so as to be able to run it within those limits?
“Of course, such runners would often be better served by not buying into the marathon in the first place, if it’s just a race.” Here I would say you have the right of it. If what you bought wasn’t what you wanted the correct answer is to not buy that again and maybe make note, to yourself or someone positioned to make things happen, the specific other thing you wanted. The incorrect answer is to complain to the manufacturer that they are somehow in debt to you until they provide what you wanted, after all, someone else paid the same amount and got what “they” wanted which is clearly an inequity in how much “value” they got for the money.
“It certainly is, if you’re only looking at a couple of variables and assuming the rest, blithely ignorant of diverse goals.” One need not be ignorant to consider a point invalid. There is nothing stopping the runners in the marathon, nor the raiding outsiders of WoW, EQ2, or LOTRO from having goals beyond those stated within the race. However they provide certain structures, if those structures are actively harmful to your fulfilling your goals, then the obvious answer is to find or make a separate structure which does. But where they are not actively harmful there is nothing to prevent you from doing so.
Still to expect to fulfill your outside goals and those of the primary structure at the same time without needing any extra effort from yourself is simply ludicrous. Walking along smelling the roses is fine. Paying 130USD entry fee to walk along smelling the roses for 26 miles expecting the entire event staff of a running event to patiently wait for you with the finish line open is certifiably insane. Smell the roses, grind out the epics, pick one.
“I don’t need someone else to feel superior to so that I can have fun in a game.” Strange, despite being a particularly competitive personality, neither do I. I spent three years in Counterstrike Source without feeling the need to “prove my superiority” over my opponents. Either my tactics, training, experience and luck won the day… or it didn’t. My tactics improved because they were battle tested, my training improved because I saw what did and didn’t work, and my luck improved by removing itself as much as possible from the equation. However, without the crucible in which I could test those skills and see them work or fail, none of them would have counted for anything. Getting to the #10 spot on my server wouldn’t have meant anything to me without knowing just how good some of the guys I’d managed to temporarily get a stat boost over really were. It wouldn’t have meant anything if I hadn’t spent over six months at the second to last ranking on the server earlier on.
You can have winning and loosing without having winners and losers. From one perspective, everyone on my server of choice was a losers since we weren’t players in the CPL, but from another perspective all of us were winners because we had been part of winning teams. Winners and losers is just bullshit and most of the competitive types know it damn well. That doesn’t mean winning and losing is bullshit though, it can tell you a lot about yourself and your team. It’s a chance to improve, or to feel good that your work really mattered.
tl;dr
If you go off the beaten path, expect your new route to not be paved.
When I initially started gaming, I shunned the subscription model and my game of choice was Guild Wars. I have no problem at all with the buy to play model, nor with paying full game price for full game-sized additional “chapters” of content (especially since, if you wait a few months, you can get them at a discount).
I’ve never bought the claim that a subscription is necessary for upkeep or maintenance or patching, as GW has never had a problem with any of those, barring perhaps the presence of online GMs.
I’ve since grown more lax in what I will and won’t pay and have paid subscriptions for several games, but I’ve never gotten as much fun out of them as GW and in retrospect I regret it a bit. Meanwhile, I played Wizard 101 for two months and spent $5 to unlock areas, and knowing I could go back and play more at any time leaves me with far more goodwill toward that game than many others.
Sara, the trouble with mapping this to MMOs is that they don’t bill themselves as races. They are marketed to a diverse audience, but the monetization doesn’t map nearly as well.
I’m completely sympathetic with the cities running marathons in the article that set up buses and cutoff points. They really can’t leave the marathon infrastructure up for everyone. Of course, the slow runners money in that case are paying for the bus service and the T-shirt rather than ticker tape and drink waystations. That doesn’t really bother me, and I think it’s a good way to handle the diverse clientele. Sure, some will be grumpy that they didn’t make the cut, but that’s life.
As I noted over at Tobold’s place, though,
“Game != Race”
That’s why I firmly believe that selling content rather than access is the way to go, because then players can do whatever they blasted well please with what they paid for. Racers can blast through the game in a week (and get their ego rush for it), and slow burners can plod along however they want.
It’s slightly, but still beautifully ironic to think that if the original marathon runner had ‘stopped to smell the roses’ we wouldn’t have marathons as an event today.
We have marathons precisely because the runner gave it 150% and did it in one go as fast as I could. He was hardcore.
Of course it’s a very silly point, and if people want to go out and run en masse, go for it. It’s fun. But running it slowly and finishing whenever, I don’t know if that’s in the spirit of the event. The slow runners don’t care about this, and I personally don’t think they should care, but they’re just running – not running a marathon.
There’s a point in there somewhere. 😉
Up there it should read “… as far as he could”. It’s not that I can’t run… it’s just that .. erm… I don’t want to. Yeah, that’s it.
I am not sure if it is a “race”, the urge to get to the endgame quickly seems even to be instilled in those who are so slow that they for sure not have to worry about world first, second or even 30th…
Basically, we try to crawl into the holes aka dungeons of our world as quickly as possible and leave it behind ASAP.
Something is wrong there! 😛
There is something wrong with Sara’s comparison, imo: the price.
A slow runner and a marathonian will pay the same price to do a marathon. Each will finish it at their pace.
However, a slow-runner in a subscription MMO will pay I don’t know how much more than the speed runnner. So, if you want to take your time, or can’t play all day long, it will cost you more money to see the content.
That, I can’t abide by.
*chuckle*
Julian, one of the comments on the NYT article reminded us that if you’re staying true to the spirit of the original, it means you’re running the marathon naked and die at the end.
I’m not sure how to map that to an MMO… and I’m not sure I want to.
“it means you’re running the marathon naked and die at the end.”
Nice PvP with durability loss metaphor in there too.
I’m a bit dismayed by the while Hardcore v Casual angle. Part of me looks at it as a legitimate topic, but the line blurs way too easily for me into the realm of fanboy war. I hate fanboy wars.
howto, I’m not sure who noted it recently, someone over at KTR or maybe hardcore Casual, but indeed, the hardcore/casual isn’t a neat split, it’s a whole spectrum of different playstyles that really could be mapped across at least two axes. It’s just not a clearcut segmentation into two camps, and while there *are* those on either end of the spectrum that may fit the mold, it ignores a lot of people in the middle, or who don’t fit neatly on the single axis of definition.
“At $15 a month, even if I only play for 4 hours it’s considerably cheaper than going to the movies.”
Tesh- I know, I said somewhere before. I brought it up to my friend while he was asking me to forego going outside and I said “I dunno 15/month, I just can’t pay that”.
He told me in so many words “15/month is f’ing nothing”, “Sh**, if you think about it the REAL price- the actual value and cost for anyone, is in one’s life”
I have to agree. 15 bucks a month is nothing, it’s peanuts compared to what the average person spends in a week on other activities. I’ve played in a hardcore style that also took a lot of my time. I could easily figure out my financial budget and show that I actually saved my during the months I did nothing but play online LOL.
Like Tobold said, the real worth of gold in game is measured in “time”. I think the real value that the game is costing you is about the same:)
While I’ll readily agree that time is far more valuable than money, the rest of that logic chain doesn’t wash for everyone’s budget. (Though it does work for some, certainly.)
As I noted, I can spend $15 and get a used DS game that I’ll get hundreds of hours out of over the course of a couple of years, which is orders of magnitude better than what I’d get out of a month’s subscription in any sub game. That’s why I’ll always buy content in something like GW, DDO or W101 instead of subbing.
Oh aye. Funny thing is this in itself is a big topic. I agree with you, I guess I’m being particular about some things, and not explaining those points.
But yeah, I haven’t started throwing money at MMORPG’s since I slightly changed my mind about their “worth”.
I still play more Free MMORPG’s (Runes of magic :)), don’t buy things from the item mall(I’ve spent a grand total of 60 bucks on all the f2p I’ve ever played over 2 years)
I’m not subscribed right now to any games but do have a timecard for WoW.
You should bring this topic up again. It always makes for great conversations(I think).
[…] Tesh enters the MMO rat race and tackles the hardcore vs. casual debate from a fresh angle. […]