Originally posted by: RBachman
Anyway, I never have & never will understand the MMORPG hate. How much TV do you watch?
Did you know your brain is less active when watching TV than during sleep? Heh, and you thought
watching people eat slugs was educational... MMORPGs offer social interaction and challenges to overcome.
What else are you going to do with your free time, honestly? The argument that you need hours upon
hours to accomplish anything is pure bullsh!t, and I think on some level you know it. It's just easier to
blame a source of enjoyment for your overindulgence rather than yourself. Same reason fat people tried
to sue McDonalds.
MMOG's are designed as time sinks. The time sinks are also increasing, so that at later point, you need to spend much more time for a porportional gain. If you think that you don't need to spend hours upon hours, then you probably simply haven't reached a point of content exhaustion that makes that true. For example, you can get to level 2 in a matter of minutes. You cannot get to level 60 in a matter of minutes. That "achievement" is certainly going to cost you hours and hours. However, that "achievement" is still quite a bit easier than say the "achievement" of a full tier 2 gear set for example, or even a minimum set of 3 tier 2 pieces. And for many many players, this is just what they have to do for further achievement. It's true by definition -- the best gear just isn't easily accessible; it's not meant to be, as a cornerstone of the game design.
If your definition of "achievement" is social interaction / guild chat, etc., then you're talking about a chat program, not about the game -- you can probably talk about matters much more substantially in focused external chat groups than in guild / public chat.
So the difference between someone who still thinks that they can accomplish something without "hours and hours" and the others is pretty much the amount of experience they already have in the game, and this is perfectly normal; how it should be. You don't play tag or hopscotch or cars or dolls or whatever for the rest of your life -- you exhaust its content and go on to something else.
As to blaming the source of indulgence vs. yourself, I think it's pretty clear that if you look at the elements of game design and the economics of the games themselves, that the game designers are out to make something that keeps you engaged, and have included mechanics that are addictive. At best, with more recent games, they try to avoid time sinks, but never really succeed. It's just not possible to have that much content at the rate that players consume it. Again, if you're not in the tail end of content exhaustion, you just haven't reached the limit yet; this doesn't apply to you yet. Around 50% of MMOG players self-report addiction, and around 20% self-report some harm to their personal lives as a result. You can blame the players, and they do deserve some of the blame, but to ignore these factors is also self-deception.
I think TV is a strawman here. It's not even the biggest alternative to online gaming -- the internet is. While it's true that around 95% of TV is pure crap, there is a small proportion of TV that makes any online game look like the game that it is. Don't delude yourself here further by making a strawman argument. A real test of gaming addiction is how much it takes you away from things that matter to you in "real life". Do you sit with your family for dinner, or do you tell them "sorry, I have to go to this raid, or I'm in the middle of a group"? Do you skimp on homework? Do your grades slip? Do you go to work sleepy? Does your family complain that you're not spending enough time with them? That you seem to like your online friends more than them? These are the real tests. If you pass, wonderful! If you don't, then consider getting your kicks from a game which has save and pause buttons -- they're just not there in MMORGs for obvious reasons.
As to "MMOG hate". This is also a strawman. I and others have been playing multiple MMOG's for a long time. It's not as if we need any lectures on guild mechanics, or gaming. We're players, not outside observers. I quit EQ when I saw it for the grind that it had become. I quit WoW when I saw that I couldn't commit the time it took to get farther ahead. I might go back to WoW when they increase the level cap. So how does that equate with a blind "MMOG hate" that you put up as a strawman argument?