A Look At The Gaming Scene And Beyond

As the heading already says, this article is about computer games and the (MMO) gaming scene  and industry. You may however want to read it anyways, although you are not a gamer, because it is more about society in general really. You probably need to read the first paragraph of this Wikipedia article about MMOs here.

Games, Magazines, Industry, In-game Advertisement

I read computer game magazines relatively often and what I perceive is that most articles – be it game reviews or other articles – are just boring, normalized, superficial and lack any depth; exactly like most games. Most – if not all – game mags are not much better than advertisement free sheets. The whole vibe of the computer gaming scene is actually one which is superficial and denoted by greed, bragging, materialism.

The first paragraph contained a lot of general allegations so let me elaborate one example: greed.

1. We got greed by a lot of the MMO players in game. They subordinate everything a game offers to collecting items and money.
2. We got greed by more and more powerful investors and gaming corporations who subordinate everything to maximizgin profits. This often leads to cookie cutter games.
3. Another form of greed is by gaming mags but also players who constantly long for new titles. This is an extreme horniness about new titles as if they were important to mankind. The pace of the hype coming and going regarding new games is  actually extremely quick these days. Hyped and highly anticipated games may be sorted out of the premium game shelves of game shops within a year or even half a year. I for example remember how fast the top title Bioshock was available for 10 bucks and sorted out of the premium game shelves within not even a full year.

A lot of the aforementioned attributes have to do with the fact, that more and more titles are published but especially because they get supported (but also pressurized) by more and more money. This puts more and more hectic into the scene. It i.e. results in more and more advertisements. Even in games, inside the virtual worlds. Imagine playing a knight wandering through a medieval scenery and all over sudden you stumble on an advertisement by a real world corporation. I have read strategy papers of advertisement companies… and I can tell you they are extremely horny about gaming advertisement. So there is more to come for sure.

And there are of course concrete examples who already have in game advertisements. Quake Wars and Anarchy Online to name just two. And because advertisement companies try to make the advertisements somewhat fitting to the virtual world and because the avarage gamer is not very receptive to virtual gaming atmospheres, in game advertisement will spread for sure.

But advertisement is not just about banners. Advertising companies try to get articles in magazines and pay for it. This is also common in other industries. Why all of this? Because more and more investors are interested in the game industry. Why? Because they are avid gamers! I am just kidding. Because they hope to maximize their amount of money they got. The real powerful elites of the gaming corporations (or investors behind smaller companies) would do the same in any other industry branch and do not care about gamers at all. And by the way  -excuse me for being polemical -  if you have ever seen pictures of them, those people look exactly as expected. Normalized suit capitalists.

Another result of this development is, that a lot of games do not risk anything and try to go new paths. A good example is probably Runes of Magic, which has written “Let’s copy World of Warcraft  and produce a money cow” all over it. In case you do not know, World of Warcraft is the blockbuster MMO game of the MMO industry, which is played by over 10 million people worldwide, according to its developer Blizzard. Runes of Magic copied a lot of World of Warcraft and is probably the most soulless, boring, major gaming title, without any depth in atmosphere and intellectual content, that I’ve ever played.

State Of Mind Of Gamers And Loving Things For Themselves

Perfectly into the picture of a mindless gaming scene of course fits a large portion of the gamers. Let me give an example which shows  the state of mind of (a huge part) the MMO gaming scene. Let’s have a look at the game World of Warcraft.

I played this game and I like the PvP aspect of MMOs the most. PvP  means player versus player fights as opposed to player versus computer generated enemies such as dragons. I was not the only one who focused on PvP of course and I think most of the other PvPers were interested into the PvP because of PvP itself.

The majority of players however, preferred PvE in its various forms. It can be quite entertaining and pleasing to pass the computer generated adventures with your friends or guild comrades and is perfectly fine. It is not worse or better than playing PvP.

But after some time, challenges against computer generated enemies are not challenging anymore because the enemies actions are foreseeable. So, a lot of people just play hours and hours to kill certain strong enemies, like giant dragons, in order to get special item rewards. The urge to get those rewards, is so extreme, that players kill the same enemies (they re-apear after some time) over and over and over and often actually hate to do it!

This urge to get items in order to improve the players avatars (the figure that represents the player and is visible in the virtual computer world) is so strong, that it is maybe a nympholepsy, because the game developers always add new and better items to the game. So basically, people are chasing a carrot on a stick, held in front of  a donkey. The carrot has the label “best and most impressive items” on it.

Attributes Of Virtual Life Are Just Consequential

Another example, to show how much donkeys like carrots, is this: At the end of 2006, Blizzard made it much easier to get rewards from PvP. Unsurprisingly the PvP anticipation exploded. There were so incredible many people who started to PvP to get those items rewards. People who never played PvP joined the battles and even admitted to not PvP anymore after they get their wanted rewards. They were like brain dead zombies with dollar symbols in their dead eyes. And they exactly played like that: like idiots with zero interest in strategies etc. And since the gamers need to pay a monthly subscription fee to play those games (other pay models exist tho), more and more investors are interested in the MMO gaming market. I mean: Can there anything better for a capitalist to make people pay him monthly to chase virtual items? (Well, yes, to make them pay for virtual items directly. This is actually coming.)

But all of this is just consequential: Which behavior of gamers do you expect, if you know, that a large portion of the real society, functions very similar, compared to the life within those virtual worlds. I think that those small virtual worlds show very explicitly, what mankind is about. If there came an alien down to earth, I would show it MMOs in order to make it understand humanity.

Thanks for reading

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