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TheDrBen

Listed below are comments made by TheDrBen between Tuesday, 11th November 2008 and Thursday, 13th November 2008.

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Your experiences of Online Game "addiction". 5:54pm on 13 Nov 2008 I'm going to make another post partly as a response to some here but also to highlight some other points. Some people have commented on how possible addiction to online games can be seen as a reason for greater controls on all games, I think this is untrue. In an excellent comment by Republicof1 the poster discusses how to control the usage of games. Likewise the fascinating yet terrifying experiences of monsterblog might lead one to believe all games can do this to a person. I think however this comparison of online games and standalone games is not as useful as it might seem.
In the modern market games now tend to all look the same and this is due to economic factors. Halo (Microsoft's first-person shooter) has spawned a huge number of games based around a man in a huge suit of armour with one or more special powers fighting single-handedly against a mighty enemy and vanquishing them for the sake of all. Haze, Crysis, Turok are all examples of this. The magnificent visual effects in these games (especially Crysis) also come with a huge pricetag which means the developers can be too scared to run the risk of trying anything special on the storyline front. There are beacons of hope on the horizon, mostly in the form of Valve's magnificent stable of games including the Half-Life lineage that has spread back over the past decade.
The other group of games hovering over the horizon are the MMOs. World of Warcraft was certainly not the first of these, indeed as a poster mentioned MUDs were running for many many years before. These are all loosely role-playing games although the role-playing is necessarily toned down for the greater part of the market and largely exist in a fantasy world with brave warriors, powerful spellcasters, elves, beautiful princesses and foul monsters. World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning all have this same basic package. Eve online at least has the USP of being set in space but otherwise appears to be effectively the same. I cannot however comment further on that as I have never played it.
At a glance these MMORPGs seem to be an outgrowth of the earlier RPG format, a gaming system that began with the foundation of Dungeons and Dragons. The transition to the computer format was easy and logical, it allowed one to do away with the tiresome dice-rolling aspect and have a clear visual representation of the environment. This let to excellent games such as Baldur's Gate series(Very closely set in the Dungeons and Dragons world with a complex plot and endless hours of gameplay). Other examples were the classic action-RPG Diablo, produced by Blizzard who went on to produce World of Warcraft.
These were each very different games to WoW and its ilk. By way of example I present World of Warcraft and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Each is a third person RPG, WoW is played online, SW:KotOR is played offline. Each has a basis in a breadth of lore about the universe: WoW is based on the stories of three previous games, KotOR obviously on the entire Star Wars saga, both the films and the Expanded Universe. Each is a world peopled by ordinary men and women of various species as well as those who can wield mystical powers: arcane, holy and demonic magic for one, the Force for the other. Each has the player character requiring the aid of a group of others to succeed (in KotOR these others are computer generated). Each has the player character growing in skill and power before defeating the major threat to the universe.
In KotOR one has ultimate control over the surrounding world: the player might decide to kill a character thus preventing a meeting with them at some later stage, or might become a top-level racing driver and thereby change the attitudes of fans to their presence. Most importantly the world changes and develops as the game progresses, the player starts the game on Taris however on leaving that planet its surface is bombed by enemies preventing a return. Likewise a vital piece of knowledge later in the game affects the attitude of all people in talking to the player character. This development creates a huge sense of immersion within the game's storyline. There is also value in replaying the game. Some methods of completing a quest are better suited to those better with a sword than with a blaster and so those players who specialise in blaster use might want to avoid them. More than this many subplots change if approached from the attitude of a light-side Jedi or a dark-side Sith, and vitally one has the ability to switch from one to the other by changing their actions. Indeed just today I have been replaying through the game even though it has been many years since it was released.
WoW by its nature has a very different style of gameplay. Players pick initially whether they are on the Alliance or Horde side. Each character is locked into one or other of these based on the species chosen and cannot change regardless of actions in the game. There is a famous beast called 'Hogger' near the start for an Alliance player. Almost all of the players on the Alliance side will have killed this same character and yet by necessity the creature must resurrect so that the next group of players can kill it. By the very nature of the game one's actions can have no effect upon the world because if it did then no new players could play. Indeed by the time I left the game the major evil character called Illidan would be killed up to once each evening by the very same group of players, let alone his deaths at the hands of any other raiding groups. By rights the vanquishing of Illidan should have brought peace to the world, at least temporarily. This destroys a sense of immersion in the game which is then replaced by the endless grind of quest upon quest upon quest with no real effect. Many of the quests are indeed exactly the same, namely go to this particular place, kill that particular person and take some particular item from their corpse.
This is only a short comparison of these two games which I hope serves to contrast these two similar seeming but actually vastly different genres. The first-person shooters, puzzle games, sports games and casual games are all yet more different from MMOs. I hope this serves to demonstrate that while I do disapprove of MMOs for various reasons does not mean a disapproval of games generally. MMOs instead are in general more poorly designed games than some of their counterparts, more addictive by their nature and by their design and obviously far more expensive if played for any period of time. I worry that in the future we will only have these MMOs and Halo-clones to play in the future.

Apologies, as always, for a ridiculously long post
"...Why that's very nearly an earful!" 11:07am on 12 Nov 2008 Thinking about it more carefully I can remember seeing a CD player at previous donation sessions (not the last one though) but could never really hear the music. This could be nothing more than an issue with the acoustics of the hall.
"...Why that's very nearly an earful!" 10:46am on 12 Nov 2008 Reply to Areopagite:

I cannot say for certain as I was not listening out for music. This was at the town hall in Skipton, North Yorkshire. All I am sure of is that if there was music playing it was too quiet to be heard over the general chit-chat of the crowd and thus presumably ineffective for whatever purpose its there for.
"...Why that's very nearly an earful!" 6:17pm on 11 Nov 2008 There was no music at the blood donor session I attended last week. Were we not important enough?
Your experiences of Online Game "addiction". 6:12pm on 11 Nov 2008 I think the biggest culprit here is WoW (World of Warcraft, if I'm not mistaken the picture here is from there). Its by far the most successful of the MMOs and with good reason, it is fairly simple to get into for the casual (dare I see the female?) gamer yet has very difficult sections at the end for the elite.
The game has parts designed to take up a lot of time with no real value to the story nor to fun - in certain quests one must kill a number of enemies in order to retrieve things from their remains, etc. Even those who have been playing the game for years admit freely that the "grinding" quests are very annoying. These sort of objectives do not appear in more traditional single-player games.
I feel I must make clear my position on computer games, I have been a gamer for many years but I largely play single-player games. I refuse entirely to listen to accusations that they are vile or evil, even such games as Grand Theft Auto (a huge amount of controversy has existed around all of the installments of the game). That said there are some I would not play, the Manhunt series for one. I don't believe it should be banned, its just like some of the more grim horror films, I choose not to watch them and do not expect to be forced to watch them but I care little if others do.
MMOs are different however, I am not sure if there is a clinical addiction but the games are designed to keep you playing for as long as possible. The reason for this is obvious, the player must pay a monthly fee, and the publisher would of course wish that income to continue for as long as possible. In a single-player game, or even in most multi-player games such economic pressures do not exist.
I myself spent some months last year playing WoW and I admit I played it too often. The game draws one in with an easy quest which leads quickly onto another short quest and then a further one until without knowing it one might have been online for several hours. I was also troubled by the fact that there were people who still played it more often than me. For me I had little else to do with my time but I believe it could not have been beneficial for those with full time jobs. I have now stopped because I think the game lacks the story or the interest to keep me involved. I have now returned to some of my older games which are far superior and do not charge me extra each time I try to play them.

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