Between work and play
OPINION
Are we still having fun with video games or are they slowly turning into work without us even realising it?
Most of the time though we call these things that we don't want to do in order to acheive an end result we do want "work" which is what I will call it from now on. My question to you is, is your video game playing becoming work? Now of course most of you will say "No, of course not, I WANT to play those video games." But sometimes I wonder if we don't play the game's just to see the fruits of our labor. I will start off by citing the best example of this . . . RPG's.
I have nothing against RPG's, a lot of people including me like to play them. However are these games becomming work? Many RPG's for are very long in length, and I don't know about you but it typically takes a pretty special game to hold my attention for the sheer number of hours of play that an RPG requires. Many times I have started to play and RPG and get about 2/3rds of the way through it only to get bored of it and forget about it for several months. Other times I will be bored of it but will play it anyways just to "finish it" or get that level or that quest item or whatever it is depending on what RPG's you play.
Clearly one of the worst offenders of this is MMORPG's. These games are truely vast and complex and when I was in college I used to be a very avid player of the now outdated Everquest during breaks. (The idea that I would have had time while in school to play much Everquest is laughable). In fact if I was home for a 2 week break and wasn't planning on working, I could spend the entire two weeks eating, sleeping, and playing Everquest. Many people could do that for much longer as I found my roommate who turned me onto the game spent the entire second semester of school doing such. (And I'm not lying to you when I say he missed every single class the entire semester.) Its no secret that these games are highly addictive.
But after a while and when I had extra time I found that my time on Everquest really just wasn't that satisfying. Infact I begain to question a few things, such as why I was playing it. Often I would have free time and decide to play Everquest over another game or watching a movie simply because I "wanted to get to the next level." or "Collet so much money so I could buy a certain item." Infact I began to wonder if Everquest had become work in disguise. I have a few ideas to support my theory.
First of all in Everquest like many RPG's the routine is pretty well the same. Go find a group, pull a monster, kill it, heal, find another monster, kill it repeat. Later it became, find a group, go into a duengon, kill a bunch of monsters to accomplish a weird mission, exit and repeat.
Many times during the game I would sit and quote another RPG (Icewind Dale) which for a particular voice set the character would say in a monotone "Hurray more fighting."
My point is, no where in the whole Everquest formula was anything new. Everyone knew the fundamentals and knew their job within the group. There wasn't much room for creativity, everyone knew the game plan, stuck to it and pretty much killed monsters to perfection. Yeah occasionally some things got out of control and there would be some excitement but for the most part everyone did there jobs with no mistakes, and everything was perfectly under control. Infact the worst mistaken often made was someone would pull two monsters instead of one and the magic casters in back might actually have to get up off their butt a little longer to cast a couple extra spells. Whoopeee . . .
Another point I would like to make is, if you talk to the people in game they would often say something like. "I have to WORK on this character." or "I'm WORKING on Level 49" Not "I'm playing, and oh look I'm close to Level 49" Interesting how suddenly playing Everquest, even by Everquest players is referred to as "work"
The other example I wanted to point out is also one that I'm guilty of. Multiplayer FPS's have become competitive almost as soon as they hit the store shelves. Small teams of amatuer players formed and competed against eachother and referred to themselves as "clans" (Which is a name I don't like even though I'm in one myself)
My first major clan for example was a Counter-Strike Condition Zero clan. I really liked competing, the clan was extermely competitive and I played a lot just so I can get good and maybe make it to match play. I was also one of two recruiters and we held weekly tryouts where we would cut 80 to 90% of the people who tried out for the clan.
Like many clans, my clan left me and the clan eventually dissolved. But when I was no longer part of the clan and the clan was dissolved, I felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Almost like I was doing 3 hours LESS WORK per day. Infact sometimes I didn't know what to do with all this extra free time.
I discovered that I was just playing for the sake of getting good and for the sake of the clan and I was no longer having fun with it. Now prior to that when I was in college I would often play many nights away (especially weekends) with my roommate on counter-strike and later Condition Zero. Those where good times indeed and even before that I used to play in public games too. Infact I would say the two games I've spent the most time with would be Everquest and Couter-strike (or one of its derivatives). But now suddenly that I was out of this clan I didn't want to play Counter-strike anymore. It wasn't out of spite because I could have easily located myself a new clan and was happy about having left the clan. But it occured to me that I never even realized that I was burnt out on Counter-strike. I had played it so much that it was no longer fun for me. It must have been another half to 3/4 of a year before I ever played Counter-strike again which is about the longest absence I ever had from the game.
Now I'm not saying that we secretly absolutly hate playing video games because thats not true. Often if you have the right type of work, work can be fun for you. There where many times in college where I some homework that I enjoyed. When I say that I enjoyed it I don't mean that I wanted to do it, heck if I could have gone through college without doing any work I would have done that in a heart beat. But I say that I enjoyed it because I felt like "This is not so bad" and "Beats about 99% of all other work out there." and I may have also learned something really intersting or got a huge feeling of accomplishment when I had solved a really hard problem or had finished a 12 page paper on "Compairing and contrasting the Ethical codes of Pepsico and Constellation brand beverages"
Many other games are becomming like this too including but not limited to, sports games and strategy games. Just remember that the next time you go to load up that game, ask yourself this. "Am I doing this because I want to play this game, or am I doing this because I want to finish it, get to the next level, reveal the story, etc."
I'm going to go play Battlefield 2 now and work on Staff Sargent. Aww crap!