Breaking Linearity

Recently I have begun playing the large social black hole known as world of warcraft. So far the reasons for its popularity have alluded me. As far as I can tell the three elements of traditional RPGs are story, combat and leveling. Together RPGs are both addictive and fun. Furthermore due to the amount of content, the experience is never over, as a result MMORPG players are some of the most hardcore you will ever meet. One such player I know has played wow for over 8,000 hours, that's an unreal amount of time. Likewise I was shocked to find out I'd spent about 2000 hours on Runescape. They are second lives, a lot of your waking hours are spent playing and when your not, your thinking about it.

In real life we can derive pleasure from achieving things. For example my current long term goal is go to uni and be an accomplished academic. In a game, an objective is invented and we strive to achieve it. Thinking about it, it sounds really stupid but while you're playing its tangible, the buzz from achieving aims is the same as real life. You might be quick to call it sad, but actually how arbitrary are my academic goals. Will they bring me happiness? Most definitely not intrinsically but the achievement itself will; how arbitrary is that? This isn't the only device however, adventure is a very strong aspect of RPGs in general. There's a similarly tangible buzz and excitement from discovering a new place or thing. Again, you may be quick to call it sad but how different is that to travelling the world. It's just innate human curiosity, which in a world where you have already invested so much, feels real.

It is however the aims of the game which are important, and their interestingness determines how easily you are drawn in. Think about a game where you press a button and a number goes up. It's not very exciting but you do have an aim, to get a high score, it's far too arbitrary and uninteresting. And this is why I struggle to see the allure of wow, ask any high level player: leveling and questing are merely devices to get to max level, where you will spent your time either PvPing or raiding for better gear. Despite all things just being pushing a button, the easier it is to see this, the harder it is to do the task with joy. Furthermore, there should also be tangible goals, for example, in the button pressing game, there could be something telling you that at 1000 presses, you can have a treat of an achievement (again arbitrary). Likewise the goal in wow is to have the best gear. However once achieved, the goal appears somewhat pointless. Which is how I come to the main point of this, what makes a good RPG? In my opinion its one where there is so much exploring, discovering, questing, leveling and gearing to do that you forget how arbitrary it all is and just play, enjoying yourself in a perfectly arbitrary way.