MMORPG… The evil video game genre?

Recently I came across a blogger’s post of a painting meant to depict, from the blogger’s comments, a World of Warcraft player in 30 years. The original post was really nothing more than a link to a painting and some very brief, seemingly tongue in cheek commentary.

The most interesting thing about the post, however, is that once it hit Digg comments began to flood in. The comments, mostly anonymous, formed up to draw a distinct line between people who played World of Warcraft and people who didn’t. After reading through these comments you almost felt as if you had been involved in a debate between two opposing factions.

Now obviously, the artist who created this painting wanted it to stir emotions and intended for discussion to be prompted surrounding their work. However, it strikes me as odd that there have been such lines drawn around World of Warcraft and, more broadly, around the MMORPG genre of games.

Why is it that this genre is seen as the ultimate evil of gaming?

Why is it that with all of the game formats available to be criticized, all carrying their own group of addicts, the MMORPG is seen as the one genre which is the monster?

More importantly, why do so many people who are obviously not involved with the games in any way feel such a strong desire to “save” those who enjoy playing them? I mean, obviously the people who are playing the games aren’t somehow being forced to play them. By their very definition, a game is meant to be a fun event… a hobby… a break from the daily grind. So why is it that people, going about their business enjoying theire hobby, have become such a target for “saving” that those not involved in their hobby feel the need to use the strongest possible motivating factor available to them to attempt to stop these gamers from playing their games?

I figured I would offer a little editorial content here on Finalint to try and provide a little perspective on this issue. Namely my perspective…

For a long time RPGs, or Role Playing Games, have been the source of controversy. These games are defined by players entering into a role (much like acting) that is different from the role of their everyday selves. There are far too many RPGs to count and even more players, but they all share the same core definition. More recently, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) have come to the surface that, while retaining the defining RPG sentiment are really focused more on players playing a fun game, rather than players pretending to be something they are not.

So for many of us, playing “cops and robbers” would have been an early foray into the RPG. Critics have contended that most people stopped playing those games when they were children, therefore they are no longer acceptable once someone has reached adulthood. So strong is their conviction that these games are unacceptable, in fact, that many of these critics have taken it upon themselves to stop those around them from playing such games.

While the conflict isn’t yet what we would consider mainstream, it’s getting bigger at a rapid rate. With the popularity of World of Warcraft many of these critics have found a single target to focus on and those who play World of Warcraft have found themselves as the unwilling target of their criticism… and in some cases outright dislike.

In my perusing the criticisms of World of Warcraft all over the internet, the most common direct criticism is that World of Warcraft players spend “too much time playing” the game.

Now, I don’t feel as if I should be the one to point this out to everyone, but “too much time” is an unbelievably relative term. My definition of “too much time” very likely doesn’t exactly match the definition of anyone reading this. In fact, our definitions could vary by many hours, depending on our situation.

In my case, I am a professional with a demanding career to tend to. So my definition of “too much time” would hover somewhere around 15 hours a week. But let me preface that somewhat…

I play games. I always have. It’s something I do for fun and I have chosen online games as a way to spend my recreational time and money. Games aren’t the only thing I do on my “off time.” In fact, I play basketball for fun, I go out with friends every weekend, I enjoy recreational softball, movies, hanging out with my wife, playing with my dogs and visiting with family. To go further into something I’d like to spend time and money on, I’m very, very into high performance cars… So much so that I ruined a perfectly good sports car trying to turn it into a race car. All of these things I did while contributing anywhere between 10 and 20 hours a week playing games and while maintaining a progressive career.

I have friends who spent the exact same amount of time playing games as me during similar periods in our lives and they have had a significantly different experience. In particular, one former friend played almost the exact same amount of time but didn’t have the ability to throttle the amount of money or energy he was spending on the hobby. In time, he began to blame the game we were playing for everything negative in his life. Health problems, a perceived lack of progress in his personal and professional life, an odd type of guilt associated with not participating in his other hobbies. Now… at this time I was playing the same game, just as much, yet I had the feeling that this game and the time spent playing it was fun, relaxing and a welcome break from “work.” To me, I would have been spending the time and energy on something… While there are more “productive” things than playing a game there are also many more “destructive” things. In the grand scheme of things, at least in my opinion, playing a game wasn’t the best or worst alternative, but it was the alternative I gladly chose.

What this story serves to illustrate is that almost identical experiences have the ability to manifest severely differing results. While my friend and I had very, very similar life experiences, similar job situations and even similar family situations we saw our time spent playing the same game as vastly different experiences. I continued to enjoy playing games as a hobby while this friend eventually grew to resent the game so much for the perceived injustice it had caused to his life and other hobbies that he eventually swore off the game (for a time, he came back eventually and is currently showing the same behavior which he resented before) and in the process alienated the friends he had made as a result of playing the game. In our case, he alienated friends he knew from other situations as well.

Some will say, “Someone should have stopped him!” To them, all I can offer is if you think he would have listened you are further gone than he was. At the time, if you had yelled and screamed at both of us I would have been the one to pay attention. Unfortunately, I am the one who was and remains balanced anyhow… so I wasn’t the one who eventually needed help. But the folks who are so obsessive about something as trivial and meaningless as a video game aren’t exactly the type who would listen to reason. It is this obsessive behavior which will damage them no matter what activity they choose to participate in. Whether it’s a game or some other hobby they’ll go too far with it and ruin it for themselves and those around them. It’s a pattern of behavior to be attributed to the human element in the equation, not the emotionless and unblinking object of their obsession, which in this case just happens to be a game.

Realistically speaking, the people who get so upset at someone because they play a game is actually experiencing the same sort of unhealthy, disabling, obsessive compulsive activity as the person they are accusing of being out of balance! It has been my experience that people who take it upon themselves to “fix” other people are often, in actuality, trying to “fix” their own issues. Assuming you know what is better for another human being is indicative on its own of a certain level of unhealthy arrogance. Acceptance is the greater challenge and the more valuable result. If you can’t accept someone’s bad habits, remove yourself from their presence but demanding that they change only frustrates two people.

In closing, everyone, everywhere should take time to think about what they are doing and saying and how it is effecting those around you as well as yourself. If you have a personality type which has difficulty experiencing things in moderation take the extra care to make sure you aren’t: A) The idiot yelling that you know what’s best for everyone else while trying to force them to change and; B) The idiot starving, or worse yet letting your children starve, as you pursue a valueless hobby. Because face it… people who fall into both A and B are the same OCD people… they just have a slightly different way of coping.