I was reading an article on slashdot that announced that OSI (presumably the company that administers Ultima Online) would begin to offer advanced characters for sale, and the resulting outcry from gamers who did things "the hard way" who feel cheated. This made me think.

First of all, while I do like to play computer games, it is the rare one that gets me completely addicted. With the exception of the Might & Magic series, Star Craft and Diablo, I probably spend less than 30 hours playing a game before it gathers dust on my shelf. This is probably because most games are highly repetitive, and fall into what I refer to as the arms race trap.

You can tell you are in an arms race game when you find that you are wandering around the world trying to find something to kill so you can level up and get some capability that you didn’t have before. Why? So you can out and kill even more things of course. Squaresoft is the creme de la creme of this genre. They manage to interject enough interesting story into the plotline to keep you hooked, but for the most part, gameplay is just one long battle sequence after another.

As a counterexample, any of the Nintendo Zelda games will suffice. In these, there is still plenty of combat, but running away from combat is possible, easy, undisruptive, and doesn’t affect your characters development in the game. Anytime that you are able to meet a boss that you must kill, you are pretty
likely to have enough capabilities to progress. Hence, the game really does
become more about the story, and less about what you kill.

Getting back to massively multiplayer games, they seem to suffer from the same problems as arms race games, with the added problem that you are playing with dozens of people that you don’t know. Think about a dozen people
that you interact with on a daily basis. Do you think all of them are people who
would be fun to play games with? Particularly if you knew that you’d never have
to answer to any of them in real life for cheating or just generally acting like an ass in the context of the game?

I play games to relax. There are some people who suck all the relaxation out of games. In real life, I know who those people are, and just refuse to play with them. In massively multiplayer games, that option is not always available.

Hmmm. Perhaps I should go back and read Poundstone’s The Prisoner’s Dilemma or Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation.