You all remember The Incredibles, right? I know that these days the hot take is to try to spin the film as some sort of revanchist Randian take on superheroes, that the idea is everyone should just get out of the way of The Gifted who are objectively better than others, but that’s not really the plot of the movie. The themes are more about simultaneously learning to live in a world where you can be destructive but don’t have to be and finding ways to celebrate that difference without hurting others.
It can be an easy point to miss if you lack media literacy, though, because according to the villain, it’s about letting everybody be special. That the special people are trying to lord it over the non-special people, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Everybody should be special so that no one can be. That is what he states explicitly about his goals.
This is a column about how raiding doesn’t make you special.
One of the recurring points we hear from World of Warcraft’s developers involves keeping things special. Why do we have weirdly time-limited access to raid finder, the mode most people use to experience raids? Because otherwise normal and up doesn’t feel special enough. Why does raiding need to occupy so many difficulties and such a huge position of importance within the game? Because it needs to feel special.
“Special” is a synecdoche for a lot of things in context. It means better gear, better appearances, earlier access, more cosmetic rewards, the social capital of the developers who pay endless attention to world first races. Special is a whole nest of what are apparently seen by the development team as linked clauses. You need all of these things to feel special.
The reason I made the comparison to The Incredibles is that, as mentioned, this is literally the plot. The villain outlines his plan to drop a menace that no one else can defeat but him, because he made it, and he’s made all of his superhero gear to be a new, welcome hero. And then after he’s done, he’ll make everyone special so no one will be. He’s trying to tear down the special people! He’s just jealous!
Did you miss something in there, though? Because you might have.
His plan is not “make everyone a superhero.” His plan is to make himself the most special superhero ever, artificially, and only make everyone a superhero after he’s bored with it. Not to mention the fact that the villain is, again, a super genius who invents incredible things. He is already special!
This isn’t a story about a non-special person rebelling against the special people. This is a story about a special person feeling that he isn’t special enough and needing to tear down everyone else who might be special because it isn’t sufficiently special if he can’t be better. It is treating “special” as if it is some sort of boolean quality applied to you from on high.
When I talked about how “special” is enfolding a whole lot of nested clauses, this is the reason why. What makes raiding special? It’s a whole lot of rewards set up to incentivize people who have the time and inclination to play this specific sort of content and then to treat those people as if their willingness to do that is in some way marking them as a higher class of individual.
And to that, I will ask a simple question. Do you remember who got the 50th clear of the most recent Mythic raid? Not the first. Not the second. 50th. It’s a high number! They even got a special title! Do you know the guild name? The names of the characters within the guild? Could you even say anything about them without looking it up?
My point here is not that these people are somehow not special. Rather, it’s to point out that special isn’t a simple yes-or-no status. Special is an emergent property. It’s something that is a confluence of multiple factors, factors that even go above and beyond whether or not you have cleared a piece of content.
There was a player in Elden Ring who named his character Let Me Solo Her. He wielded dual katanas, wore a pot on his head, and sat outside of what may well be the hardest boss in the game for players to summon him… and as the name suggests, he would then solo her. That is special. But it’s not because he beat Malenia, and it’s not because he did it with a specific build dedicated to flexing. Other people have done that. It was because he did so in a very public and memorable fashion. The specialness was, in fact, an emergent property from varied behaviors.
Our protagonist in The Incredibles is Mr. Incredible, and his whole lesson is realizing that he may be special, but he has to treat himself as part of a group. His family needs him to be not just The One Who Fixes Things but a father, a husband, a friend, a mentor. He needs to rely on others just as they need to rely on him. It’s about recognizing the limitations of what makes him exceptional and using that to inform a more mature attitude toward his family and others.
Raiding does not make you special. But the things that are layered on top of raiding to make it seem super special don’t make you special either. You’re not special because you get the best gear from your raid night; that gear was put there specifically to reward you doing the not-special thing of clearing content that was always meant to be cleared by a group of players. You’re special for getting, say, the world-first clear, but even that is more about doing something difficult in a short span of time.
And doing something first doesn’t mean you were the best, just that you did it first. Neil Armstrong was special because he walked on the freakin’ moon. The fact that he was the first person to ever do so is notable, but Buzz Aldrin didn’t exactly spend the whole trip sitting in the lander being like, “Nah, you have fun, Neil, I’mma wait this one out.” It’s not like somehow Buzz Aldrin was Less Special because of it!
Clearing a raid is supposed to happen. The content is not put in the game to not be cleared; quite the opposite. And if you find raiding to be fun, that’s super; I have an article from just yesterday about the ways in which we can chart different kinds of fun in different contexts. My point here is not that you are bad for liking this, just that this in and of itself does not make you special.
But WoW’s developers not only seem to think it makes them special but seem personally offended that anyone might not think it’s special enough. They are bound and determined to keep making the game focus on reclaiming raiding glory days, and even as the design goals take a half-step toward doing something else, they yank it back. Which is a really weird flex when you consider that these designers are super-successful people who have worked in their industries for years. That part is already special. They do not need to make sure that they can feel special because they like to play a certain sort of game content.
So what if you’re not special for raiding? What’s left as a reason to do it? Well… let’s talk about that next week.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre each week for a new installment of WoW Factor as he examines the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
