So I’m wrapping up a month of talking about how MMORPGs are by necessity social games. These are games in which you need other people around, and if you don’t want other people around, you should not be playing them. This is something that I’ve gone over extensively at this point in the last four columns, but there’s an angle of this that I haven’t really touched upon: playing solo in multiplayer games. The thing about soloing is that it’s actually a big chunk of all of the mechanics and social systems I’ve talked about, and it is not the problem.
No, really. We’ve talked about the solipsistic view in which you are the only person who matters in an online game and everything should arrange itself specifically to you, but that doesn’t actually overlap with soloing except incidentally. In fact, soloing is actually crucial to having a functional social framework within MMORPGs. And yes, that does mean that a lot of early games that were less solo-friendly actually had a weaker social fabric, and we’re going to go into that too.
To start with, we have to actually take a step back and lay down some philosophical framework. Specifically, we have to understand that in order for a choice to matter, you have to be able to make the opposite choice.
This seems like common sense, and to a certain extent it is, but it’s also something that is easy to overlook. In order to choose to play a video game, you have to be able to choose to play something else – or even to not play anything at all. In order to choose to wake up, you have to be able to choose not to do so. If you’re in a prison and guards will come in and force you to wake up if you don’t get out of bed, it isn’t a choice; it’s just what is going to happen.
And the same is true for social play. If you can’t choose to play solo – if you cannot decide to accomplish things by your lonesome without requiring other people – you also cannot choose to be social. That choice has been made for you, and you don’t really have an option.
You may be noticing that this also extends to the discussion earlier of being able to unilaterally shut people out, and if so, very good! That is entirely correct. The whole point of MMORPGs is taking a choice away from you. You don’t get to choose whether other people are there. This is, as I’ve stated, the whole point of the genre; it’s why the acronym is “MMORPG” instead of something else.
Despite what you might think, taking choices away from players is actually the whole point of designing a game. Games are a series of interesting choices, but they are a series of interesting choices curtailed entirely by the overlap between choices you do get and the ones you don’t.
Imagine a version of Monopoly where you got to choose what space you moved to, provided it just had to be at least one space less than the whole board. Would that game be fun?
The answer is “no” because you would never land on anyone else’s property because why would you do that on purpose? So the game becomes pointless. The game forces you to make other choices (where to buy property, what to sell, where to build houses, and so forth) because some choices (where you move, what cards you get) are not under your control.
You do not get to choose whether you have other people around you in an MMORPG. The world exists outside of you, and it does not start and stop at your convenience. That makes it an online and living world, in which other people are going to do what they want regardless of your input.
But if you also need those people in order to play the game, then suddenly the game tilts further in another direction, and you can’t actually choose to not engage with the people who are available. You have to, or you can’t play – and that’s not a choice.
In Final Fantasy XI, you needed a party to do basically everything, and that meant there were a lot of people who everyone on the server knew were jerks but weren’t big enough jerks to be excluded from groups. Nobody really liked them, but… sometimes you needed a Warrior, and the guy nobody likes was the only Warrior around. You didn’t have an alternative if you wanted to even level up. And since you would probably need a regular group later in the game, you had to find people you could tolerate…
Heck, ask Bree some of her stories about EverQuest or vanilla World of Warcraft and the people everyone hated on her server who also were the people with the time and social capital to make everyone dance to their tune! But at least you could play WoW and do some things solo, which made that a bit better. And in many way a long stretch of the game’s development was to put more things in that category, to give more solo options and avoid the grim specter of being trapped with the one guild of assholes who can assemble a successful raid.
The thing about soloing as a viable option is that it doesn’t just address that problem; it addresses the general fact that it allows you to make connections you choose to make. No, you don’t get to choose which in-game events are running or whether or not people you like are milling around the social hangout spots. But you do get to choose whether you go there. If you don’t want to jump into that hangout spot, you don’t have to. You can go somewhere else and do something else.
And that choice makes choosing to be with people all the more satisfying.
I have the crews that I run with in MMORPGs. Some of them have been the same basic group for years on end now. Some of them have been fairly recent. Some of them have frayed. The Beatles singing “In My Life” is perfectly relevant for MMORPGs. But the whole point is that I don’t get to live an isolated, siloed existence.
Sometimes I want that and I want my own comfy game that I control. But do you know how nice it is to say “I want to do something to take my mind off things” to people in-game? To not just roleplay but have friends come up to me and say they’ve heard about the divorce and they’re here for me? To know that this isn’t just a game but also isn’t just a social spot – it’s both at once?
That matters. And it matters in part because none of these people has to care. They’re not shackled to me because I happen to be a good tank. They care because they want to. They have the option to do other things or eschew me altogether. Circumstance brought us together and knitted our bonds, and even if it is ultimately somewhat ephemeral, the whole point is that it is a game built on connecting with other people.
And you can’t truly connect unless you have the choice not to. Not to shut the world away, not to disconnect from human empathy, but to play the game on your own and with others, even as you share the same world.
Vague Patch Notes: Going solo isn’t a problem in MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: Living like a rock in MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: Solipsism and what it means for playing MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: The MMO world you don’t control
Vague Patch Notes: MMOs rely on other people – but what does that really mean?
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
