There was, for a brief period of time, a window when World of Warcraft was moving toward a more deterministic gear structure that de-emphasized the idea of raiding as the pinnacle of content. That window is now almost two decades in the rear view. The current game is currently stuck in a place wherein it’s trying to offer scraps to people without an elitist/progression mindset without changing that as a central element of its design, and WoW Classic has stuck to that vision right down to literally changing that window in Wrath of the Lich King to be less relevant, removing the dungeon finder (before hastily backpedaling on that) and doubling down on the more elitist progression elements.
None of this is up for debate or ambiguous. But that’s not actually what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about people who ignore that.
See, while many of the most vociferous players of the classic servers are exactly the elitist players who are best ignored, it’s not all of them by any stretch of the imagination. And some of those players might even take issue with the statement because how can I say that the game is an elitist playground if they themselves are playing in the game and are not elitist? In other words, we need to talk about designed mechanics and intended play and the text as a thing in itself. But first, we need to talk about MOP’s Justin.
If you’ve never met Justin, well, that’s on you. I have because we have been working together for years now, and one thing that I think is well worth knowing about Justin if you aren’t already aware is that Justin is not an elitist progression-minded player. He is, in fact, pretty checked out from “progression” as a concept. Dude has other things in his life that matter way more to him. And that’s fine, but it’s also a true statement that Justin really digs on WoW Classic. That is absolutely his jam!
Does that invalidate anything I said in the beginning? Well, no, because as far as Justin is concerned, that part of the game doesn’t exist for him. He doesn’t focus on it and doesn’t fuss about it, and while he is aware of it, that’s not really a going concern for how he plays. That’s how you square that disconnect.
Are there things that Justin and I disagree about? Absolutely, but none of that is relevant in this particular arena because what we’re talking about here isn’t actually a disagreement. It’s more about whether or not you’re interested in the thing as a text in and of itself or just in the experience of the text as you choose to ignore the parts you aren’t interested in.
Something that comes up a lot in serious media discussion is the idea that the text is the text. It sounds like a Yogi Berra-ish statement, but it’s also relevant because it can be easy to vanish down various rabbit holes without it. Put simply, it’s a reminder that while a number of different interpretations can alter the way you perceive a text and you can excuse some of it or be willing to overlook it for whatever reason, the text is the text. It doesn’t change the actual object in and of itself.
For example, if you’re a fan of H.P. Lovecraft? The man’s work is fundamentally based on a racist worldview and realizing that the world doesn’t work as expected through a reactionary and limited lens. You can argue that there’s still value to his work despite that, you can point to him learning at least a little better before the end of his life, you can apply the ideas and themes he wrote about into a more loving worldview, and all of that is good – but the text is the text. What he wrote is still what he wrote, and none of the justifications for it change that fact.
I know Transformers fans who try to find things that are worth loving in the Michael Bay films by basically pushing away all of the misogynistic, racist, and generally violent and hateful things in those films – because these people love Transformers and they want to find some worth in there. Do I blame them? Not really. But the text is the text. These films are what they are. You can love them in spite of John Turturro staring up at Devastator and stating that he is directly below the enemy’s scrotum, but that does not change that these are films in which John Turturro’s character stares up at Devastator and then informs someone that he is directly below the enemy’s scrotum.
When we play video games in general, and MMORPGs in specific, we usually have a lot of things we can choose to engage in or not depending on our approach. If you watch people who exclusively speedrun the original Super Mario Bros. you will see people who are never engaging with the game’s system of power-ups at all. It doesn’t mean that the power-ups don’t exist or the designers did not make the game with that as an intended mechanic. It just means that they are choosing not to do anything with it.
You can opt not to be involved in an MMO’s crafting, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Whether the crafting is good or bad, that’s still a true statement. And maybe you play Final Fantasy XIV but hate crafting and never want to engage in crafting and wish that crafting wasn’t a part of the game, but crafting is still a major part of the game and is thoroughly developed and has lots of support. You can be happy that Star Trek Online encourages you to totally ignore crafting, but that doesn’t mean the game’s crafting mechanics don’t matter.
The text is the text. That doesn’t mean all of the text needs to matter to you; it doesn’t mean that you are honor-bound to have a deep and comprehensive knowledge of every aspect of every game to talk about it. Oh, sure, that can definitely help. I’m glad that FFXIV is a game I have ages of experience with across the entire game. But if I thought I needed that amount of knowledge of every game to talk about it, I couldn’t talk about Warframe at all, and y’know, I kinda like that game too.
And that doesn’t mean your love for a game is less genuine if you choose to just not engage with parts of the game. It just also means that your love isn’t more genuine for doing that, either. You are allowed to like WoW Classic even though you have no interest in progression play or elitist gatekeeping; that just doesn’t mean that these are not true statements about how the game is designed. Putting less to no emphasis on the parts of the game that don’t matter to you is part of how you can enjoy the game, but they are still parts of the game.
You love what you love and you get there how it matters, you play the parts of a game you enjoy, but the text is still the text.
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.
