So if you are anything close to my age, you probably do not think of Simon & Garfunkel’s music as being anything remotely “raw.” It’s more likely you’re distantly aware of them as fairly anodyne easy listening music from the ’60s. But that’s not actually correct. And a good example of that is their song “I Am A Rock,” in which the speaker is discussing his desire to shut himself away from the world and willfully embrace a scornful and separate view of the world.
Yes, I know the instruments sound a lot more gentle than you might be thinking, but listen to the words (or even just read the lyrics if you have a hard time hearing them during the song). This is not a happy song; it’s not even a sad one. It’s a song from someone who has decided that they have been so wounded by emotional connection that they will instead embrace emotional separation, cutting themselves off to completely avoid the possibility of any and all future pain.
This is a column about MMORPGs.
The past few columns here have talked about the ways that MMORPGs are built with the central part being other people. That’s not an opinion; it’s right in the acronym. Games built not to include other people don’t include “massively multiplayer online” in the genre name. I can play Forza Horizon 4 by my lonesome, the game works just fine, and nothing is missing if I never join an online mode.
But if you want a really sharp contrast? Go play Final Fantasy XII and then play Final Fantasy XI, and just run around the first city you enter – Rabanastre in the former, your starting city in the latter. I promise you, the second will feel really empty compared to the first.
This does not make logical sense because there are more NPCs in the latter, and even if there is one other player in the capital city, FFXI by definition has more players. FFXII is a single-player game.
But the streets you run down are narrower, feature fewer open spaces, and more effectively give you the illusion of a city space with less space to roam around. It’s designed to be a place for one person instead of a space for dozens, and so it doesn’t feel empty. FFXI’s cities have spaces for players to congregate, auction houses meant for players, wide-open regions, things that are set up for several players to participate. Yet the players are no longer there. It feels emptier.
It’s a little thing, but there’s a reason people often describe older MMOs as being profoundly lonely: because that critical mass is no longer there. But there is a certain type of player who seeks to actively reject other players and treat the games as single-player outings. And you might be thinking that I’m talking about solo players, but playing solo is a good thing (and we’ll get to that next week). This is taking “I Am A Rock” as an outline for behavior. I don’t need any of you; you don’t get to share space with me.
And that’s a different issue. That’s a rejection of the world.
You’ve heard the phrase “no man is an island” before now. If you know that it comes from John Donne, so much the better. But the point Donne was making was not that no one may have time alone; rather, his point was that we live in the world. That’s not an option. The rest of the world interacts with you and has an effect on you, and you in turn have an effect upon the rest of the world. Being cognizant of that fact is important, and here’s where we start tying in with last week’s talk about solipsism.
Are you obligated to reply to someone who says to you randomly that your character looks nice? No. But if you don’t – or more severely, if you block the person from ever messaging you – that has an impact. A player is trying to be friendly and you’re shutting him or her down. Maybe it’s a new player trying to form a connection. Maybe it’s a veteran looking for a friend. Maybe it’s just someone who wants to be kind to someone. The fact that this is an online game means that kind of interaction is literally a part of the game.
You become part of the reason there’s an assumption that talking doesn’t happen in MMORPGs any more. (It totally does, but that’s a different column.) You do not get to opt out of the world. You can push the world away if you want to, but you are still within it and still have an impact upon it.
That’s not to imply that wanting to be separate and make the game be solely what you want is necessarily a bad impulse – because that’s what single-player games are for. It’s literally their purpose! Sometimes you get to be in control of your universe. Sometimes you don’t, and you need to live with other people, and acting as if they’re inconveniences or like none of them should ever be part of your day if you don’t want them there means you don’t want to play an MMORPG.
Some days I don’t! But I recognize that impulse just the same.
It wasn’t so long ago that I wrote a Storyboard column about character failure and dealing with the fact that you probably never want your character to fail. Captain John Startrek in Star Trek Online is supposed to be awesome and not fail. But Star Trek – the actual series that game is based on – features a bunch of characters who fail all the time! The average episode of The Next Generation is characters trying unsuccessfully to solve a problem for about 40 minutes before finally figuring it out. That’s literally what makes it entertaining!
There are some MMORPGs that I don’t think are particularly good games outside of their multiplayer aspects (though I don’t think the multiplayer salvages those), but most of them do have an appeal. A fun combat engine, or fun crafting, or whatever. But invariably they offer less than games built solely for those functions. The recent Spider-Man games are better raw superhero games about being a superhero than City of Heroes in terms of moment-to-moment gameplay.
But I still love CoH because it’s a fun superhero game with other people around. That’s not a coincidental feature; it’s the main feature. It lets me experience superheroic combat in a game with other people when I can team up for a Hamidon raid, then go off and do some door missions, then maybe take on a task force with friends. Back and forth, and it’s up to me how much I want to play or not.
I alter their experiences; they alter mine. I am not an island. I am not trying to cut myself off from other human beings or demand that they cease to exist in a game literally built for other people; I am embracing it. Even if I happen to be playing alone at the moment. I can miss things or fail to get things or just exist in a world temporally separate from others, because I play these games to be part of a world I do not get full control over.
And I already said I would talk about soloing next time, so let’s wrap this up by addressing solo play in this context, shall we? Fun times for everyone!
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.
