Double-Take: Rewards

by Daniel Bullard-Bates and C.T. Hutt

In our double-takes, we give our informal, conversational thoughts on a specific game or topic.

Daniel: Video games reward the player in a variety of ways. Some games reward the player's progress by showing them something awe-inspiring, be it a pre-rendered cut scene or a thrilling set piece. Others use new weapons, leveling up, and other systems of player empowerment. One classic reward system is the high score; a modern analogue is the achievement/trophy systems that have recently come into favor. No matter how a game doles them out, rewards are a key element of the pacing and design of most video games. How easily one reaps a game's rewards is also a large indicator of a game's difficulty.

So what are the most effective systems? The most satisfying rewards I have ever received from video games have been intellectual ones; to be more specific, I treasure the sense of victory that comes from solving a particularly interesting, intelligent puzzle. Braid was incredibly effective in this regard. I would get frustrated for a while, fiddle around with my various options for interaction, and eventually stumble on something that worked with a sense of sudden elation. Puzzle games are enthralling because they make the player feel intelligent when they successfully complete a challenge. This formula can also lead to discouragement and self-doubt, but to me, those hard-earned intellectual victories are worth the risk of feeling like an idiot from time to time.

So what video game rewards do you most crave, and why? 

You’re Speaking My Language

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Gamers, like kids and drunks, say the darndest things. Just last night I sat down to play Mario Kart Wii with a few friends. This was only the second time any of us had ever played this incarnation of the game, but we were having a blast just learning the courses and the new power-ups. As we chatted about the mechanics of the game and shouted obscenities at one another, I took note of some of the stranger sentences that sprung unbidden from our mouths:

“I think that if you’re in the air when you get POW’d, you don’t spin out.”

“The lightning storm works like a hot potato! Ram somebody!”

An outsider would surely think us mad, but such is the nature of video games and their effect on language. One of the great beauties of language is its adaptability. Lacking the needed terms to describe a given situation causes players to create their own. When Shakespeare didn’t have a word that worked for one of his plays, he invented one. I’m not saying that words like “POW’d” have quite the same puissance as Shakespeare’s invented words, but they still serve a linguistic purpose. I know that when I played Neverwinter Nights online, terms like PhK and FoD were bandied about, and no one looked askance. We all spoke the same language; our communal terms helped to define us as a community.

(They’re spells, for the curious. Phantasmal Killer and Finger of Death. Both bad news.)

I’ve never played World of Warcraft, and when two of my in-recovery friends speak of their halcyon days in Azeroth they are completely incomprehensible to me. (Chris grows more understandable with each passing day.) I’ve picked up a few words here and there, maybe enough to get around, find a bathroom and even a bite to eat. From the Penny Arcade comic below, for example, I’m pretty sure aggro is aggression and DoT is damage over time. Many gamers use terms like nub, newb or noob to mean someone who is either new to a game or acting like they are. But Omen? Raidwipe? L2P? MT? I need a translator, someone who has walked these lands before.
Whether it’s yelling at a friend to use their star power or complaining about shotty spam, video games do more than take us to new locations. They teach us new, bizarre languages and rule sets that only make sense in the context of the game. We talk about the gaming community as a whole, and the communities that arise around specific genres and games, and nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in these communal languages. It’s a testament to the power of video games that this never strikes us as odd: just like our own native languages seem like the norm to us, the languages of the games we play become perfectly natural over time. It’s only when we walk into a room of people playing a strange game that we realize just how bizarre this phenomenon can be.

So what’s the strangest thing a game has ever driven you to say? Have you ever paused to wonder just how such a sentence left your lips? I know I have.

No Country for Old Trolls

by C.T. Hutt

The first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem. In the darkest period of my addiction there was no questioning that things had gotten out of control. My apartment was a mess, my health was in steady decline, and I spent most of my days and nights with only the sickly blue light of my monitor to keep me company. It was as though my avatar in World of Warcraft (Troll, Hunter, Lvl 60) was slowly consuming my strength. As my life declined, he became more powerful. Thankfully, in the spring of 2005 my computer suffered a terminal meltdown forcing me to spend several weeks without my precious. In that time, I was able to re-connect to my life. I shudder to think what would have become of me if I hadn’t gotten that digital monkey off my back. Perhaps I would have simply wasted away to a shadow, leaving only my online character to wander the plains of Azeroth alone.

I don’t play massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) anymore; I simply do not have the time. Whether you love them or hate them there is no denying the fact that they have become more than a passing fad. They have become a part of our culture. And I don’t mean “our” culture to mean gaming culture, American culture, or even western culture. MMOs have become a part of world culture. Eleven million people play WoW alone: from every corner of the globe people are signing in at this very moment to take a break from their lives and go slay a dragon or storm a castle with their buddies. If every single person in Ireland and every single person in Norway were to get together for one big game of capture the flag it would still be a smaller game than WoW. That goes beyond entertainment. That is a phenomenon. And WoW is hardly alone. Others like EVE online and Final Fantasy XI have respectable populations. But what are these places really? Beyond their value as amusements or distractions do they have any real social or artistic value?

Artistically, I think that so far MMOs have about as much value as a crackball machine. So long as the developers gets their nice shiny quarter and consumers get their sweet, sweet crack everyone is a winner. Crack here being entertainment value, and quarter being the eighty quarters a month players pay in subscription fees. There is no denying the presence of beautiful music, stunning visuals, and extensive creative writing present in these works. Still, MMOs are creations of function before form. If these games ever failed to keep us entertained or started losing their creators money, they would cease to be.

From a social standpoint I think MMOs are symptomatic of a colossal shift in human history. The advances furnished to us in the technological age have been so ground breaking, so fundamental to our understanding of the world and of each other that we really have no idea what they mean for society as a whole. Let’s approach WoW from a distance, cutting away all aspects such as context, style, and game play. Here is a forum where people from practically anywhere are able to gather, not physically, but using digital representatives of bodies. Anyone, from anywhere, may take part in this forum. Age, sex, race, religion, and appearance before entering the forum are completely irrelevant. Using their digital representatives, players work together and against each other to achieve various goals. I think it is either going to take historians or archaeologists to measure the width and breadth of the development of social anomalies like MMOs. Those of us stuck in the present are only seeing the very top of the rabbit hole.

I am hard pressed to think of a single other scenario where hundreds of complete strangers from all corners of the globe and all walks of life get together in their free time to work in unison to accomplish a given objective. Not only are people engaging in this activity in mind boggling numbers, they are paying for the privilege of doing so because they enjoy it so much. Taken outside of the gaming medium, what could the combined efforts of eleven million people accomplish? For some context, most modern Egyptologists believe that the pyramids where built by about twenty thousand souls, none of whom owned a PC.

I am curious to see what MMOs will evolve into as time goes on. There’s truly no limit to what they could mean to us as a society and while they may not be art themselves I appreciate the artistic aspects of them. I can only hope that developers will someday make one slightly less addictive so I can give them a try once again.