The Armchair Game Designer

This video (also below the break, probably NSFW) has been making the rounds as of late on the Internet, supposedly showing a World of Warcraft player having a monumental freak-out over the fact that his mom cancelled his account. Whether or not this particular video is real (I have some doubts), I believe that this kind of reaction is absolutely possible from a hardcore W0W-player. I’m not here to argue about Blizzard’s moral integrity in creating an army of Azerothian slaves. No, I’m going to be a bit more favourable toward a game that stole so much of my own time as well, and see what sorts of things Blizzard did right in order to create an experience as addictive as WoW.

First, I want to talk about a guy named Abraham Maslow. Abe was a psychologist, and like most psychologists, he wanted to know what made people tick. But while people like Freud were busy studying crazy people and getting their names dropped at parties, Maslow decided to study “exemplary” people like Albert Einstein. His studies yielded him quite a bit of recognition when he published his so-called “hierarchy of needs” theory. The theory outlines the various things that are important to people, most notably suggesting that people’s needs form a pyramid-like ‘hierarchy’. Once the lower and more basic needs are met, the theory goes, individuals are willing and able to achieve the higher levels of needs.

The needs of the One. Spock would disapprove.

Hopefully, this is starting to make some sense where WoW is concerned. All people want to have these needs fulfilled, but few are successful in achieving the highest needs to their satisfaction… in the real world. Yet many of these needs can be fulfilled virtually. Both a player and its avatar are able to meet the needs of physiology and safety. The WoW game world, from personal experience, can provide a sense of friendship (whether that sense is genuine or just functional is irrelevant- all that matters is that players feel that it’s real). At even higher levels, the rewards of succeeding against growing challenges and becoming more powerful in the process fulfill the esteem needs of confidence, achievement, and respect by others. Even self-actualization needs can be fulfilled to some extent in WoW, with raids coming together to “problem solve” their way through challenges.

Scientific!

Nonetheless, this model is flawed in that players don’t necessarily achieve one level of needs – virtually or IRL – before moving on to new ones. A player, for instance, might have no guild and no sense of any communal belonging, but might still feel a sense of achievement or confidence. Enter Clayton P. Alderfer, a man with both an ass-kicking name and a reaction to our boy Abe. His ERG Theory (which based on his incredible name, we can only assume stands for Electric Raptor Guns) suggests that needs and their relative importance differ between individuals. In other words, any game that strives for enormous appeal must not only present a number of different things for players to do, but also a number of different types of things.

Part of what makes WoW such an escape is that, unlike what is often the case in the physical world, it presents very low risk with comparatively high reward. There is a relatively small penalty for failure (death, loss of a round, etc.) both in terms of the time and the invested effort that has been lost. There is an extremely high potential for gain, such as the satisfaction of leveling up and becoming ‘one higher, of victory over another player, and of beating an insurmountable challenge as part of a group. Not to mention the promise of better and better upgraded items in the process.

Blizzard retains its players with endless and unrelenting carrot-dangling, understanding that this is the way to retain customers. The first carrot is the ever-present ‘one level higher’ reward, complete with the promise of more challenging areas and quests. Yet this goal can only take a player so far, with the necessity of level caps. How does one maintain the dangling of said carrot with these players? WoW capitalizes upon a player’s desire to be recognized- in other words, through his or her psychological goal of self-improvement.

It began with simply enough- top players could obtain ‘epics’, which separated the proverbial wheat from the chaff, the hardcore from the casual. But all that epic loot made the casual players feel left out, with no way to improve. Once Blizzard conceded to these demands and offered epic items accessible through casual play, they needed new incentives to hold onto high-level players. The developer came up with a whole slew of incentives that fall into both the ‘self-improvement’ and ‘pride’ categories:

Self-improvement

• More viable reputation grinding (especially with the inclusion of daily quests)
• Badges/Emblems system, which keeps a player ‘saving up’ for gear and gives them a reason to keep coming back to dungeons and raids after they have been completed
• Grinding honor and victories in PvP to gain rewards

Pride

• Achievement grinding. Blizzard made a brilliant move in choosing to advertise achievements within a guild and local area, giving an immediate social sense of achievement, an automatic ‘look at me’
• Mounts, titles, pets, tabards, and other vanity items that can be shown off to others, all of which say,  “Look at what I have accomplished!”
• Arena ratings for pride, titles, and mount reward

There is never a lack of attainable items that can be lusted over. Maybe it’s getting through the levels and quests of the latest expansion pack, maybe it’s completing that raid instance, maybe it’s that one amazing item that still hasn’t dropped for you, maybe it’s a 1900 arena rating. Whatever it is, Blizzard offers a level playing field and rewards that are always just slightly out of reach.

Just when it becomes likely that a number of players have attained the highest possible goal (such as full sets of arena or raid gear, or completing every raid challenge), new ones are presented in a major update patch. Maybe it’s a newer, harder raid, a new arena season with new gear rewards, a new faction to gain reputation with, a new holiday on the horizon, or even sometimes a new game mechanic to try out (such as the recent addition of the gimmicky ‘jousting tournament’). In other words, Blizzard makes it easy to dream for the highest peaks of the pyramid of hierarchical needs, but patently impossible to ever truly scale those peaks.

For some players, these goals are NOT what keeps them returning to the game. Sometimes, player retention has much less to do with gameplay at all, and much more to do with human social interaction. I’ve heard from players who say they only stick around the game for the people they know and the human connections they’ve made. Indeed, this was one of the hardest factors in my decision to permanently quit WoW, and it’s still really the only thing I find myself missing today, so much so that I still keep in touch with my former guild. Even though I had no physical inter-personal relations with them, we still all spent a lot of time together and engaged in a lot of discussion. This differs from a job in that we were all there to have fun as well as get something done in a productive way, and all had a similar interest binding us together. Community is stubbornly difficult to quantify or plan for in a game. All one can really do is facilitate easy communication and create a world in which people want to interact.

A lot of very cool people have had a lot of not-so-nice things to say about these qualities of WoW, and after far too much time lost to the game, I find myself inclined to agree with them. But I have to hand it to Blizzard. They’ll manipulate your psychological needs, hook you on their product, never let you go, and then make you smile all the way through it. It’s like heroin, but without all the dying and the after-school specials and the being River Phoenix.