The Vineyards

In a MMORPG, you pay monthly (American model) or buy exclusive items (Korean model) and control a character in a big world where most of the action is killing computer-controlled enemies that spawn without much regards to realism, and sometimes killing other people’s characters for sport. There are also endless searches for better items to make these actions easier, and sometimes quests that, although often repetitive, may give the game’s world a semblance of history, background, and evolution (even if the evil demon you killed at the end of your epic journey just re-spawns half an hour later to be killed by the next player on an epic journey).

People say this is a tremendous waste of time. Grinding for levels and items in a world that does not exist, spending so much time socializing and competing with people you may never see personally. For these reasons, some consider MMORPGs the bottom-end of the gaming spectrum. “Paying to fight endlessly for a goal that can never be reached.”

Little is said, however, about online First Person Shooters. Spending your whole weekend playing Team Fortress 2 is perfectly healthy. And the game has no story whatsoever, it is just groups of people trying to kill each other. “It takes skills, MMORPG is just about who grinds the most”, but both have a learning curve, and in a MMORPG you can get help from other players; in FPS, your skills are yours alone to improve. “It is free, MMORPG has a monthly fee”, but most MMORPGs run on standard hardware while FPSs keep demanding new video cards, better mouses, better keyboards, XBoxLive, etc – because few FPSs have the longevity of an MMORPG (”I still play Quake!”, fine, other people still play Meridian59, and it is older).

Still, I am not pitting FPSs against MMORPGs. People play other games. I know people who put equally unhealthy numbers of hours into Winning Eleven or Madden. Perfecting a speed-run through some Metroid game probably takes two- or three-digits hours as well. A perfect score in all levels of LocoRoco can go well into twenty hours. The average time to reach the 10th level of Dungeon Maker and slay the wandering demon is 60 hours, then another 80 to get 100% items and reach the 20th level for bragging rights (on GameFaqs, as no one is really keeping track or paying attention). Pokemon games need to be played multiple times if the player wants a complete Pokedex and a good team for matches against other players – and there are two dozen Pokemon games. A modern Final Fantasy game takes some 30 hours to finish, older ones took longer. Some people play endless puzzle games over and over for months seeking a better score. Contra, Battletoads and any other game from the generation where companies used frustration tactics to prevent players from beating the game too fast occupied kids’ entire childhoods. Fallout kept me for some 40 hours of playing by the rules, saving, reloading, playing against the rules for fun, reloading back, grinding for money and items – and I never even finished the game. Fighting games have people practicing them like they were sports, multiple hours every day; the same goes for real-time strategy games like Starcraft. GTA games and other open-ended games have people playing well into 200 hours. Morrowind and Oblivion get probably even more than that, as people replay with different classes or using mods. The Sims is probably at par with Solitaire in amount of hours put into it globally. Solitaire itself needs nothing said of it.

A match of tabletop Risk (known in Brazil as “War” – which makes more sense, I must say) can go well into the night, as many other board games. Pen-and-paper RPGs have stories and campaigns running for months or even years. Magic: The Gathering and a hundred other collecting-card games see astonishing time, effort and money put into them as well. Miniature tabletop games like Warhammer 40k take so much time and money for preparation they blend into the hobby field. People play snooker and cards among friends and family, without betting anything, for hours on end.

Everybody plays all sorts of games for incredible amounts of time, most often gaining nothing from it beyond simple fun. MMORPGs are not the worst case in this field. If their players find them fun, so be it. We are all equally “wasting time” with our fun.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.