Mind games and MMORPGs

For a long time, I played the hugely successful World of Warcraft. Eventually it got boring, but it has a huge player base still.

Watching this video and reading this article certain links between threat/response and the addictiveness of certain things become clear - I had "known" them but not had the right language for them.

If you look at the "five social qualities" that Rock talks about - status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness ("scarf") - I can see how WoW certainly pushes a lot of feel-good buttons.

Status: As the game goes on, your character gains levels, skills, better weapons and armour; you will gain experience of the dungeons and encounters in the game, and if you play well be someone that others will want to play with. If you prefer to play player vs player, kills will allow you to get better (and better looking!) equipment, titles, and so on.

Certainty: One of the biggest complaints with MMORPGs is that they can become "grind-fests" - you get a quest to go somewhere, kill a certain number of enemies, and return. But the brain likes this certainty - it doesn't have to think too hard about what to do.

Autonomy: I'm not quite sure that this correlates exactly, but you are free to quest alone, pvp alone, etc, if being part of a guild becomes too much..

Relatedness: Perhaps this is the least developed in WoW... This is "friend or foe". It's pretty easy to tell, I guess - green name floating above a character is friendly, red is hostile! A big skull in the character portrait means "this thing is much higher level than you; it will kill you in a couple of seconds!"

Fairness: This is perhaps the area that has been worked on most. Initially with WoW at least, bosses in dungeons dropped "loot" from a loot table - so you, as a healer, might do the same dungeon 20 times, and never have the piece of loot best suited to your character drop (for a rogue, a good dagger; for a healer, a nice staff, etc). Lately, though, all characters might get a token for completing a dungeon, which can then be traded in when enough have been acquired.

In short, WoW creates a comfortable, familliar world in which some rules of normality are removed, but others are skewed in order to create a reward-response (and hence keep players playing and paying!)

Much as with Money Saving Expert's Martin Lewis, it's not that what is happening in the world is of-itself bad, it's just that people don't realise that... banks are there to make money FROM you, not FOR you; supermarkets are trying to encourage you to buy more than you intended to; and so on. The object of commercial TV is to sell advertising time, not primarily to create quality programming - that is the vehicle by which they sell the advertising time.

They really, really should teach this stuff in school. Because currently, everyone is at a disadvantage by not knowning - people are enslaved by money, to buy the things that make them think they keep their status, to all these things that wouldn't matter if we became aware en masse that our evolution has left us with these triggers that are entirely unsuited to "modern life".

Well, that has little to do with MMORPGs, except that clever people have designed games that give us feelings of security, certainty etc, pushing all those neuro-buttons to make us feel warm and fuzzy (Hammer of Smiting +3! YEAH!).

Happy gaming!