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Must We Always Kill? Confronting the Murder On Rails MMO Mindset
by Wolfshead on April 2, 2009
Let me make a small confession. I find it somewhat troubling yet strangely fascinating that video games are largely popular because they provide people with a safe, sanitized and consequence free way to act out their violent fantasies - things they wouldn't dare do in real life.
As a person who spends a considerable amount of time playing MMOs I am guilty as charged. But I have to ask: has modern life become so devoid of passion, meaning and fulfillment that we must resort to the escapist delight of killing and murder in our spare time on our computers and consoles? Is the ultimate destiny of video games to be nothing more then a murder simulator?
Must we always kill in video games and MMOs?
Why We Love to Escape
I'm not a cultural anthropologist but maybe part of the reason is that we seem to love escapism is the current reality of humanity: for the most part our western culture is metropolitan and industrialized. I don't think people were meant to live in cities; people weren't meant to work in cubicles and on assembly lines either. The paradox of civilization is that it has not made us more civilized. Deep down we still yearn for those primitive and primeval pursuits such as the thrill of the hunt, the need to be competitive with our fellow humans and our love of warfare with other tribes.
Since the limitations of living in a civilized world preclude us from engaging in those aforementioned uncivilized behaviors we instead turn to sports and entertainment. Even as far back as ancient Roman times people have loved to watch bloody carnage in the coliseum to satiate those primeval urges. Today's coliseum could be football, any other professional sport or even a virtual world! (You knew I'd eventually link this back to video games.)
I admit that it's far better for people and soccer hooligans to act out their aggression fantasies in a video game then to do so in real life. So let's concede that entertainment, sports and video games play a very important role in allowing people to blow off steam in a safe and controlled environment. Still the fact that I have to exclusively kill in MMOs in order to progress bothers me.
The Virtual Body Count
For as long as I've played MMOs I've killed things. I did it not out of virtue but out of necessity - I had no choice - I needed to level my characters. You soon learn that to advance in MMOs means to kill and kill as fast and efficiently as possible.
In the past ten years I've probably killed enough humanoids and creatures in video games that would make infamous hunter Hemet Nesingwary look like Ghandi. I'm sure the virtual universe is littered with WANTED posters with my name on it accusing me of a multitude of crimes against virtual humanity.
For the record, in the past few months that WoW Achievements have been in existence the statistics show that my dwarven hunter has killed over 20 thousand creatures. I'm the kind of person in real life that hates to kill a fly but somehow in video games I'm shamelessly transformed into a ruthless cold blooded mass murderer? How did this happen?
Tired of Killing Yet?
At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, the fact is that killing has become far too common in MMOs. It's sucked the air out of the room to the degree that other types of play styles that one might expect in a virtual world (explorers and socializers according to Bartle) are left to whither and die due to a lack of nourishment.
I was reminded of this by a brilliant article recently penned by Tesh entitled Tired of Killing. Just as some of us like Muckbeast and myself have recently started questioning quest directed gameplay in MMO's, Tesh and others like Ysharros and WQID in the new MMO blogosphere are starting to present alternatives to the combat-centric MMO mindset as popularized by Blizzard. The short version: we tired of the same old crap shoved down our throats.
Tesh puts forth this challenge to the MMO industry:
That's just not satisfying in what I want out of MMOs. I want living, breathing dynamic worlds, not murder on rails. To be sure, some players do want that, so I don't disagree with including the combat mini game, I'm just pointing out that it's not a satisfying world that only offers new and unique ways to kill stuff and raid corpses. There are so many more things that could be done to make an interesting world.
Channeling everyone through one "golden path" of gameplay (the combat mini game) does work, for many people, but it's just so... shallow (and ultimately static), compared to what this genre could really offer. In other terms, it's just one (highly burnished) facet in the gem that a spectacular MMO could be.
Now before you think I'm going Jack Thompson on you - this is not a call to eliminate violence or to sanitize it. Instead I'd like to see MMO players have more options available to them that let them progress their characters that don't involve death and destruction.
