LAGWAR | GAMING'S BEST IN TOP NOTCH MEDIOCRITY

Games are rules.  Games are fiction.  Jesper Juul makes this the central them in his book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, and we use this text in our class to discuss the value of narrative in the context of our gaming lives.   Professor Clayton and I set up a session in class on Tuesday the 13th of October to ask our students the following essential question:

“Are you story?  Are you grind?”

In this class, we set our seminar students into discussion groups of 4, and we put the question (above) to each group.  One of our student groups characterized the story versus game mechanics debate in the following manner: “the game is co-dependent.”  She asserted that the story and the game maintain some proportional value – but not in equal parts. 

My family went to a local restaurant where my 11 and 12 year old sons opined on the topic.  My 19 year old daughter, with whom I played Worlds of Warcraft for a few months, commented that she always skipped the quest text and went “straight to the killing.”  Everyone under the age of 20 seems to possess the same opinion.  The story is not essential to their enjoyment of the game.  My youngest son, when discussing Halo 3, said that he plays the story once through (i.e. by way of fully attending to the cut scenes) to establish “what to do,” but he focuses mainly on the objectives of the game.  It seems the story provides a loose context for the game mechanics and can almost be treated as incidental.

You can’t succeed on all story.  You can’t have all mechanics.    This debate remains at the center of my thinking around this series of articles.  The user interface needs to disappear so that you can move into the game and narrative space without being encumbered by the interface or mechanics.  I recently experienced this when I adventured with my Hawt Sauce super group in Millenium City in the context of a public quest. 

Only two games that I play offer a public quest mechanic:  Warhammer Online and Champions Online.  If you don’t play either of these games, you may not be familiar with the concept.   Basically, the quest is centered around a geographic area.   Everyone participates in the objectives, and when all of the stages are complete, if you contributed, you get a reward.  This particular group mission served up one of the more fun activities in my recent gaming memory. 

Let me walk you through the events of my gaming session:

1) We implemented a new Irish Leprechaun guild costume (I will speak to costume mechanics in a future article)

2) We each equipped the new costume and decided to do a public quest.  After all, we wanted to show off our Irish.

3) We killed Mega-Destroid.  After his minions killed us five or six times.

Dr. Destroyer

The quest, entitled Destroids Rise Again!, takes place in the center of Millennium City.  To understand why the quest exists, you first need to understand the history of Millennium City.  Essentially, the place is Detroit, Michigan after it rises from the ashes of destruction at the hands of  A mad super villain named, Dr. Destroyer, essentially a Nazi scientist with really great power armor!  In 1992, he triggered an orbital cannon which destroyed Detroit.  Dr. Destroyer, although defeated, reappears in the context of the contemporary Champions Online universe.

In terms of the game mechanics, the sequence required to succeed and deliver your reward:

XP Payout was around 20,000 XP this time, but the primary reason is that my team started from the very beginning.  Timers govern these areas, so we just got lucky when we were able to start it from the beginning – and with not many other players coming in until the boss fight.  Loot drops based upon your contribution.  I received a temporary damage absorbing force field drop.

End boss Fight in a Public Quest Called Destroids Rise Again

I suppose the real question is this:  Is the story line incidental to the Champions Online public quest concept?   After all, the stages are predictable.  You know what is coming next.  The variation of winning or losing only comes from whether or not you have enough colleagues with which to effectively combat Mega-Destroid.  My real motivations for playing this MMORPG center around meeting people and socializing with my online friends.  When the game we share in common presents us with a challenge, including the background for the challenge, the shared experience is heightened. 

These public quests help in that regard, but they don’t really carry forward the narrative in Champions Online.  After all, in about an hour Mega-Destroid and his ilk are back at it.  In Warhammer, however, PQs do matter to the state of the war – which is the story.  In this case, the PQs offer shared experiences in a narrative context.  PQs in Champions Online provide purposeful goals, and this one provides a narrative compatible reason to get together and kill some robots.