Fun Inc. (11 page)

Scruton’s critique is compelling in many ways and can, to some degree, be applied as a salutary warning to all forms of mediation between people. There is no substitute, he is arguing, for face-to-face contact in the development of a healthy mind and a fully developed social and moral life. This is difficult to disagree with. What he also seems to be implying is that modern technology encourages people to spend too much time interacting with each other remotely, and not enough time getting out of their homes or offices and taking the ‘risk’ of meeting in person. Again, it’s difficult to disagree, in terms both of observable health and what people themselves say about their lives. ‘Balance’ is a difficult thing to achieve, and in everything from diet to health to family time, almost every society lags behind the ideal.

Should we then simply put up our hands and set about trying to minimise the quantity of these low-quality, remote interactions? Not quite. Scruton is making a general point about online culture rather than a specific one about video games. But at the root of his claim lies the assertion that it is ‘a screen that I am glued to, not the person behind it’. And this is something that, when it comes to video games, fails to ring true in several crucial respects. Many gamers will, for instance, find it difficult to reconcile their social experiences within online games with the idea of something that’s either ‘risk-free’ or regressive. A computer can of course be switched off at any time, just as a telephone can be slammed down or a letter ignored. But a game is a very different proposition to a simple conversation or an exchange of views, and its most fundamental appeal is something far more closely related to a player’s abiding interest in the hazy workings of other people than their subservience to any implacable machine logic.

World of Warcraft
– or
WoW
, as it’s invariably known – is the world’s most famous MMO. It’s fascinating for many reasons, but perhaps the single most compelling one is its sheer success. At the time of writing,
WoW
boasted a still-rising total of over 12 million monthly subscribers, and annual revenues of well over $1 billion. Its sprawling, cartoonish fantasy world offers literally thousands of hours of content in the form of levelling up a character (or characters) by gaining experience points, exploring hundreds of varied and distinctively beautiful landscapes, undertaking quests in search of better equipment, and so on. Beyond all this, though, playing
WoW
soon opens any new players’ eyes to a social experience whose richness, strangeness and layered possibilities constitute a more compelling reason for play than even the most expertly designed levels, items or reward sequences.

The sheer size and friendliness of the
WoW
community is a large part of this: the game has deliberately made itself accessible to ‘non-hardcore’ players and, crucially, allows people to show their full personalities and behaviour they are comfortable with, rather than expecting them to take the business of ‘being’ an orc or dwarf seriously. Players can do exactly that if they wish, on dedicated role-playing servers packed with Gandalfs and Saurons, but on the whole the game offers an extremely sophisticated combination of pop cultural references, witty visuals, clear practical explanations of what your options are, and plenty of opportunities for casual cooperation, bantering, learning and self-expression. Perhaps the single most popular character customisation involves owning – for purely aesthetic and emotional reasons – a wide variety of cute pets.

Equally, once a player starts to get the hang of the whole notion of playing and advancing a character within
WoW
, they’ll soon discover that the various different ‘classes’ it’s possible to play (each with their own specialised talents and limitations: a warrior is peerless in hand-to-hand combat, but lacks magic, healing abilities or projectile attacks; a mage is physically fragile, but able to wield various elemental abilities to do huge damage from a distance; a druid can transform into a variety of specialised animal incarnations, and so on) interlock in a progressively more complex set of permutations. It culminates, in the so-called ‘end game’, with parties of twenty-five or forty seasoned adventurers fighting their way through challenges that only the most precisely coordinated strategies and finely honed skills can beat. This demand for extremely sophisticated patterns of player behaviour and strategy creates a social environment that is in many ways more akin to a busy, ambitious office than a teenage slacker’s lounge: one full of organisational necessities, political manoeuvrings and complex patterns of inter-reliance.

Adam Brouwer, in the guise of a ferocious orc warrior called Mogwai, started playing
WoW
the month it launched, in November 2004. A civil servant specialising in crisis modelling at work, he hurled himself into
WoW
with a ruthless panache honed by decades of gaming at home on everything from a primitive Amstrad computer to Sony’s finest console offerings. First, there came the rush simply to explore and to progress: finding out what this virtual world had to offer, and trying to reach the ‘level cap’ beyond which a character cannot continue to increase their vital statistics. Then came the serious business of leaving his mark on the world.

As Adam soon discovered, the best way to combine pleasure and progress was to formally ally himself to other players within the structure of a guild. The medieval ring of this word is no coincidence. Guilds in the game are essentially feudal structures, consisting of a pyramid of autocratic power descending from a single leader through officers and members to the rank-and-file of wannabes and applicants. Anything from five to 500 players can be in the same guild, and their individual cultures are as varied as the people who play them. Often, real-life friends will create a loose, casual guild of mutual convenience to help them hook up online and join together in taking on a few big challenges. Meanwhile, bloodthirsty specialists in slaughtering other players might form a guild dedicated entirely to ‘player versus player’ mayhem. And truly ambitious players will vie to operate the most successful guild on a server, or even in the world, running their affairs according to fanatically strict operational timetables, membership rules, and even private monetary subscriptions from individual members.

For Adam, after a couple of years of membership in a variety of increasingly ambitious guilds dedicated to completing the game’s very toughest challenges (for example, involving raiding parties of up to forty expert players), the moment eventually arrived when a power vacuum left him free to make a move for supreme authority. With the support of a few fellow players and a detailed strategic proposal, Adam became leader of a guild known as Adelante and promptly set about remoulding it in his own image. In May 2008, he was at his peak: 20,000 gold pieces in the bank, the two most powerful weapons in the game resting snugly on his back (the Twin Blades of Azzinoth, green-glowing monstrosities each the length of a full-grown orc), other players following him around just to glimpse the splendour that one day might be theirs. On the secondary market (an illegal but inexorable part of the
WoW
experience) he reckoned Mogwai might fetch up to $10,000. But he had no intention whatever of selling. For a start, having clocked up over 4,500 hours of play on this character alone, even an astronomical sum would hardly make it worth his while. More sentimentally, too, he felt this character was not his alone to sell. ‘The strange thing about Mogwai is that he doesn’t just belong to me,’ he explained. ‘Every item he has got through the hard work of twenty or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces. When I started, I didn’t care about the other people. Now they are the only reason I continue.’

As Adam is acutely aware, the moment you start taking a more than entirely casual interest in a game like
WoW
, something paradoxical begins to happen. In a non-game online experience – browsing the internet or using any ordinary website – your relationship with the world onscreen is a largely casual one: you flick backwards and forwards, opening and closing windows at the click of a mouse. Far from this casualness being a modern ideal that people crave, however, it seems that they will go to quite extraordinary lengths to inject meaning into their online encounters: the entire phenomenon of guilds, complete with its connotations of cloistered medieval life, is ample testament to this, and is something that was developed over time entirely thanks to the efforts of players themselves rather than game designers. Gaming life is, in its way, thick with obligations, judgements and allegiances – and this is the way people like it. What they crave is not so much an escape from or avoidance of the commitments that make for ‘real’ friendships and worldly achievements as the opportunity to conjure virtual versions of the same class of satisfaction.

Take the activities of Adam/Mogwai and his fellow guild members during a typical ‘raiding mission’. First, a team of twenty-five players with a carefully balanced spectrum of abilities and equipment must meet at a pre-arranged time and place, under an agreed leader. All players must remain in vocal communication, via microphones and headsets, at all times. The raid itself might take up to ten hours, and is to be conducted according to a painfully researched strategy. Essentially an assault on a heavily fortified dungeon, it will entail mass attacks on a succession of powerful computer-controlled ‘boss’ creatures, each with unique abilities, demanding a unique attack strategy. Players with missile abilities will attack from a distance, healers will keep other players alive, while melee specialists will engage at close quarters, all to a strict timetable. The rewards gained from each encounter – which usually take the form of rare and powerful weapons, armour and trinkets that can be used by in-game characters – will be allocated according to an in-guild system, depending upon rank, experience, need, contribution and the whim of the guild leader. Those failing to pull their weight could face being summarily ejected.

A raid is an extreme example, but this is the kind of complex, pressurised scenario that all games force on their players in some way, in which one lapse of concentration can – and frequently does – mean having to do things again, or losing. Tempers fray, and leadership qualities are severely tested. As Adam explained it, ‘a successful guild leader needs to be thick-skinned, capable with the carrot and the stick, able to deal with a wide variety of people of different sexes, backgrounds, ages and egos’. And all the people within a guild, or simply playing alongside one another, need to be able to deal with each other: there are few environments more likely to bring the essential features of a personality to the fore than the intensely inter-reliant pressure-cooker of a game.

It’s not just gamers who are noticing the significance and scale of this. Adam cited a recent article in the
Harvard Business
Review
, billed under the line ‘The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status’. In fact, the article argued, it was increasingly true that games allow people to learn new ways of thinking about leadership in a digital world that are far ahead of most practices in the world of business itself: ‘Perhaps the most striking aspect of leadership in online games is the way in which leaders naturally switch roles, directing others one minute and taking orders the next. Put another way, leadership in games is a task, not an identity – a state that a player enters and exits rather than a personal trait that emerges and thereafter defines the individual.’

If you used that argument within the traditional business market you would, Adam felt, probably still ‘get laughed out of the interview’. But things are changing fast, and he already counts himself among those whose real-life career and skills have benefited significantly from their gaming activities. ‘In
Warcraft
I’ve developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I’ve enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people’s intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task.’

It’s an observation that chimes with the feelings of many other gamers in a similar position, some of whom don’t share Adam’s reservations about the attitude of the traditional business market towards gaming as an indicator of certain skills. Guild leader Craig McKechnie has, for instance, been playing games since he was a child, and even spent a stint on the American pro-gaming circuit during his late teens. Craig has headed several successful guilds, first in
Ultima Online
and then, perhaps inevitably, in
WoW
, and now lives in Massachusetts with two people he met via online games. He also works for a major bank, and feels no obligation to conceal his love of gaming from his employers. ‘When I was hired,’ he explains, ‘I was asked why I left running my guild off my résumé. A Vice President of the company told me that it shows great leadership and responsibility, and not to leave it off future applications.’

Although it still has a ring of novelty to it, Craig’s observation invokes an attitude that has long prevailed in the world of business: the right kind of play can be both profoundly revealing and motivating. A round of golf can reveal more about a CEO than a hundred more formal meetings. Team games can produce more bonding and mutual understanding than any amount of time spent sharing an office. The problem is not so much injecting meaning into gaming interactions: it’s coping with the level of commitment, energy and self-articulation that they demand.

In June 2009, Adam faced one of the biggest watersheds of his gaming life: his decision to step down as guild leader and cease playing
World of Warcraft
. Five years after he first logged on, and with over 6,000 hours invested in the character of Mogwai, a combination of factors had, he explained, meant that he now felt his time playing
WoW
should end. What was going on? ‘I felt a sense of disillusionment with where the game was going. Key guild players were moving on themselves. And, probably more vitally, I’ve had a realignment of my own priorities.’ This, he swiftly added, no more represented a disillusionment with video games as a whole than stopping watching a particular drama series might spell a disillusionment with television. ‘It really culminated with me realising I wanted to play other games, games with a pause button.’