B.F. Skinner Would be Proud

Last Monday night I was woken up by a ping on my phone.

I'd gone to sleep --again-- after another Monday evening spent with an early-ish bedtime followed by waking up at around 11:15 PM and then a second time around 1:00 AM, from which I couldn't get back to anything resembling slumber until 3 AM once more.

This has been kind of a constant theme lately, where I wake up involuntarily and can't get back to sleep while the Monday raid is going on. It kind of puts a lie to my excuse of needing to get more rest because of the new job, but it appears to be something I simply can't control. 

"You miss us," my questing buddy whispered to me while I was --naturally-- on WoW, waiting to get tired enough to go back to sleep. 

I wasn't doing much --just some reading for work as well as questing and grinding so I could level my weapon skills and get enough gold for a flying mount for Linna*-- but this happening for much of the past month has forced my hand.

"Okay," I replied, "I'll admit it. I miss y'all."

"Hehe... win!!"

"A true win would be to come back."

"Do you want to? We're 1 short tonight."

"But I'm the kid from A Christmas Story with his face against the glass window. Can't. No Kael kill."

"I know. :-("

She then asked, "Is it the Kael kill keeping you from BT?"

"Without a Kael kill, no Hyjal. Without Hyjal, no BT."

"Ah, right."**

So, with that on my mind, I finally was able to get to sleep right after the raid concluded. If I were in the raid, however, my night wouldn't be over until after 4 AM EST, when the raid lead team would have finished their analysis of how things went. So while I do miss the raid, I don't miss the afterparty that much.

***

When my phone went off, I was certain it was work.

And I was totally ready to be able to tell people at my old position to basically "fuck off", because I had a little over a week left in my old job and --with the blessing of my administrative manager-- I could tell them to contact my successor instead.

Politely.***

Instead, I discovered it was from Shintar, who contacted me directly about a comment I made on Kaylriene's post about whether the WoW Community itself is doing okay. (Spoiler alert, it's not.) 

You see, Shintar had commented about one regular commenter on her blog(s) who only would come on to comment about how the game sucks and that it used to be good but it isn't now. Not mean spirited, mind you, and polite about it, but it wears on a body to see that all the time.

And yes, I thought that person was me.

Because of that comment (and the post itself), I began to do some soul searching about why I feel the way I do about WoW --both Retail and Classic-- as well as other MMOs. Shintar's comment via Discord led to a relatively short conversation that I honestly hardly remember at all were it not for the entire collection of text in Discord itself.

One of the things that stood out to me the most about the conversation, reading it in the morning while drinking coffee, was that I said that Kaylriene is right; I really wanted WoW to get better, but I didn't know how to do so. I also mentioned that every time WoW is at a juncture, it makes a turn to embrace the hardcore raiding crowd. And that after a certain point, [the game] can't find [its] way back to anything else.

Shintar disputed that, saying that she does not get the same vibe out of Retail playing now as a non-raider.

That being said, my observation was that everything was oriented toward a raid at the end, and WoW's design was to get you into a raid. Unlike, say, Wrath, where you'd get new instances as well as new raids with each major patch, as well as new non-raid content (such as the Quel'Delar questline).****

But Shintar pointed out two things that I thought, upon reading them again, were quite important: that Retail has tourist mode raids so that more people can see the content, which Wrath definitely didn't have, and that we're seeing the same player behavior in TBC Classic as we saw in Retail, so in her opinion raiding hasn't changed much over the years other than the fact that Retail allows people to see the raid with minimal effort nowadays.

But that, and my reaction to that, makes me think of conditioning.

***

It may sound like a simple question, but it is at the heart of why MMOs --and to a lesser extent a LOT of other video games-- operate: do we play the way we play because we have been conditioned to play that way? The positive reinforcement of how MMOs are designed, with the "do this get a reward" does hand things out bite sized chunks, but it also conditions us to expect those things. And not just the rewards, but how a game is supposed to be. 

The joke about all of the Zelda games is that Link goes around smashing pottery, and there isn't a piece of pottery throughout the kingdom that is safe from him. But when you think about it, have we as players come to expect to have to smash pottery in a Zelda game? That smashing pottery is the way to find rupees and items? And that if Link doesn't go smashing pottery, is it really a Zelda game? That if the next installment of The Legend of Zelda didn't allow Link to smash pottery willy-nilly, would the fans of the game raise havoc?

MMOs have their own conditioning based on how "things have always been done" in game worlds. Things such as:

• Quests follow a specific cadence, in packs of 3-4 quests of increasing difficulty, until you the final quest is a mini-boss.
  
• Speeding through content to get to Endgame.
• The game begins at Endgame.
• MMOs must have raiding as the primary focus of Endgame.
  
• How other things to do in an MMO, such as crafting, side quests, and reputation grinding, affects raiding.
• To be a good player, you must follow the metagame.
  

Or, for more game specific conditioning:*****

• WoW must always have a Horde vs. Alliance conflict.
• Once you reach Endgame, you're expected to run dailies and grind to gain access to raids.
• Every major content patch in WoW must have new gear to grind/raid/whatever for.
• The only real raiding in WoW is Heroic or harder.
• Each new expansion in WoW must have new systems, so that you start the grinding/learning rotations/etc. all over.

Perhaps this is why things remain the way they are in MMOs, and WoW in particular, because we as players are conditioned to expect things and do things in a specific way, and we see those patterns even when they weren't fully fleshed out back in the day. Which would explain a bit as to why people are playing TBC Classic as if they were playing Retail: we were conditioned to do this over the decades of MMO playing.

***

Subverting the conditioning, however, is hard.

Some games, such as Elden Ring, can pull it off despite deviating from the expected open world formula we've come to expect. The articles that swept gamer space a week or two ago, about how Horizon: Forbidden West developers threw shade at Elden Ring for quest development, shows how ingrained the conditioning is.

And no matter how many new things there are to do in WoW, ostensibly designed to let people do things other than simply raid, people feel obligated to do all the things because they're conditioned to believe that's how it's done. There is no easy way out of that mentality.

It would be one thing if video games themselves were performing the conditioning process, but with the advent of social media, the behavioral reinforcement comes from a myriad of places. If you put "things to do before the next patch drops" into Google, you get a ton of results from all sorts of places that look something like this:

• "Things to do and NOT to do before Patch 9.2 Drops"
• "What things can I do before pre-patch drops?"
• "4 Goldmaking Things to do before 9.1!"
• "7 Things You Need to Finish Before FF XIV Endwalker"
• "First Things to do at LVL 60 in Classic WoW: Get Raid Ready!"

Yes, these were all real article names, taken across YouTube videos, Reddit posts, blog posts, and gamer website articles.

This isn't limited to MMOs mind you, because just about any video game has this sort of output, whether it's tutorials on how to play, how to get good, how to win, or just how to do things the way you're expected to.

I remember back in the day when I frequented Boardgame Geek, there was a certain subset of Eurogame player who would rip a new person playing Puerto Rico for "not doing it right" if you didn't play the game the "right way". Some of that is based on the metagame for Puerto Rico, but other parts of it was due to the conditioning behind how things were supposed to flow in a game of Puerto Rico.******

***

As for what to do about this I have no good answer.

I can sit here, typing away, missing the raid, but realizing that I don't miss a lot of the work that I would have to do to actually raid in progression.

Lot of people are perfectly happy to play the way they have been playing, and get the game they have been expecting, and I can respect that. 

But for those who see problems with their favorite game, whether it be an MMO (like WoW), an RPG (like Assassin's Creed), or a boardgame (such as Puerto Rico), it's a fair question to ask whether the conditioning has locked us into an unsatisfying realization:

Is the problem not with the game, but is it us?

*I have a goal of 1200 gold before I spring for basic flying for her. I don't want her to be so cash poor afterward that she can't buy food/water (or other things) on her own, and 1200 has a nice round number to it. Of course, having said that, I'll probably end up getting close and telling myself I could wait until she has 1500 gold. Or make up some other excuse to delay the inevitable, I suppose.

**I corrected some of the grammar during the exchange. I suppose I can't help myself there either. And yes, I'm completely aware that --supposedly-- the attunements were removed for Hyjal and BT, although it wasn't mentioned in the official post.

***I can be polite whenever I need to, but I really really wanted to let certain people know what I really felt about them going around behind everyone's back and backstabbing me.

****I found it interesting that TBC did NOT add any new instances or non-raid content that didn't end in a daily grindfest until the last patch, with the addition of the Magister's Terrace instance. I'd taken my cues from Wrath, having been my first exposure to WoW, so it seemed natural to me that the Serpentshrine Cavern instances would drop when the SSC raid would, etc.

*****Some of these are more generic as well, such as the Sith Empire vs. Republic in SWTOR. Well, except for Knights of the Fallen Empire and it's immediate successor expansion, that is.

******And yes, a good portion of it was people just being assholes.