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Saturday, August 5, 2023

A Short Ponderable about MMOs and Motivation

As much as MMOs are driven by so-called Big Bads, the top enemy of whom people have united against, it's kind of funny how few times that plot device has worked in the real world. 

The most obvious example is ol' Adolph Hitler, with folks such as Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and other great conquerors as other examples, but for the most part conflicts and wars have little to do with opposition to a specific leader. If you made a list of the top reasons why people go to war, there's race, territory, resources, and history*, but the one bugaboo that almost never gets brought up in MMOs is the one I was wondering about: religion.




Most MMOs out there don't have religion as a primary motivating factor in warfare or conflict like we do in the real world. Hell, even in a lot of RPG campaigns I've been in, religion has hardly been a motivating factor. More frequently I see a "orcs hate the elves and the dwarves hate the goblins" dynamic but you rarely see an "our gods hate your gods" motivator. If such a motivator exists, it's kind of a secondary thing, where "yeah, the gods dislike each other" motivation tacked on to the primary ones. 

In a world where the gods actively intervene on behalf of their adherents, you don't get a lot of "Our gods are real, and yours don't exist" assertions. Neither do you see the "we worship the same gods, but ours is the correct way to worship them!" argument.

Ah, Life of Brian. I love that movie.
From Yarn.

***

I was put into this frame of mind when I remembered a story that my sister-in-law once told me about when she was in Vet school in the Deep South. This first year she was there, they were coming up on the end of the semester and the Winter Break. Conversation with some of her classmates devolved into what they were going to do for Christmas. 

Knowing that she was Catholic, one of her classmates asked my sister-in-law what she was going to do instead of Christmas.

"Uh, celebrate Christmas," my sister-in-law replied.

"Oh," her classmate responded, "well, we know that Catholics aren't Christian, so when we celebrate Christmas, you celebrate...."

"Christmas. Catholics are Christian."

"No they're not."

My sister-in-law was flummoxed. This was the first time she'd encountered anybody who didn't think that Catholics aren't even Christian, which would be a bit of a surprise to the Pope. 

Then again, I've met people whose version of Christianity is such that they believe the Pope is the Anti-Christ, so... Yeah.

***

I guess we kind of tend to sweep these sort of conflicts under the rug when we play MMOs or RPGs, because the concept of "nobody is correct" and "everybody is correct" with regards to religion touches a raw nerve with people. Besides, religion in the real world comprises a large amount of a person's identity --whether we realize it or not-- and that's kind of hard to replicate in a fictional world where you don't have any real personal stakes. At most, you tend to get what I call the "Exorcist" type of religious interaction. As in the book and movie, the "Exorcist" references the temptation to worship and devote yourself to evil, as opposed to merely worshiping somebody else's gods.

Once in a while religion does come
up in an MMO in a way that is relatable.
But you know, it could be worse.
From Knowyourmeme.

This conflict is comfortable --if you want to call dealing with evil comfortable-- because we're familiar with the tropes involved. It's much harder to drop, say, the Wars of the Reformation into an MMO or RPG because it forces us to look harder at why religion makes us do what we do. That's not a path toward a successful and popular game.

But what do you think? I've talked enough, and danced around certain aspects of this topic enough.

#Blaugust2023



*The "you started a fight with us years ago, so now it's our turn to get back at you!" reason.



8 comments:

  1. Love that screenie with the sheep, lol.

    Now that you say it, I can't think of many media in general who treat with fictional religions that actually work like in real life, as in: people believe in them without any evidence but purely out of faith. I suspect this is because if held up in a mirror like that, with protagonists taking strong action based on nothing tangible, it would make many viewers uncomfortable. Much easier to make it so that the fictional gods obviously exist and we know who's right.

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    1. Whether or not the gods are real and, if they are, whether they're really gods comes up quite a bit in Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2. I can remember some conflict over that between NPCs and as part of the storyline.

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    2. That's the biggest problem about Fantasy worlds: there's tangible evidence that the gods exist, so it's not such a matter of faith but which gods you prefer. When you call on a god for healing and you get healing, it's kind of hard to say "those gods don't exist".

      If someone were to create a fantasy world where it didn't matter what, nobody got magical healing or anything else that's in the gods' traditional wheelhouse, that would make things a wee bit more interesting. Of course, Wizards or Kings would be worshipped as if they were gods, just like in actual history.

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    3. @Bhagpuss-- I remember some of the discussions in the original part of GW2 --I never played GW1-- and GW2 does do something just like I mentioned above: there are no obviously "Priestly" classes in GW2. The Missing Gods are another item that push GW2 into territory that other Fantasy worlds tend not to go as well, but they still have their Big Bads, the Elder Dragons, who can be a sort of god unto themselves.

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  2. A good deal of the main questlines and the ongoing narrative in EverQuest and EverQuest II revolves around religious conflict, warfare and the direct maneuverings of one god against another. It's probably the primary narrative driver across the life of both games and certainly one of the major facets of the lore. I think it's quite important in Guild Wars/GW2 as well, although I never really understood a lot of the backstory there...

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    1. GW/GW2 is a bit different than most MMOs, because even in Everquest it's about whose gods are best, not faith without direct evidence.

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  3. World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands surely seemed to me to be someone’s deep dive into religion and the afterlife. I personally found the presentation of life after death to be onerous. Atheren

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    1. When I do think of Shadowlands, I think of it as part of a multiverse. Any true metaphysical discussions that could have been had in Retail WoW were thrown out the window in favor of "let's go kill the latest Big Bad". Of course, when everything hit the fan with Afrasiabi and the other stuff at Blizzard (coupled with the tanking of subscriptions) Blizz kind of tried to pivot a bit, but the afterlife as presented by Blizz is a lot closer to Dante's vision than anything else.

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