People play games for different reasons, and even those reasons may change over the course of your lifetime.
When I was growing up, my family would have regular game nights. Those included some of the classics, such as Waterworks,
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| This was the version at our home, which dates to 1972. I believe Mom still has the game around somewhere. From eBay. |
or Authors,
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| I should have this version around the house somewhere. From eBay (again). |
or Clue,
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| While I was unsuccessfully trying to find my copy of Authors, I found my circa 1980 version of Clue. |
but they also included games that are no longer published, such as Scan.
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| This is circa 1970 or so. From Rahmiano Anderson via BoardGameGeek. |
We also played card games such as UNO, Hearts, or Michigan Rummy, the former two of which received new life when I went away to college. However, those days of my youth were fueled by the desire to beat my dad at these games. It was partly a competitive streak in me, but Dad was easily the best player in the house, and so if I wanted to finally prove my worth (in my own mind) I had to beat him.
As for chess... Let's not talk about chess. I only beat my dad once in chess despite years of trying, and my brother was on the chess team at his high school, so I kind of got used to losing at chess.
But still, it all fed into my primary motivation: Beat Dad.
The simple straightforward concept of "beat the other player" is not exactly new, and this is the basis of a lot of PvP video games today.*
It was only when I was a teen that I began to break out of the 'beat Dad' mentality and understand that there were other reasons for playing games. I wasn't giving up my quest to win, but that drive to win doesn't necessarily fit well into other types of games.
Some of that comes from learning RPGs. Sure, there's a "beat the Big Bad" component to RPGs, there's also the social element to those sorts of games.
Back when I was a kid, we approached playing AD&D as if it was The Party versus The DM. Who became the DM in our campaigns rotated, but the resulting competition was always the same. The DM tried to kill us, and we tried to outwit the DM.
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| The high point of any Party vs. DM competition was ALWAYS The Tomb of Horrors. Let me just say that of the two options above, there are no right answers. IIRC, one will destroy you utterly, and the other one will merely strip you of all your gear and clothing. From TSR Hobbies via The Alexandrian. |
Understanding the concept of a shared story or a shared plot with the DM not as an antagonist but rather a facilitator came about much later, but old habits do die hard. It was then, when I was an adult, that I finally realized that merely killing things and beating the DM wasn't nearly as much fun as a well crafted story that both we as players and the DM participated in.
Sometimes it's part of a big story arc like what you'd find in a premade module, or sometimes it's something we purely make up as we go along. Or maybe it's something that we work on in creating a world together, but what I found to be the most fun is the story and my participation in it. Perhaps I'll never write a novel, but this is the closest I can come to actually doing just that.
Sure, I love puzzles, but I recognize that they're just that. The long term enjoyment, however, comes from the stories I participate in. Given my love of reading, I guess that's not that much of a surprise.
So... What drives you? What do you play for?
*Despite complaints from players otherwise, I sure as hell go into Alterac Valley in WoW Classic wanting to win, and the constant losing in Battlegrounds by the Alliance during the Mists of Pandaria expansion just wore me down to where all I was feeling was anger. That was when I knew it was time to leave WoW.
For me it is a combination of my connection to my long-term characters and the opportunity to play with friends.
ReplyDeleteThe stories I build in my head keep me coming back to playing my characters, even when the developer is doing a poor job with the game. There's always something I can go back to and putter around with if the current stuff doesn't suit me. I've basically learned to build my own fun when the game isn't otherwise calling to me or my friends.
The other big thing is when friends and guildies are engaged with the game and consistently play. It's not so much the content that calls to me, but the social nature of doing shared events with folks you like. At first there was the satisfaction of being able to do hard or the hardest content (of that time period), but eventually I reached the point of not being interested in difficulty for its own sake. It was the shared bonds with people I knew and who I enjoyed that content with, not what goalposts we hit.
As a side note, when I look back at my AD&D 1st edition days in the early 80s, it was the adventuring with friends and classmates that was the most fun. We weren't an role-playing group, but mostly an adventuring group. While our adventures often lead to overarching stories and themes, doing instead of the being that role-players of the era seemed more engaged with.
The social nature is very important, to be sure. When I was knee deep in raid leading in TBC Classic, there were people on all the time, it's just that the focus wasn't shared fun but rather "do your job to get yourself min-maxed". While there's plenty of people who love to do just that, they do it for fun; this was, well, work.
DeleteBut my time spent in Classic Era? Oh yeah, that's fun. Sure, I kind of min-maxed the Era version of Cardwyn, but I wasn't going out of my way to make it my job to do so. And I did plenty of goofing around with friends in game, which made it enjoyable. So yeah, I get where you're going.
Talking specifically about online gaming, my motivations have changed enormously over the nearly 25 years I've been doing it. It started out as a combination of an interest in role-playing and a sense of amazement about the opportunity to meet and play with people from all around the world but over time both of those aspects have dwindled considerably. Now, my main motivations are, as Pallais puts it, connections to my long term characters, who I think of as something akin to pets who need to be looked after and taken care of, an ever-growing curiosity about the mechanics of the games, and possibly most motivating of all, a desire to find new things to write about on my blog.
ReplyDeleteIn MMORPGs, I was never much interested in the storylines and the more I see of them, the less interested I am. I also no longer care much about playing a character beyond the broadest of strokes, mostly defined by what they're wearing. I think it's one of the reasons I'm finding Survival games more satisfying these days - the story there tends to be more of a suggestion in the background, whereas all the focus is on the mechanics, which is where my main interest lies these days.
I do like some good lore, though, especially if it's mysterious and hard to pin down...
That's the thing about lore that does annoy me the most: there's a push within MMOs to have everything in it's place and have everything understood, when life isn't really like that. Perhaps it's the nature of games --and video games especially-- to have a finite set of information provided by the DM/players/developers, but it could also be a symptom of the players/consumers themselves and their desire to have something "complete". Either way, lore within MMOs and RPGs tend to be complete unto themselves, until it's time for an expansion, and then suddenly the devs insert a new branch of lore that wasn't there before and had no references prior to that expansion. It's the "Princess is in another castle" or the "if you think I was bad, everything I did was to defeat the next Big Bad" syndrome.
DeleteIn real life, stuff like that rarely happens. There's a steady drip of information if people are looking for it, and frequently there are questions that can't be answered and will never be answered, much to the frustration of completionists everywhere.
Bleh. Yes, that was me. One day I'll remember I need to log in before I comment.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I figured out it was you even before you posted this follow-up, as you have a distinct writing style, Bhagpuss. And yes, I do love your writing style.
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