We live in a world of instant gratification. I am not entirely sure when this change in society happened, but with the proliferation of personal information across the internet, we have been able to look into the lives of our peers and realize the extent to which we differ. The ability to see into the lives of others has started a trend in having to keep up with the joneses on a much grander scale. This has not been lost on the gaming community. In fact, MMORPG gamers are perhaps the most impatient gaming segment in the industry today.
In the early days of the MMORPG, you had the early adopters of these types of games. These individuals were highly loyal and would defend their game to the end. They would gladly replay content for hours on end and the key to this repetitive yet satisfying grind was two fold:
- Gamers never experienced multiplayer on a grand scale on the PC before
- Gamers were much more social even though the tools for communication back then were primitive
Everything was new and exciting and everything required cooperation with others. I think back to my time playing Ultima Online as some of the best days of my gaming career. It was a time where you were literally freaking out that so many players can play together through the internet. In game chats were vibrant and out of game communication tools were limited resulting in the need for a high level of in game coordination. These made encounters challenging and fun to conquer.
Then at some point, the plague (instant gratification) started creeping in. With the massive success of games like World of Warcraft (WoW), the MMORPG industry started to see a massive boom of copycat clones that tried to replicate the success of WoW. Almost every game had (and still has) the same tried and true gameplay loop that made WoW a success, yet they were not able to do it as well as WoW did. Gamers however still tried all of these new games because they wanted to see what they were doing differently. Similarly to a new restaurant in town, gamers would frequent these new games for a short time, get bored, then go back to whatever game they were playing. The question is, why did they get bored in the first place?
Below is a list of reasons why the plague of instant gratification was able to take hold of the MMORPG gaming community:
- The Founding “fathers of gaming” abandoned their newer gaming “children” when they grew up and got jobs / got married
- WoW Clones (games that tried to mirror WoW’s success) burned out a lot of gamers who were trying to find the next big thing
- The birth of early access gaming and datamining essentially revealed all of a game’s secrets prior to launch, leaving nothing for the imagination
- Live streamers / Youtubers who bill themselves as experts set the meta for thousands to see and contributed towards a lack of diversity in gameplay
- Toxic online culture made it “weird” to roleplay in MMORPG games, reducing the amount of player driven creative content that could extend longevity in online games
- Pay to Win (P2W) mechanics and corporate greed allowed instant gratification gamers to get what they wanted at the expense of their personal wallet and the expense of non P2W gamers
- Crowdfunding’s broken promises to those who backed projects early contributed to the general decline in quality games being released and increased the skepticism of future game releases
- The rise of the casual gamer made it ok for game developers to release light content expansions that had little meat to them, resulting in more hardcore gamers burning through the content within a short period of time
- The pressure to go through content quickly expanded beyond the hardcore player base as a creeping anxiety for all players to rush through the content and get to end game
- Gamers began playing for the destination (end game) rather than the journey to get there
- The anti social nature of the youth in the internet age (lack of in person contact) decreased the amount of communication in game and diminished the social nature of MMORPGs
There are certainly more reasons than these, but in the bigger scheme of things, we as gamers are to blame. We are the ones who choose to play games during early access, leaving nothing to the imagination. We are the ones who subscribe to datamining websites to get the latest changes in a game before they are even announced. We are the ones who pay real life cash to purchase an advantage over other players in the cash shop just to make our in game lives just a little easier. The buck stops with us. If you are in the disgruntled gamer community like I am, then it falls upon us to begin to change our gameplay loop by looking within.
Start to take a stand and develop your own personal standards on games, regardless of what some talking head says or some blogger writes. We all know that we deserve high quality games that are built for both the journey and the destination and when we accept anything less than that, we diminish our own experience as well as the experiences of others. Again, I am guilty of being infected by this plaque, but every day I think to myself, when will enough be enough? When will be go back to a time where we were mystified by the games we played? Perhaps that time may never come if we continue to keep our same expectations and fall for the same WoW clone gameplay that has been around forever.
These have been my experiences in the MMORPG genre of gaming, but I would bet my last dollar that the gaming industry as a whole in whatever genre of gaming you look at, is also experiencing this plague. I challenge you as a gamer, regardless of what game you play, to demand better from not only game developers, streamers, bloggers, and peers, but also to demand better of yourself and begin to see things within your own lens. Change starts with you. The cure to this plaque is within each of us.
Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or suggestions on additional reasons this plague has taken hold, feel free to comment here, on reddit, or on social media wherever you see this post.