- get up and turn off the alarm clock
- check email for any critical alerts overnight
- turn on the morning news so wife can wake up slowly while listening to it
- hop in the shower
- get dressed
- make sure wife is actually waking up
- prepare Kenzie’s insulin shot and coax her into letting me give it to her
- give the cats wet food and a little dry food
- gather and take out the trash
- feed the outdoor cats
- sit down and consume caffeine while writing a blog post
Dailyquestification of Games
I had a bit of a revelation over the weekend, and now I understand a little better some of my motivations. I hate daily quests, and I understand WHY I hate them, but first I guess we should probably talk a bit about the daily quest construct as a whole. If you are one of my readers that has not played a ton of MMORPGs, then maybe you have escaped the sirens call of them. Essentially they started their life as an optional method of creating repeatable quest turn-ins and have become widely signified as having a blue exclamation icon to signify that status. The very first repeatable quests I ever experienced were in Everquest, as I turned copious amounts of bone chips to the dude in the Kaladim Paladin guild.
World of Warcraft however had a more formal questing infrastructure and as a result they had to make a specific version of questing in order to support the repeatable nature. I am honestly not exactly certain when I first encountered them, but I know for certain that by the time we reached Silithis they were the backbone of the quests leading up to the opening of Ahn’Qiraj. At that point they served a very distinct purpose and were pretty straight forward in nature allowing you to gain favor with a faction for repeatedly turning in the same items over and over. They were more construct than feature at that point and served as a means to an end.
With Burning Crusade a number of optional faction grinds were put in place, and with them a series of limited daily quests were introduced. Each faction would give you a number of quests each day with additional options opening up as you increased your standing. The first of these that I participated in was Ogri’la, which required a flying mount so absolutely nothing you even saw prior to dinging the level cap in that expansion. These were time wasters more than anything, and if you decide to completely skip a week it didn’t feel terribly bad because it didn’t feel like you were really missing anything other than some incremental progress.
The problem is that as we have moved further from that original mission of simply facilitating multiple turn-ins they have spread more and more from something that felt like optional content, to something that is absolutely a requirement in order to function within the game. Now exists a tapestry of daily quests, world quests and weekly objectives that all feel like they need to be observed for fear of your character falling terribly behind the curve. In Shadowlands for example there are a number of things that can only be obtained while a certain World Quest is up, which only serves to add a fear of missing out on potential rewards by not logging in every single day.
This unfortunately isn’t a World of Warcraft problem, but a larger MMORPG problem. Every game has some version of this infrastructure of giving you limited rewards for logging in each day and doing some things… all in an attempt to make you appear to be “active”. This becomes important because in the free to play economy… no one reports subscription numbers at investor calls anymore. They instead report on MAU or Monthly Active Users, and if they can keep you logging in it gives the appearance of the game having a healthy ecosystem. However none of this is really compelling content and I’ve reached a point where I find it harder and harder to swallow as such.
In general I do pretty well with completing dailies for maybe a week at a time, but eventually I find I lack the desire to log in. I’ve reached this point with so many games now that I started to wonder why exactly I reject this construct so much. Now comes the realization part. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my day to day existence, and my life is basically a series of repeated rituals at this point. I am the primary caretaker in my household and when I get up I start running through a list of little daily activates that are required to make sure the household is running smoothly. Everything in my life has been ritualized in order to make sure it happens and to also try and make it as efficient as humanly possible so I can move on to more enjoyable things.
So for example this morning my list of rituals looked a little something like this: