Tamrielo

I really love FFXIV, and I’ve gushed over it quite a few times in this blog. What I am right now is frustrated with it, and while I’m going to talk for a while about why, I want to point out that it only slightly diminishes my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent game.

We’ve been playing the expansion for a few weeks now, and people fall into one of three categories: finished levelling, still levelling, or not yet in the expansion. The gaps in all of these are tied heavily with level, and to some extent, the amount of story content they’ve been able to complete. What frustrates me is that in a game that has done so much excellent work to help friends play alongside one another to the benefit of everyone involved, it has thrown a lot of that out the window for the expansion. We return to levels as a hard barrier to playing together, and the number of times I’ve seen people lament that they can’t join– despite playing the right role or being ready, willing, and capable of joining a group– simply because they aren’t the right level has been maddening.

I’ve seen and heard frustration from nearly everyone I play with on a regular basis– they can’t join a group or can’t fill a particular need because they’re held back by levels. I’ve watched people sigh and frustratedly grind, draining the fun from the game for them, simply to “catch up”, and I’ve seen a number of people try to branch out and try something new and exciting with the expansion content only to lament that they “fell behind”.

In the meantime, what is a level? Is it that meaningful that I’ve gone from level 52 to 53? 17 to 18? 59 to 60? Other than displaying an incrementally higher number next to my name, what am I *actually* getting from levelling up, other than some satisfying music and particle effects? I’m occasionally getting a new ability (except all of the abilities in Heavensward are quest-linked, and could easily be unlocked with story progress rather than levels), I’m getting a stat point every few levels (except the stat allocations are mindless for every class in the game save one, and the one where it isn’t mindless is considered a mistake by the devs that they’ve talked about wanting to fix), my spells go up in MP cost (hooray!), and I can, every so often, go into a new zone (except this, too, is linked to the main story quests).

What I feel like I get every time I level up is either a widening gap between myself and my friends, or a small bit of relief that I’m catching up to my friends. Often it’s both, as I leave some friends behind and catch up with others. Other than the knowledge that eventually the levelling process ends and the little fanfare and particle effects stop being a bittersweet trigger, levelling is a net neutral experience, other than the questionable joy of making a single, questionably significant number slightly larger.

I get the desire for progression. Opponents of level-less systems say that you can’t make people feel like they’re progressing if they don’t have a single, nice, clear indicator that they’ve become more awesome. I think we’ve long outstripped that in MMOs; levelling isn’t progression anymore, it’s either the game you’re playing until you reach max level and have nothing else to do, or it’s the chores you have to do before you really get to enjoy the game. What makes me love FFXIV is that the main storyline quests continue throughout the levelling process and into the ‘endgame’, the max-level content, giving me the distinct feeling that the main form of progression for me is through the story. I want to get better gear and progress further so that I can see more of the game’s story when it becomes available. However, the levels still block me from playing with my friends.

Every little happy tingle I get at seeing the level-up fanfare is countered by looking at a friend who I can’t play alongside, or who feels like they’re bringing the group down, or who looks at an apparently insurmountable hill to climb, who skips the story so they can catch up faster and doesn’t really get attached to it or who jumps into story instances with strangers who won’t wait for them to see the story just so they can catch up faster. I’ve reached the point where I no longer care what reasons people might have for enjoying levels, I’m tired of being forced to mediate between the people with a singular focus and (sometimes) copious free time and the people with less free time or a desire to explore and have fun, because they’re all at different points in the levelling process. I’m lucky to have a guild that’s incredibly understanding and patient, and even more painfully aware that that isn’t the norm. I’ve seen my own guildies panicking because they don’t think they can catch up in time, because they had the unmitigated gall to do something else for a day or so some weekend. I hate watching the frustration and the stress.

The game that keeps players is the game that makes it easy for friends to play with one another, and among a variety of other things, MMOs have been trapped in the past on this one, blocking friends from playing with each other for the convenience of a simple number to denote power. Levels make people feel bad for gaining them too quickly, or too slowly, or at the wrong times. They separate and demoralize and incur stress, and I’m painfully aware that when they’re fun for me, it’s at the expense of other people around me, because me getting ahead drains the fun from others who aren’t ahead and who now need to catch up.

I want those walls torn down. I want to be able to play my games without worrying if I’m behind, or if me playing is going to stress out my friends who are going to feel left behind. I’m tired of levels as a meaningless marker of ‘progress’, and an artificial gate to me having fun with friends.

Source: Digital Initiative
Tearing Down Walls

We’re back! Thanks for putting up with my week off; I’m feeling a lot better and more functional now.

I had a discussion with a friend recently about games as a social outlet. She had some trouble wrapping her mind around the concept of a video game being a social event; she viewed them as largely solitary activities. The idea that you might meet someone through the internet and have that feel “real” was confusing, because (as she put it), “In the end, you’re just interacting with your keyboard and computer screen.”

There’s a layer of abstraction that I think we often take for granted and is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t see it. To connect with someone through a game online, you have to view your game avatar as an extension of yourself, and other people’s avatars as themselves– the sprites or pixels you’re seeing on the screen are not only representative of actual people, but the act of moving the mouse or pressing keys is just the background noise for what you’re REALLY doing– interacting with those people.

I used a couple of examples to illustrate the kind of thing I was talking about to my friend. The first was straightforward– a game of catch. I tossed her a frisbee and she, intuitively understanding the game, tossed it back. I asked her why she did that, and how she was thinking about throwing the frisbee. Specifically, I wanted to know what she thought she was interacting with– the frisbee, her own hands, or me. I got a laugh and a “you, obviously”, and pointed out that she didn’t interact with me at all– she used her hands to throw the frisbee at a shape she was looking at that she identified as me. She made the jump pretty quickly about the difference between, essentially, user interface (hands, frisbee) and the game itself (playing catch with me).

From there, everything else is just layers, and it’s a pretty quick jump to a game like Mariokart (where you’re shouting at the people on the couch next to you) to an MMO (where you’re typing in chat or chatting over VoIP). Having gotten the connection, she had a followup question that I found insightful: “How do you know who to play with?”

It’s an interesting question, and one I have a hard time adequately answering for myself. A lot of MMOs have group search functions, like FFXIV’s Duty Finder or WoW’s dungeon queues, but I think it’s hard to make a solid argument that those are necessarily social experiences; you often don’t exchange a single word with the people you’re with, and it’s rare to see them after the run. I have my guild/free company mates, who’ve been slowly (for certain definitions of ‘slowly’) recruited over time and who form the core social circle I operate in. Other than seeking out a guild, however, I don’t know how you find a group like mine. There’s also the friends I know personally, the ones I’ve spent time in realspace with, who might be separated geographically but with whom I can still play games. I can’t always play with them, though, because we’re not always playing the same games or even necessarily caught up with one another if we are in the same game.

In the meantime, I’ve watched a number of my friends get into social mobile games, exchanging currencies and helping each other out in a variety of similar-looking-to-me titles. I heard a story recently about a couple who met playing Ingress, because they happened to keep showing up to the same place to score points or capture the location (I’m not really sure how Ingress is played). It makes me wonder if, done right, mobile games could be the new MMOs, bringing disparate people together who otherwise might not meet.

For me, the real appeal to video games is the social outlet– while I play a decent number of singleplayer games, a lot of my motivation to do so is anchored in wanting to talk to other people about them. One of the fondest memories I have is sitting and playing Chrono Trigger with my sister on the couch next to me, asking me questions about the story and what I was doing, and inserting her own thoughts on the matter. It turned a singleplayer game into a social experience, and I’ve talked about games with my friends ever since (and, indeed, have picked up games I would never have played otherwise because people I knew were playing them and would have stuff to say).

I think that a lot of modern games have pushed the social aspects aside to some extent, going for more convenient play with more temporary connections. I don’t think the desire to connect with people through games is likely to go away, though, and I’m interested to see where the next big social game comes from, that connects people like MMOs in the early-to-mid-2000s did, and the arcades of the 80s and 90s.

Source: Digital Initiative
Social Games

Sorry about being AWOL for the last couple of days. I’m coming out of a pretty intense weekend experience and I’m still emotionally unpacking it. This is the first I’ve been able to bring myself to post here, and while I’m feeling better, I’m not going to force things. I’m going to take the rest of this week off to recuperate and will be back Monday.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a sticker I saw on the back of a sign today, that was the right message at the right time for me. Maybe it will be for you too:

Source: Digital Initiative
Mental Health Week