Now that we have clarified in the last lesson how you should approach a game in advance, finally the absolutely unjoyful and annoying playing can start.
If you can recite the following three guidelines in your sleep, you have already almost achieved the target:
- Playing has nothing to do with fun, it is bitter severity!
- Story and atmosphere are for offline wimps; in MMOs all that counts are stats and game mechanics!
- The developers and publisher are the enemies and you are the target of all attacks!
If you are already a guru in that area, these things are probably self-evident for you. All others I would like to assist on the path to enlightenment, by explaining these tips a little bit more. Let’s start with the first and most important one, because this credo runs through all following topics. As you already know by now, the word “game” is totally misleading as a label for our favorite time-wasting activity. Way too often it is associated with fun, which might have been true in the virtual Neander Valley, but for sure not anymore nowadays. It is therefore only consequential to talk about MMOs and not MMOGs, as the majority of humankind has already realized.
But back to the topic: MMOs with all their social components are already for quite a long time the long arm of reality, reaching into the gaming world. Therefore the virtual universe has to be as lousy as the real one. All it needs to accomplish this target is the right way of playing. Taking yourself way too important and in general everything too serious is a grandiose start for achieving that. Write down “Faster, higher, further!” or “I have to become the best!” on a note and stick it to your screen. Compare yourself with everybody who is crossing your way and soon enough you will recognize, which ridiculous and insignificant footnote in the virtual fabric you are. Put pressure on yourself, and the circumstance that somebody is better than you – and usually there are a tremendous lot of them – will soon enough make sure that you have taken along the ubiquitous pressure to perform from the “real” world to the game. Adios, relaxation!
Comparing yourself to others is not your thing or you just don’t care about other people in general? No problem, for loners there are enough starting points too! For example, just set yourself entirely unrealistic, or from a reasonable point of view totally irrelevant targets and the pressure will come all by itself. Ideally suited are the virtual items which exist in every MMO galore. Just persuade yourself of thinking that your existence is purposeless without the uber-set of the hundredth level, say it to yourself five times every day before going to bed and within shortest time you will believe it. Important is to always keep the right perspective. It shouldn’t need any explanation anymore that story and atmosphere can be blanked out utterly in MMOs. They exist, exactly like quests and all the other annoying stuff, only to create a supporting program for all the nice figures, often denoted as attributes, skills, stats and that sort of thing.
The game mechanics are the only thing that matters, and they require in most games after all to take part in the jolly arms race. Tales like “In Ultima Online you could create and experience your own stories” testify either (if they are told by yourself) that you are actually already way too old for all that kids’ stuff, or (if somebody else is telling you them) it is the senile prattling of a perceived game-grandpa, which can be pigeonholed without hesitation as “Yeaaah well, back then everything was better”-nonsense.
Senile prattling of a game-grandpa
Another established tool to reach the ultimate discontent is to put yourself into the victim role. The only thing missing is a culprit. If it’s not the other players, the developers and publisher are suitable too. Because truth is, they just create the entire game for the sole purpose of angering you. Just walk through the world with open eyes. All these small bugs and inconsistencies make only your adversity their aim. Publisher only want your money and every patch is purposely doing the exact opposite of what you are wishing for. Should there once be an exception to that rule, then your wishes will spontaneously change. Let’s take for example the universally loved balancing updates: It is an unwritten law that exactly your class is the only one that gets nerfed. Coincidence? A likely story! The same is true for all these special bugs that oddly enough only affect you and almost nobody else – except half of your friends, but they just had bad luck and are statistically irrelevant.
We will leave it at that for now, because all these grandiose wisdoms need time to be processed. In conclusion I want to remark that when I talk about “you”, I refer to the ideal student of discontent, and neither want to insult or accuse the whole MMO-community nor specific individuals. Neither the one nor the other or whomever. Ok, maybe whomever, that guy always seemed strange to me.
Outlook to the future
After the first two lessons you should be able to choose the least fitting MMO, get rid already in advance of any fun and to act while playing in a way, that any joy is hiding from you. To everyone who has still problems with these concepts I recommend as a homework to practice these lessons – ideally in your favorite game, so that it won’t stay your favorite game for much longer. If you then reached the first level of discontent and erased your own enjoyment in gaming it is about time to involve your fellow players. Nowhere else you can be as discontented as in a hostile environment. You will learn in the next lessons how to achieve that.
Mordant Gamer 