Thoughts on MMOs

I think the thing that really puts me off trying an MMO is what the drawing point for a lot of other people is. They may be more fundamentally social than your usual single-player console RPG, but while I might enjoy playing with other people, the dependency some MMOs have on teams and organization (such as World of Warcraft and its guilds) means that for me, playing would eventually become less fun and more of a chore and obligation.

Hypothetically, if a guild or team organized an event for a time that everyone agreed on and marked on their calendar, say, a week in advance? Maybe come that day, something happened at the last minute, or I feel sick, or I just don’t feel like playing. For a single-player offline game, who cares? I just won’t play that day. For an MMO? Even if I felt like crap or wasn’t really enthused, I’d feel an obligation to play anyway.

And at that point? A game has surpassed its place as trivial and played for fun, and become a responsibility. I have enough responsibilities without adding a game to them. If this happened one time, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but if it starts to happen regularly, and the people I was playing with were relying on me to be there all the time…it’s a situation that would just leech all the fun out of the experience. I don’t feel comfortable rearranging my life around that.

Some people do, though. Some can do it and have no problems, and props to them. Others, I think, eventually fall into the ‘problematic use’ category discussed in the lectures. I think with MMOs, falling into this category, even by accident, is easier than a simple console game. Once a game becomes an obligation that you rearrange your life around, it’s easy for that to overwhelm other aspects of your life and eventually cause problems. For example, if you happen to play with people in other time zones, you might end up playing a lot after midnight or in the early hours of the morning. Doing so consistently might wreck your sleep patterns and impact your health.

I can see the benefits of MMOs and why people enjoy them, but the way many of them are structured mean that I won’t be partaking in them.