Player killed the Videogame Star, Part 1

There is an odd trend amongst gaming and gaming groups that relates directly to the quality of the players. Game players as a people, often deemed such reverent titles as “nerd” and “dork”, are known for their quirkiness and general lack of a full range of social skills. It’s true. That’s why we spend our days reading websites that talk about our dark desires and secret lusts. This obviously does not go for every single person that plays games, but this is not an all-encompassing article just an observation of trends.

There are a number of great games, generally that are very popular, which are amazingly designed and produced, extremely fun to play, but that suffer from an overall flaw that ruins most of what the game should be. What I am talking about is the game players; the people who bring the game to life are also what condemn it to disparity. The most obvious example of this is the popular computer game called Counter-Strike. I’ll just assume that most of you already know plenty about the game, but if you’ve ever played it you will notice a few things very quickly. The game in all of its versions has always looked nice; it has an air of realism put into the art and design that immerses the player almost instantly. It is also very fun, pitting teams of players against each other as terrorists versus counter-terrorists with varying map objectives ranging from planting a bomb at a specific site, rescuing hostages from guarded locations, or escorting a VIP to an evacuation point. All in all it is a fantastically wonderful game.

The problems arise when you are online playing, which coincidently is the only way to really play the game, in any public server you will immediately notice that it seems like you are playing with a bunch of monkeys. Highly trained, secret-service monkeys who are also Navy SEALS, which seem to have missed every educational course in English since the time of their birth and suckled entirely upon the internet for sustenance, that like to kick your ass and brag about it. While not in the classroom learning proper grammar and etiquette, these primates were apparently placed with eye-straps ala the Clockwork Orange in front of every single Tarantino movie while their brains became baked like scrapple with profanity and obscenity. These people are not nice. From what I can tell they seem to be playing the game entirely to shoot other people and gloat about it, while simultaneously attempting to ruin everyone else’s enjoyment of the game through sheer idiocy.

Counter-strike, however, is just the more popular example of this plague upon gaming culture. Another computer game that is quickly falling to the same fate is World of Warcraft. This is, in my personal and artistic opinion, one of the most amazing computer games developed to date. As with most of Blizzard’s products, it is very polished and beautiful game, it has a number of flaws and problems but overall as an MMORPG it is far beyond any of the competitors that are on the market. The problem arises in that it is an MMORPG and depends entirely upon the other players for it to be as fulfilling as it was designed to be. The largest issue with WoW is that the Chinese have quickly found a market to exploit, despite being illegal, and many factories have formed where players are using the game solely to farm for gold, sell items, and overall just abuse the internet and the in-game economy to their own personal gain. The problem arises when their farming of specific creatures or items interferes with all of the other players in the area, and it serves to sour the game play experience greatly.

Another famous detractor from the enjoyment of WoW is the aptly named “ninja-looter”. This is a person who tags along with large groups of people performing difficult dungeon raids and decides to have a chance at stealing every item they come across so that they can sell it for their own gain. Generally players have a common courtesy for one another that if something is not directly useful to a player they will not take it, unless no one in the party can use it at which point it is open to anyone. These are the two most famous types of game-spoiling players that are encountered in World of Warcraft, and they stem from a general lack of compassion, generosity, and kindness that comes from many people while playing an online game.

These games are created for the enjoyment of everyone who plays them, and they are created very well. Problems like these arise when people do not respect the intention of the game, they do not respect other players, and they either intentionally or unconsciously seek to ruin the experience for everyone involved. These examples served to show how the players become the all important factor in a game, no matter how well designed or implemented a game can still be destroyed by the people that play it. The next part of this discussion will focus on the more personal world of table-top gaming.