On the subject of MMORPGs, I’ve enjoyed playing one for about a year and then it stopped being fun. In the beginning the interesting part was the world exploration, acts of learning new things, rules and interactions between various parts of the system, feeling of steady advance towards some clearly defined goal and work that was guaranteed to pay off. After a while grinding has started to become annoying and my interest shifted towards minmaxing everything and writing complex scripts to allow bots do the boring parts.
Then realisation hit me. In real world an extraordinarily efficient way of doing things is good, it’s called an invention. In a game it is called cheating. Nature doesn’t care what smart tricks you used to achieve your goals. In a game if it wasn’t anticipated by developers it probably counts as an exploit. The universe has a set of unchanging rules, a game is perpetually balanced by series of patches and crutches in unpredictable places. By being creative you are fighting against game developers, which is pointless because they will actively oppose and get rid of you through their control over the sandbox. You aren’t expected to have hacker (in the original meaning of the word) kind of fun in such games.
You aren’t expected to have hacker (in the original meaning of the word) kind of fun in such games.
You can be expected to have that kind of fun, but only in the better sorts of games. I’m thinking particularly of games like Minecraft where, after mastering the game’s own systems, the player’s next activity is “write some neat game systems of your own and share them around so other people can expand their experiences”.
On the subject of MMORPGs, I’ve enjoyed playing one for about a year and then it stopped being fun. In the beginning the interesting part was the world exploration, acts of learning new things, rules and interactions between various parts of the system, feeling of steady advance towards some clearly defined goal and work that was guaranteed to pay off. After a while grinding has started to become annoying and my interest shifted towards minmaxing everything and writing complex scripts to allow bots do the boring parts. Then realisation hit me. In real world an extraordinarily efficient way of doing things is good, it’s called an invention. In a game it is called cheating. Nature doesn’t care what smart tricks you used to achieve your goals. In a game if it wasn’t anticipated by developers it probably counts as an exploit. The universe has a set of unchanging rules, a game is perpetually balanced by series of patches and crutches in unpredictable places. By being creative you are fighting against game developers, which is pointless because they will actively oppose and get rid of you through their control over the sandbox. You aren’t expected to have hacker (in the original meaning of the word) kind of fun in such games.
You can be expected to have that kind of fun, but only in the better sorts of games. I’m thinking particularly of games like Minecraft where, after mastering the game’s own systems, the player’s next activity is “write some neat game systems of your own and share them around so other people can expand their experiences”.