New Friends

Are they brothers?

While I'm not nearly as dramatic as Stabby, I do make my own observations. Like... for example the recently married Taur and Karn Stonehoof. Thunderbluff's recently married butch gay duo have gone into business selling blacksmith supplies like leather pants, leather gloves, big hammers and hot pokers.


I know I'm not the only antihero who has my eye on these two. Species differences aside, I could really stand to get some good gym advice in Thunderbluff.

Fighting and thinking:

Being a warrior doesn't encourage thinking. I don't have time to consider the moral weight of the the skulls I'm smashing.... If blood stops spraying, I lose the berserker rage that gives me momentum. It's funny how Blizzard builds these traits into the game, messing with my mind.

Anyway,

I'm going to Northrend. I hear they have a zombie problem. I hear they have frozen axes out there.

-Glyph

A Morality Tale

Now those of you who have played a modern video game will know that story telling has greatly improved since the days of simple eat-dots-avoid-ghost narratives, or even the stereotypical rescue-princess-from-turtles scenario. Millions of dollars are spent on cutscenes, voice actors and top notch writers to render blockbuster movie quality storytelling.

WOW, not so much.

Which is not to say that WOW doesn't feature any of the above mentioned things, simply that it is not really presented in the same way as you'll find in other games. WOW does what is sometimes called passive storytelling- If you're interested in understanding WHY you're killing 20 whatsits, you can read the text and talk to various NPCs and find out, but if you're just interested in getting to the next level, you can go through the game largely unaware of the story being told underneath the actions you're undertaking.

As a writer, I'm fascinated by passive storytelling. It's a delicate balancing act, trying to create a full, rich narrative while couching it in ways that can be disregarded. It's a pretty thankless task, really: No novelist writes with the understanding that his words will be a largely optional part of the expirience. But, games are not books, are not movies: They're games. And if a gamer doesn't want to watch your movie, doesn't want to read your briefing, why should he? In some games, those elements are more part of the playing experience- Games with dialog trees or quicklime events - but not WOW. If there is a story to be told, it has to be told in ways that don't get in between the player and the thing the player is supposed to kill.

WOW deals with this in various ways: Many of the zones have real world analogues so that if you don't take the time to understand how an oil rig works in WOW, you'll at least have the real world counterpart to equate it to in your mind. All of this which is a lead in to a morality play that played out the other day:

Stabby was setting out in the typical adventure: Head to place Y, Kill X amount of creature Z. But then when he got there:

If you don't see it in the screenshot above, that is a den mother, naturally, surrounded by her cubs. Wait- what?
In Alpha Protocol, a recent action RPG, one of the statistics that the game keeps track of is "orphans created". It's really just a little tougue in cheek number, based off of the kills you make through the game. I mean, it's not like you kill various guards and militia members when they're surrounded by their children. Well, here.... I'm mean, it's WOW, right? There's no real narrative complexity. Press a button, numbers come out and if you do it long enough, the numbers get bigger. Besides, it's not like you can KILL the kids by right clicking on them or anything. Right? Right?
Oooo...

Listen, this game is about races constantly at war with each other, each titanic clash followed by a bigger, crazier, more epic one. Death is a minor setback, involving at worst a long run back to your corpse and a trip to the nearest blacksmith to fix up any broken equipment. You can spend hours chasing a fellow player back and forth across the land, killing each other over and over again dozens of times. But killing little kids, even bear creature kids... That shit is fucked up.

When I returned to drop off my quest, I noticed a daily quest (which I typically avoid) that happened to actually address the issue: This member of the tribe you're allied with worried about the ramifications of the war with the bear creature tribe and wanted you to, instead of killing, CAPTURE the cubs to some un-elaborated upon end.
Better?

I'm not sure. Wow isn't a game that I typically ask questions about. Penny Arcade recently touched on this kind of thing. I mean, I went and did the quest, "saving" a dozen of the little cubs. But it wouldn't let me save more. And even if I did, the nature of MMOs leaves them doomed to a cyclical fate, set to watch their parents killed over and over again, only occasionally to be "saved" by a player. Rinse, lather, repeat.

This whole episode gave me pause. Really, what was this game trying to say to me? What was the right thing to do? Had WOW passed my personal threshold of appropriateness? It was while I was thinking these thoughts that a baby polar bear attacked me out of the blue and forced me to kill it.
I mean, come on, XP, right?