Overly Positive

 Over at Warhammer Alliance, where I write things that are not always as sunny as this little space of the internet, I wrote a piece about the lack of pride in WAR these days, where it went, and what we can do to get it back.

On a side note from that particular article is the idea that people who’ve played MMOs for longer than a few years or so, and remember, with pain but fondness, the need to go retrieve one’s own corpse, are getting a bit frumpish in their old age. Glory days of unforgiving mechanics aside, it’s just darned difficult for the MMO geriatrics of the world to keep up with this new fangled attitude of gear and achievements.

As much as MMO grumps of yore would like to continue being so, let me introduce to you a bright ray of sunshine, as I always do.

For one thing, in your older age, aren’t you glad that your progress isn’t wiped out by a few careless deaths or a mechanic that perma-loses your gear if you don’t do something successful? After all, you’re not a spring chick anymore. I daresay some of you have found such inconvenient things as a “real job”, “bills”, “responsibility”, and for some of you, the dreaded “children effect”. With your all-nighter college days behind you, do you really have time to play a game that punishes you for being just a little bit unaware?

And what about the “massive” in massively multiplayer. Sure, you may shake your cane at those young whippersnappers who zip around you like they were playing Counterstrike and mash a button like they would suffer a heart attack if they didn’t. And yes, there are plenty of new generation MMO players that are just not the kind of people that would sit down with you for a game of canasta and roleplaying. But the charm of MMOs is the critical mass of people that are playing them. As long as you’re selective with your canasta and roleplaying partners in the vast world of MMO population, you should do just fine.

Finally, there’s the ease of participating in what we all play MMOs for, character development. Do you remember what it was like to raise your statistics in a game like Ultima Online? Sure, you relished the moment you gained a stat after countless whacks of the practice dummy in your house, but damn if it was hard to just get done. MMOs these days make things easy – so easy even a trained monkey can do it. You could be brain dead and still level up certain classes to your heart’s content. How convenient is that?

So the next time you’re having a hankering for the good old days, I have a bit of advice for you. Try to load your character with no armor or weapons and get into a fight. Then roll your face across the keyboard and when you die, bash your face on it repeatedly. You’ll get the same sense of burning inconvenience and physical pain from dying as you did in one of those early old school MMOs.