The MMO Agenda: Total World Hegemony
If you aren’t completely burned out from hearing how woefully harmful MMOs are, GameSetWatch has an interesting rundown of some of the latest moves in this unending, probably fruitless ballet. Broken Toys blogger and MMO designer Scott “Lum” Jennings debunks some claims made by a recent article in the Washington Post, namely that game companies retain ranks of psychologists whose evil goal is to help games captivate players for increasingly long periods of times.
Click below for the full scoopy-thing:
Says Jennings:
Um, OK. I don’t know of any psychologists employed by an MMO company for that purpose (or at all, actually). Maybe they’re kept in dungeons. When the topic comes up around me, I keep trying to explain that we’re not nearly that bright, and simply try to write up our D&D campaign from high school, over and over again. No one ever believes me. Maybe if I drool uncontrollably while saying it?
Now, that may be true, but there’s still some food for thought when a topic like this just won’t die. There’s an interesting take on the ennui of reaching level 60 in World of Warcraft over at PlasticBag, where Yahoo’s Tom Coates asks some reasonable questions:
I’ve started wondering whether a game could still be considered good if you want to play it a lot but at the same time resent the time that it takes from you. What if you find it boring but still somehow can’t put it down. Can you love and hate a game at the same time and still call it ‘fun’? Can a game be a narcotic, or a guilty secret or an addiction? Can it be a fruitless activity without value that still feels good?
Good question. Except I’ve felt the same way about Tetris, Hexic, Sudoku, crossword puzzles, masturbation, the Discovery Channel HD, and several kinds of pies. Isn’t this really more of a tendency of human behavior in general? And the Washington Post provides its own best rebuttal:
According to tvturnoff.org, Americans spend an average of 28 hours a week watching television, a fact that has yet to spawn a bevy of dependence clinics.
Does this mean I have to give up watching reruns of Blow Out? Because man, those b*tches do some fierce hair.
tiny dancer
Posted to Video Games on 21 August 2006
Other stuff like this: addiction, mmo
