Having played WoW, City of Heroes, Final Fantasy XI, some Everquest, a little Guildwars, etc...I've since given up on this particular model of online play. They're always fun to start. They always do just one thing new or different enough to make me think that, somehow, this time, I've found something different, and worthy of my continued attention and emotional dedication.
But after tearing myself free from these games, they always, 100% of the time, leave me with the nagging feeling that they have served me no other purpose than a monumental time-suck. I feel no fulfillment. I have not made friends. I have not learned anything and nothing has been expressed. I've let another accursed little goblin worm its way into my head and take tiny little bites out of my soul--for no reason.
There is a concept, as a student of game design, of how to make a game more addictive. Lengthen objectives with mini-objectives. Have the rewards lead to new tasks. Have the Big Reward always just over the horizon. Figure out your risk/reward cycle and exploit the hell out of it.
MMO's run headlong at all of these design philosophies and milk them to death until they become cardinal sins. They do this because more time spent playing the game equates to more money given via subscription--or pay-to-play items, or advertising, or what have you. They are money-making machines. Nothing more. Nothing less. There is no art in them but what is derived by accidental consequences of the sheer amount of time and human energy involved in their continued existence.
The thing they forget to tell you when they're arguing about how games have the capacity to tell stories in new, unique ways is that games also have an inherent stranglehold on select human behavioral tendencies, in a way that other mediums of art absolutely cannot imitate. Game designers sit down and ask, "How do I tweak the player's brain to make them think this, and do that?" MMO designers sit down and ask: How do I keep them playing? It's psychological exploitation, plain and simple--and the responsibility cuts both ways, as players who dedicate forty hours of their week to what is at best masturbation and at worst sado-masochistic extortion continually fail to ask, "Why the fuck am I doing this?"
Eventually you just have to take a step back, unplug from the mechanisms they've behaviorally designed to snare you, and ask . . . why the hell am I still playing this game? And when you do, there's this kind of base-level Lovecraftian horror when you realize the weeks and months you've hurled into the void, that you can never have back--that, someday, you will be lying on your deathbed, desperately trying to account for the cumulative 48-hour-period you wasted, vainly hoping to obtain a fucking digital hat. Or growing a digital plant. Or whacking digital monsters with a digital stick, to obtain digital money, to continue buying more of the shiny arbitrary digital macguffins they've laid on your increasingly-endless breadcrumb trail into the abyss . . . and all of it is so hopelessly, ridiculously inconsequential to any kind of objective reality.
It's just a waste of time. Nothing more. Nothing less.
So yeah. I would have to agree. They're evil. WoW is only (inevitably) the oldest, largest, and guiltiest of this breed--and if it wasn't WoW, it would be some other game, occupying the exact same place and doing the exact same thing.
They're about as offensive as a bunny rabbit squeaky toy.
