Maybe it's better that these time wasters die, speaking as someone who played them way too much.
Now playing alone for the dopamine rush of successfully grinding repetitive tasks: yeah, that's a bit of a time waster. Maybe therapeutic for some, and definitely not the most harmful way to spend time and get validation, but also a bit pointless. But I would argue that if you play an MMORPG alone you're doing it wrong. If you don't have friends at least get engaged in a guild and spend countless hours improving real-life social and leadership skills.
But point is, that realization isn't that simple, it took a long time for cooperative games to become common. In early days game consoles had cooperative split screen to let two players play at the same time, not because that was more fun, so it took a really long time for cooperative modes to become standard in online gaming because it wasn't at all obvious that people liked cooperative play.
MMORPGs were the main cooperative online games for a long time. Today we have dedicated short session cooperative games, those are still very popular.
Speaking of social cues, interacting with others specially in a complex environment where there can be severe competition as well as cooperation and difficult coordination, is something that also is worth practicing.
I have nothing against solo games, but this kind of thing is not practiced in a solo game.
Finally, I think other kinds of games (e.g. in competitive games) tend to have very simple interactions and objectives, compared to an MMO: there's a clear objective to win that's shared by everyone. Some MMOs have much more interesting interactions, where each person is interested in a different thing, and I think this contributes to a very rich atmosphere that isn't just 'Go win, try to win match, go out', i.e. more life-analogue (without other limitations of life, like you can't actually die, and being poor isn't as terrible as it often is IRL :( ).
The inputs to a computer game are more limited, you can't see people, their faces (and sometimes voices), the graphics are still a far cry from the more beautiful places.
Also, real life is full of responsibilities and large parts of it still, well, suck (bad jobs, exploitative practices, etc.). I think we're improving somewhat (greatly hampered by greed and power games).
If you have interesting activities IRL, like a great fulfilling job and hobbies (that are also potentially useful in other ways, like charity work), then by all means, but I think virtual worlds have their place in our lives.
It feels fun to be rewarded for something you accomplish in-game.
In many singleplayer games, you can slide difficulty up or down to change the effort:reward ratio.
In an MMORPG, though, you have different groups of players with different amounts of time. You want to make it fun for both the kid on summer vacation who is happy to spend 80 hours a week on a game (not a choice I want for my kid, but I was a kid once too) and an adult who has a 60-hour work week and exchanges 2 hours of sleep after the kids go to bed to play.
That means the person with more money than time will want to buy things from someone with more time than money. But this causes all kinds of distortion in the game balance and economy.
I don't know that this is solvable, whether you're trying to balance against cheap labor or AI bots.
Not sure how it'd compare against similar amounts of youtube/netflix though.
- Paul Morphy
One of my favorite chess quotes. As an avid chess player, I can't agree more.
How? A lot of games could be seen as a sort of 3D chess.
I have fond memories of LAN parties growing up, where socializing was as big a part as the actual gaming - it's not like we were sitting there harvesting wood for hours on end!
Much more than chess which is mostly a individually played game whereas an MMO is a cooperative game.
During the teenage years while the neocortex is growing, teenagers are practicing and honing fine motor control. Video games help develop that, as well as learning about social interactions, emergent system behaviour and strategic vs tactical thinking.
I’m not saying they don’t have downsides, but there are some upsides too.
Sure, if you’re an addictive personality using video game escapism to ignore your life problems, that’s a whole different thing (and even without video games this type of person would just find another form of escapism)
So I don’t agree with your generalisation of games as “time wasters” - maybe for you they are, but not for everyone, I don’t play them anymore very much (just a bit of chess every now and then) but they provided me with a lot of understanding in my formative years
I also agree that even MMORPGs have their upsides. But as a genre they're pretty unhealthy.
We've reinvented how arcade games used to try and extract maximum quarters, but the iteration cycle is so much faster now that we can't really play whack-a-mole on all the pathological human manipulation strategies people deploy now, and with people not being able to physically walk away from their phones or other devices in many cases, it's Bad(tm).
I used to think: “Anything that got rid of the ‘pointless grinding’ aspect of RPGs would be an improvement.” And then micro transactions and pay-to-win got invented. I didn’t think it was possible but game designers somehow actually managed to make RPGs even worse!
Some people find incremental progression for weeks or months or years at an achievement point or something similarly ephemeral to be satisfying. Some people think that it's not worth doing anything that you can't get in one play session.
Neither of them are wrong, for them, necessarily, but I do believe there's a nonzero amount of friction you want to introduce, and various sweet spots for friction versus people saying it's too much but still loving the game and playing it versus it actually driving away too many people.
I have played a number of fairly grindy games to various definitions of completion, and found it satisfying to play them more than once and get a lot of the optional objectives again. I have other friends who spend a week just grinding out the cap of various items in early game and then coast through the rest and think anyone who thinks a week of nothing but grinding to do that is mind-numbing and unpleasant is just wrong. I have other friends who have refused to play games older than PS4 era because the graphics not being hyper-realistic drives them out of the game and they think anyone who enjoys anything remotely grindy is just rationalizing broken systems.
But ultimately, for many games, you play them for the incremental satisfaction, and ensuring you get a steady drip of that and incremental fixes of larger satisfaction until completion, without turning each hit into a microtransaction exploitation, is the essence of making a game that people want to play again. Nintendo does this very well, in a number of their games even in modern times.
I feel like not understanding that there is a certain amount of padding required for you to enjoy a game as much as you might otherwise, because humans don't process things instantly or handle a truly constant flow of engaging things well, is one of the things a lot of people I see who play games and complain about being bored when they bounced off spending more than 15 minutes on it don't appreciate.
(Not saying you're one of those people or making that argument, just that I see a lot of people arguing that various kinds of friction could be removed, without thinking about how much that changes the perceived experience.)
I didn't say they were
A large percentage of social interaction in a game like world of warcraft is profoundly negative and maladaptive. I'm not sure I would want my child learning about that in a MMO.
We don't give kids as many opportunities to make mistakes in real life, I dunno.
"Why did you do that if it doesn't make money?"