A story I found.

I found this story on reddit, written by HobbitFoot. With his permission I am posting it here for others to read. You can find the original article here. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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A lot of modern games have terribly written rules, even games that are made for children. They usually rely on someone who knows how to play the game and a set of rules provided to clarify small issues.
Case in point, when I went to high school, I saw a group of developmentally challenged kids huddled around a pair of twins trying to play a game of Pokemon: The Card Game one morning. I say trying because what they were playing obviously wasn’t how to play the game. I knew how to play the game, and I had time to kill so I started to teach them. They seemed to pick up some of the basics of it.

My group of friends, all in AP classes, were getting into Pokemon as a small break from Magic: the Gathering. So, one day, those kids saw us playing and started hanging around. They would watch us play, get help from us to play each other, and even played us. We all knew that they were taking classes to go work at the local supermarket and would say some odd things, but they weren’t crazy and it wasn’t like we were winning any popularity awards ourselves.

Eventually, we switched back to Magic; Pokemon was too simple and didn’t mesh well with the large multiplayer games we would have at lunch. The twins saw us play Magic, and wanted to learn. We would teach them, starting with the basics. Soon, they were playing games with our decks with us correcting them if they made any mistakes. They got better, and soon wanted their own cards. I sold the two of them some simple decks with mainly commons in it for a couple of bucks each; one was a blue deck and one was a red deck.

The lunch games I had with my friends were great. Some people would die, but the games rarely finished; we didn’t care. However, one day, I was just getting pounded on. I was down to four life. Then, it was one of the twin’s turns. He had the red deck; he had a Lava Axe; he dealt five damage to me. I tried to convince him to keep me alive, but he didn’t want that. He wanted the victory, and my friends backed him up saying the win was fair and square.

He beat me.

This was a guy who was literally near the bottom end of intelligence at the school; he was segregated out to take specialty classes because he couldn’t handle normal ones. I was one of the school’s brightest, acing the AP classes I was taking without breaking a sweat and earning academic awards from the school and from outside events.

He beat me at my own game.

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MMO vs Multiplayer

This is a topic I've been thinking about lately.

In my past mmo's have been a large chunk of my gaming time. I played games such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, which involve countless hours of "grinding". Grinding for xp to reach max level, doing dailies for money, doing heroics for valor, etc. Then there are the raids which can take hours, with chance you might not get a single drop. All of this is so that I could get a small increase in my characters stats.

Vinzulu - 19 Troll Rogue Twink - World of Warcraft

It seems in mmo's that you have to put in an incredible amount of work to have a little fun. I've read before that mmo's are designed to get you to play as long as possible. This means dragging out everything as far as they can. In 2011 I started slowing my grinding to an eventual halt. I first stopped raiding, then heroics, then dailies. I still enjoyed pvp doing battlegrounds, but since I didn't grind for honor points I didn't fare very well.

Then in 2012 I eventually stopped playing WoW, and pretty much swore off grinding. So what had brought on this change to reduce and eventually remove grinding from my life? I came to a new philosophy. If I am playing a video game, I am playing it to have fun. As such, I am only going to play it if I am having fun. What I realized is that I wasn't really playing at all, I was working. Doing dailies, heroics, etc was work, not play.

Since then I've rarely played an mmo, except for Guild Wars 2. I'm mostly playing single and multiplayer games, such as Skyrim, Tribes Ascend, Farcry 3, and Chivalry. These games can be immensely enjoyable, and have a high fun for your time ratio. Have half an hour to kill? You could do a heroic you've done fifty times before, or you could rack up a great kill count or go on a quest to save a town from pirates.

Zappi - Asura Engineer - Guild Wars 2

Writing this article has brought up a few questions however. Leveling up is found in both an mmo and in multiplayer/single player games. So what is the difference? Why does one seem like a chore while the other is often just a byproduct of having fun? One of the answers I think lies in an earlier statement of mine, that mmo's try to stretch things out. Why are there so many games coming out as mmo's?

Also, what MMO would you like to have been a multiplayer game instead? What would it be like?