A busy player is a happy player… or not?

     Back in 2000 Ernest Adams, one of my favorite game design writers, wrote a little article called Letter From a Dungeon, all written in-character: one young hero who set out to be a great adventurer, fighting for glory… and instead of epic tales full with glory because of mighty deeds he finds himself fighting hordes after hordes of faceless monsters. To me it remains the best to date ilustration of the tragedy that IMO plagues gaming: in the trailers and cinematics you’re promissed reason, drama, epic things, but the games end up being filled with fighting monster after monster, all looking and feeling the same… a huge mass of duplicates. My latest example: from the first clip I saw of Bioshock i was fascinated… why? because it looked like amazing art direction, amazing potential to tell a story through visuals… the promisse of great atmosphere… but recently i got to play a bit of it… and my heart was broken: it seems that all that great artwork, instead of being used to create a ton of atmosphere was just the background for yet another shooter. Why did i feel that way? Because in the trailers it felt like each enemy would have personality, it’s own tragedy, and drama… but then they popped out more, and instead of feeling different they felt the same, just thrown at me to keep me busy…
       Can’t talk from experience but I suspect that’s a biggie with MMOs too: they’ve got to keep you busy all that time. And what better way than having you kill monster after monster? 58 of type A, 25 of type B … etc etc etc. Add to that the inventory management that seems to be a big part of what people call RPG-ing… and you’ve got busy players. But are they happy players? Sure there is some satisfaction to be gained in these things… but I believe not nearly as big it could have been if they were exposed to more content, to more artwork, to more reason for the endless slaughter, to the choice of solving things in other ways…
I’ll leave you with some quotes from Ernest Adams’ writing, warmly recomending a full read:

Dozens, hundreds of beasts have I slain, in considerable variety of species; but each individual is identical to all its fellows of the same species. There is none of the variation one expects to find among living things, and I find myself wondering if they are not creatures of machinery or magic, all conjured from some template somewhere. They attack in groups of four or five, seldom more, and although there are obviously hundreds of them in the dungeon, they never mass in overwhelming numbers. They are clearly extremely stupid, possessing neither any organizational skill nor a communications system to summon their fellows. They attack blindly, marching towards us, taking no advantage of cover or tactical opportunities. And so we mow them down. The simplest expedient is to stand in a door and slaughter them one by one as they approach.
This is not the way Beowulf fought Grendel. In this business I am no hero, no warrior; I am an exterminator, a dog killing rats in a crate.
…I said above that I do not know what I am. For sure I am not a hero; a greedy and bloodthirsty mercenary, perhaps. Yet when this is done, I have sworn to regain my pride and my self-respect. I shall study again the virtues of the legendary heroes of old… between the covers of a book.