A Sense Of Direction: Lost

Sports games have a direction for a player to head in, no matter the sport or game. You go for the gold, the championship or whatever the top prize is in the given sport. You know how to get there too, by beating everyone else at whatever sport the game involves. With MMOs, it can even be difficult to figure out where to begin. When I first started playing World of Warcraft, I could not tell how to get out of the opening town. Another online player had to tell me where the exit was, and that I had to ride a bird out of the city. Once out of the city, I could “do whatever I wanted.” I "wanted" to beat the game, but I had no idea how to, and most gamers just told me that was not "how this game worked." I could only attempt to level up my character, which I did by walking around and fighting monsters. Fighting monsters was fun at first, but you can only fight so many monsters using the same tactics. There is really no game plan, except maybe to “kill the monster.” Once you find out how to kill a certain monster, a player can use the same pattern/tactic for every monster with the same statistics. With sports, each team has a different attack, and even the game-to-game plans against the same team change, depending on match-ups, shooting percentage, etc. Each team has a star player, or a hidden play, while with an MMO, a player can look up online the statistics and strategies that beat each monster, boss, or even the just where to go to find stuff, which kind of takes away from the exploration idea of the MMO. A gamer can look up all the tips they want on how to beat the Pistons in the finals in NBA Live 06, but even the best gamer could easily mess it up. The only sense of direction I was able to discern from anything was to follow the online guides. At least the guides had places to go and things to check off, but even then I felt more like I was wandering than working towards a goal. There is an absolute lack of competitiveness to walking around a map, and without somewhere to go or something to do, a lot of gamers will give up and move on to a more exciting game.

But where does that leave us?