Community Manager Laura Genender explores the motivations behind MMORPG play in her most recent Community Forum Spotlight.
What do we play MMOs for? The idea behind gaming is to have fun; most of us do this as a hobby, and why would you take part in a hobby if you didn’t enjoy it? For forum user Devour, though, the gaming industry has forgotten about fun and only thinks about competition. “We now play for bragging rights,” claims Devour. “The average MMO gamer no longer plays for the chance to have fun, they play for the cheese at the end of the road – the tier gear, the nice looking items. We're seeing the end of gaming being games, something you do for fun and maybe a bit of money. Now, they're a life away from life, a repetitive grind of same tasks repeated for pixels.” Devour isn’t the only poster who feels this way; a lot of posters agree with him. User sitheus answers, “It’s mostly because of the game design of raiding and grinding for loot and players accepting it unanimously and will continue as long as it makes a profit. The fun usually stops once your guild turns into loot zombies as fun is replaced with guildies wondering aimlessly around chanting "need to raid, need loot...need to grind, need loot". It’s almost as if they are mind controlled. Scary stuff.”
Read the whole column here.
