Conflict and MMOs

 I brought you a gun!

The landscape of the massively multiplayer world is well trodden by just about every single style of game that one can feasibly come up with. We've had MMOs that based themselves on the rigors of colonialism, several set in vast fantasy worlds that span dozens of interwoven cultures, giant sci-fi MMOs that throw players into the cold reaches of space and sets them off to explore its depths, MMOs that take roleplaying as such an integral part of it's systems that it's developers throw themselves into the game and roleplay as high level quest givers, and MMOs based on famous books and movie franchises with giant overarching narratives to explore. But throughout all of the grandiosity of the MMO genre, it's actually quite surprising to find that the core successful  few MMOs all seem to revolve around the same simple ideal: Player driven conflict.

Now you might frown a bit and recount how all stories are driven by conflict in some manner, and you would be pretty much absolutely right- but what I'm taking about here is player driven; and I'm not limiting myself to the scope of the narrative. I'm talking about the games that base their audience in one of several camps, typically at odds with one another, and uses the momentum of that natural competition and conflict between opposing teams to fuel the player base (and retention) beyond and between major content drops. It's a similar heart beating in the chests of some of the biggest MMOs out there, and within that may lie the secret to creating a functioning and sustainable MMO formula that at least has a chance to exist in the very inhospitable space that MMOs inhabit in the modern day.

Of course, whenever I'm thinking of MMOs the first that comes to mind is going to be World of Warcraft. There is a game within which the player base is split between the arbitrary line of 'Alliance' and 'Horde', between those party lines the various playable races are scattered. The narratives of the game were originally heavily driven by the conflict between those two factions, even providing exclusive areas and questlines for each side, as established and built upon by the Warcraft games. Whilst that is always important in the heart of the story, some of the as later expansions have taken a more lax approach and brought those two sides together to battle against common foes more often than not. (Player bases don't like being split down the middle, afterall.) These faction lines decide who's going to facing the other in the arena, as well as in the general struggle for minigame side activities across the world- fuelling some natural space for players to provide their own motives and goals.

We also have Star Wars The Old Republic, which is an MMO built within a world that already had a very workable divide of 'Dark and Light' to split it's players between. Just as with WOW, players of either faction have their own selection of classes and race, which would influence the places that players start, where they explore, and even the majority of the narrative they resolve. And, once again, players would find themselves going against each other in PVP sectors of the game, and coming together for later-on PVE crossover expansions. Again, relying on the conflict for between-content fuel, and subtly ignoring it when it's easier to introduce a wild third NPC faction for everyone to beat on. (It's easier than designing distinct routes for each faction and class within that faction everytime you want to drop some new content, I suppose.)

Perhaps the most recent example of this sort of MMO set-up would be for Amazon's New World, which doesn't explicitly establish battle lines from the moment that the player spawns in, but does build the majority of it's higher gameplay ideals around the movement of factions known as 'companies'. These organisations battle for territory and market supremacy in a dance that can feasibly be entirely ignored by the solitary player if they so choose, but there's no pushing forward to the best gear sets and facing the toughest challenges without getting embroiled in that political hot plate eventually. Still, the conflict of PVP drives the decisions of the endgame content producers, although additional content has been PVE geared for the time being.

And then there's my MMO of choice, The Elder Scrolls Online. From it's very concept this game was based around the three faction war, split between the races of Tamriel and presenting three entirely separate questlines across distinct tacts of land. The centrepiece of the game was even a giant board of 'secure the territory' played across all of Cyrodill in a brutal no-mans-land that was PVP heaven to a lot of the 'killers' in the playerbase. This was a direction that Zenimax even stuck with for a while, with the first official expansion being the Imperial City, through which you could either battle with enemies both player and NPC for the above-ground districts or mount strike teams through monster littered dungeons. Of course, this was only for a time. Eventually one Tamriel released and broke down all barriers allowing any faction to visit any land and leaving the 'war' to PVE only sections.

What we're seeing consistently is the way that MMO's seem to work best when they stoke some interaction between players, typically conflict. And as I've alluded, I think the reason is simply because it allows the player base to keep themselves completely busy whilst actual new content is made behind the scenes. Although, interestingly, most MMOs know that further development is better served veering towards the wider player base of those who don't want to engage with the pressures of PVP, which creates a strange dichotomy wherein for a lot of these games, the PVP landscape doesn't really change as the game around it evolves to complete distinction. But a game that practised what it preached would end up simply backing it's potential for growth up in a corner, so what is there to do?

As it happens there are endless unique ways to handle an MMO that don't get the chance to shine so often. I'm often left in complete awe by the likes of The Matrix MMO wherein the server hosts played 'Roleplay' with the ordinary folk to stir something of a narrative within their world, or 'Star Wars Galaxies' wherein the draw was to literally adopt a role within the Star Wars Universe and simply evolve within that. The sideways progression MMO's are woefully underserved in the modern MMO market, and only the unhinged kickstarter pipe-dreamers seem interested in giving that style of development a shot anymore.(Well... them and JAGEX) Perhaps a game that doesn't rely so heavily on the aura of conflict wouldn't need to betray it's own identity quite so often. But that's just food for thought, I suppose.

Elder Scrolls online and character migration

 'The players are never right', apparently...

The Elder Scrolls Online made it's latest proclamation during the Bethesda/Microsoft hybrid conference amalgamation, and I would be lying if I didn't say it was probably one of the least interesting sections of that presentations next to Forza, depending on what you like out of your game genres. The Elder Scrolls online is so much of a known quantity these days that it's hard to really get excited as an outsider for it's new year-long expedition into one of the various remaining nooks and crannies' still left over on the Tamriel map. That being said, the Zenimax team did reveal a new class coming to the roster, which is something that ESO doesn't do very often, so that alone is going to draw some curious eyes. But as for my eyes, even if I wanted to look back at the game I left behind, the end result would be me just shrugging my shoulders in frustration because increadibly, in the year of our lord 2023, Bethesda as a company have stubbornly refused to adopt any form of save migration.

Gaming is a rapidly evolving medium these days that regularly jumps from newer hardware to new platforms with the regularity of the tides rising, nothing is capable of staying static in the world of evolving technology. But our save data for all of these online games, where info is kept server-side, can often get themselves tied to the consoles we leave behind, preventing a problem with preservation and longevity; both key pillars of MMOs. Maybe a console gamer is now a PC gamer and the reverse. How do you bridge that gap without losing players due to the slow march of time and personal circumstantial evolution? Well, the greatest minds of our age already pow-wowed to fix this. The solution is save migration, a system which has lingered in the public consciousness since the time of Mass Effect. It isn't automatic, and hardly flawless, but for online games that encourage you to 'main' a small group of characters for years on end, you'd have thought that basic save migration features would be a necessity, wouldn't you?

But you'd be wrong, wouldn't you! Because Bethesda seem utterly allergic to the very idea of porting progress from one platform to another, in a manner that I can't help but find utterly archaic in our modern age of interconnectivity. Now days we are constantly bedecked in smart functionality devices from phones to watches to fridges and light sockets, all of which talk to each with a complex web of networks and systems designed to work as intuitively and 'invisibly' as possible. Why is it that the modern world is so keen on bringing the typically mundane and static together, whilst the games industry with it's heart forged in the fires of this technically progressive world, seems so bitterly adverse? At first I bought the excuse, that Sony's unwillingness to open up it's ecosystem spelled stunted evolution for us all; but as Sony has slowly begun to reverse it's enclosed ecosystem and yet the boundaries remained, sights have to be retrained at the individual companies themselves.

Bethesda, though typically a single player company, have themselves a couple of ongoing multiplayer titles based on their properties and neither of them are open to cross platform play or migration. Fallout 76 in particular shut down any momentum towards players having the ability to migrate platforms, even as the older generation of the game struggles to provide a decent play experience that the new gen of consoles can offer. Oh sure, you can jump from Xbox One to Series X just fine, because Bethesda have to do next to nothing to facilitate that, but Xbox to Steam? No way, buddy; that's alien tech! What astounds me so much about this is, just like with Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76 is a universally updated game! Each version of the game maintains itself to the same update standard more or less, so it's pretty much the same game regardless of platform. Why is migration still such a taboo, then? 

For the Elder Scrolls Online this problems seem close to an actual sin of design. The game is supposed to be MMO, the very concept of migration should be in it's very blood! I know that part of the charm of The Elder Scrolls Online is the subtle removal of visible servers which allows anyone to play with anyone else, thus removing the concept of server hopping as it exists in more traditional MMOs, but honestly that kind of reinforces my point in a different way. Can they really market the global connectivity of the game, allowing people across the world to connect with one another to some limited degree and allow enemy factions to fight alongside one another; when they don't provide even the most basic account migration option from console to PC? I understand vice versa, but not even a one way conversion? That smells like hypocrisy to me!

Each time the patterns plays out in the exact same way. These studios remain utterly staunch in their stance against external player QOL procedures until such a situation where it becomes a necessity to their bottom line. If there was a new Xbox releasing with a distinctly incompatible server makeup to the Xbox of today, you can bet that Zenimax and Bethesda would scramble over on another to build some sort of bridging technology to ensure the generational jump would occur as seamlessly as possible. But today, in peace times, Bethesda are happy to laze about and grow fat laughing about the struggle thier fans have to go through if they want to migrate their progress and characters from one platform to another. Inexplicably giddy at how their years-long games need to be completely restarted if someone simply grabs themselves a change of hardware and doesn't want to fish out the Xbox just to play their favourite time waster game. It's maddening!

Bethesda are by no means alone in their rank laziness, a lot of prominent developers won't bother lift their hand unless it's already in the fire. But after seeing how easy it was for all those companies that found out Stadia was shutting down, during which they got together and built framework for a lot of save porting tech over the space of a couple of months, it becomes a really hard pill to swallow when contemporary studios declare it's too much work to figure out a clean save migration system to be used at players' leisure, not under the duress of an entire crumbling ecosystem. So instead of lauding the new Elder Scrolls update and brushing past the shortcomings, I'm dedicating this blog to my grumbling about inequities and unnecessary systemic omissions that bug me. Thank you so much, Bethesda, for not wanting my money bad enough to convince me not to buy your game on a new platform. I guess that is, unintentionally, somewhat conscientious of you.

The Elder Scrolls: Dwarves

 Where did they come from, where did they go?

The Elder Scrolls online was a perfect opportunity to expand the world and lore of Elder Scrolls further than it has done ever before, and in many ways that's exactly what they achieved with that game. By the very virtue of being an MMO set earlier than any other piece of media in the franchise, ESO has served as a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of lore snippets forever injected into it's healthy ecosystem. (as it is a rather good MMO nowadays as well.) There's only ever been a few little slip-ups here and there such as how 'The Lusty Argonian Maid' exists within the games files despite the fact you literally meet the author of that play in Morrowind. And he's a normal human, so there's no "Maybe he was alive for hundreds of years" to fall back on. Maybe he totally ripped off the play from some ancient unknown source, but the protagonist is still an obvious crude self-insert of him trying to bone his maid, so I think that's a weak argument. (I guess we'll chalk that up to temporal displacement, I don't know.) But there's one aspect of lore that, as was recent discussed, ESO will never get a chance to touch on, and that's because they've been forbidden. No, it's not the ever interesting eastern land of Akavir, which I would love Elder Scrolls 6 to be secretly based in, but instead the 'mystery' surrounding The Elder Scrolls' Dwarves, and it got me thinking about them myself.

Of course, Dwarves are a fantasy staple present in just about any fantasy setting you can imagine. (I'd joke about how that's a prevailing symptom of systemic ableism, but knowing this industry there's bound to be someone who'll take that too seriously.) Dragon Age, The Witcher, The Forgotten Realms, insert any fantasy franchise you want and no matter how grounded they are there's a good chance the game has dwarves. They all tend to be the same in concept as well, subterranean isolationists who specialise in all things related to minerals and the earth: mining, smithing, general metallurgy; that's always their thing. And yet despite the Elder Scrolls sharing that cliché, I must admit that their take on it is actually one of the most original I've seen across the various quite distinct franchises that I've mentioned. It's surprising to me because as much as I love the Elder Scrolls it does tend to be very clearly influence driven in a lot of manners; but not in the Dwarves.

Known in the lore as Dwemer (Deep Elves), leading off of the naming convention for Elfin races wherein they are some sort of descriptor followed by their species of 'mer', the Dwarves are still subterranean masters of their craft, only these guys fill the role of the mandatory long-missing civilisation for this universe. Every series has their own, the Engwithans, Aen Elle, those of the Elvhenan; traditionally this spot is held by the native-American allegory race, telling of a long lost culture of nature lovers who would live forever, be more moral, and just all round be better than all the scrub cultures who live nowadays. The Dwemer go a different direction, with the Dwarves being merely technologically superior, (and also not actually short in any fashion) but conceptually just as corrupt and backstabby as their modern day counterparts, with the added bonus that their tended to be a civilisations most predisposed towards blatant sacrilege. (They literally made artificial life to be their slave protectors, these guys were hardcore 'playing at god'.)

Where the mystery comes into it, is in the way that the Dwemer actually disappeared from the world, because this isn't your stereotypical story about a society that slowly collapsed after generations of withering fortunes, no the Dwemer's disappearance is much more abrupt than that. It was a disappearance in every sense of the word, in that one day they were there and the next they were not, with no clue left as to how an entire species vanished, where they went or if they can ever return. These are the sorts of mysteries hanging over the Elder Scrolls world ever since after Arena where the team decided that the mentioned-but-not-implemented Dwarves should be more interesting. Diving into this would be unravelling one of the great mysteries of the Elder Scrolls universe, but as Todd Howard himself apparently decreed; such is not the duty of the ESO team to cover.

Except, we do actually know how the Dwarves disappeared. Is this- am I being stupid here? This was covered pretty extensively in Morrowind, but we've just sort of continued like we didn't get a pretty open and shut story told to us. For the sake of those who missed it, the story goes like this. Indoril Nerevar, the Chimer (Dunmer Predecessors) war hero who's life and times are of central importance to the story of Morrowind, really had an issue with Dwarves. Their people were traditionally enemies, but he'd managed to secure a truce through his friendship with their leader King Dumac Dwarf-Orc. The two of them were the best of friends with a relationship so tight it bought warring nations to peace. That was, of course, until the world's bigger Narc, Dagoth Ur, ran to his master Nerevar to report about how his spies had watched the Dwarves chief scientist, Kagrenac, experimenting on the heart of Lorkhan.

Woah, back up a second; okay, so Lorkhan was an Aedric god who created the mortal plane and, in true promethean fashion, was punished for his transgression by having his heart thrown to Nirn. (The impact of which would form the volcano known as 'Red Mountain'.) So this was a sacred and holy artefact that some Dwarf dude, in all the hubris of mortals, had dug up and now was experimenting on. Something about creating a big artificial god with the heart of the Dragon of time or some such nonsense, it's a whole thing. (basically he's responsible for the events of Elder Scrolls 2 indirectly) Messing with such a holy relic tied to creationism is sacrilege, and Nerevar turns to Dumac to have this forcibly stopped. Dumac doesn't believe Nerevar, and the two nations end up at war again. Nerevar and Dagoth Ur manage to storm Red Mountain and Kagrenac's lair, but he has other ideas and tries to tap directly into the Heart of Lorkhan with his tools for some unknown cause. (Perhaps he hoped to be imbued with the power of a god to wipe out their Chimer foes.) In that moment something inexplicable happened, the entire Dwarven race was wiped from the face of existence in the blink of an eye. Where they went, nobody knows, and touching on that mystery is the only real direction this story could go on.

Although, and I loathe to try and interpret Mr Howard's own intentions here, but perhaps the idea is not to delve any deeper into the Dwarves at all, ever. Maybe, just maybe, the plan over at Bethesda is to keep the location of the Dwemer a secret for now and forever, only ever hinted at or teased upon, but never fully explored. I say this because of the commonly held theory that a mystery is often best left unanswered, because the conclusions of the mind will always trump anything the creators could come up with. It's a simple and inelegant solution to one of Elder Scrolls' largest running mysteries, but as this point what other choice does the team have? The Dwemer, in their absence, has been built up to being an entire race of genius-level intellects capable of creating fully autonomous robots that function perfectly generations without maintenance. The only reason to bring them back into the lore at this point would be if The Elder Scrolls were seriously considering a hard jump into the industrial age with factories, powered automobiles and firearms. And whilst that would be cool, I don't know if that would make the best fit for a fantasy world like Nirn.

Ultimately, however, the final decision falls to the creative team for how they want to handle this one. Personally I think it's a tale worth exploring, and there's certainly a way to 'bring back' the Dwemer people as a new race for players to toy around without defying the mystique and grandeur of the disappearance. What about a small colony of exiles getting discovered on some remote realm outside of the traditional purview of the Daedric princes, letting the species join the roster as some super rare special race? (I just want there to be more official Elder Scrolls races, it's pretty dry in that regard so far.) Let me know what your ideas are for the future of the Dwemer in The Elder Scrolls down in the comments: let's self-therapy in a group.

New ESO Tease

"No reaction is ever so forceful as the mixing of opposite components"

We're always talking about new games on this blog and making wild speculation upon titles with which I have no first-hand experience. It makes it difficult for me to get my thoughts together as I always feel like I'm out of my depth and screaming into the void. (Well I'm kind a doing that regardless but that's besides the point.) Today, however, I found a decent excuse to talk about a title with which I am incredibly, uncomfortably familiar with, and that is the Elder Scrolls Online; due to some light teasing that they pulled off regarding a brand new expansion to be revealed later this year. The tease was especially vague, however, so I may ramble.

As it would just so happen I am incredibly involved with The Elder Scrolls franchise as a whole, having played these games for over a decade now and- whoops, sorry lost my train of thought. (My own mortality caught up with me for a second there.) I feel like I must have mentioned it at least once before, but I credit the Elder Scrolls as the very first fantasy franchise that I truly got into at a visceral level and it's one of the only fictional worlds that I would truly want to live in. (Ohh, that'd be a good idea for a blog in the future! Actually, that'd make a more fun discussion but it's not like I really have that option...) When it comes to the world of Tamriel I can recount the races of the land, both playable and otherwise, and recall the historical moments of the founding of the empire. I can name the Septim Dynasty practically from founding to dissolution and I can reliably recite the opening 5 minutes of Skyrim from memory. In fact in matters vegetable, animal and mineral I am the very model of a fan who's ES hysterical.

It would come to the surprise of no-one then, that I was a very devout player of The Elder Scrolls Online back in my day, but interestingly enough I didn't hop on at initial inception. Just like with the trajectory of modern Bethesda, Zenimax's ESO launched in a fairly dire strait, and people lambasted the title enough to keep me far away. It was only after the first major overhaul to the game that I was tempted to give the title a shot with the promise of getting to play an MMO with actual friends. In truth I was always curious how the team could handle a Massive Multiplayer title from a lore perspective given how previous Scrolls protagonists were renowned for the scarcity of their type. (Those that they call 'Fateless' are only supposed to show up once a generation or so, for this title there were thousands!) That curiosity would turn into a feverish passion as I found myself swept up in my very first MMO love-affair. (Former WOW-Addicts will know how intense the first time always is.)

My time with ESO was perhaps the first time that I truly began to get into the concept of min-maxing, (Not that I ever got anywhere close to that with ESO, but it taught me how to apply that knowledge to over RPGs) raids, and communicating with other players in the game for coordination purposes. (There's an experience that I never want to go through again.) So it's safe to say that this title held an exceedingly precious place in my heart for a decent couple of years and those are the kind of gaming memories that I'll take into the joy stick afterlife, or whatever. The bubble would have to burst eventually, however, and for me it was when I realized that I was the only one who liked playing this game, everybody else was just in it for grinding the best loot and that sort of sucked all of the fun out. I liked the idea of role playing and not taking everything so darn seriously, (Unless we're talking about the 'Planar Inhibitor', because she was demanding of the utmost seriousness.) but I was alone in that desire and it meant that I ended up being alone in playing the game. It's no fun playing an MMO by yourself, and so I gave up the title. But I still pay attention every now and then to see what's going on with updates, not to gauge whether I'd jump back in, but to fantasize about what it would be like if I'd never left. (Does that sound weird? Reading it myself it comes across as weird.)

Good thing I got out when I did, however, as the year after I left ESO was the time when Zenimax decided to assassinate the lore with their 'Elesweyr' expansion. The one which introduced dragons into ESO. The game which is, let me remind you, the prequel to all of the single player Elder Scrolls games. (Warning: I'm about to get all nerdy about Elder Scrolls lore so this your last chance to duck out.) Can I just say how sad it is that no one in Zenimax's writing staff could figure out a way to up the stakes from last year without resummoning the dragons several thousand years early? You have a universe brimming with ancient demon gods, (Daedra) mysterious vanished super-races (Dwemer) and iconic storied locations that we've still yet to explore in exhaustive detail. (Sancre Tor. Yeah, there was that one mission but there's got to be more to it than that!) But some moron came in and said "People want dragons, right?" and so they pulled all the majesty out of the canon of Skyrim whilst simultaneously invalidating the prophecy on which Skyrim's story is premised. (Sure, they didn't awaken the World Eater early but they still knocked the wind out of that poem's sails.)

Okay, I know I'm getting too deep into this but I need to rant about this to someone and all my contacts have blocked me so this is my only outlet. In the lore, the dragons had the run of the land in ancient days and thus enslaved the first men under a despotic rule. Man couldn't fight back due to the dual fact that the dragon's held a powerful magic in their very voices that could tear men apart and that the dragon's ruler, Alduin, had the power to fly into the land of souls. (Essentially meaning that he could revive any Dovah that men managed to slay.) It was only through the combined forces of the greatest heroes of their day (and the help of a traitor) that the first men banished Alduin through time and thus got the upperhand in the war. For the preceding centuries, the descendants of those heroes worked to slay every single dragon in existence in the knowledge that they couldn't be revived without the work of 'Alduin the World Eater'. The only dragons who supposedly survived was the traitor, because he earned some reprieve from the slaughter at least, and Nafaalilgarus, because he lived in secrecy and even his existence could very well have been a myth.

From a point of storytelling convention, it really helped distinguish the world of Elder Scrolls that they didn't rely on dragons to be their ultimate bad like every fantasy has done since 'Beowulf'. That was a story in which 'the dragon' is utilized as a personification of all of man's struggles into one beast that one may do battle with, but will never entirely triumph against. A powerful and evocative metaphor, no doubt, but one that has lost it's edge and fundamental meaning with constant reimaginings. Skyrim, however, managed to tap back into that mythical original by introducing 'Alduin' the dragon destined to destroy the world. Even when you are victorious at the end of the game, you've only delayed the inevitable, not stopped it. Just like the legend of Surtur's role in Ragnarok, his ultimate destiny to be the end of all things: he is the World Eater.

"But screw that noise, let's throw in dragons!" the executives must have argued, reasoning that the bottom-line was more important than narrative integrity. You may have picked up on the fact that I'm actually really ticked off by Zenimax for how they handled 'Elesweyr', but that doesn't mean I didn't get a little bit excited to see where they're taking the story next. And that is because at the VGA's us fans were provided with the vague tease that the next part of the story would be taking place in a previously unexplored corner of 'Skyrim'; my single favourite Elder Scrolls province. I've always been a huge fan of Scandanavian and Nordic mythos, so any more attempts to feed into that fandom is absolutely fine by me. I'm also excited to see another side of a landscape that I know like the back of my hand at this point, so ESO has me curious.

At the end of the day is this going to be enough to get me back into The Elder Scrolls Online? Probably not, but that's okay. The gaming world has been completely taking over with time-sink live-services so folk like me just plain don't have time to sink into an MMO. Even one in which I'm already well established. Perhaps this'll make for a nice treat for those who are still loyal to those Zenimax folk, but I'd rather wait until the next full fledged entry to sink my money. Wait a minute- does that mean I have to depend on Bethesda to get their next game right? Oh boy, maybe I should get back into ESO, soon it might be the only game keeping this franchise afloat...

I talk about Event Culture on Christmas day. Yay.

Something different this way comes.

It's Christmas I guess. Rather than spend the day being judged by my extended family (and family friends!) I''ve taken the time to treat myself to doing something that I still inexplicably enjoy; writing these blogs. As such, it should come as little surprise to hear that the topic on my mind today is 'Event Culture' and specifically how that pertains to the video gaming world, be it offline or on. (It's mostly online.) Perhaps this isn't most festive of topics or moods to get oneself in this time of year, but it's the only way that I can alleviate the massive headache that I always get this time of year so that's where I am. (I've always held that cynicism has healing properties.)

First you might ask; what exactly is it that you mean by 'Event Culture' and how does it relate to the world of gaming? Well, in the words of that one eye-gouge-worthy advert that I keep getting off YouTube "Event Culture is dedicated to those willing to invest in experiences rather than material possessions." (And no, actually, I don't remember what that Ad was for making it's entire purpose a failure.) So, in relation to video games; it is those moments in a video game's life cycle whereupon additional elements are added into the game in a temporary fashion for the end of creating valuable memories for the player rather than adding value to the permanent package itself. I suppose, at a stretch, you could relate it to a 'Fight Club'-esque 'Anti-materialism message, but then you'll have to find a spot for the 'nihilism' angle to fit in so I'd personally avoid that particular analogy.

For someone such as myself, who is forever aware of their own mortality and yet finds themselves a struggling slave to it, this is a concept that inherently makes no sense. (At least not in the video game world. Real world: Sure, whatever, I don't care.) Whenever I am dedicated to playing through a title and experiencing everything that game has to offer, the absolute last thing that I want is to be rushed towards certain activities for fear of missing out. This is the tactic that is pushed in many modern online titles such as, ESO, BDO and WOW just to name a few. The commonly accepted theories behind these attempts are two-fold; on one hand they attempt to draw in new folk by assuring people that the game is healthily active and that they'll miss out if they wait for a bit and on the other hand they want to draw existing customers back to the title for re-currency purposes as well as alternative monetisation.

Now that isn't to say that there is anything inherently wrong with the act of celebrating events and holidays in style; afterall there is nothing inherently wrong with either of those two goals. I'll never complain about being given an excuse to go back and play through a title that I love and if a title is deserving enough, I have no issues with spending a bit on microtransactions to celebrate the event, but my irrational fear of the finite plays on my nerves just enough to put me off. What is especially as baffling, are those events in which huge chunks of content are added to the game with a deadline before being taken out. It makes no sense to me; you put in all this effort to put this stuff together only to snatch it away within a manner of weeks, what's the point?

'The point', of course, is to provide value to the holidays. When Runescape would conduct it's yearly Winter questline (I presume they still do that but I don't know) it would serve as a great rallying call to the game whilst putting everyone in the right mood for Christmas. For habitual gamers, these events can be our chance to experience the fun of the holidays without having to actually force ourselves outside in order to physically see people. (Thank god.) My own neuroses about this kind of content is really unwarranted when you consider the value folk get out of events and the aura of 'exculisveness' that is generated from unique rewards of such events. Overwatch would often limit some or their best outfits to the holidays and that often made such events the best time to play those games.

There are times, however, where event culture is sought to the determent of the game. Lets take 'Anthem', for example. There's a game that certainly had a rough launch-year due to the way that it was put together in a year by a team that had no idea what they were making or where they would go with it. The title suffered from many criticisms from those that endured it, most parroted of all being; there's not enough content. Bioware were very lethargic when it came to supplying content too, with players having to wait until close to 6 months later to see a substantial addition to the game in the form of: The Cataclysm. What people weren't aware of initially, however, was that 'The Cataclysm' was conceived as an 'event'; meaning that the name play area and game mode that it offered was snatched away a month or so later. As a result, in the effort of building up and giving the community an event for their trouble, Bioware just ended up wasting their development time on an event that annoyed everyone by ending too soon. (Or at all.)

Perhaps it won't surprise you a great deal to read, but I'm not particularly the most 'event driven person'. I find that 'Events' rarely ever live up to the hype around them and the annual build-up to such moments can easily become nauseating. But then, I understand the place of events in society and do not 'wish them away', so to speak. Out of the monotony of the everyday it can be exciting to escape it all, even for a day, by escaping into a fantasy of 'love and understanding' and 'good will to all men'. I suppose being a 'habitual gamer' has desensitized me to the rush of 'escapsim'.

This blog was probably even more incoherent than my usual drivel. So I'm sorry for that, but I just needed something to catch my attention while I nurse this literal headache that I get every Christmas, so I just threw this together. I hope to tackle at least one big meaty subject before the end of the year, but it depends how I'm feeling over the next few days, might not have the right head space to get into it. Fingers crossed, I guess.