The Gamer’s Quagmire: 22nd Edition
- Jamison DeLorenzo

Understanding one’s obsession with video games is important when trying to figure out which games to play.
There was a week where every day I spent time writing about nothing but World of Warcraft. That was pretty much the only game I was playing at the time. Such is the life of a person hopelessly addicted to online games. The love affair with the game lasted a couple months and it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy the game or because there was another game I had to play. I reverted back to some PS2 games and another online game without realizing why. Being someone who likes having a wholly incomprehensible explanation for everything I decided to think about this for a long time.

After spending entirely too much time on the matter I figured out what was going on. I had experienced textbook attack of Gaming Connoisseur Detachment Syndrome and decided it was time to move onto another game. At the time the new game was City of Heroes. I would say that GCDS is very common for several online gamers who max out their level, skills, and equipment to point where there is nothing left to challenge for them. For gamers who traditionally play multiple games at a time this sensation is only heightened in online play.

All this sophisticated talk is making me sound pretty intellectual, isn’t it? I would say that 90% of the content in the previous paragraph was completely made up and thrown together. Of course people can make up statistics to prove anything (41% of all people know that). The main point I was trying to make was that being someone who prefers playing multiple games World of Warcraft was not providing me with the gaming experience that I desire most. Online games require heavy commitments to get anywhere. If you do not care about getting a lot of the really good stuff in the game then that does not matter a whole lot. It is easy to be casually involved in any game and not let it engulf your life. We’ll get to that in a minute.

There is another gaming affliction that affects a specific group of gamers, specifically those that play role playing games or adventure games. Traditionally video games labeled as role playing games are nothing more than a story and an engine that allows you to level up characters, obtain spells, obtain equipment, and explore the world. While these aren’t role playing games per se that is how the industry labels them, hence my compulsion to throw in the term ‘adventure.’ Whatever you decide to call these games, there are games that force one to have an overpowering compulsion to obtain everything in the game no matter how trivial. This is known as APD, or Adventurer’s Perfectionist Disorder.

I first started noticing symptoms of APD when playing Final Fantasy II on the Super Nintendo (or Final Fantasy IV as it’s known in Japan). In particular the one character who could summon creates in the game, Rydia, was relatively weak. Still her summons provided a lot of destructive power to the party. This is not as though you had a choice whether she was in your party. The way I saw it, considering she always had the fewest amount of hit points, I had better get some bang for the buck considering my healer Rosa had to spend 70% of her time healing her. As such I made it my mission to obtain every summon in the game including Leviathan, Asura, Bahamut, and Imp. The latter of these was by far the weakest of the summons as it was obtainable around level 12 whereas if you sought any of the other summons before level 40 you were either a master of the game or you were clinically insane (especially Bahamut). Still, I had to have Imp even though it was the hardest of all summons to get. The fact that I remember to this day how and where to get it, along with the drop percentage, is a little disconcerting.

However, the fact that I do remember all of these things about the game, while it could be argued that I have an exceptional memory, is just another symptom of APD. You may laugh at all of this talk about this fictional gaming terminology being tossed around, but the fact of the matter is that I am allowed to. After the nonsense being pushed onto society known as Road Rage, which is nothing more than idiots who have weak minds and a major impulse control problem getting an invisible wall of protection from their own stupidity (which they crash into a little too often), I figure it is perfectly fine to come up with my own terminology for gaming behavior that I have seen in myself and several friends over the past 20 years. While I have no formal degree in the area I certainly am a field expert having spent over 85% of my life playing or studying games.

The major trouble begins when a gamer has both GCDS and APD. Which disorder controls a gamer’s actions more? Does the fact that gamer likes playing multiple games preempt him from being able to achieve the highest level of achievements in complex online games? How long does the drive for perfection delay the inevitable desire to jump from one game to the other? Online games challenge a gamer with both conditions more so than any other because traditional games can be completely broken down and perfected over the course of under a month. The biggest online games can require a gamer to spend over 4 months just to get to the highest possible level let alone the most powerful gear. It can be quite a fascinating study, one which I have been conducting on myself over the past 5 months as online games have consumed most of my free time (with about 4 weeks being siphoned off into Civilization 4, The Movies, and PGR 3).

At this point I have written close to 900 words and still have yet to even get to the premise that I need to divulge before telling you the point of this whole article. Well, I’m officially back on World of Warcraft. Part of the drive was seeing friends playing the game and having fun all the while knowing that I never truly tried to obtain the highest level of dominance in the game despite the amount of fun I was having. GCDS had driven me away from Warcraft the but now a powerful APD attack was bringing me back. To date I have achieved more success with my new level 60 character than my previous level 60 character. This is because I am in a very strong guild and my overall knowledge of the game has increased close to a hundred-fold since my first run through. My parents always taught me to never stop learning and this is the will to learn in action (admittedly not in the sense it was originally intended).

So why bring this game up again? Lately World of Warcraft has been jockeying to become the most talked about game in the news, thusly supplanting GTA of its current title. From the lawsuit over one kid committing suicide (which was later attributed to Warcraft III) to farmers beating up the economy to Blizzard’s PR hit over a gay and lesbian guild issue to what is now one server in the game being held hostage over the overall war effort. A premise one needs to know to understand what is going on is what the heck this war effort is.

In reality it is nothing more then the game designers realizing that the upper level characters need some new things to do before dropping the game, so Blizzard attempted to push back the saturation point for the game, much like Sony had done with Everquest, by adding a major war effort in which both major factions were competing in. This war effort opens gates to fight these incredibly powerful enemies that otherwise are locked away inside an instance that nobody gets to open. Conceptually it is decent because all characters on a server have to donate metals, leather, cloth, and foodstuffs to their faction and once there is enough of these items collected it is a way of saying that there are enough goods to lead a war effort against a far greater enemy than otherwise is available characters on a particular world.

(Who said run-on sentences couldn’t make sense?)

Hopefully that made sense because I’m going to keep running with the whole point of this. There is a story that is attempting to be driven by a couple news outlets that one server has a guild which is so far ahead of the curve that the war effort can be brought to the point where the new enemies are made available to everybody, yet the guild is intentionally not activating the gates necessary to do this. Their motive? Greed. They want people to pay them enough in game money to net $5000 USD. A couple articles were written stories that attempt to call this situation a ransom demand.

The way I see it this supposed ransom demand is in the running for the most preposterous demand ever made, because in the end there is no threat. This is like holding hostages in a house with a threat to set off a bomb, only the front door isn’t locked and there is no bomb. Why do I say this? There is nothing to prevent other characters in the game from completing this war effort themselves other than time. You cannot prevent players from activating the final portion of this event so what I am having trouble with is what the threat is in the first place.

This is not a ransom demand but another symptom of people using online games to make money. A good description of what is going on here is entrepreneurship. It is not as though there is some penalty for this guild making the request if they do not get the money. Now it is possible that this action is in violation of the license agreement in playing the game. I doubt this because then in-game farming would not be allowed and, again, there is no imminent threat here. If people decide not to pay the guild will probably wind up opening the gates anyway (that is, if some other group doesn’t beat them to it). Now maybe because I am not on this server I choose not to be bothered by this action, but even if I were there are plenty of other things to do in the game besides tool around with this war effort.

Truly, I applaud this maneuver as it no different than a real-world middleman asking for a cut. Think about it for a second (or maybe even 2!). You want to achieve something that will allow you to prosper but something is in your way that will take time to complete. Someone comes along and wants money to complete the task for you. Do you pay them or ignore the request and do it yourself? The spirit of true entrepreneurship states that you do because you get money after achieving your goal (assuming that the up front cost is not outrageous).

If you must get offended by these supposed ransom demand then go right ahead. An advanced case of APD, along with a dose of reality, is preventing me from doing so. I can still achieve what I want to in the game no matter what other people do. And, honestly, if I was playing an ORPG-like game where my attempts to achieve certain goals could be completely stymied by someone else doing something first then I wouldn’t be playing it in the first place. Based on my intricate knowledge of APD I can hypothesize that not many other people affected by APD would either.

But then again, this is all just theory and conjecture.

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