This blog post was initially going to be about “class,” in the Marxist sense of the word, in World of Warcraft. Yet, the more I thought about the issue, the more troubled I became with the general idea of “class” in the Dungeons and Dragons sense of the word. Using the theories that I’ve brought up in my previous posts, I’ve been trying to analyze this central mechanic to virtually all RPGs to detect a social meaning behind the game. As I mentioned earlier, I was going to try to attach the various classes in WoW to classes in real life, viewing the tank classes as a sort of knowledge class, the healer class as an aristocracy who demands power based on their inborn traits, and the dps classes as the unwashed masses, begging the tanks and healers to join up with them briefly so they can take part in the game. While I think these relationships are pretty apt, I think ultimately that they fail to confront the central problem with character class in RPGs: Why do we demand a division of labor in RPGs?
Part of this, of course, comes from the heritage of sport in our culture. Virtually all team sports demand for this division of labor, implicitly in their structure. Obviously, this isn’t a real answer to our problem, though, as a sports theorist would need to look back through the history of sport to determine where this development initially came from (a task I’m not really qualified for), but for our purposes, we can definitely draw a relationship between the positions in baseball or football and the positions in your traditional raiding group in an MMO. Ultimately, in the tasks demanded of a team in a game, results are more easily achieved through this division of labor.
There are two driving forces behind this sort of division: First, a division made necessary by the implicit nature of the game. In baseball, the diamond is a huge expanse that requires players to be placed in an even pattern to make fielding a possibility. We can’t even imagine a game without the positions, for if we didn’t have the labels “outfielder” and “infielder,” the players would inevitably (if they were smart!) break into similar positions. Though we have ultimately codified this division of labor, the rules defining positions, in this case, are not limiting rules, but merely definitive aspects of the game.
Secondly, there are divisions caused by the implicit strategic approach to the game. Continuing with our baseball analogy, we can look at the different approaches to lineup. It is smart to put your fastest player at the top of the lineup, to increase the likelihood of getting a player into scoring position in the first inning. When that approach is implemented, it introduces a demand for a fast player. Thus, through strategy, a role has been created.
Not to spend too long on the sport discussion, but we can observe these two methods of role creation in soccer. The first shows up in the left-wing and right-wing positions. Based upon the implicit nature of the game (it’s played on a huge field), the team inevitably splits the players between those who play on the left, right, and center. From there, we find that play in the center tends to be slower moving, due to the fact that the game can be affected from the left, right, and center when the ball is in the center, while play on the wings is faster, because the play can only be affected by central players, and those on that specific side. Thus, we have the fast winger and the slow central midfielder. On the other hand, the style of play of that slow central midfielder is defined by strategy. Since players in the center affect both the left and right of the field, central midfielders tend to be the best passers in the game. Thus, teams begin recruiting players who have high passing skills to play that central position, and eventually we have the central playmaker.
When we carry over these role creation methods to World of Warcraft, however, things become problematic. The first of these role creation methods, the roles created by the nature of the game, becomes a problem when the world of the game and the roles are created simultaneously. For example, the central game-task of World of Warcraft, the defeat of a boss, was a priori to the construction of character classes, though the inverse is similarly true. The nature of the game is that we have three roles, the tank, who protects the other characters by taking most of the damage, the healer, who keeps the tank alive by restoring his health, and the dps, who actually kill the enemy. If all three character classes were conflated into one, where each player is capable of tanking, healing, and dealing damage, we can assume that most players would just divide the labor into those three categories again. Unlike sport, which assigns players roles based on the ultimate goal of the game, a goal that is a priori the creation of the roles, MMO architecture requires the roles and the goal to be entwined.
For the sake of the rest of my day, I'm going to stop for now, but prior to ending, I want to give a little preview of what's to come. I know a lot of people would call me out for conflating MMOs to sports, rather than to their obvious parent, the table-top role-playing game, a complaint that I completely agree with. Thus, in my next post, I'm going to attempt to find some structure behind the table-top division of labor, that can conjoin with some of what I talked about in this post. Finally, when we put this all together, I think we can see more clearly why the character class mechanic has become so important that it is even found in sports video games now. Wish me luck!
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