Why aren't computer RPGs (especially MMOs) as much FUN to play as old-time D&D?

(Originally published in my game design blog: http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-arent-computer-rpgs-especially-mmos.html )

[This was originally completed in October 2009, but for various reasons has not seen the light of publication. Generally it still applies, but occasionally I’ll interject some comments in brackets from the perspective of 2016.]

Oh, but they ARE as much fun, you say?  Yet I don't see much evidence of that.  For so many people it seems like a lot of work especially in MMOs - "the grind" - aimed at rising in level.  People don't enjoy the journey, they only enjoy the destination ("I'm 80th level!").  That's why there's a big market for sale of items and gold and even entire accounts for such games, the market addressed by "pharming".  (More details later.)

How did this happen?  We can observe that, in hard core video games in general, this "ennui" seems to be a problem (ennui: "a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom").  The journey isn't much fun.  People brag that "I beat the game," often throwing in an impressively-short duration of play, or that "I made maximum level", but they don't appear to have enjoyed it.  How many of the hard core say "did you enjoy playing?", instead they say "how long did it take you to beat the game?"  They want the result, not the experience.  It's as though a ten year old who wants to be wealthy when he's 60 would be happy to jump from 10 to wealthy 60 without experiencing the years in between.

Focus on “Leveling up” and lack of Group Play
Where games involve character levels, there are two possible reasons why this has happened.   I played First Edition AD&D for 30 years starting in 1975; my highest level character made 14th, but the last two levels were from magic items and he never actually played higher than 12th, which is just as well because the game doesn’t handle 14th level at all well.  Most of my many characters didn't make double figures of levels.  It took a LONG time, many long adventures involving several people, to "level up".  I recall one character that took ten adventures to reach second level.  So of course, I played the game not to level up, but to enjoy the adventure - as we all did.  (I can even remember discovering that a character had risen a level, but I hadn’t noticed because I’d not tallied the experience points from the past several adventures.  “Leveling up” was not the objective.) 

I knew a former WoW pharmer who said he could reliably go from 1st to 30th level in 16 hours.  Nowadays in video games, it's quite easy to rise in level, and not surprisingly the objective of many players becomes rising in level rather than enjoying adventures.  How many players say "I really enjoyed that game;" instead they say, "I made 80th level".

Perhaps much of the reason for this change in objective, and consequent change in enjoyment, is the solitary nature of MMOs and computer RPGs (something that has ended for folks who join guilds and participate in big raids).  Face-to-face D&D is a social game, one that you enjoy with friends (or people who become your friends), one where much enjoyment is taken from the talk and activity between (and often during) the actual adventures, as well as from the adventures.  This is only now starting to become common in MMOs and online RPGs.  In times past, people playing alone didn't have other people to share their adventures with, to commiserate with, to recount old events.  Lacking that, what could they do?  Concentrate on "leveling up".

Too Much Like Work
But even in online games we find people doing more and more that seems like work.  Nick Yee, then of Stanford University, wrote a journal article called "The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play" published in 2006.  He used data from over 35,000 surveys completed by MMO players.  From the abstract:

Video games . . . transformation into work platforms and the staggering amount of work that is being done in these games often go unnoticed. Users spend on average 20 hours a week in online games, and many of them describe their game play as obligation, tedium, and more like a second job than entertainment. Using well-known behavior conditioning principles, video games are inherently work platforms that train us to become better game workers. And the work that is being performed in video games is increasingly similar to the work performed in business corporations.  (Google "Nick Yee Labor of Fun" for a PDF of the article.) 

Some of this “work ethic” may be because players pay to play the game, so they feel obligated to play even if they don’t enjoy it.  But that’s a minor factor, as those who really don’t enjoy it will quit.

[Far fewer games are paid for these days, rather they’re free-to-play (F2P). Though many who play long enough to reach “max level” will still be spending money.]

Even when many people participate together, the experience of actually playing the game is rarely social.  Listen to accounts of the big raids in MMORPGs.  Every person is assigned a task (DPS ["damage per second"], healer, etc.); must do that task with precise timing; and does nothing else.  Each person's experience is uni-dimensional, a cog in a machine rather than an independent actor.  If a few people mess up their timing or role, the whole raid can fail.  Because of the time pressure, there's no opportunity to think, to use strategy, or to enjoy what's happening once the raid starts. 

Does that sound like fun?  Contrast this with old D&D played at a leisurely pace, with lots of time to think and enjoy what's happening, where every character could act independently while keeping the good of the group as a whole in mind. [I suppose the key is the difference between “brainware”, using your brain to succeed in tabletop games, and “athleticware”, using your physical prowess to succeed in video games. There’s a lot more potential stress in athleticware.]

The "play" has become work to too many people.  I remember talking with someone who was a major officer in a fantasy MMO guild for many months.  He finally realized that it was work, that he wasn't enjoying it, that people treated him badly if he didn't do exactly what they wanted, or if the raids weren't successful.  So he quit.  There are similar examples in Yee's paper.

No Fear of Death
The other reason for the change in focus involves character death.  In First Edition AD&D you actually feared character death.  If you died,  it hurt your constitution or your experience points, or both; at worst, you were dead and gone.  In an MMO or standalone RPG, character death is generally something between a minor inconvenience and no trouble at all.  Think about it, if death is not to be feared, it matters much less what you do during your play, and you can pay less attention to it.  The details of play tend to blur because your full attention isn't required.  (Megaman 9 (for example) shows how even a minor fear of death changes a game immensely.  See http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21324.)

The co-creator of D&D (Gary Gygax) put it this way in one of his last publications (Hall of Many Panes) “a good campaign must have an element of danger and real risk or else it is meaningless - death walks at the shoulder of all adventurers, and that is the true appeal of the game.”

"Pharming" highlights both sides of this problem.  If people enjoyed playing the games, would they buy characters and items from pharmers?  And if the games ordinarily required more than a dreary, predictable "grind", could pharmers produce enough such items for the demand? At the very least, the scale of pharming would be much smaller.

Obviously, a good human referee can provide more interesting adventures than a computer.  Moreover, in D&D the actions of a character can change the future, whereas in MMOs that’s rarely the case because they’re designed for thousands of players.  Once again, if what you do makes no difference, you’re less likely to pay attention to, and care about, what you do.

Similar Trends in Tabletop D&D
In tabletop Dungeons and Dragons itself we can see an evolution toward this same fixation on "leveling".  Second edition D&D is much like First;  Third Edition D&D (3.0) is a very different game, a kind of fantasy Squad Leader, with the emphasis on players finding ways to "minimax" the system via unearned advantages (such as myriad books and articles containing new feats, skills, and prestige classes).   Each character can be a one-man army, very different from First Edition where "combined arms" cooperation was absolutely necessary to survival.  In First Edition fighters cannot withstand the enemy without magic-users who deal massive damage to groups, and magic-users cannot survive if the enemy gets to melee range without protecting fighters.  Characters must help each other out, and each kind of character class provides an important component of "combined arms" success.  (Clerics provide defensive magic and medical help, rogues provide scouting and stealth, etc.)  It is rather like American football, with fighters as linemen, clerics as linebackers, rogues as wide receivers and secondary, and magic-users as quarterback and running backs.  Just as a football team will fail if some of its parts fail, the First Edition adventure party will fail if some of its members fail.

In Third Edition, every character type is designed to survive pretty well on its own.  Part of this evolution is attributable to the reduction in size of the typical adventuring group.  One of "Lew's laws" is "the survivability of an adventuring group varies with the square of the number of characters in it".  Our First Edition parties averaged seven or eight characters; Third Edition specifies four.  3.5 is essentially the same.  When there are only four characters, there's rarely a practical way to prevent the enemy from getting to the magic-user(s), who must then be able to cast spells in the face of melee opposition, who must be harder to kill, and so forth.  Fighters, with the proper feats, can kill several ordinary enemies in one blow.  And with "buffs" from the spell-casters, a fighter can take on a ridiculous number of monsters.

Further, you are supposed to rise a level in about 11 encounters, and could have several encounters in one adventure.  In other words, leveling can occur so often that leveling can become the objective, rather than focus on enjoying the adventure.  When I set out to convert some First Edition characters to Third, the first thing I did was double their level to be at a near-comparable place in progression.  The game was also designed to scale up to 20th level (and later 40th), whereas First Edition starts to break down when characters got well into double figure levels.

Fourth Edition D&D is for larger adventuring parties, and characters have many powers that only help other people in the party, not themselves.  It appears to be designed to encourage groups to work together.  Character "roles" have been added to emphasize cooperation and "combined arms".  Individual characters are very hard to kill, but don't have a lot of offensive capability.  Yet the general take on Fourth Edition is that it has been "WoW-ified", made to be more like World of Warcraft, with easy leveling and all the other things that have made WoW so widely popular.  Fourth Edition may be a good game, but it's not D&D.

[Fifth edition D&D is much like First, except that it’s much harder to get killed because of easy healing and spells such as Revivify at third level cleric.]

Is this “bad”?
Is it "bad" that people play for the destination rather than the journey?  In and of itself, no - every person has his own reasons for playing a game, and those reasons vary drastically.  These people can enjoy the game, even if they're not having fun.  Yet when the result is something that's more like work than play, you have to wonder what is wrong.  Yee quotes a registered nurse who played Everquest: "We spend hours - HOURS - every SINGLE day playing this damn game. My fingers wake me, aching, in the middle of the night. I have headaches from the countless hours I spend staring at the screen. I hate this game, but I can’t stop playing.  Quitting smoking was NEVER this hard."  Maybe there IS something wrong here.

Further, when games are designed to emphasize leveling up, those who want to "enjoy the journey" are left behind.  Is there anything game designers can do to help restore the fun?  We can’t quite put the creativity of human referees into computer games.  But already in some games, what a character does changes the world according to his view of it.  (What the players do very much affects EVE Online.)

We're in "the age of instant gratification".  Levels are easy to earn because video gamers expect to be rewarded at every turn.  30 years ago, experience points and the occasional magic item were sufficient reward; now expectations have been raised, and levels are the expected reward.  If a designer takes away those easy levels, will people play any more?  What a difficult situation!  I've designed many commercially published or forthcoming boardgames, but I've only once tried to design a role-playing game - though it was a board game, not a typical RPG - and now I wouldn't even contemplate it because of the problems I’ve described.

Games are entertainment, not Life
Younger readers might howl that video games are NOT easy.  Yet most long-time players recognize that, generally speaking, it's typically a lot easier to succeed at a video game than it was decades ago.  Death has no sting, games are automatically saved for you, heck, some games even aim your gun for you!  I'm not saying that easier is "bad", because it's what the market requires, so that people don't have to work for their entertainment; yet somehow, the entertainment has become too much like work for the hard core players, even when they're successful.

Fundamentally, then, it may be that these games aren't as fun as old D&D can be because they are designed to stroke the egos of pseudo-competitive people who think they've accomplished something important when they reach maximum level.  Good D&D players know better.  I remember a teenager who had an "18th level magic user", but had no clue how to play it well.  He may have made it up (rather like buying an account, but much cheaper!), or he may have played with a "Monty Haul" referee.  Your level didn't say anything about how well you played, and for that matter nobody outside your little group cared how well you played–you weren’t competing with the rest of the world.  We played to have fun, not to brag about our level or our loot (though we surely enjoyed such things when we attained them).

"Casual" players in general, and Nintendo among major publishers, haven't forgotten that games are entertainment.  You don't prove anything about your worth by being a "bad ass gamer", you don't help your family, your friends, your country, your world.   Commercial video games are not training for life, they're a pause from life if not an escape from life.  It just doesn't matter whether you "beat the game", or how quickly you beat the game, any more than it matters whether you complete a crossword puzzle or Rubik's Cube.  Casual players know that; some hard core players seem to have forgotten it, and those are often the people who "grind", who don't enjoy the journey, because they think "beating the game" is truly important even as the rest of us wonder where they got such an unrealistic, immature notion.