This post by Christian Lindke, in reaction to my “Noob’s Lament” post last week, got me thinking again about the value of noobs. This started as a comment to Christian’s post, but expanded into more musings once I got the Matrix metaphor in mind, so I’m sharing it here to see what you think. So, then:
MMOs offer a venue for noob-bashing (a time-honored tradition, that, as any schoolboy can tell you) where anonymity and level-derived imperviousness favor the basher. That thrill is fed to bullies through an IV that’s separate from the game’s supposed mainline of fantasy-adventure trappings. Alliance/Horde jerseys just offer a flavorful rationale for what’s bound to happen anyway. They channel the inevitable roughhousing that comes with massive numbers of players and online anonymity into something vaguely on-topic.
In my experience, tabletop RPG players experience a similar focus-shift (from the fantastic to the pragmatic) over time and through experience, as player expectations evolve from exposure to practical perils, in addition to fantastic ones. Practical perils are things like campaigns dissolved by player strife or displaced by a sudden interest in a new game, or characters undermined by rules changes. Fantastic perils are things like goblin thieves and hungry dragons.
As one example, I think noobs find fun in fretting about the fates of their characters, so they focus on protecting their characters, while vets who have seen characters come and go aim to maximize their investment in playtime, and so focus on protecting their abstract “fun” instead of fleeting details like this or that character or magic sword.
Thinking about it now, though, the noob-to-vet spectrum here may be marked by tics representing the number of campaigns/games rather than play hours. Players in a 10-year-long campaign are likely to be “more noobish” (noobile?) in their willingness to immerse themselves in the fantasy rather than the game, I think. (I think.) Because, I suppose, they haven’t had their hearts broken by an unfaithful campaign yet.
People who’ve weathered more break-ups tend to be more jaded. Breaking news, I know, but how apt is the analogy, really? Are noobs the open-hearted vestal swains and are veterans the heartbroken rounders? I like this because it pairs up the earnest, exaggerated joys of the young lover with the kind of scarred, doleful comfort of weathered bachelors and widowers, without implying either as somehow inherently virtuous. The question is just whether their defeats lie ahead or behind them.
There’s a point to be made in here about the element of challenge that griefers bring to an MMO, and the implication that some kind of victory can be won by joining a game as early as possible or enduring it longer than other players, which makes griefing and its survival a kind of user-added metagame, but that’s not a point I’ll be making here.
This in contrast to the perspective that casts gamer vets as the leather-clad badasses with the freed minds who see the Matrix for what it is — monsters as encoded hit points and XP, magic swords as mere expressions of DPS — versus the foolish noob-sheep who buy into the colorful lie painted by the devs to please the silly children.
(This makes griefers either the STD-stricken sluts who screw and leave or the equivalent of turncoat Neos beating the Machine-enslaved folk who haven’t yet been given a pill to swallow.)
Whether you see noobs as naive up-and-comers or as rubes who haven’t yet seen the light (wherein “seen the light” roughly equals “stopped reading the flavor text”), I say let them enjoy their noobishness while it lasts. It’s hard to get it back once its gone, especially when it’s flayed off by some tea-bagging jackneck with nothing better to do than get awesome at ganking the easy targets.
Adding a noob to your tabletop group, or questing with a noob in your MMO of choice, can be like pulling open the curtains after a weekend shut in with your favorite game. It can shoot a dose of wonder back into play, show us the sheen again, and remind us that what matters to the meanest, fastest players isn’t all that matters.
It’s like inviting someone new to your favorite restaurant — some place where you long ago stopped reading the menu — and getting a new look at the place through them. If it’s like shitting in their soup, then you’re the asshole, no matter what jersey your minotaur costume is wearing, no matter what’s on your nametag.
Synchronicity strikes, today. This…
“…vets who have seen characters come and go aim to maximize their investment in playtime, and so focus on protecting their abstract “fun” instead of fleeting details like this or that character or magic sword.”
…is as good, or better, an explanation for why it was necessary for Anvil the Just to fling himself off a cliff than the narrative compulsion I suggested was the reason over in the comment I just wrote over on the Downtime post.
Or, maybe these two explanations aren’t at odds.
No, I don’t think they’re at odds. There’s something to be said in there, too, about the thought process behind the action. I find it easier to imagine a noob throwing his character off the cliff, despite the risk, because slaying this monster matters to his invested imagination. Conversely, I find it easier to imagine a vet doing the same thing, because of the risk, in the hopes that the dice will come through for him and payoff his investment in the character — which even a glorious end could do. But I’m projecting.
It’s weird to me, thinking about this now, that I’ve left GMs pretty much completely out of this, though.