This thing’s been sitting in my drafts for a couple of weeks, hoping for some blast of insight that would turn this post into a serious analysis revealing some essential kernel of the gaming experience. With Jimmy Fallon as our proxy noob. But who the hell’s got the time to wait for me to roll the critical hit?
So watch as Jimmy Fallon learns a bit about WoW from Felicia Day, who you know from the breakout online gamer sitcom about online-gamer comedy, The Guild. (And some Whedon musical thing.)
There are a few telling moments in there about the veteran and noob perspectives. (I’ll ago ahead and call it the noob perspective, even though I think that’s not quite right—I hold onto some of that noobish wonder as long as I can.) Look at where Jimmy’s ideas of fantasy and immersion split from WoW-vet Felicia’s.
When Felicia tells Jimmy that it’s a fantasy world where he can be anything he wants, Jimmy’s reaction is, “I don’t want to trick people.”
He tells her that his first character had a great name — Davarnon — which is presumably great because it’s got the sound of elegant gibberish we look for in heroic fantasy. When Felicia hears it, she makes a face. She suggests Jimmy name his character after a snack he likes, and his instinct is still to translate it into something with a fantasy flavor. (Or fantasy fruit-chew flavor.)
Jimmy’s the hopeful noob roleplayer hoping to explore a heroic fantasy realm. Felicia’s the nonchalant veteran gamer focused on practicality. Jimmy’s interested in the way his character looks, Felicia looks at what he wants his character to do. For him, a great name is vaguely foreign and faux-historical. For her the disguises, murder, and snack-food names are just the lay of the land.
“There’s a lot of teabagging,” she says.
The sample size of this episode isn’t enough for me to make blanket judgments regarding Felicia’s playing style in general, but that isn’t going to stop me from trying.
I think Felicia (as portrayed in this skit) demonstrated many of the personality traits that make me favor tabletop rpgs to MMOs. Not only does she show revulsion at the name Davarnon, but her response makes it clear that she too would be griefing poor Davarnon were she not actually in the room with his user (to make a tron reference).
Sure, Davarnon is a silly name and I would find it a silly name in a fantasy novel. It’s the type of name you find in a poorly written one. BUT, as you point out, it is a name that attempts to be immersed in the fantasy. Jimmy’s trying to step out of reality into the imagined while Felicia seems to be stepping out of the everyday into a different set of assumed systems.
Table top games can suffer from this “stepping into assumed systems” flaw as easily as MMOs.
The difference, from my perspective, is that when a n00b finds something that the assumed systems cannot properly emulate is when the rubber really hits the road in a table top game. That’s when the GM, and other players, must stretch their design muscles. It is also highlights how n00bs can make the table top experience more enjoyable.
Whereas in the MMO, the n00b apparently gets teabagged — potentially by Felicia Day. Wow!
Great points, Christian. I think, beyond having noobs around to test the limits of RPG system assumptions, they’re also a vital infusion of the original wonder that makes RPGs or their worlds fresh in the first place. I love playing with new players, for whom the core routines in D&D (or whatever game) still have some mystery, peril, and wonder.
This is, in part, why the edition cycle is important, I think. My favorite time in the lifespan of most games is the period when the new edition is still new and even the kobolds are interesting again.
Also, to be clear: Yeah, I don’t know that this video is actually indicative of Felicia Day or Jimmy Fallon at all. I’m using their on-screen micro-roles for my own purposes, not trying to summarize the whole folks.
I think this really gets under the skin of player expectations, too.
I gamed with a group while at law school that had a genesis similar to what you might see in an online guild: a few people who knew each other from school, thrown together with a few people who had gamed together, and a few more who others -knew- gamed, but had never shared table-time with, all brought together by the magic of the Internet.
What we were left with was a really strange assemblage of expectations: we had people who wanted to bash monsters, people who wanted to try and tell epic stories, people who were totally experimental (after I moved away, I heard tell of a D&D dungeon crawl in which all the characters were participants in a fashion show!); people who put a lot of time into characters and backstory — I had someone tell me that my character brief was longer than their story notes — and people who would name their characters “Deadly-a” and let that suffice as a concept.
MMOs have a similar problem: because it’s so hard to filter your interactions in an online environment, you end up sharing gamespace with Felicias and Jimmys in equal numbers. The design and marketing of MMOs doesn’t help, either: they are built with Jimmys in mind, and they are sold by appealing to the Jimmy mindset, but it’s the Felicias who log hundreds of hours per month and treat the game like a second job, and grind high-end content.
How many WoW patches have come down that have tweaked on class or another, making the game a more “balanced” experience or one with more “content”? All of them. How many have come along that have created a more immersive RPing experience? Well, I suppose that’s open to debate.