Category: News

“An illusion!? What are you hiding?”

For anyone who’s played World of Warcraft at max level for at least a few days, those words and the exact intonation with which they’re spoken by both male and female Nightborne guards are burned into their memories. Like so many unwitting memes in video games, it captured the kind of furious audience ambivalence that points to a genuinely successful product. This is a bold claim, but I’ll try to explain.

The phrase comes from Suramar, one of the max-level zones on the Broken Isles, where WoW’s Legion expansion takes place. The province is the home of the Nightborne, descendants of the Night Elves who drank deep of arcane energy, transforming themselves in the process. Their vast capital city is the heart of the zone. It’s occupied by the Burning Legion–think, glowy green demon army–who’ve been permitted to march on the city by leaders who felt it was the only way to save the Nightborne from destruction. This fell alliance produces a fascinating questing area.

WoW and many other MMOs have no shortage of occupied, burning cities where you run around and fight the occupiers. Secret World Legends has Tokyo, Star Wars: The Old Republic has Coronet City, and so on.

“Suramar is a…reminder that you can tell a story about tragedy, diminishment, and the brutality of war without appearing wanton or childish.”

What sets Suramar apart is that Blizzard actually did a better job of demonstrating what an actual occupation looks like. Life goes on, civilians go about their business, the elite host their soirees–and there are demons patrolling the streets, harassing people and snuffing out any embers of rebellion. You can walk through it all without attracting much attention, doing quests that are not necessarily centered on killing mobs, with the help of… an illusion. A spell, cast on you by the resistance, that makes you appear as one of the willowy Nightborne, allowing you to blend in.

And thus we come to the mechanic that gave us one of WoW’s most immortal phrases. Certain guards can break your spell if you linger near them for more than a couple of seconds. They utter the line (and other, less memorable ones) when you come too close. It’s meant to keep you on your toes and always put you at risk of being descended on by a dozen guards, and it’s also a source of frustration for players who prefer a more direct approach to things.

But it’s also at the heart of what makes Suramar work. As irksome as it can be to deal with the illusion mechanic, Suramar is a much more interesting place when it’s not simply a killing field. While far from perfect, the city reveals its tensions and contradictions to the player when they’re able to wander around without having to fight. The constant risk of combat underscores the danger that lurks beneath Suramar’s surface, while making room for other sensations. Mystery, drama, political tension. This is a city where certain quests see you attend masquerade balls, put up propaganda, or help destitute Nightborne get the mana wine they so desperately need to survive. It’s also a city where you can break into a zoo and ride a gigantic dinosaur into the heart of town to feed her demons. It contains multitudes.

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The larger story–in every sense of the term–is quite interesting. Suramar is distinguished by having one of the best story arcs for a single zone in all of WoW, made all the more remarkable by its contrast to the often overwrought injections of cheap pathos that characterize the cutscene-based beats of the expansion’s main story.

Suramar’s story begins when you’re contacted by an emaciated exile from the city, Suramar’s former High Arcanist Thalyssra, who was exiled for leading the initial rebellion against her sovereign’s choice to allow the Legion free reign on Suramar’s streets. Together, you found a headquarters for a new resistance, made up of everyone the new regime has alienated, hurt, or left behind: an expanding base of operations with its own sidequests and stories that take you all over the province, discovering no small amount of once-esoteric Warcraft lore in the process.

Eventually, you help build this resistance into a force that can retake the city and liberate it from the Legion. With some fleshing out, Suramar’s story could’ve been its own game. In an age where major studios seem to be moving away from the single-player RPG model, it was a refreshing experience to have something so well structured and story-focused. Though its expansive length grated on some players who were sick to death of skulking around Suramar city, I’d argue it was actually tighter and better paced than the rest of the expansion–and thus more involving and rewarding. There were characters you cared about with clear personalities, rather than the fully-animated ciphers that WoW’s marquee characters often are (the less said about Tyrande Whisperwind and the desolation of her personality, the better). I felt more regret at the death of a secondary Suramar character than at the passing of the umpteenth major storyline figure Blizzard killed off.

This is, after all, an expansion where a principal character spoke the words “I am my scars!” without a hint of irony. Before blowing up a Naaru. That happened. And I can never unsee it. Suramar is a desperately needed antidote to those moments, a reminder that you can tell a story about tragedy, diminishment, and the brutality of war without appearing wanton or childish.

From activating hidden leylines at my own pace, to finding hidden merchants in Suramar City, to a fascinatingly detailed strategic minigame where you lead an army of withered mana zombies through ancient ruins, it all felt like a standalone RPG in the best way. For WoW where story always came second to Kill Ten Rats style questing, it was a welcome sign that the game is still able to weave a magical tale. Rather than wallowing in declension, or faint echoes of past glories, in Suramar WoW reinvents itself while being true to its roots. It’s had to do this in every expansion, of course, but Suramar was a particular triumph for its unique take on an important part of Warcraft’s lore and how deeply it mined that lore for good storytelling and questing.

To look at the WoW forums is to see a study in ambivalence about the zone; some players loved it while others vociferously hated it. Its storyline is far longer than that of any other Broken Isles zone, and it was parcelled out on a weekly basis over the course of Legion. Taken as a whole, it can seem rather overwhelming for something that’s ultimately meant to be a gateway to deeper parts of the endgame.

But I hope that the complaints don’t cause Blizzard to turn away from refining the model they created with Suramar; perhaps not gating the content would be a good start? Giving players the ability to binge or take it slow would probably have led to more overall comfort with Suramar when it was fresh.

But the memes about the zone hint at a level of emotional investment that wouldn’t attend a true failure. There is love to be found in the mockery–which Blizzard itself recognized long ago: the “illusion” line is riffed on countless times later in the expansion, and forms the basis of several jokes made by the newly playable Nightborne. WoW’s always done a good job of making fun of itself, of course, but it rarely does so when facing unalloyed disasters. The love/hate relationship players had with Suramar was the result of a productive tension that can be honed to a sharper point. Blizzard’s ludic portrait of a city under occupation was nothing short of brilliant and memorable.

That we got a few in-jokes out of the deal is just a bonus.

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.

If you want to start a fight among Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplayers, just ask them about their views on “alignment.”

The game, and many others inspired by it, is well known for its three by three grid of moral persuasions; one axis ranges from Good to Neutral to Evil. It’s the second dimension here, an innovation of earlier editions of D&D, which became far more interesting and far more controversial; the one that purports to measure how “Lawful” or “Chaotic” you are. It turns morality into a set of coordinates: Lawful Neutral, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil, and so on, with nine combos in all.

But, quite arguably, it’s the meaning of “Lawful Good” which causes the most dissension, sitting as it does at a controversial collision of conflicting, received notions about law and justice. It even led to the coining of a popular bon mot among D&D and Pathfinder players who push back against simplistic interpretations of moral alignments: “It’s Lawful Good, not Lawful Stupid.” The admonition is meant to be a way of stopping players from “roleplaying” Lawful Good characters in ways that are mockeries of virtuous behavior–charging into the mouth of a dragon because it seems selfless, worshipping rules however banal or pointless they are, et cetera.

The subject has fascinated me not only because Lawful Good was my favorite alignment, but because so much of the controversy around it exposed a good deal about the moral assumptions we would bake into game mechanics. It’s profoundly instructive for anyone who tries to make a mechanic of morality in their games or who wants their title to express moral ideas in a thought provoking way.

It also illuminates the many problems we have portraying morality in games at present.

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The morality mechanics of D20 inspired games were always controversial, especially for those who played classes that had strict morality requirements, like Druids or Paladins. During roleplay, one false move could lock you out of your class and– more urgently– start a neverending philosophical debate at the game table. As a mechanic it’s meant to provide girders for the moral dimensions of your roleplay, a way to quantify it and provide rewards or consequences for how you RP.

This is where we run into a classic problem of game mechanics; much is lost in the translation from ineffable to quantifiable.

The D20 alignment grid shares this common failing with the primitive morality sliders that have existed in several roleplaying games, particularly in Bioware’s various outings over the years. What results from these aggregates of points, of additions and subtractions, is twofold: one, any worthwhile exploration of morality is lost in the mercilessness of scoring, and second, that players are compelled to game the system rather than play with it.

Image via StarWarsRP.net

The distinction there is important. When I played Knights of the Old Republic, for example, I did what I quickly learned would net me “light side points”– it became a simple matter of picking the obviously virtuous option, which was often declarative, simplistic and ethically uncomplicated, ultimately in the service of ensuring I played a “good” character (I felt guilty otherwise) and getting that lovely column of light around her in the character screen. But what I could never be encouraged to do in such a system is make anything other than a binary choice to achieve that predetermined state; it did not teach me much that I didn’t already know from basic, inoffensive, moral education.

Put very brutally, both alignment and good/evil sliders are like moral vending machines that yield to the inputs of sufficient kindness (or evilness) coins, not unlike romance systems which were actually structured very similarly.

Can they be saved, however? Yes, I think, and the answers are already out there in the form of more flexible and thought-provoking forms of gameplay.

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In the Pathfinder roleplaying game adventure Herald of the Ivory Labyrinth, your characters meet the crusader goddess Iomedae, an armor clad, sword-wielding divine embodiment of Lawful Good in the Pathfinder universe. She quizzes your party with three essay-worthy questions about morality to test their moral fibre for the challenges she is about to task them with.  She asks, among other things, “[If] villains…beg for their lives, are they due mercy? Or are the wages of their villainy always death and oblivion?”

The “right” answer, as suggested by the authoritative voice of the book includes the following:

“Iomedae is not looking for a specific answer to this question; rather she’s seeking hesitancy and conflict. Blindly adhering to any rule may be lawful, but is not always good—a truly lawful good person will temper rules with judgement. A paladin should never be so bound to his pursuit of the law that he loses sight of what it is to be good.”

This was music to my ears. If law in the real world is to mean anything beyond being yet another plaything of the rich and powerful, this is a notion that we could all stand to learn something from: the ability to morally judge rather than genuflect to law’s cold edifice. Through these suggestive instructions, writer Wolfgang Baur compels players to think more deeply through their moral assumptions. There is no one right answer, just a general field that tests one’s moral maturity– and mercifully, that maturity is measured by one’s ability to be nuanced.

Baur’s writing makes something abundantly clear about the whole Lawful Good debate: the ‘good’ aspect matters considerably more than the ‘lawful’ one. Put another way, Lawful Good is defined by the subservience of law to virtue; it is an expression of the conviction that laws are instrumental to justice and that, per St. Augustine, an unjust law is no law at all. It sees law as an altar that can be desecrated by immorality, not an end in itself– even if many roleplaying games and players treat it as such, as if Lawful Good must always mean blinkered adherence to anything calling itself “law.”

Baur succeeds by prising apart the assumption that what is lawful must be good and vice versa, something that remains relatively unusual in roleplaying games, sadly.

Crucially, there is also an airy dimension to this moral test that Baur wrote up, one that refuses scoring. It leaves players free to be more thoughtful and inventive without excessively scrutinizing their every word for its adherence to a narrow conception of virtue.

But what about in a video game where a player’s means of interacting are more limited?

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The key is to create openness and room to explore through the interaction. Are you compelling the player to simply make a red vs. blue choice or can you show them something more? Knights of the Old Republic 2 had a very different moral character from its more popular predecessor and placed a good deal more emphasis on demonstrating the limits of the player’s power. Kreia, your character’s mentor throughout the game and a steely-voiced advocate for moral ambiguity, bathed you in shades of grey that forced you to question deeply held assumptions.

A rather (in)famous moment occurs when you land on the planet of Nar Shaddaa, a world-city characterised by extremes in vice and poverty. You are immediately confronted with what has long been a mainstay micro-moral choice in KotOR: a homeless man asks for spare change. What is interesting, however, is the way that Kreia intervenes: she lends you her Force sight to show you the consequences of your actions. No matter what you do, it ends badly for the poor man you’re asked to help. If you refuse him money, he stalks off in anger and beats up some of his fellow vagrants. If you give it to him, he becomes the object of their jealousy and they attack him.

“Sometimes the best morality mechanic is not to have one; other times it means using the game environment itself to express moral ideas.”

Make no mistake, this is profoundly cynical, but it works on a number of levels: illustrating Kreia’s morality, for one, and also demonstrating that sometimes you as the player cannot make everything right. Sometimes you face a situation with no good options, where tokenistic acts of morality may have unforeseen consequences. It’s an interesting case where the restriction of player choice paradoxically opens up an exploratory space for the player.

Moral expression and learning often happen under conditions of humility; we must confront our own powerlessness as much as our responsibility to justly use the power we do have. Though frustrating for players sometimes, such moments end up staying with us. Kreia’s moral musings stuck with me considerably more than some of the less interesting Light/Dark Side choices sprinkled throughout the game.

Sometimes the best morality mechanic is not to have one; other times it means using the game environment itself to express moral ideas. Dragon Age 2’s affection meter (divided between Friendship and Rivalry) was intriguing because it measured levels of emotional attachment rather than a simplistic love/hate dyad; it permitted different shades of cathexis, a committed Rival could still fall in love with Hawke or still stand with her at the climax, it just flavoured the relationship very differently. A similar mechanic could be applied to moral distinctions as well, going beyond good and evil, and lending complexity to any recreation of the law/chaos dyad.

The trick is to get the player to think outside themselves for a bit and set aside the instrumental goal of being 100% good or evil for the sake of stat bonuses or what have you. In this way, the blind obeisance to law commanded by the “lawful stupid” interpretation of Lawful Good in D20 is analogous to simple moral mechanics in videogames; each is lifelessly instrumental. Each bows before rules instead of true moral exploration.

Permitting failure, giving the player a sense of the game world beyond themselves, opening up a wider array of choices, can all contribute to making videogames more morally interesting.

There’s a long road ahead and the issues with morality mechanics tie directly into problems of choice mechanics and romance mechanics; they’re variations on the same theme of shortcomings. But there’s always hope– and that’s a thought I know my old D&D Paladin would’ve approved of.

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.

From the get-go, Nintendo has said that its decision to bring some of its brands to iOS and Android games was ultimately in the hopes that those titles would lure mobile players to Nintendo’s own hardware and, according to current Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima, those efforts may be starting to pay off.

In the translated transcript of a Q&A with Nintendo investors, Kimishima notes that Nintendo’s smart-device business a driving force behind what one investor described as a “relatively large percentage of Nintendo Switch sales” from countries outside of Japan, the Americas, and Europe when compared to past Nintendo consoles.

Kimishima notes that Nintendo’s customer base in Asia and the Middle East in particular is growing thanks to the fact that new players in those areas have been introduced to Nintendo IP first through its smartphone games like Super Mario Run, Fire Emblem Heroes, and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and are seeking out and purchasing Nintendo Switch systems as a result. 

This resonates with comments Nintendo’s incoming president Shuntaro Furukawa made to the Japanese publication Nikkei just recently, explaining that the company is looking forward to bolstering hardware sales in the Middle East and South East Asia and that he envisions Nintendo’s future efforts in mobile as a $900 million business.

Across all regions, the Nintendo Switch has sold 17.79 million units in just over one year, with roughly 15 million of those sales falling during the 2017-2018 fiscal year that concluded March 31. Even with nearly 18 million units sold, Nintendo predicts that the Switch will sell 20 million additional units during the 2018-2019 fiscal year, something it hopes to achieve by appealing to people that may have never played a Nintendo console before.

“In this second year, the initiatives we are planning come from our recognition that we also have to challenge ourselves to delivering Nintendo Switch into the hands of consumers who have never played a Nintendo platform before, and to those [that] have played before, but not recently,” Kimishima explained in the Q&A. “In order to sell more units than we did last fiscal year, the software lineup we have planned is meant to attract people, including those who have not been playing video games recently.”