Endless Play
Turning in a paper on time late: do you understand the delicious irony? It has to be said that I’m sorely short of time at the moment. I’ve got weekly quests to do, reputations to farm and a raid to drop. The War Within, the latest World of Warcraft expansion, has just been released and it’s a good one. I’m having it for breakfast and before breakfast too, 5 times a day, midday, evening and morning. Then I go to bed.
WorldofWarcraft is an MMORPG, so it takes time to play. A lot of time. So much so, in fact, that it’s hard to get to grips with these never-ending games, because you feel like you’ll never finish them. There are plenty of other incredible games that I won’t be able to play because I don’t have the time. When I have to recommend a game to a friend, or to my grandmother, before any consideration of the quality of the game, I first make sure that there are no retention mechanisms. A good game should be one that you can finish, and that doesn’t demand your attention in order to keep it there. Because I want my attention to go to my friends, or my grandmother, and not to the 65th upgrade of my legendary character. Capitalism will take all the space it can to value, commodify and turn everything into work and financial speculation, including our attention. We might as well not make it any easier.
World of Warcraft, or WoW for those of you who are lazy, pays for itself every month by draining my (far too) meagre bank account. So it’s in the best interests of the vile game that I stay in Azeroth for a long time. It’s important that I never finish this game, that I always want to come back to it to get a new achievement, take part in fishing tournaments (?!!), or discover the latest content that comes out every week. As for me, I’m screwed, you go ahead and leave me behind, I’m held back to the highest degree. But YOU, maybe you still have a chance. Let me do something about it.
WoW is surely the villain of the story, the final boss of the dark patterns, the first of all. But here’s the thing. There’s a problem, something that’s sticking, seizing up and blocking. WoW is incredibly good. Worse still: it’s extraordinary to let yourself slip into its retention loops. These loops are what make World of Warcraft unsurpassable, inexhaustible. When you play WoW, you’re playing with time.
We play with the past, which is always there, accessible. No game manages to evoke so much nostalgia and make us play with it. All eras still coexist in this two-decade-old world. Old and new meet again and again, as we travel through landscapes that were home to our adolescence and in which we find traces of our past actions. I enjoy sailing from one continent to another: the one that’s all frozen is the one I rode on after my first love. This horse that I won, I hunted it down at a time when friendships were stronger than anything else. This character I’m helping has grown old with me. When I met him, we were both just over 10 years old. Now Anduin, like me, is a tired thirty-something. This tomb… This tomb is that of a person I had come to know, and I return to it from time to time, to remember what it was like to have a father…
We play with the passage of time. The time that’s supposed to be used to earn money, which for once is just unproductive idleness. The more you play, the more powerful you become, so it’s only fair. More so than in a world where the people who lose the most are the ones who win the least. Because the game demands this time from us, it demands that we explore it, that we live it. Each area has a patina of my thoughts, and I’ve practised places in the same way that you master a dance movement or a theatrical line. I’ve practised again and again, there and here, to make myself feel at home. I know an area by its music, its atmosphere. No wonder there are Geoguessers on Azeroth. At a glance, all the players find themselves on maps they know as well as their characters. The time spent becomes a reward in itself, a driving force behind the game. We become attached to a place or a character because it has welcomed us for a long time.
We play with our daily lives. WoW punctuates our weeks with collective events and weekly get-togethers. Wednesday evenings are raid nights, and we meet up on Discord as if we were at the PMU. As in real life, we can take shelter and prefer the queer bar in the town centre to avoid the hooligans, or we can join the virtual third places that are the inclusive guilds. Every week, we find little rituals that accompany our lives, a mount to fetch, a place to visit, a resource to collect. The aim is no longer to save Azeroth from all the intergalactic threats, but to give our lives aesthetic, emotional and social dimensions. Everyday life is lived as a Zen practice. Gestures are repeated, and a certain calm settles in. The cup of tea is steaming, my cat on my lap: I can continue my journey in this world that I inhabit.
It is sometimes said that free play is a never-ending act. The tumbling, the rocking, the spinning and other great feasts of the senses are free of all rules and constraints. There are no losers and no winners, just the joy of existing beyond all meaning. We are in the midst of a rediscovered world that bends to our imagination. Conversely, other games push us to win or lose, to act cautiously according to established permissions, to please a referee or a triumphant conscience. These games come to an end.
World of Warcraft is a game with no end. These two attitudes coexist within it. Endless play can be a terrible burden when you’re playing to win. But the innocence of exploring fantastic lands in wonder, endlessly renewed, for ever and ever, retracing your steps, finding loved ones and forgotten lands, all that is priceless.