Musings On Longevity
Today I wanted to muse about my changing experiences with two games over the last decade. In the last 10-20 years, there have only been two games that I've played with any real consistency: the collectable card game Magic: the Gathering (Magic/MtG) and the online role-playing game Kingdom of Loathing (KoL).
It rather surprises me that, as a rabid game collector and card-carrying member of the “cult of the new,” I would ever play any game more than a few times. I own hundreds of board games and hundreds more video games, many of them unplayed or played only for an hour or two. And if I had to guess, I'd say that many of those under-played games are structurally superior to MtG or KoL. So why do I continue to dump my precious time and hard-earned money down these particular rabbit holes? What do they have in common that keeps me coming back?
This is a particularly difficult question to ask of KoL, because the act of playing the game has morphed so much over time for me that I'm not even sure I'm really playing the game any more. Yet the game itself is very similar to what it was when I first began playing - it is me who has changed. Meanwhile, my experience of playing MtG has stayed almost identical to what it was in 1994, yet the actual cards that I am playing with are drastically different, as are many of the underlying rules. What games am I actually playing here, and why am I playing them?
Let's start with a little history, beginning with MtG, which I've been playing for longer. My obsession started in 1994, during the early days of Magic. The (comparatively) cool kids at my high school were all playing, so I joined the crowd, to the disapproval of my socially conservative parents. We would play before school every morning, and at lunch every afternoon. We'd play on the bus. What kept me playing at the time? The community, the thrill of discovering new cards and combinations of cards... and the joy of competition. I ran a few tournaments for my friends, and everything puttered along quite nicely until graduation, when my gaming community instantly vaporized. I tried to keep it going in college, but could raise no interest save from a lone friend, who would agree to play be very casually and very occasionally. And, frankly, doing college-y things was far more interesting than continuing to do left-over high-school-y things.
Once I reached law school, however, my ever-so-distracting undergrad community vaporized. But there was a comic book shop across the street from my apartment, and people hung out there to play Magic (this is fall 2001). Soon I was attending tournaments on Friday nights, and traveling to larger tournaments across the State. However, my new-found competitive drive shriveled in the face of the sheer amount of time and money required to stay competitive, and after graduation, lacking that comic shop social group to drive me to keep playing, I again fell “off the wagon” in 2004-05.
Oddly, in the last six months I have gone from not playing at all to being more competitive than ever, through the back-door of collecting cards to add to a very non-competitive “draft cube.” Realizing that my old cards are still very valuable because they are still seeing heavy tournament play made me want to climb back in the ring. The difference is that I have not bothered to find people to play with locally - I've got no community. Instead, I practice for tournaments by playing games against myself (a boring and strategically terrible plan, BTW). What has changed is that, with the advent of a global internet community I can pseudo-playtest simply be keeping up with the weekly tournament scene, without having to commit time (which, thanks to marriage, a kid, and a real job, I no longer have to spend) keeping up a regular playtest group.
So what can be gleaned from this cycle? First, when I move to a new city and don't have a social network, I use Magic to create one. Second, I enjoy Magic primarily for its competitive qualities, but am not dedicated enough to be truly competitive. Finally, I enjoy Magic for its ever-changing nature. You'll note that I tend to play Magic in 2-3 year cycles, then quit for several years. This has much to do with the “Standard” Magic tournament format, which allows you to play with only the cards printed in the last 2 years. So my cycles go something like this: year 1 - discover all these new cards, buying new sets as they come out; year 2 - I've caught up and can play competitively, which I do obsessively; year 3 - a new set comes out causing the cards I'd purchased in year 1 to become obsolete, which makes me grumpy and causes burnout, so I find a new hobby for a while. I suspect that if the price of Magic cards were lower and if my attachment to my “pet” deck were lessened (and/or if my current social group liked the game) I would keep playing without this burnout. But for the moment, watching the “metagame” of Magic is as interesting as playing the game itself. Of course, I'm in “year 1” of my cycle....
Ok, enough on Magic for the moment, let's move to KoL. KoL is a horse of entirely different color, and shares nothing whatsoever with MtG outside a generic fantasy setting, which both have, but neither with any particular continuity. I discovered KoL in law school, in late 2003/early 2004, courtesy of some internet forums I used to hang out in as an undergrad known as SomethingAwful (SA). The SA “forum goons” had a habit of getting a group of people together to “invade” various multi-player games, form a clan, and beat up on people for a while. They discovered KoL in its infancy, and tried this trick. Most quickly became bored and quit once it became apparent that clans in KoL were virtually meaningless, and that player-vs-player combat was a joke. I stuck around for a while because the game's humor appealed to me. It wasn't possible to finish that game at that time, so after creating a character for each of the 6 classes and playing as far as I could, I too got bored and quit. I would check in every few months to see if the game had been finished, but at one point I waited too long and my characters got deleted for inactivity. And that was that.
The next summer (2005) I was chatting with an RPG-obsessed co-worked with whom I shared an office, and mentioned KoL. Checking online I discovered that, as of the prior week, the game was now finish-able. So we both made characters. I've played almost every day since. This is despite that fact that I've long since played through the game; indeed, I've beaten it 116 times. But over the course of that play-time, both the game and my experience of playing it have changed enough to keep it fresh. First, like MtG, new content keeps getting added to the game. Not at the same speed or to the same extent, to be sure, but enough to, at absolute minimum, keep me checking in every few months to see what is new. And, as with so many video games these days, there are achievements to unlock, which get added just about as fast as I can accomplish them. As long as this continues, my inner collector won't quite let me quit. The number of trophies, outfits, and skills to collect always grows just a little faster than I can keep up with.
Unlike MtG, KoL is primarily a single-player experience. Instead of head-to-head competition, there is a more “euro-board-game” style of competition: multi-player solitaire, if you will. Which player can optimize their play best, “best” being measured by the ability to beat the game in the fewest days/turns? To the extent that there is true intra-player competition in KoL, it lies in this resource-management “speed game.” But the speed game is not a level playing field. As in MtG, there are advantages to having the money to purchase all the relevant tools. In MtG those are cards; in KoL those are ultra-rare items or the monthly donation items. In both cases, being an early adopter has given me a leg up, but I am by no means at the top of the totem pole. Nowhere close. So instead, as in the days when I ran track, the goal is always to better myself - achieve that elusive “personal best.”
Here's the part that is curious to me, the reason I'm writing this at all: while the game of KoL has changed only slightly in the time I've been playing it, my goals, and the interface through which I experience the game, have changed drastically. KoL is a browser-based game. You are given a certain number of “adventures” to use each day, and once you spend them you are done. The way the designers intended the game to be played, you open up your browser, read the text, make some choices, and repeat 40ish times per day. And that was how I played for the first few years. But as is the case for many games, eventually the trappings of the game become invisible, and the hardcore player begins to care only about the mechanics. You can only read the same joke so many times, after all. And so, in addition to optimizing turns, I began to lean more and more on scripts to optimize my time, and to prevent mis-clicks and mistakes. Eventually, and thanks to a client called KoL Mafia, which allows me to play the game without opening a browser at all, I reached the point that my “play-experience” was simply an exercise in optimizing script-code. I had gone from player to programmer.
Here is a snapshot of my current play experience: I first check the announcements and forums to see if anything is new. If there is a new podcast by the game's creators I will download and listen to it. Meanwhile, I download the latest version of KoL Mafia, and check for revisions of my favorite support scripts. I examine the logs from yesterday's play to see if there were any glitches or mistakes that may have impacted my speed. I then tweak my script code and tell it to play the game for me. That's right. My “game” is watching my script play the game. Which is almost assuredly not what the designers intended for me to be doing. In fact, it's so far removed from the original game as to be an entirely different entity.
So what keeps me coming back? The challenge, most certainly. The fact that the game keeps changing? Definitely. The 1-man “community” of my co-worker? Probably. But mostly, I suspect, it's pure habit. And the fact that I can play at work and it doesn't look like I'm playing. That helps.
But what about time? Is there a point where you've sunk so much time/effort/money into a game that you feel like you have to keep sinking more on the same into it? I definitely have felt that way about books/games that I've mostly finished but don't really want to complete - they almost always get finished in the end. But with both MtG and KoL there is no “end.” Is that their ultimate secret? Something - and I suspect that it's a very similar something - keeps me coming back to both, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is.
It rather surprises me that, as a rabid game collector and card-carrying member of the “cult of the new,” I would ever play any game more than a few times. I own hundreds of board games and hundreds more video games, many of them unplayed or played only for an hour or two. And if I had to guess, I'd say that many of those under-played games are structurally superior to MtG or KoL. So why do I continue to dump my precious time and hard-earned money down these particular rabbit holes? What do they have in common that keeps me coming back?
This is a particularly difficult question to ask of KoL, because the act of playing the game has morphed so much over time for me that I'm not even sure I'm really playing the game any more. Yet the game itself is very similar to what it was when I first began playing - it is me who has changed. Meanwhile, my experience of playing MtG has stayed almost identical to what it was in 1994, yet the actual cards that I am playing with are drastically different, as are many of the underlying rules. What games am I actually playing here, and why am I playing them?
Let's start with a little history, beginning with MtG, which I've been playing for longer. My obsession started in 1994, during the early days of Magic. The (comparatively) cool kids at my high school were all playing, so I joined the crowd, to the disapproval of my socially conservative parents. We would play before school every morning, and at lunch every afternoon. We'd play on the bus. What kept me playing at the time? The community, the thrill of discovering new cards and combinations of cards... and the joy of competition. I ran a few tournaments for my friends, and everything puttered along quite nicely until graduation, when my gaming community instantly vaporized. I tried to keep it going in college, but could raise no interest save from a lone friend, who would agree to play be very casually and very occasionally. And, frankly, doing college-y things was far more interesting than continuing to do left-over high-school-y things.
Once I reached law school, however, my ever-so-distracting undergrad community vaporized. But there was a comic book shop across the street from my apartment, and people hung out there to play Magic (this is fall 2001). Soon I was attending tournaments on Friday nights, and traveling to larger tournaments across the State. However, my new-found competitive drive shriveled in the face of the sheer amount of time and money required to stay competitive, and after graduation, lacking that comic shop social group to drive me to keep playing, I again fell “off the wagon” in 2004-05.
Oddly, in the last six months I have gone from not playing at all to being more competitive than ever, through the back-door of collecting cards to add to a very non-competitive “draft cube.” Realizing that my old cards are still very valuable because they are still seeing heavy tournament play made me want to climb back in the ring. The difference is that I have not bothered to find people to play with locally - I've got no community. Instead, I practice for tournaments by playing games against myself (a boring and strategically terrible plan, BTW). What has changed is that, with the advent of a global internet community I can pseudo-playtest simply be keeping up with the weekly tournament scene, without having to commit time (which, thanks to marriage, a kid, and a real job, I no longer have to spend) keeping up a regular playtest group.
So what can be gleaned from this cycle? First, when I move to a new city and don't have a social network, I use Magic to create one. Second, I enjoy Magic primarily for its competitive qualities, but am not dedicated enough to be truly competitive. Finally, I enjoy Magic for its ever-changing nature. You'll note that I tend to play Magic in 2-3 year cycles, then quit for several years. This has much to do with the “Standard” Magic tournament format, which allows you to play with only the cards printed in the last 2 years. So my cycles go something like this: year 1 - discover all these new cards, buying new sets as they come out; year 2 - I've caught up and can play competitively, which I do obsessively; year 3 - a new set comes out causing the cards I'd purchased in year 1 to become obsolete, which makes me grumpy and causes burnout, so I find a new hobby for a while. I suspect that if the price of Magic cards were lower and if my attachment to my “pet” deck were lessened (and/or if my current social group liked the game) I would keep playing without this burnout. But for the moment, watching the “metagame” of Magic is as interesting as playing the game itself. Of course, I'm in “year 1” of my cycle....
Ok, enough on Magic for the moment, let's move to KoL. KoL is a horse of entirely different color, and shares nothing whatsoever with MtG outside a generic fantasy setting, which both have, but neither with any particular continuity. I discovered KoL in law school, in late 2003/early 2004, courtesy of some internet forums I used to hang out in as an undergrad known as SomethingAwful (SA). The SA “forum goons” had a habit of getting a group of people together to “invade” various multi-player games, form a clan, and beat up on people for a while. They discovered KoL in its infancy, and tried this trick. Most quickly became bored and quit once it became apparent that clans in KoL were virtually meaningless, and that player-vs-player combat was a joke. I stuck around for a while because the game's humor appealed to me. It wasn't possible to finish that game at that time, so after creating a character for each of the 6 classes and playing as far as I could, I too got bored and quit. I would check in every few months to see if the game had been finished, but at one point I waited too long and my characters got deleted for inactivity. And that was that.
The next summer (2005) I was chatting with an RPG-obsessed co-worked with whom I shared an office, and mentioned KoL. Checking online I discovered that, as of the prior week, the game was now finish-able. So we both made characters. I've played almost every day since. This is despite that fact that I've long since played through the game; indeed, I've beaten it 116 times. But over the course of that play-time, both the game and my experience of playing it have changed enough to keep it fresh. First, like MtG, new content keeps getting added to the game. Not at the same speed or to the same extent, to be sure, but enough to, at absolute minimum, keep me checking in every few months to see what is new. And, as with so many video games these days, there are achievements to unlock, which get added just about as fast as I can accomplish them. As long as this continues, my inner collector won't quite let me quit. The number of trophies, outfits, and skills to collect always grows just a little faster than I can keep up with.
Unlike MtG, KoL is primarily a single-player experience. Instead of head-to-head competition, there is a more “euro-board-game” style of competition: multi-player solitaire, if you will. Which player can optimize their play best, “best” being measured by the ability to beat the game in the fewest days/turns? To the extent that there is true intra-player competition in KoL, it lies in this resource-management “speed game.” But the speed game is not a level playing field. As in MtG, there are advantages to having the money to purchase all the relevant tools. In MtG those are cards; in KoL those are ultra-rare items or the monthly donation items. In both cases, being an early adopter has given me a leg up, but I am by no means at the top of the totem pole. Nowhere close. So instead, as in the days when I ran track, the goal is always to better myself - achieve that elusive “personal best.”
Here's the part that is curious to me, the reason I'm writing this at all: while the game of KoL has changed only slightly in the time I've been playing it, my goals, and the interface through which I experience the game, have changed drastically. KoL is a browser-based game. You are given a certain number of “adventures” to use each day, and once you spend them you are done. The way the designers intended the game to be played, you open up your browser, read the text, make some choices, and repeat 40ish times per day. And that was how I played for the first few years. But as is the case for many games, eventually the trappings of the game become invisible, and the hardcore player begins to care only about the mechanics. You can only read the same joke so many times, after all. And so, in addition to optimizing turns, I began to lean more and more on scripts to optimize my time, and to prevent mis-clicks and mistakes. Eventually, and thanks to a client called KoL Mafia, which allows me to play the game without opening a browser at all, I reached the point that my “play-experience” was simply an exercise in optimizing script-code. I had gone from player to programmer.
Here is a snapshot of my current play experience: I first check the announcements and forums to see if anything is new. If there is a new podcast by the game's creators I will download and listen to it. Meanwhile, I download the latest version of KoL Mafia, and check for revisions of my favorite support scripts. I examine the logs from yesterday's play to see if there were any glitches or mistakes that may have impacted my speed. I then tweak my script code and tell it to play the game for me. That's right. My “game” is watching my script play the game. Which is almost assuredly not what the designers intended for me to be doing. In fact, it's so far removed from the original game as to be an entirely different entity.
So what keeps me coming back? The challenge, most certainly. The fact that the game keeps changing? Definitely. The 1-man “community” of my co-worker? Probably. But mostly, I suspect, it's pure habit. And the fact that I can play at work and it doesn't look like I'm playing. That helps.
But what about time? Is there a point where you've sunk so much time/effort/money into a game that you feel like you have to keep sinking more on the same into it? I definitely have felt that way about books/games that I've mostly finished but don't really want to complete - they almost always get finished in the end. But with both MtG and KoL there is no “end.” Is that their ultimate secret? Something - and I suspect that it's a very similar something - keeps me coming back to both, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is.