Playing Games In Good Faith
âThe destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.â
â Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design
I've been thinking a lot about how different online gaming is now.
When I look at the last two decades of online games, there's a big shift that I don't really see anyone talk about. Now more than ever, players seem willing to forsake their own preferences about how they play a game in order to improve their perceived odds of success and rewards. Most people experience this to some degree; it's when you reduce your graphics settings in a shooter specifically to make enemies easier to spot. It's when you stop playing a character or class you like because a guide told you it's not good this patch. It looks like skipping cutscenes because they take time away from progression, or playing in immersion-breaking ways that are more statistically effective.
I've taken to defining this idea by what it isn't. Instead of playing games in the way they present themselves to us, or in the way we find fun, we often choose to prioritize playing in ways that our communities consider valid or optimal. Put short, we don't play games in good faith.
A lot of this has to do with metagaming, and while I think these ideas are deeply intertwined, I do think they are distinct concepts. Metagaming is the realization of instrumental play; it is the process that creates the rankings, the strategies, the methods of play that are considered to be "correct" or "optimal" play, through group consensus. Playing games in good faith, however, is what you might call the organic or natural way of playing a game. It's about the way a game presents itself to a player, and how a player perceives it. When outside pressures make you play a game in a way you normally wouldn't, you start to play the game for reasons beyond itself. You begin to play in bad faith.
Personally, the most significant instance of this issue that I've experienced was in World of Warcraft during the Shadowlands expansion. In Shadowlands, there was a system called Torghast that was initially meant to be a kind of optional game mode, inspired by games like Hades or Dead Cells. The mode itself is unimportant here, but what is important is that playing that game mode was the only source of an obscure currency for upgrading your character. The power gained from these upgrades was viewed during development as relatively small, meant to be a bonus for the subset of players that enjoyed the new mode, and not much more. In practice however, the WoW community largely decided to make playing Torghast mandatory for everyone. The community's argument was, it's a statistical benefit to your group if you get those upgrades, so by not getting them, you were being rude and holding other players back. Not just at the highest levels of play, mind you, but basically across the board. To be clear, If you did not spend hours a week grinding out the currency from this game mode, players would refuse to group up with you. From the game director at the time:
"We often hear feedback that people are upset when they run out of goals and lack the motivation to do anything. But what we found, to our initial dismay and horror to some extent, is that a much broader range of players than we expected saw this .4% power increase that was behind something they didnât necessarily enjoy doing as absolutely mandatory."
â Ion Hazzikostas, in a 2021 Interview with Gamesbeat
This issue is certainly not exclusive to WoW. In basically any online game, the decisions about what character to pick, what items to use, the strategies you employ, are all more driven by social pressures than they ever have been before.
There's a whole other side to this discussion, about how social media and the proliferation of player-created guides and strategies affects how we view these things. It's harder to engage with a game organically when so much media is determined to tell you the "correct" way to play. But that aside, the more I think about this, the more I see a common trend in online games across the board; fun in online games always takes a back seat to success. The social structures around gaming have just never really materialized a form of sportsmanship, or "playing-in-good-faith". Broadly, socially, players will choose to win while having a bad time rather than lose while having fun. Or rather, in online gaming, extrinsic rewards are socially prioritized over experiential, intrinsic fun. Intrinsic fun, on some level, requires variables, unpredictable outcomes, and surprises, and the agency to make meaningful decisions based on the info provided to you. Meta-gaming requires those uncertainties be shaved off if they don't get rewarded faster than other methods. And more than ever, gaming communities define "fun" by success and rewards almost exclusively.
This is the part where I'd love to give some kind of idea for a solution, but truthfully I don't think there's a way to put the cork back on the bottle. The channels by which these pressures propagate are already too deeply entrenched, and the pressure to play "optimally" is only getting stronger with time. But I do think we lost something along the way, when we collectively shifted to prioritize success over authenticity.
P.S.: There are a ton of other related topics I wanna give their own discussion later, like social media's role in all this. Also while I mostly talked about online, multiplayer games, this phenomenon does occur with single-player games as well to varying degrees (i.e., the community around Elden Ring offered a deluge of guides/tier lists/builds when that came out). I didn't focus on single-player games here because there's far less social pressure. You don't have teammates pressuring you to play a certain way, so it's much more avoidable.
P.P.S.: I linked it once above, but seriously. Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft by Folding Ideas is one of the best videos on this kind of topic. Please, if you can spare the time, give it a watch. He's much better with words than I am.
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