Computer games and the society around them have changed profoundly in the last twenty years. World of Warcraft was the first always-online game that I played and a personal landmark in slowly recognizing the dark consequences of the dawning always-online world. (It’s crazy to realize that children born after this game released are legal adults now; I hope they vote for faction leaders based on their ability to stand in the middle of the capital and fight raid groups, since that’s newly relevant to American politics.)

And at first, the positives of this massively-multiplayer world were enormous. I cannot overstate how exciting the social aspect was in the days before ubiquitous social media and unlimited texting. Real people are so interesting that it ruined single player games for me for a long time. And the game was basically a detailed tabletop roleplaying game system with a computer doing the bookkeeping, designed to encourage players to help one another. For example, many quest sequences return to the same area repeatedly for different targets. This is not designed to frustrate the solo player. It’s so you can find players to help you fight large groups even if they are on a different quest.

The beautiful design of the game started to erode almost immediately. Even before any game expansions, most of the player-crafted items and highly situational abilities… simply did not matter. Then the game design became manipulative, introducing mechanics like daily quests to create content that was endless but shallow. (I burned out at the Isle of Quel’Danas.) Datamining websites, YouTube, and Twitch made a lot of information available but changed the culture so that other players were less patient with exploration and trying to solve game mechanics by strategizing on the fly. Changes like layering and cross-server groups solved problems, but took away the greatest catalyst for community, a fixed set of people who repeatedly interacted with and needed one another.

The Classic ruleset removes years of changes, but it wasn’t enough to interest me on its own.

What makes this game one that I want to play again is permanent death.

Now it plays like the super-TTRPG it was meant to be. Every profession and every whimsical trick matters. I’m logging in to play the part of the game in front of me right now to the fullest. The fear of missing out on the current endgame and the endless greedy acquisition is removed because this character is going to die. Will it be deserved from hubris? Undeserved from an internet outage?

Part of the fun will be blogging about the journey.