What World of Warcraft Taught Me About GMC

So, as some of you know, Sailor Boy is a big World Of Warcraft aficionado. In fact, I should call him Level 60 Boy (though now I think it’s like level 65, and Epic Mount Boy doesn’t quite hit the family friendly blog tone for which I strive). Anyway, now that the Burning Crusade expansion is out, I’ve been playing a little too, because, well, I lost a bet and it’s a long story, but it’s actually pretty fun and let’s move along before SB starts to gloat.

(Note: the following is going to be overexplaining a lot to people who understand WOW, so bear with me while the rest of us catch up.)

World of Warcraft is like the great-great-grandchild of D&D, so it’s all on this Tolkienesque fantasy kind of template. When you play WOW, you can play on one of two teams, which are in turn made up of a variety of different “races” (e.g., troll, elf, zombie, etc.) each with its own set of “racial abilities,” and each race can have a different “class” (like a caste or a profession — there are “hunters” and “priests” and “rogues” and etc.) with their own set of special skills and weaknesses. So when you create a character in the game, you have to decide right away what team, race, and class you want to be. (Not all races have all classes.)

SB usually plays on what’s called a “player vs. environment” server, which is basically what we think of when we think of video games: you control a character who plays against computer monsters. This is what you do when you play Super Mario Bros. or Pac Man or what have you. Now, WOW, being an online game, has millions of other players who all play online and coordinate with one another. There are other servers that are “player vs. player” servers, which are the same as the PVE servers, except that there, players can also attack other players — other characters with real people, not computer programs, behind them.

The game designers made up these really elaborate backstories for all the races to explain why they have the abilities they do and why they are allied with the people they are allied with and what their personalities are. But the castes and alliances of players on the opposing faction are not important during PVE play (i.e. “quests”). A zombie (“Forsaken”) who is on the “evil” “horde” side is going on quests and killing monsters and collecting gear and points and money in pretty much the same manner that a pretty elf (“Night Elf”) on the “good” “alliance” side is.

(Note: Sailor Boy is correcting me on some of this.)

But if you’re on a PVP server, that pesky opposing faction matters more, because at any given time you can kill or be killed by a player of the opposing faction (as opposed to PVE servers, where you have to specifically flag yourself PVP-killable). PVP on a PVE server is like a wrestling match — you’ve agreed to a fight with certain rules. PVP on a PVP server is often like going to 7-Eleven and being punched in the back of the head while you’re getting a slurpee.

PVP players are often role players assholes. which means that However, some are simply role players; they take the elaborate backstories the game has provided them and they go even more elaborate with them. Like maybe you’re a Night Elf Priest but you’ve decided that your personal moral code puts your class above your race so you will not, even if confronted by a Forsaken Priest, kill her, because Priests stick together. Or maybe you’ve decided in your head that YOUR character’s mother was turned into a zombie so you will kill other horde characters but not zombies, because hey, that’s your mom. Could be anything.

SB has a character on a role-playing PVP server, but he doesn’t play her very often, and the other day, I found out why. He was playing her and came across another player getting a slurpee who was one of the new expansion characters for the other team. He’d never fought one of these before. I urged him to fight her, and he did, and killed her and… that was it. It was remarkably unfun. I mean, astoundingly unfun. And we sat there, looking at the screen, feeling like assholes, and then SB said, “Now you know why I don’t play PVP. Because all I did here was slow this real person down for five minutes.” (“Dead “players go to a “graveyard” and then their “ghosts” have to run back to their bodies to be resurrected.)

And that’s when it hit me. This situation was all about the building blocks of story: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict. For those of you who have not encountered these terms before, it goes like this:

Goal: What the character wants.
Motivation: Why the character wants it.
Conflict: What is keeping the character from getting what she wants. (This can be further subdivided into external conflict — someone or something is keeping the character away from their goal — and internal conflict — the character has conflicting feelings about what achieving this goal will entail. For our purposes, we’re only going to talk about the latter.)

The situation, as it stood:

G: To kill a character we’ve never been up against before.
M: Because it would give us a new experience and skills and to please my blood-thirsty lady friend. (Diana interjects: That’s not enough motivation?)
C: There’s a real person behind that character, and it’s not as if we play PVP very much anyway, so is the experience really worth inconveniencing him/her?

There, the conflict well overshadowed both goal and motivation. No wonder the victory seemed hollow! We didn’t actually want to do it. Not that badly.

Lesson learned: If the internal conflict keeping your character from accomplishing the goal is more reasonable than the goal, no one will cheer him on. Possibly not even himself.

Now, what to do if this were a story? The GMC needs to be balanced, which means that the goal and motivation have to be stronger than the conflict, but not too much stronger, otherwise it’s a no-brainer what the character should do.

This is why people on PVP servers are assholes or have to role play. Because then they can say:

G: To kill a character we’ve never been up against before.
M: Because it’s an evil blood elf, an abomination of our race, addicted to arcane magic, who will steal my soul-power if I’m not careful and who have aligned themselves and their not-inconsiderate abilities with the evil zombies responsible for torching my village and eating my family. The only good blood elf is a dead blood elf. (To the limited degree that I developed a backstory for my character, Diana seems to have guessed it pretty well here. Whose story-telling ability does this reflect upon?) (Diana would like to point out that she was going for the simple here.)
C: Well, it’s not exactly honorable of me to kill someone when they are just out hunting and not looking for a fight. Bu-ut… see above. (Oh, and there’s a real person behind that character, but they know they’re playing on the other team and that all that cannibalism and addiction stuff is true. Plus, they’d do it to me.)

See how much better that works when you pretend it’s all real, and give your character complex backstories that inform their opinions and give them reasons to do whatever it is they do?

One of my writing mentors, Julie Leto, is fond of telling me that I can have my characters do whatever I want them to, as long as I motivate them enough. When I work with my critique partners, we don’t say, “She can’t do that.” We say, “I don’t see why she is doing that. She needs a better reason.” This means: “She needs to beef up her goal and/or motivation.”

As for WOW, we went back to playing on the PVE servers, because given our goals, it’s better for us to play against computer programs designed to be killed by the players. No conflict there. 🙂