Balance and Meritocracies - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 150

for most of the game. After Level 20, players must enter areas where groups
of high-level characters can wait to slaughter them. 31 The problem of gank-
ing, being repeatedly slain by higher-level opponents, is not unique to Aion ,
although the prominence of ganking can be seen as an issue of balance.
Compounding the problem for Aion is the state of the economy, where
massive hyperinfl ation, which is attributed to both professional gold farm-
in g 32 and bugs in the game's code, 33 changed the balance of the in-game
money supply. The combination of player versus player content, ganking,
and massive hyperinfl ation created a situation where game play fell out of
balance and the “fun is now absolutely dictated by how much real money
you spent to buy Kinah [ Aion 's currency]. Skill is useless when you are fac-
ing a rich noob who got the best armor and weapon he surely bought with
Kinah from gold sellers.” 34 Critiquing the lack of control over the economy,
one critic contended that gold sellers need to be shut down for NCSoft to
show that “they are really serious about protecting the integrity of Aion 's
economy and game play balance.” 35 An economy out of control led to play
out of balance, which drove people away from the game. Players had an
expectation of balance, that success and failure in Aion should be based on
skill at play, rather than the size of one's wallet.
In addition to the cases explored so far, concerns about balance in online
games can be seen throughout the discourse surrounding them. Players
routinely appeal to developers with balanced based concerns about their
games of choice, whether it be to balance their preferred style of combat 36
or to decry a sudden change that put the game out of balance and led to a
rage quit. 37 Developers seek to explain the balancing issues in their games,
as it becomes an ordering principle for what they think the game should
be like. 38 Players lament a game's death spiral based on others gaining an
unfair advantage, 39 placing the game out of balance, as “speed glitch losers”
dominate Forza Motorsport 3 ' s leaderboards. 40 Rewards that are too good
to be true can also be a problem, as players feel they become so powerful
that the challenge is sucked out of the game and the content is facerolled. 41
In all of these cases balance is expressed in various ways, but the central
focus on and need for balance is never questioned. Balance is an ordering
principle of video games, one that drives both design and play and feels
like a natural, unquestioned part of video games, even if many of the other
games we play are not balanced. Wordplay shows how this focus on creat-
ing a dif erent kind of world, a balanced one, is one more key to unlocking
how discourse shapes the terrain for video games.
BALANCE: WHY IT MATTERS
One of the clear results from the focus on balance is that video games fea-
ture something akin to the more perfect world that Trubshaw and Bartle
fi rst sought out to make with MUD . For many, this is an appealing vision: