Balance and Meritocracies - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 151

a perfectly balanced meritocracy where hard work, ef ort, skill and knowl-
edge can be rewarded as players become more powerful based on their
actions and knowledge. However, this desire for balance also has a notable
impact on video games, shaping development and potentially altering the
demographics of those designing and playing games. Balance can obscure
the need to look more critically at some aspects of the game industry and
of game players, as video games can be seen as 'perfectly balanced' worlds
where the strong and skilled thrive. Further, the dynamics of design are
changing, as corporations lead a push toward a dif erent kind of game
world, the one represented in the Mann Company Store, where players
are able to buy their way to success while generating revenue for the game
developer. Understanding the impact of the ideograph of balance requires
looking beyond the games and toward the ideological framework the focus
on balance supports.
Some of the framework for the tension about how balance works in
games can be seen in player discourse about balance. In the midst of a
post about how hard it is to balance player classes in MMOGs, one writer
concludes,
In some respects, I kind of like it when games . . . are imbalanced. Life,
after all, isn't fair. We don't have obsessive-compulsive deities lording
over us and tweaking various country factions and vehicles and modern
day fi rearms to ensure that a broadsword is “competitive” with a sub-
machine gun. The obsession over balance can be overrated, and it can
sometimes do more harm than good. A game's class system is a large,
complicated machine with many expensive, moving parts. Tweak one
thing on one side and another thing goes out of balance. It's an impos-
sible tight-rope to walk. Just look at WoW ! They've been “balancing”
that game since release . . . The question becomes . . . is perfect balance
possible? Should we even try? Or should we just make a bunch of cool
stuf and toss it up in a big, chaotic salad? As a woman, of course I
prefer salad. And chaos. 42
This argument is fascinating in that it is almost a direct refutation of what
Bartle sought to put into the original MUD and stands in opposition to
many of the designer quotes mentioned previously. Similar to a mode of
design focused on awesome, this places a focus on cool and notes that life
on Earth is not balanced, so why would you balance a video game? Addi-
tionally impressive is that the author chooses to declare her subject posi-
tion as a woman, a minority demographic in the genre of the games she is
discussing. This argument inspired discussion, including the observation
that “[v]ariety is all well and good, but sooner or later, if there's no balance,
everyone's going to end up choosing that [most powerful] class, and then
you might as well not have all those other possibilities.” 43 Although not an
outright attack, this response voices the presumption that the reason why