Talking Game Design - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 62

Black Ops is dif erent, as it is more about how the audience for games is
composed of dif erent segments, all of whom can impact what games are
developed and what risks in design companies are willing to tolerate. The
status as the largest entertainment launch in history is both a blessing and a
curse for Call of Duty because the spotlight placed on perceived failures or
changes to the game can be harsh. Popularity and scale are also at the heart
of the role of audience in setting the terms of play for the largest MMOG,
World of Warcraft .
WORLD OF WARCRAFT : FEEDBACK AND CHANGE
The size, scope, and design of WoW makes it another game where an
invested community of players use words to redefi ne design and play. Play-
ers develop strategies for the game, occasionally deliver withering commen-
tary on a variety of design decisions, and interact with both community
managers and developers on a variety of forums. The amount of online
player-driven discussion about WoW is massive, as the discussion and
analysis of the game has become a legitimate industry with a number of
companies capitalizing on the economic possibilities available by catering
to engaged communities of WoW players. 53 The player driven reshaping of
the game comes in a variety of dif erent forms, but two of the clearest are
the near constant feedback about the game's development and the ways in
which the game is altered by the modifi cation community.
The size of the audience engaged in WoW creates an overwhelming
amount of discussion about any change in the game's design. When one
considers that an MMOG is in a constant state of becoming, it means
that players are regularly discussing the ways in which the game has been
altered and whether or not those developments were in the best interests of
the game as a whole. Often, players will either identify problems or solu-
tions they feel need to be addressed and many of the suggestions end up
being integrated into WoW . Although this relationship is correlative, rather
than causal, it is certainly a case where players talk back and shape the
discourse of WoW .
Two clear lines of discussion that cropped up in the wake of the Cata-
clysm expansion to WoW illustrate the benefi t of wordplay's acknowledge-
ment of players as active agents. The fi rst is the way in which the Cataclysm
quests are designed. For years both players and the game developer dis-
cussed an interest in designing the game so it felt like players were making
a dif erence in the game world. This is something that can be easily inte-
grated into single player games, but is much more dii cult to do in a game
with millions of players. Cataclysm sought to address this issue by intro-
ducing world zones in sections and 'phasing' the world so that when one
had completed quests in an area it changed how the environment appeared
to the player. However, a side ef ect of this was that the “overuse of linear