There are times when I'll be sitting at home or driving through town or doing some random task at work when it'll hit me. This wave of nostalgia and homesickness. This desire to go back, to be somewhere familiar.
This homesickness isn't for a childhood house or even mom's home cooking (I eat that most nights since my parents live right down the street from me).
No, this sudden urge is to go back to some other reality, a place that can't be physically occupied but feels more like home than anywhere I've ever slept.
For me, there are a few: Balamb Garden. Shadow Moses. Hyrule (back in 1992). Amongst others.
Video games give us this opportunity to be other places, to be with other people, to BE other people, in ways movies and books can't. We can walk across the country and spend some time in our favorite villages. We can scope out our high tech apartment and feed our dog while taking a break from hunting Replicants. We can decorate our houses in ways we never would or could in real life, learn the back alleys of the neighborhood slums, stay at mysterious hotels, take a breather in secure diners while searching for our daughter in some hellhole town.
These locations become bases to us, safe places where the conflict of the game can't actively hunt you down. Your heart gets to take a break from trying to pound free of your ribcage. Your thumbs get to take a break from rapid-firing those controller buttons.
So when a game denies me this little space, I get very disappointed.
RPGs, adventure games, horror games, action games - most of these understand the need for a home base and deliver rather nicely.
But where I'd really love to have a "home space," a place to retreat when not questing or fighting, is in MMOs.
Why oh why oh why, do I not get a house in WoW or Guild Wars or FFXIV? I mean, I know the real reason is because it'd be damn expensive to have a house per a player, but come on, can't we get some sort of apartment complex where everyone gets at least one room? I know Guild Wars has guild halls, and those are cool, but let's give it a little more detail and individuality, hm? Allow us to throw our treasures in there and decorate.
Hell, Gaia Online gives members their own little houses to decorate. I think WoW should be able to afford some sort of dormitory. Limit the server sizes and give us a place to live, damn it. If people are going to be getting married in this World of Warcraft, you can't go denying them a threshold to carry/be carried over! I mean, obviously people aren't devoting enough of their lives to MMOs.
Seriously, though, while having a house in WoW may invite people to abuse and neglect their real-lives even more, I think many gamers would thoroughly and safely enjoy the feature.
I, for one - a novice WoW player and perhaps one of the least dedicated gamers on any WoW server - would love the feature. My main problem with MMOs in the first place is that the rewards for heavy battling aren't enough to keep me going. I got new armor? Awesome. I can make an amazing potion? Sweet, go me. Still nothing to really entice me to keep battling over and over.
Give me a house and make battling a way to get stuff to decorate it, though - I be on that all night, I be on that all day, baby.
It would be like an episode of MTV's Cribs - the WoW version. "And in this corner, I stable my own dragon mounts. They have 42-inch satellite televisions in here - got those from some Alliance member whose ass I kicked last week."
No, I'm just kidding, I totally play Alliance. Those Draenei are just too cute to say no to.
Anyway, home space is something MMOs really need to learn to utilize. In single-player games, homes provide small details that really build on the characters and give them a depth that wouldn't be possible without those spaces. We can see how they keep their personal space and that says a lot about a person a game developer is expecting us to spend 50+ hours with.
In an MMO, a game genre that functions largely on the ability for the player to feel like an individual that they've created and developed, having a home space would provide a whole new level of interest, and I'm sure the number of people who would play just to enjoy that "Sims" and "Farmville" aspect of it would more than cover the costs.
I've always semi-wished that WoW had a house feature. It seems a little strange that I'm able to keep my 100+ mount collection (comprising several large dragons, a dragonhawk, and numerous rams and elephants) in my backpack. But I do think the allure of WoW is that so little of its world resembles our own - and given a choice between repainting the living room or invading an enemy citadel and slaying its dragon populace, I think most players would choose the latter.
ReplyDeleteHaha, true. I wouldn't want keeping a house to be a tedious task. I think if they did it right, though, it would be a pretty fun addition, and I know a few people who have expressed similar interests when I brought it up to them.
ReplyDeleteIt would just be a nice option. Not necessarily something you *have* to keep up with, but if you want it, it's there. And I think enough people would want it that Blizzard should consider it.
Thanks for visiting, by the way :D