Over the past month or so I’ve been playing two of the year’s most lush and satisfying videogames, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. For some context, I have two characters in Skyrim totalling about 150 hours, and I’ve finished the main plot and Desmond’s journey in Revelations, something like 35 hours in that. As I played both of these games, I found myself oscillating between a state of pleasant immersion, a determined single-mindedness, and an apathetic self-consciousness of the futility of it all. Those last two. I blame on my history with another game - World of Warcraft. For me, WoW created a whole new way of playing videogames, a mindset I still sometimes struggle with today. The biggest game-changer WoW represented for me was the whole concept of ‘end-game’, which creates a never-ending cycle of dungeons and raids (many) players strive to crack into.

Let’s step back again just a bit, so I can perhaps verify my MMO credentials. I played WoW for about four years, maybe five (I trailed on and off for the last year). I began in Vanilla, started my first guild before I really knew what they were for and had a fantastic time. By the time Burning Crusade hit, I had learned what raiding was, and was hitting Karazhan in my crafted clefthoof armor as a bear off-tank—back when Karazhan was hard! I worked all the way up through to Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, but only really got to Black Temple after it got nerfed. I played through most of Wrath of the Lich King and the new Naxxramas, but by that time I was seeing the formula and that’s where I started to wean myself off the game. I played as a feral druid, an enhance and resto shaman, and a paladin tank. The only thing I never did was ranged DPS. I waxed and waned between very casual and social play, to spreadsheets documenting my gear progression and theorycrafting the best rotation for threat or DPS.

So, over the course of those years, I got myself into end-game. Raiding in end-game is more like playing a regular sport than playing a videogame. Raids occur every week, sometimes every night, and you’re expected by the group to turn up with your game face on. Raids become the raison-d’etre (or raison du jouer, perhaps?) for many long-time players. The boss encounters are a brutal numbers game. Strategies are all well and good, but if you don’t have a certain level of gear then you simpily can’t hit, dodge or heal well enough to participate. So gear is important. Gear is a reward for playing, though, so there’s plenty of it around.

End-game encourages a certain mentality for playing MMOs, something I’ll call a reward-driven cycle. That is, you gear up to fight bosses, who drop more gear so you can fight more bosses later. Those bosses, of course, drop more gear so you can fight more bosses... When the whole reason for playing the game is to get the rewards, the whole process becomes very instrumental, efficient and calculated. Every action taken needs to contribute somehow towards the eventual downing of a boss, and the chance at some gear, or that action is wasted time. This way of playing tends to focus the mind in a particular, economic way, and so I spent far more time looking at spreadsheets and loot tables than the story or characters in the world of Azeroth. I was a lot more concerned with keeping up with my guildmates, and progressing through challenges, than I was with the fiction of the game.

Unfortunately, that attitude ingrained itself deeply into my game-playing psyche, and bleeds over into other games. In Skyrim, I found myself blasting through the countryside, sprinting from one objective to the next, so fixated I was on the next reward, accomplishment and challenge. This is not a great way to enjoy Skyrim. There is so much to found by meandering, becoming distracted and taking things as they come rather than by planning and calculating everything in advance. There is a sense of discovery and wonder that Skyrim can deliver, but not if you know exactly what you’re working towards all the time.

In both Assassin’s Creed and Skyrim, there are rewards for completing certain challenging feats. In Revelations these are more ‘videogamey’, in that they are repetitive tasks around various themes, such as calling down Assassin allies, or repeatedly killing guards with their own weapon. Repetition is a major theme in World of Warcraft, too—no guild can get by doing a raid encounter once. I found myself completing some of the Assassin’s Creed challenges, working my way towards the various faction rewards (weapons, abilities etc). Then I suddenly realised—what’s the point? The repetition of these menial tasks in Revelations is essentially the grind found in MMOs, and increasingly in other games. But at least in an MMO there is always that light at the end of the tunnel—or rather another tunnel entrance. Grinding was always purposeful because the reward would be useful in a later raid. Even the repetitive raiding is purposeful, since each boss drops an item that’s useful in taking down the next boss.

What was I working towards in Assassin’s Creed? I’d already finished the main storyline, completed the Desmond journey, and yet here I was grinding my way through Assassin’s Guild challenges, with no hope of a rewarding or useful outcome. What was I going to use Altair’s sword on? There aren’t any end-game bosses that I can’t take on without that little piece of gear, so why bother going through the grind?

Having these thoughts about games like Skyrim and Revelations is disappointing. It makes the games feel pointless, because there “aren’t any rewards.” But in reality there are rewards - just not the kind of rewards that MMOs offer. Where in WoW the Purple Sword of Fiery Taco Sauce is the reward for hours of rote gameplay, in Skyrim and Revelations, the varied and unique moments of gameplay required to get that sword are the reward. Particularly in Skyrim, one doesn’t do the Thieves Guild quests to get the Guild Master’s armour. Instead, you do the quests to do the quests. The interesting, story-rich, difficult and varied tasks ahead are a melding of challenge and reward. Infiltrating the Goldenglow Estate is rewarding for its own sake, rather than something to be put up with because it pays off in the end. These kinds of videogames pay off all the way through — if you stop to smell the roses.

In the end this is a story about not forgetting that different videogames are fun in different ways. WoW is satisfying partly because it seems to pay you for your gameplay time with fat loots, but more importantly as a social event, where a group works/plays together and enjoys the shared accomplishment. Single player games don’t pay for your time with good rewards, but pay you with a good time.