On Another Note: Virtual Agon

“There is also an aspect of ludus that, in my opinion, is explained by the presence of agon within it: that is, that it is strongly affected by fashion. The yo-yo, cup-and-ball, diabolo, and ring puzzle appear and disappear as if by magic and soon are replaced by other games. In parallel fashion, the vogues for amusements of a more intellectual nature are no less limited in time; e.g. the rebus, the anagram, the acrostic, and the charade have had their hours. It is probable that crossword puzzles and detective stories will run the same course. Such a phenomenon would be enigmatic if ludus were an individual amusement, as seems superficially to be the case. In reality, it is permeated with an atmosphere of competition. It only persists to the degree that the fervor of addicts transforms it into virtual agôn.”

-Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games.

When I think of my experiences playing World of Warcraft I find that they resonate quite strongly with Caillois’s above concept of “virtual agôn.”  I understand this concept of virtual agôn as a kind of competition with oneself, but one that is dependent on other people playing the game.  It’s the drive to self betterment (or in the case of MMOs, character betterment) for a kind of implicit competition: more comparing than competition.  The player enthralled by virtual agôn in a puzzle such as Sudoku knows that he will never “compete” against another Sudoku player in some sort of time trial, but he increases his abilities nonetheless, to know that if such a competition were to happen that he would come out victorious.  I find that this sort of comparison permeates the grinding experience in PvE in World of Warcraft.  A player raiding late-game dungeons wants to get better gear.  Why?  To complete harder dungeons, in order to get better gear.  And given the structure of WoW’s separation of PvE and PvP gear, nobody can even make the argument that the end goal is to fight other players with the gear.  It’s merely for the ability to implicitly or explicitly compare their gear to others’.  I’d hazard the claim that the driving force for players to play WoW (and most MMOs) is a sense of virtual agon.  Finally, this could probably be posited to be at least a driving force for many single player digital games.  Think about it: would you really want to continue playing Fallout 3 if nobody else had ever played it?

And what’s nice is our experiment could help affirm my theory (which nobody but me seems to agree with) by showing very little competition between the factions.

-Max

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