Game Design: Bitchwork Isn't Gameplay

This episode of All-Craft, a World of Warcraft podcast, talks about Project 60 and Classic servers. The reason I'm putting it here is to talk about game design using a well-known game as an easy example, so don't panic if you're not into MMOs or WOW in particular.

The take-away points is that the MMORPG medium works best when it incentivizes the formation and participation in a community, but the medium over the decades had issues figuring out what that is. Each MMO, and each iteration of each MMO, changes where that point is and often with undesired effects that impact gameplay.

The challenge now is that the MMORPG player base is not high school and college students. They are adults with responsibilities that demand a lot of their time. The result is that things that are tedious, but not challenging, became business liabilities and the only sane solution is to identify and exterminate bitchwork in MMOs.

The bitchwork has to go, and the gameplay challenges have to be entirely based on player skill- the mastery of one's character and the ability to execute solutions properly. This means removing things like buff spells and items as relevant things required to be part of community-driven group content. (Seriously; it's not in tabletop.)

If MMOs were truly faithful adaptations of proper tabletop play, I wouldn't complain about the logistics of consumables. They're not, so it's not an interesting element of gameplay; MMOs are Tactical, not Strategic, so anything logistical isn't fun at that level- it's tedious bitchwork that only ads a barrier to entry that has no right to be there. The gameplay is in solving the tactical puzzle of the encounter, not in managing the strategic puzzle of defeating the opposition forces at that strategic location in order to advance the campaign towards its successful conclusion.

You can see similar bitchwork bothers in other game forms. Look, it's this simple: take a critical eye to your gameplay paradigm, put a cleaver in your hand, and hack off everything that distracts from it. No one likes bitchwork, no one appreciates bitchwork, and no one values bitchwork. Cut that cancer from your games early, and stay vigilant that it doesn't come back.