The most relevant part I quote here:
The MMOs of old did not have these distractions, so the questions of "Where do I go?" and "What do I do?" were the only things in our minds. That's why we felt so free in those games, because they didn't exactly have the arrows to answer those questions for us.
I will let you in on a little secret though... those arrows are not the only answer.
Remember that, "Where do I go?" and "What do I do?" They're still there in our heads. You can ask yourself those questions like Pippi Longstocking does every morning and act on them.
While I honestly have no clue who Pippi Longstocking is, the rest of it is something I'd like to muse my way around.
Bhagpuss, one of the MMO blog frequent commenters, is an eccentric chap who will make no bones that he plays every MMO like his own personal meandering sandbox, willfully ignoring signposts to go off and do his own thing. He often expresses frustration as to why other people don't just go ahead and do that, instead of complaining bitterly that about themeparks and rails.
On the other hand, I can very well believe that lots of other people do not have that sort of determined inner focus to stay immersed in their own personal little immersion story, irrespective of whatever quirks of game design throw their way.
And then, there is my personal belief is that good game design sways the masses on the fence into playing a certain way as desired by the developers.
Otherwise, how could you produce different player behavior like Eve Online cut-throat competitiveness and Left 4 Dead enforced cooperation? It's certainly not just a product of self-selecting gamer choices (though it might play a role), but it also has to do with the ruleset of the game.
Here's an anecdote about arrows and marching ants. I played WoW pre-Cataclysm in a trial once. Or twice. Or thrice, before.
The first few times, I played with the vanilla WoW UI. This mostly consisted of reading quest text and hoping you were walking in the correct direction, and then a lot of pointless running around in circles and experimental slaying of differently named mobs and hoping you spied the correct shiny quest item. Kinda like LOTRO when they first began, except LOTRO was a little more verbose.
Somewhere mid-second or third try, they had started improving the questing interface somewhat, and at least deigned to include a popup tooltip that indicated whether you were on 0/9 of angry zehvras, and yes, these are the angry zehvras you're looking for, not furious zehvras or savage zehvras.
Then I got bored of the tedium and decided it was time for the next step in MUD/MMO evolution: cyborg'ing. I got my Curse-surfing on, and downloaded a ton of WoW add-ons. One of which was QuestHelper.
QuestHelper revolutionized questing in WoW. Especially in conjunction with Cartographer.
It took control of everything. It would re-order your quest tracker for you, pointing things out to do in terms of how near you were to the quest goal (in-game GPS!) and sort based on certain filters whether it was xp worthwhile yellows and orange quests or just miserable greens and greys.
It could set your route across zones for you - which flightmasters to use, which direction to go there and back again, and display it all in a glorious line of happy marching ants when you pressed M for map.
And by golly, there was THE ARROW.
This glorious instrument of compass-y doom would float above your avatar's head like an angelic halo, or you could shift it to the bottom of your screen near your hotbars if that was a better spot for it. It dangled the promise of customisation to your very specific preferences, but the truth is, one was often lazy to tweak the default settings. It was often easier to go with the flow and do what The Arrow wanted.
Walk this way. It would swivel in distressing fashion if you veered away from the path, and pulse comfortingly if you were on the right track towards the quest object of its desire. With its unerring pinpoint precision, it would bring you to the spot of next quest completion and the next and the next...
It played the WoW questing game so well, that ultimately I started feeling superfluous and decided not to continue with this pasttime of Follow the Arrow and There And Back Again and Right-Click on NPCs with Yellow Punctuation Over Their Head and Hit Accept.
Post-Cataclysm, to my distress, many of my add-ons had stopped working. Nothing like a dramatic world changing patch, and a few passing years to bore add-on makers to really throw a spanner in the works. I eventually found substitutes or updates for some I couldn't live with, such as Auctioneer and AtlasFu, but I could not find one for QuestHelper.
Not for the lack of trying either. Turns out the original developer stopped supporting it some time ago after tiring of WoW. And that the Shattering had fubared any semblance of a functional quest database for QuestHelper.
In retrospect, this was a rather silly and foolish quest, to go in search of an add-on that would optimize all the fun out of the journey, but I really didn't think about what I was doing until later. It was just an automatic compulsion to check all my prior add-ons and see if there were any updates. And I'm not even a regular WoW player with obsessive can't-live-without-certain add-on habits.
It turned out that I didn't need QuestHelper with Blizzard's revamped quest UI. A waypoint on the map, a tiny arrow I rarely looked at on my minimap radar, the tooltips and a little bit of searching and observation skills (which is the true fun of the journey - being encouraged to pay attention to one's surroundings) and I was doing Shattering streamlined quests in systematic fashion, meandering from quest hub to quest hub.
Surely I'm not the only one to fall afoul of this little over-convenience. A little google search for "QuestHelper arrow" will reveal the distress faced by some (many) when they find it GONE?! or MISSING? HELP!
(Now technically if you follow the link, you'd find that it really isn't a QuestHelper arrow, but was a function of Cartographer - also now defunct - and TomTom - which is a perfectly serviceable replacement for those who can't live without their happy green/red arrow.)
Still, one has to wonder why we humans do it. Why do we slavishly follow signposts and arrows that demand our attention?
The arrow points one way. But there are 359 other degrees of freedom in which we could have swiveled our avatar and walked. If only for a little while.
Except that we would be walking away from our goal. And why would we walk away from goals, it is inefficient!
But who said that was our goal to begin with? Well, it was in words that popped up to the right of our screen with a little counter and checkbox that beg to be fulfilled. And the NPC I clicked on gave me those words, and promised me a reward, so yeah, that's our goal! And the reward is sweet sweet eps (oh sorry, does everyone call them xp these days?) to fulfill our ultimate goal of hitting max level and becoming most powerful! (except the cake is a lie and you start at the bottom of a very long ladder whose rungs only appear on favorable casts of the die.)
I think part of the problem is that goal setting is hard.
Choosing goals for yourself in a sandbox all sound very well and good, but when players actually splash around in the sand for a while, getting dirt in their eyes and kicking sand into other people's eyes, and have finished making all the sand mounds and sandcastles they can imagine given the limitations of the type of sand they have and the boundaries of their imagination, they shortly end up looking about and going "Now what?"
Hell, even in real life, I don't think we've worked out goal setting as a species yet, judging by how many self-help articles are online and books are available in print.
People need prompts, guidelines, blueprints and plans and yes, even direct orders.
So it's kind of comforting to be told what to do and how to go and do it, and one tends to follow the arrow until the rare day that revelation hits and one realizes: Hey, I'm not really having fun doing this. And hey, I'm blindly and unquestioningly following orders given by a machine...which I ultimately installed and allowed dominion over me.
At which point, one ends up cast into the wide world wondering just what they really like or should want, veering away from arrows because they can... and guiltily, sneakily, going along with the arrow because not-thinking and checking off a bunch of errands is easier and gives a more satisfactory buzz than relentless self-analysis about how much fun they're having at any given point in time and what they should be doing next.
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