If you play MMOs, you instantly knew from the title that there is a group of people who want to go to Wailing Caves/Caverns/West Commonlands (depending on your MMO) for the purpose of making their characters more experienced, and they are looking for someone to take the hits and attacks from the monsters therein, plus an additional person of any profession to fill the group. They are meeting at the Crossroads (both EQ2 and WoW have a Crossroads near their WC, go figure) and are otherwise ready to go.
If you don’t play MMOs, you had no idea what that meant (but referring to the MMORPG Lexicon might help).
Every profession has its shorthand — think real estate, or medicine, or engineering. It’s like that old yarn about joke-telling prisoners that have been in prison so long and told the jokes so often that they’ve numbered them.
On the one hand, after the tenth time you’ve told the same joke, you appreciate abbreviations. On the other hand, it’s a little confusing for the new guy.
Shorthand lets us spend less time typing and more time playing (important during fast-paced activities with a lot of people, such as raids). But it also implicitly says, if you don’t understand what I’m saying, you’re not worth talking to.
Language, then, becomes another play in the metagame. That’s the game of playing the game, and it takes place in the chat channels and the out-of-game forums and wherever else players meet. EverQuest 1 had (and has) such a strong metagame that it still thrives nearly eight years after release. This isn’t because it’s the best game ever, or anything SOE does in particular. It’s because the players have so much invested in the metagame.
The strength of a game depends on the strength of its metagame. And conversely, a game with no metagame (also called a community) can’t succeed.
The metagame has its own ranks, skills and levels. Learning the lingo gains you rank in the metagame. Keeping chat channels lively earns you rank — there are a bunch of people in the various EQ2 chat channels who aren’t high level or in raiding guilds but still get a lot of love and respect just because the game is more fun when they are on. They always get the help they need and never go looking for a group because their metagame rank is so high.
Learning to play the game is easy. Learning to play the metagame is hard, but you won’t have much fun in an MMO playing one and not the other. It bugs me to no end when I read that a reviewer logged on to MMO XYZ, didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t visit the community sites, just killed ten beetles and decided the game was about killing beetles and logged off bored.
They miss the point. MMOs aren’t about leveling or killing beetles or even raiding. MMOs are about making a place around which the real game, the metagame, is played. Graphics may be 3 and sound may be 2, but if Community is 10, I’d be interested in giving it a shot. Graphics 10 and sound 10 but Community 1… forget it. That’s a dead game walking.
