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#26. Consequence: The Monomyth of a Game
There is another, more abstract, monomyth that is usually part of a
virtual world. It is hard to notice, because it is not explicitly being
designed, yet very deeply built into almost all sufficiently matured
gamelike virtual worlds. I only became aware of it because Blizzard has done
something unheard of to World of Warcraft, and as a side effect broke
that special monomyth.
What they did in their latest expansion ("Cataclysm") was to completely replace most of the early-to-mid game content, and redo it almost from scratch. As much as this was an urgently needed face lift, and a substantial improvement of almost every aspect of the game experience, I felt that something was missing now. I am still not 100% sure I understand it, but here is my hypothesis:
As the game designers built the original World of Warcraft, and then expansion after expansion, they kept learning. They kept exploring their possibilities. The technology they were using evolved, their tools became more powerful. Their workflow became more streamlined in places and more sophisticated in others. The gamut of material that they could use grew and grew. They became more confident and more creative as technological limitations were lifted. In short, the game's makers were traveling along their very own hero's journey and gained power.
This evolution of the game designers must necessarily be reflected in all game content they create!
Thus the game world, and all game content set there, too, follows this general principle of evolution: newer stuff is "better" than older stuff. Parts of the game that were created later are richer in detail, have more subtlety, are more varied, and generally have more depth (all of this on average, of course).
Usually, and World of Warcraft is no exception there, virtual worlds are being created starting with the early game content. That is just the natural way of things: you start out small, with a sketchy game engine, with rough tools. At first, there are characters with few abilities, game mechanics are simple and few in number. Likewise, the first few areas of world environment will be simple and basic. That's all you can do, so that's all you have. But: you have a coherent game right away, simple as it may be. So you can test that prorotype, play it, iterate on the design, and evolve it from there.
Eventually the design stabilizes, and then the designers keep adding more and more content to the virtual world, chronologically following a character's progress through a personal monomyth as laid out by the story artists. While they are doing this, the designers themselves are advancing on their very own hero's journey. Their progress and growth is reflected in the game content they create.
This results in a subtle but powerful experience to the players: as they play along, advancing their character's monomyth, the game world gains details, subtlety, variety, and depth. This simulates for the player the accumulation of knowledge that their character is going through. As the characters, storywise, begin to see more, understand more, so do the players see a richer, more colorful world.
I believe that this "monomyth of a game" is one of the many lucky accidents that help make virtual worlds as amazing as they are.
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