In particular, I’m not sure if you mean that context is required for a *game* or for a *virtual world*. I’d be interested to hear your views.

If there’s no conflict…entire crops will be lost. :)

In Second Life, if you choose to engage in sword fights, you agree to use the standard swords supplied. If you like, you can make a sword which knocks your opponent backwards as you parry, or a sword that screams “YOU LOSE!!” every time you swing it, but that defeats the purpose of sword fighting in the first place. SL has pockets of mini-games with well-defined rules for participation. Within these pockets, you can engage in gameplay. The mini-games have no impact on the meta-game of SL, unless you define the meta-game in SL as “get rich” and the mini-game in question impact your available funds.

SL has no explicit winning conditions, which is compounded by the lack of boundaries and restrictions placed on the player. WoW, on the other hand, presents an explicit driving force of “Evil” as embodied in creatures you must kill (presumably for survival and justice, but in actuality this is just an excuse to increase personal power – chilling, when you think about it). In Dwarf Fortress, the danger is real – if you don’t do anything to improve your dwarves’ situation, they will starve or get killed by raiding goblins.

But saying there’s “nothing to do” in SL is like saying there’s “nothing to do” in Australia. The catch is that for SL “players” need to turn their power into a recognizable “game” by artificially imposing direction and restrictions onto themselves. To enjoy playing the game, you have to be able to ignore the fact that winning or losing really doesn’t impact your overall life and still play to win. Just like in Australia.

A friend at work was lamenting how hard it was to level her Night Elf Hunter. According to her, she kept dying, and was rapidly losing faith in her ability to play the game.

Luckily, as she was on my server, I was able to group with her and give her some basic pointers (“send pet to attack BEFORE you shoot” and “no, you can’t solo instances”). Of course, she’s a 55+ yr old lady, and this is her first experience with video gaming (much less online games).

Lately, she has been having a blast, and even recounted to me how she soloed 2 mobs at once (woot). That is growth.

Warcraft’s much-vaunted ease is really subjective. To people who laughed at 4-hour corpse recoveries, WoW is gaming on rails. But as sub numbers grow, it’s much harder to pinpoint the modal demographic, and thus harder to determine what, in the aggregate, is “difficult”.

Given the right gamer, I think WoW offers opportunities for growth through overcoming obstacles. Just not to every gamer.

I’m reminded of Dwarf Fortress. It’s a sandbox cross between a city-builder and The Sims, done with ASCII graphics, and many challenges. So much so that one of the mottos of the game is that there is no way to win, only many ways to lose, and it’s fun. It took me half a dozen games before I was able to survive even the very first stage of the game.

In a sandbox, where initiative is weak, a pressing need for survival is the most effective provision of direction. The problem with World of Warcraft is the inability to lose. The problem with MMOs, as they stand today, is that things go from good to bad in seconds, so a grand loss is inexcusable.