The Gaming Iconoclast: Is Ignorance Bliss?

Ignorance is bliss.
-- Thomas Grey

Knowing is half the battle.
-- G.I. Joe

It goes by many names -- Rumor. Speculation. Innuendo. Suggestion. Suble hints. Vague allusions. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Slips of the keyboard. Loose lips sinking ships. Detective work. Snooping. Unearthing forbidden knowledge. Call it what you will, by whatever method you choose, but it's become an increasingly inescapable fact of life regarding the games we play, especially those in the shared iterations of persistent worlds.

We're referring, of course, to knowing about content before it's on our hot little hard drives.

[Note: Many of the links that follow do, in fact, go to information about pending updates and patches. If you're averse to reading this sort of information, please skip over link text that contains an asterisk. (*)]

Some folks pore over fansites, check developer logs, scour the forums, and have an extensive spreadsheet of any and all upcoming changes, sorted by date, importance, and source. They may already be thinking about what they will need to tweak to make the most of their skills and equipment the moment any new material* hits the server. They may even have some theories about what to stock up on as far as spell or enchantment reagents, crafting supplies, or even doing a bit of economic hocus-pocus to earn a tidy profit on some items they suspect will be in demand. On the other hand, another sort of player is opposed to the notion of reading ahead, checking out upcoming releases or leaked* patch notes, and is a firm believer in discovering what's new the day a patch goes live, or maybe only stumble upon a change in skills or mechanics after the fact.

Which approach delivers the superior play experience?

As readers of a gaming news site, TGI suspects that most of you fall into the former category. There's certainly no shortage of coverage of upcoming content here, or on the myriad other sites that cater to one title or another. Indulge your host in a question of your motives, then. Why do you want to know? What is wrong with living in the present? Note, however, that we're not suggesting you ought not to be reading up on strategies and tactics for encounters you'll soon be meeting in the current iteration of the game itself. While "reading ahead" is a sub-set of this sort of behavior, it's a bit draconian, even by TGI's admittedly harsh standards, to proscribe against being informed about existing material you'll be seeing. True purists don't read strats. They also get bitched at by their party-mates. It's how I pick up some of my best insults, sometimes.

That having been said, you are not playing the next point release, unless it's on the "we may obliterate you at any moment" test realms. "But I want to be ready!" How does being ready for something that you can't officially do yet make your play today better? Perhaps it's simply a matter of having a focus and direction for your energies. "I will need to have such-and-such amount of currency to get $New_Shiny_Thing" or "The recipe for $Weapon_Of_Uberness calls for a bunch of Unobtanium, I'd better get to collecting that."

This sounds an awful lot like how many people go through life -- always looking ahead for something better, and not enjoying where they are and what they have. "I'm looking forward to lunch." "What's happening after work?" "I can't wait for the weekend." In a culture, at least in the United States, where putting the lion's share of the focus and attention is on the Next Big Thing (or even the next holiday weekend) is the order of the day, this tendency to mortgage today's happiness on tomorrow's hope has become increasingly prevalent.

Don't believe me? Think about how early Christmas decorations go up in department stores. They're probably being unpacked as we speak.

We have become a culture fixated on the future to the detriment of the present. The fact that the games we play exist in a semi-defined future state -- someone, somewhere, has at least some control over what and when new stuff will come into being -- only serves to exacerbate this situation. Gamers know that changes are coming, and, like Adam and Eve, tempted by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, are willing to forsake comfort for wisdom.

Take, for instance, the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft.It's going to be, what, something like six months until the expansion comes out? I'll just be happy when it gets here. TGI has reached the point where merely hearing the term "Death Knight" causes hives.

In this vein, TGI contends that knowing what's in the pipe could, for a certain sort of player, cheapen what you do today. Actively seeking out ways to ruin one's enjoyment of a hobby strikes us as more than a little counter-productive. This being the case, why endeavor to find out more and more about it? It's a self-destructive way of asking for disappointment and discontent in the interim. Speculation is all well and good, and there is undoubtedly a certain amount of truth to the notion that the buzz about updates keeps folks playing and may draw new ones in or bring semi-retired players back into the fold.

However, the energy expended by the player base, nitpicking every suggested nuance of the PTR patch notes* , compiling sheaves of data on skill and gear updates -- wouldn't that be better spent doing something productive in-game?

Even if every wish-list item for every player were somehow to be miraculously implemented in the mother of all updates nine months down the road, knowing about it doesn't make it arrive any sooner. The joy of discovery -- whether it's new territories, features, and skills -- is an intrinsic part of the evolving game experience, if you ask me.

Sit back and enjoy what you've got. The future will get here soon enough.

Rafe Brox spends an inordinate amount of time annoying people who think they know more than he does. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you, too, would like to tell Rafe exactly how wrong he is doing it, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.