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The Smart Kids -- or, why Cataclysm failed to impress
I was a smart kid. You remember those kids from school who were always the first to turn a test in and the ones to get the best grades? The ones who never seemed to put any effort into studying but always managed to get an A? That was me. You'd think that being a smart kid would make life incredibly easy, but it did exactly the opposite. Of course you had the endless students who hated you or made fun of you because you were smart, but there was something much harder to deal with than that. See, in public schools (in America, at least), teachers generally teach at the speed of the slowest kid in class. This is absolutely appropriate, because you don't want anyone to fall behind. For the slowest kid, this meant that subjects were presented in a way that they could understand, and they'd learn the lessons even if it took a little extra time. But for the smartest kid in the class, it meant that classrooms were places of exquisite torture where information flowed at a snail's pace, and most of the information presented were things the smart kid already knew. It made school an excruciatingly boring place to be.
The Soapbox: Decent challenge
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. The ancestors of modern humans had a lot to contend with, but I'm willing to bet that the seeds of MMO gamers existed even in those days. There had to have been at least one person who looked at a wooly mammoth, a titantic mass of tree-trunk limbs and tusks and fur, and announced "I bet you get great loot for killing that thing!" And as it turned out, he was right, assuming "great loot" means "meat for food and fur for clothing." I'm exaggerating, naturally; everyone knows that ancient humanity spoke Norwegian, not English, and it's a well-known fact that the term "loot" was first coined in the Canterbury Tales along with "spawn camper." But that need for a challenge is still there, the central idea that in order to get something really awesome you have to overcome a big obstacle. Which is why challenge is such a thorny issue for MMOs and always has been, because one person's challenge is another person's irritation.
