This is the first post of a series on Blizzard’s quest creation strategies and how to use them to succeed IRL.

Anyone who has spent even a little amount of time in World of Warcraft (and most other MMO’s) has experienced quests. Quests are the bread and butter for leveling, for gaining new armor, and making money in the online world. But what is a quest really? What about a quest has caused millions of people to spend countless hours working away at them? What can we learn from these quests and apply IRL? That’s what this series aims to answer! Let’s get to it.

Objective

The first part of a quest we will look at is the objective. The objective is what you are actually trying to accomplish. When you talk to someone with that familiar yellow ! above their heads, you are given an objective to complete. This can range from anything like kill 12 wild boars to return with the head of a dragon in your backpack! All physical limitation of size aside, Blizzard does a great job of creating tons of quests to keep people motivated and happy. So what can we learn from this? How to set a quality goal.

Quality Goals

There are certain aspects of a goal that make it quality and more likely that the goal will actually be accomplished.

1. Specific – Goals that are specific in objective are much likelier to get done. Imagine if instead of “Kill 12 wild boars and return to me.” Farmer Ned had said “Go kill some boars and come back to me” you might have gone out, killed a few boars, came back to Farmer Ned and wondered why in the world you couldn’t turn the quest in! This would lead to some frustration and many of players would have quit playing all together (or at least given up on quests). So it then makes sense to make your goals specific.
2. Measurable - Another important aspect is the ability to measure the goal. Could someone other than you track your progress? Without seeing any results or any progress we don’t gain momentum and momentum is HUGE for accomplishing your goals! Remember the phrase from high school physics: Objects in motion have a tendency to stay in motion while objects at rest have a tendency to stay at rest. In game, when you take a step towards completing a quest it tells you and alerts you on your screen. 5/12 Boars Slain. Hey, I’m making progress! This isn’t so bad, let’s keep going!
3. Attainable - In WoW’s Quest Log, quest names are typically colored according to the difficulty relative to your current level. A Gray is a trivial quest, Green is an easy quest, Yellow is on par for your level, Orange is a bit harder to attain, and Red is difficult! Then they take it even further by adding ‘Group’ and ‘Raid’ to alert you in advance it will be difficult to do this solo. Imagine trying to solo a Red group quest! It’s probably unattainable for you in the current moment but that doesn’t mean abandon the quest and give up, but that’s what most people do. They set unrealistic and unattainable goals, fail to meet this huge expectation, then abandon the goal and give up trying to improve. Set attainable goals IRL and as you accomplish them you will begin to develop momentum and ‘XP’ in accomplishing your goals.

By creating quests that follow these guidelines for Quality Goals, Blizzard is able to keep you moving towards the long term goal of hitting 80 and playing the end game, where a whole other set of goals and quests that follow these guidelines keep you playing and paying!

Next time you go to set a goal remember these guidelines for setting the goal and use Blizzard’s secret formula for goal setting success. If you don’t think it really works, check out this link: World Of Warcraft Players Racking Up 16 Million Quests A Day (kotaku.com)

In the next post of this mini-series we will go over everyone’s favorite part of the quest: Rewards!

Read on: Anatomy of a Quest – Part 2: Rewards >>

I’m staring at the login screen of RL (Real Life for you non-gamers out there), my login info is typed out, all I have to do is press the start button. My mind is racing with so many possibilities. This is an MMORPG where you don’t respawn, where leveling up is self defined, with a huge number of classes and a seemingly infinite number of possibilities.

I feel a little fearful as scenarios play out in my mind: What will my family think about this? My Guild? My E-Friends? What happens if I get rejected and my sense of ego gets deflated and I return to just play video games… Why not just keep playing? Atleast here my character is already level 80 and decently geared.

Let me take you back a few steps here. I am a nerd… I have been since I can remember. I was a military brat and I changed schools every school year. I was never very good at making and keeping friends because I knew I would be moving soon and I didn’t want to get attatched; but that was ok, I had found video games at an early age.

Early Days

If you take a timeline of my life you can trace back every major period of my life and parallel it with my current video game. My genre of choice? MMORPGs. Been playin’ since dem early dayz. I found EverQuest in 6th grade, installed it on my celeron processer peice of crap computer, established a dial up connect, closed out napster, and logged in for the first time and found my home. The virtual world that would be there no matter where I was… Suddenly moving didn’t seem so bad because I’d have the certainty and familiarity of this digital world. My friend list would be saved no matter how long I was logged out and all this took? $10 bucks a month! I was hooked.

Fast forward to my junior year of high school. Here I am, king of the computer classroom. I was the guild leader for 50 something would-be-World of Warcraft players from my school. These were the days of Beta when only a handful of us actually even had accounts. We met up every day in the computer classroom for lunch and discussed strategy, thought out duels, and sometimes just watched silly dance videos. You remember when they were at their height of popularity, right?

Finally I had found an identity in the real world. I had hyped up this game so much to all the other nerds and geeks that they were hooked before the game had even come out. All they saw was the enthusiasm of a few beta members and some awesome videos (Think”The Adventure of Setz and Plexx Part Duex?”) and none of us could get enough.

On release day half of us skipped school to pick up our copies of the game. My parents were out of town for a week so I invited everyone to my house so they could lan up and we could get a head start on everyone. The next four days were a total blur of Mountain Dews, kids coming in and out of my house like a revolving door (I happened to live a block away from the school), intermittant naps, and LOTS of World of Warcraft. Our guild was quickly becoming a dominant force on our server and we had a very powerful alliance with another dominant guild. Things were looking amazing for me. I had this awesome persona built around my character, my guild and my friends. I was finally feeling a (false) sense of accomplishment in life.

Rebellion Against The King Of Nerds

Eventually a few months after the game had come the guild started having some hiccups. The thing was some of the people were “Goths” irl, some were “nerds”, and others were even “preps”. This started to wear on people and caused a division in the guild. Long story short, we eventually disbanded, I quit playing and went into a depression, and my attendance and grades suffered because of it. I had my first ego crash. I had built up my ego on all these external and volatile variables that it was inevitable. Of course then I didn’t see that.

I did have a girlfriend at the time and I was getting laid on a regular basis, I had some online friends and some rl ones, so I was comfortable. Comfort is in opposition to change. If you are comfortable, why would you change? Things are ok the way they are. Then she moved to the other side of the country with her family, my best friend rl and in game stole my Sulfuron Ingots and sold them to a competing guild, effectively screwing up my chance of having the world’s first Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros and down I went again. A few more years of this off and on and I decided to make a change. I am no longer using a video game to satiate my needs as a human. I want to truly experience RL and I want to own at it.

That should just about catch us up here. I take a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. Start.

Pressing The Start Button

The purpose of this blog is to share my experiences with other people, gamers and non-gamers, to hold myself accountable by publicly setting goals, and maybe even help others break free of the false sense of accomplishments held in video games. I want to be honest as possible with people about my experiences and I want to make some money too. Apparently RL costs more than $15 per month. I want to connect with other people and develop a sense of self that isn’t built around external sources that aren’t related to me and I have no real control over.

The start button has been pressed and I’m now logged in to RL for the first time in years.