Anatomy Of A Quest – Part 1: Objectives
Posted on : 26-06-2009 | By : Gabriel | In : Anatomy of a Quest, Discussion, Goal Setting, Introduction, WoW
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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.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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 >>
