Last week I played WoW with friends for the first time. I met two college buddies, Neil and Sam, on the Silver Hand server after sorting out my confusion about how to find people, invite them to quests, and above all negotiate the command-line chat system which seems like it should be analogous to IRC but isn't.

The three of us were finally united at a crossroads where a large number of players were duelling. Neil's gnome avatar began pulling all his pets out of their carriers like a kid showing the contents of his toybox to a new and interesting guest. Sam, in the thickish, hearty form of a female dwarf cheered and leapt around and danced with and blew kisses at me. Responding in kind was a joy -- I was slowly coming to master a new means of expression.

Then a trade window popped up with a cat carrier in it. Neil was giving me a Cornish Rex. "Really?!" I whispered to him. It would have taken me eons to work up the money to pay for one on my own -- money I was going to need in order to buy equipment to fortify my frail priestess. "Of course," he said. I greedily accepted and fiddled frantically with the commands to bring the cat out. There he was, at my side just like Sam and Neil's own cats. My avatar burst into tears. And kisses. And cheers. (Avatars are mercurial creatures.) Sam admitted to getting a contact high off all the newbie thrills; his dwarf leapt and danced.

Neil gave me a rose for my non-weapon hand as we headed off to fight a cave full of kobolds. "What's that for?" I asked. "Nothing," he said, "it just looks pretty." A little femme-y for me, but then, so are my priestess's robes. And, like the whaleskin boots a mysterious night elf later bestowed on me without explanation, that rose was mine, and made me less of a naked, helpless avatar without any status crawling on the continent's frozen wastes.

I am sitting up on another New York night when I ought to be sleeping, writing this out, and the reason why I can't sleep is more than just the oppressive humidity. I kept having these images of a little pointy yellow pile float before my eyes. In a jerk of recognition, it occurred to me what was going on. The gold dust was an item I was supposed to be collecting last night to complete a quest. Let me tell you about it: that dust wasn't something my priestess would get to keep. It appeared in little bounded squares in the loot from kobolds, and I was supposed to collect ten and return them to someone who'd sent me on a quest. I don't remember who it was, and in the grand scheme of things, he wasn't going to matter to my play. That dust wasn't useful, or really even pretty or fascinating. In short, collecting the dust was not an intrinsically motivating part of gameplay. And yet, I am going to have to do dozens of missions like this if I want my priestess to advance. (And why do I want my priestess to advance? I need her to get to level 40: I want a pony, goddamn it! I've been screaming this for years, why hasn't anyone heard me yet? It's the secret of "pink" gaming, ladies and gents....)

Yes, this is what keeps me up at nights: the nagging thought that Jim Gee may be wrong about games incorporating intrinsically motivating learning. I'm not by any means the first one to note that the grind of MMORPGs is boring; I first remember hearing about it at a panel that Eric Zimmerman, Katie Salen, and Warren Spector sat on at Parsons two years back.

I want to take apart what was not motivating here:
The gold dust would not be mine
It was not something I was excited about!
It was not an intrinsically useful substance
It would not be transformed into anything else (that I knew of)
There were no options for what I could do with it
The incident was not a meaningful one on my quest,
it would eventually be commoditized into other items
just as other quests, which consisted of boring things like killing ten of the same animal
would also be commoditized into clothes or money.

Ergo, this was not a matter of learning for learning's sake, or even playing for playing's sake. This was a disposable, forgettable moment. Granted, life has plenty of those... I guess movies and other forms of entertainment do, too....

Meanwhile, let's look at what was motivating for me about meeting with Sam and Neil at the crossroads
It was social
It was hilariously ridiculous
It directly contributed to my avatar's identity and skills
If we're talking in Jim Gee's terms, it also developed my own skills with the interface -- I became more competent
It was a performance

These two motivational moments may ultimately come into conflict: why am I motivated to improve my avatar if my game experience is for the most part forgettable?

* * *

Wrote this last week, and have since chatted with Chuck about it. He gently reminded me that there's more than one way of looking at motivation, and that a model which suggested that "games incorporate intrinsically motivating learning" might assume that motivation is a monolithic thing. Which I don't think it is. That's just dumb. Because I want a pony, and obviously George W. wants something else out of life (having doubtless been offered all the ponies he could possibly hope to bonk as a child). This puts the lie to the idea that using games in education to motivate kids is a sure thing: obviously, some of them won't even like games, and then where will we be? Walking straight into Larry Cuban's pointy, pointy traps. So can we talk about something else now?