For my critical play on worldbuilding, I decided to play the game Wizard101 on my computer. The game was developed by KingIsle Entertainment in 2008 and is free to play and available on Mac or PC (internet download). The target audience is magic or wizarding fans of any age.
To start answering the question about what invites a player into the world, I think we have to start at the onboarding process. I found it really interesting that I felt like I had agency both in picking what my character looked like, what kind of wizard I was going to be, and that I could keep trying again and pick at the end exactly what I wanted. I noticed that the players were quite androgynous, although there was a type A and type B player, which I assumed matched up to the different genders. Although this didn’t particularly influence my experience of the game, I can see that it could be a positive for people who maybe feel misrepresented or underrepresented in games like this. There definitely seemed to be many options. The start of the game also has a lot of narrative which forces you to get to grips with the world that you’ve now been placed in. That narrative came through dialogue with the grand wizard guy as well as through the world that you see built around you: bright colors, interesting creatures, etc. Thinking about the MDA 8 Kinds of Fun, this game majorly taps into narrative, fantasy, and discovery, all of which make a player more engaged with the world.
A few mechanics that I felt invited me into the world:
- the main wizard guy’s tone of voice (reminded me of Dumbledore)
- the agency I had in picking my magic school and appearance
- the gradual reveal of world details (led to a feeling of curiosity) rather than knowing what the entire game is about all at once.
From an ethics perspective, I think there were a few areas of note:
- the game did split character creation into type a and type b rather than male and female, but it is still a very binary model.
- the game didn’t allow for any diversity of body type
- the racial identity of characters was limited (essentially a player could pick different levels of melanin and that was about it (black and white).
Overall though, I wasn’t a huge fan of the game, mainly because it felt like it moved too slowly through the intro and I’m used to other games with much more beautiful aesthetics (in my opinion). I found it hard to engage with the old school animation of the game and I also didn’t really like the card playing dynamic for fighting given that we have so much freedom to move around as a character. (it felt weird that I’m running around a map when exploring but then am forced to be so static during the fighting scenes.
I think the game did do a good job at worldbuilding overall and I could see a lot of people liking it, but it wasn’t the game for me.
