This past weekend I started playing Beyond Good and Evil on the PC. The developers did something I’ve never seen before which was to allow inverted mouse movement that forced one to have the X-axis inverted with the Y-axis. WTF?

I tried to use both ways and neither made much sense to me. I’m used to flight sims and treating the mouse like I would a joystick for camera/POV movement.

Then I looked it up on the BGaE forums and found that other people were having the same problem as me. I found someone’s blog post (snarfed.org) about it which referred to his journey for a way to invert only the Y-axis through a third-party solution. His write-up led me to email a guy named Moritz who wrote a custom mouse driver which would let a user toggle Y-axis orientation. It worked okay… sometimes didn’t seem to work… anyway, when I started playing the game again, the menus and such (especially the code entering screen for locked terminals and doors) were too hard to navigate.

That night, I was thinking about it and visualizing why I am so used to the flight-sim method of input. I pictured my head and my right hand on the back of my skull pivoting my head up and down. But that analogy doesn’t hold true for right and left because if I move my hand right, my face should point left as a result… which isn’t how I was used to moving and isn’t how joysticks work for flight sims.

This made me frown. In other words, I introduced a cognative dissonant thing into my thinking… and when I went back into the game the next morning, I was able to think of using the mouse on a 2D plane instead of embodied in my head. My task was to point the center of the screen (or the mouse cursor) up or down, left or right. (Insert philosophical questions about whether 3D game interfaces should be embodied in a 3D environment or on a 2D screen here…)

And it worked! When I went into World of Warcraft later, I found that the inverted Y-axis that I set up in that game was no longer working for me. In three days I retrained myself through mental visualization how to use a mouse to navigate a 3D environment and unlearned what I had been using (A LOT) for the past 20 years! Wow.

I've thought of this for about 15 months now, but it recently came up in a great conversation I had with two cool people, Tom Baer and Theresa Horstman, yesterday at the Cafe on the Ave.

There is a quest line in WoW that happens pretty early in the life of a Horde player. Thrall wants you to investigate some baddies in a cave outside Orgrimmar, the Shadow Council or whatever they're called want you to go into Ragefire Chasm, etc….

My memory sucks. Most of the quests in WoW blur together for me.

But I do remember this: I thought there was a build-up happening between Thrall and the Council who wanted to usurp power from him. I thought (thoguht) that, as a player, I would get to choose sides. How silly of me to think the developers would let me decide how to role-play.

It is a sad world we live in right now when players cannot count on CRPGs (not just MMOGs) to let us act and make decisions based on information that we get in the game in interesting ways. It's like they go halfway… they have a cool story, but then don't follow through by taking advantage of the interactivity of the medium.

Summary: World of Warcraft and many, many other computer role-playing games are missing the most important part of a role-playing game. They don't let players choose how their character would act and react in the dynamic worlds that've been created for them. I would love to have to make decisions about who to ally with and who to betray–moral and ethical decisions.

WoW instead has different factions you can gain reputation with… but none of them mean anything. Their only mechanic is to act as a time-sink so you can craft stuff with questionable utility. It would be interesting if the factions weren't so clearly divided into who you are meant to ally with and who you are meant to attack. Wouldn't it be cool if gaining faction with Argent Dawn made you lose faction with Cenarian Circle, for example? That would be a real choice.

Wouldn't it be cool to funnel some of your money and wool and silk and other crap collection into the Shadow Council to secretly work agains Thrall or vice-versa rather than just giving it to the Horde collector?

Bah… I ramble… What I want is a game that actually makes me grapple with who I am, who I want my character to be, and who my friends are.