Games - Catassing

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	Games - Catassing

Catassing is the process of sequestering oneself at a computer and avoiding other day-to-day activity in favor of advancing one's character in a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) whose game design makes heavy use of level treadmills or their logical equivalents.

Origin of the term

The term appears to have originated in a June 1, 2000 newspaper article called "The Surreal World" in which the author described a gamer who had become so addicted to Ultima Online that he had spent his waking hours playing the game, dispensing with other activities competing for his time including personal hygiene and changing the cat's litter box. As a result, he and his entire apartment reportedly had the "pungency of cat urine", which he then called a "Den of Cat Ass and Murdered Time". On June 2 the article was linked from Lum the Mad, a popular MMORPG commentary site at that time, and was used by Jeff Freeman (aka Dundee) in the rec.games.computer.ultima.online newsgroup a week later.

The term has since spread, and as of mid-2004 has been spotted in use throughout the community of MMOG players.

People who have not played MMOGs may have difficulty understanding the addictive potential of the refined Pavlovian conditioning employed by the designers of these games to keep people playing and paying the monthly fee. Those who have spent significant time playing MUDs or MMOGs will recognize the disturbing plausibility of the anecdote.

Countermeasures

For a variety of reasons, MMOG designers occasionally attempt to reduce the amount of catassing among players of their games. It has proven to be very difficult to come up with successful game designs that reward continued play while discouraging catassing, resulting in controversy when experimental techniques are forced upon players.

Reasons why an MMOG might take steps to discourage catassing might include:

Power gamers quickly outlevel their friends, making them unable to play together and inhibiting the ability of the player base to grow through word-of-mouth
Power gamers may tie up valuable in-game locations for far longer than expected, damaging the play experience for the majority of users
Power gamers tend to accumulate in-game negotiable rewards (i.e., items and money) disproportionately and more quickly than expected, affecting the in-game economy and again damaging the play experience for the majority of users
Concerns about potential liability

Theory

Proposed countermeasures include:

Steeply diminishing returns on advancement, aka "flattening the level curve", in which it takes longer and longer to obtain smaller and smaller incremental advances in power level. While this helps address the problem of power gamers being unable to play with their non-power-gaming friends, it instead seems to encourage catassing among the more obsessive players by requiring increasingly long stretches of marathon play in order to obtain meaningful advancement.
"Soft caps", in which artificial limits are enforced on the maximum power attainable in some area. This can be difficult to balance: If the caps are too high they may have little impact, while if the caps are too low, players will reach them quickly, become bored, and may stop playing the game.
Removing intersession advancement altogether. While this drastic step is unlikely to be taken by any current or future MMOG that wishes to remain solvent, this is the normal state of affairs for popular online first-person shooters including Counter-Strike
and the original Quake.

Case studies

Ultima Online

One of the first attempts at limiting catassing was the "power hour" in Ultima Online. With this mechanism, advancement slowed down if you played for more than one hour per day. This provoked outrage among some players, and the policy was eventually modified.

World of Warcraft

More recently, World of Warcraft has experimented with a "rest state" system in which time spent logged out or in town (especially at an inn) would earn the player additional experience on later kills. Many have argued that since Blizzard games typically have a more mainstream appeal than other MMORPGs, the "rest state" was a way of appealing to people who wanted to play a MMORPG but specifically wanted to avoid "catassing". Anecdotally, most of the controversy has come from more serious players, whereas more casual players see the "rest state" as a valid balance.

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