World of You're-Never-Going-To-Finish-Me-Craft

“Four years have passed now since the aftermath of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and a great tension now smolders throughout the ravaged world of Azeroth. As the battle-worn races begin to rebuild their shattered kingdoms, new threads, both ancient and ominous, arise to plague the world once again.”

This is a potential concept statement for World of Warcraft. At the very least, it is the introduction to the game given on their website. This sets the scene for the game, at the same time as giving little enough detail to keep people curious. WoW is nothing special in terms of its concept statement. It does, however, take an interesting approach to start and end conditions. Well mainly end conditions.

Start Condition: Each race has its own starting area, where the player is initiated into the game with a small backstory about their race of choice, and where they can familiarise themselves with the game completing some simple quests. In terms of individual background, the player essentially starts a clean slate with no backstory. The game itself also only gives the player a brief overview of plot backstory (in the long run, plot comes a long way down the list of driving factors in this game – why are we killing Illidan? Because he drops epics…).

End Condition: This game takes an interesting approach to end conditions, in that the definable end does not take place in game, but out, in one of two situations:

1. You ‘/quit’ the game due to one of several factors including, but not limited to:
1. Your loot being ninja’d
2. Blizzard failing to adequately buff your class
3. Repetitive PVP deaths to a class that Blizzard has repeatedly buffed
4. Guild related angst
5. Inability to deal with noobs
6. You tire of the game after reaching 60 / 70 / 80 and realising your class sucks. This coincides with realising that there are several months / years of your life missing and you can’t get them back
2. You continue playing…forever, until WoW not only dominates your life, but your death, when you’re inflicted with a disease (incurable) that deals -100 stamina every hour.

Funnily enough, neither of these situations would really constitute a player winning the game, or even finishing it. Does this mean that WoW is not technically a game, as it can’t be finished? Or does it represent a game that has an undetermined end condition, where the end condition is decided not by the developers, but by the players and what they hope to achieve from the game.
This raises an interesting issue in regards to Lecture 2: do start and end conditions always have to be decided by developers, or is it enough to simply create a framework and allow the player to decide what constitutes having ‘finished’ the game?