Great MMORPGs? A friend sent me a video of MMORPG 'gameplay' a while ago. I don't play these things, she does and is aware of my opinion of them and chose this

Great MMORPGs? A friend sent me a video of MMORPG 'gameplay' a while ago. I don't play these things, she does and is aware of my opinion of them and chose this as the best sample she could possibly find as a way to try to change my mind about them. It was a major boss battle, something that should've been the highlight of what the game had to offer. There was no gameplay. The boss monster was rendered as a hundred foot tall demon, but it didn't fight in any meaningful sense of the word. It stepped back and forth over and over again, executing some canned move the same way every time. The two dozen players did the same thing, wasting half an hour of their lives mindlessly pressing the same buttons over and over again until the boss monster 'died' (scare quotes because obviously it popped up again later for the next batch of victims). MMORPGs aren't games. They're Skinner boxes, exploits for security flaws in the human motivation system. The real challenge is at the meta-game level: the developers win if they successfully exploit you, and you win if you successfully prevent yourself being exploited. And the way to achieve the latter is to stop playing.