[MUD-Dev] Salon article: "Showdown in cyberspace: Star Wars vs. The Sims"

[Robert Zubek]

Tuesday's Salon had an interesting article on MMP online
games. Worth taking a look:

  http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/07/09/mmorpg/index.html

Rob

--
Robert Zubek
rob at cs.northwestern.edu 
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~rob

<EdNote: Copied below>

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Showdown in cyberspace: Star Wars vs. The Sims
By Wagner James Au

  If online role-playing games are ever going to break out of the
  hardcore gamer ghetto, they'll have to do more than please the
  geeks.

July 9, 2002 | What if they gave a world and nobody came?

That's the dilemma facing dozens of companies and hundreds of
developers this year, as they gamble tens of millions of dollars in
the volatile realm of online games.

To be more precise, they're wagering on the growth of MMORPGs and
MMOGs -- the unwieldy acronyms for "massively multiplayer online
role-playing game." It's a genre with enormous commercial potential,
as demonstrated by the success of fantasy titles like Ultima Online,
Everquest, Asheron's Call and Dark Age of Camelot, each with paying
subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. (Everquest is the ranking
colossus, with around 400,000 players.)

Many industry analysts anticipate that those numbers will grow in
the coming years, and grow mightily. "I expect there will be 2 to 3
million more people in the U.S. that come on board in the next two
years," says David Cole, president of the multimedia research firm
DFC Intelligence. "Humans are a social species," says game designer
Brad McQuaid, formerly the prime creative force behind Everquest,
"which is what makes me believe MMOGs will rival the movie industry
in the next five to 10 years."

If they don't, it won't be for lack of trying. Virtual worlds
expected to go online this year or next include (by no means a
complete list): 3rd World, Ages of Athiria, Asheron's Call 2, A Tale
in the Desert, Black Moon Chronicles, Caeron 3000, Charr: The Grimm
Fate, Citizen Zero, City of Heroes, Darkfall, Dragon Empires, Earth
and Beyond, El Kardian, Endless Ages, Eve Online: The Second
Genesis, Horizons, Lineage II: The Chaotic Chronicle, Myarta, Myth
of Soma, PlanetSide, Quest of Ages, Realms of Torment, The Rubies of
Eventide, Shadowbane, The Sims Online, Star Wars Galaxies and World
of Warcraft.

Almost all of them are fantasy, with a smattering of sci-fi. Even if
you're a gamer, chances are you've never heard of most of them.

And in all likelihood, this is the last time you ever will.

Most of these games will fail for several prosaic reasons -- not the
least of which is an unavoidable fact of life: The hardcore gamers
who make these games successful can usually obsess over only one
game at a time. There are only so many hours in a week, after all,
and MMORPGs are nothing if not massively time-consuming. (For this
very reason, says Cole, "I think there is room for only a handful of
these games in each genre.") And because many gamers have long since
established a social network on established MMORPGs, it's unclear
how these new titles can lure them away.

"I play Everquest currently and have for three years," says Jennifer
Powell, an online community consultant and freelance writer based in
Colorado. "The only thing that would make me switch would be if all
my friends did, since my friends, including my husband, are the main
reason I continue to play."

But the main limitations on the MMORPG market really seem to be
self-imposed: Most developers can't shake the fantasy/sci-fi mindset
or conceive of an alternative way of playing. Very few role-playing
games have deviated far from the world imagined by that somewhat
dotty, Hobbit-fixated Oxford professor 50 years ago, or strayed much
from the central conceit of "leveling up" -- that is, improving the
traits and abilities of your persona in gradual steps -- originally
invented by Gary Gygax for Dungeons & Dragons more than 25 years
ago.

The genre restrictions create a kind of hardcore role-playing gamer
ghetto. "I think they're all kind of mining the same hardcore
group," says Will Wright, chief designer at Maxis Studios, speaking
of the current roster of MMORPGs. "I don't think they're bringing a
lot of new players in."

Are too many game companies chasing too few hardcore gamers? If so,
we could be set for a disastrous year of reckoning, as the game
industry's fixation on its own cultural inclinations sends it into a
downward spiral of failure. With so many entrants fighting for air,
companies will fold, game worlds will evaporate, investments of time
and capital will dissolve into ether -- all lost in a narrowness of
imagination and an unwillingness to build a space that accommodates
the rest of the world. In the short term, the real battle for an
online audience will most likely come down to two games in a clash
of true titans: Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online.

But there's some hope. Because while Star Wars Galaxies may seem at
first glance an exclusively geek nirvana, the developers have taken
an effort to make it something more. Even more intriguingly, The
Sims Online hints at a different future and could promise a true
breakthrough: a world of online role-playing where everyone feels at
home -- and everyone has a home.

"You're running a fucking service!" Bernie Yee growls at a group of
his industry peers. He's trying to persuade his fellow MMOG
developers not to force their subscribers into "a Darwinian survival
of the fittest," which benefits their most obsessed
subscribers. Instead, he argues, the developers should cater to
casual gamers, even at the expense of their hardcore fans.

"That's a new law, then," another developer scoffs back, suggesting
that designer Raph Koster's influential "Rules of Online Gaming"
will need an addition: "survival of the wimpiest."

Yee refuses to budge: "You tell me -- who do you want to alienate
more?" Since developers are often as hardcore about games as their
audience, many are evidently unwilling to buy his reasoning.

The exchange took place at the Game Developers Conference in March,
during a heated round table on the future of MMORPGs. Yee, former
director of programming at Sony Online Entertainment, was the
moderator. And from the start, the dialogue was interspersed by
shouts and smack talk. It was also an early glimpse at the oncoming
train wreck of soon-to-fail games.

"Will all the women in the room please stand up?" an overwrought
British developer fumes. "It's white males, all wearing glasses! 
Look at us!" The bespectacled Caucasians in attendance nod: The lack
of women players and developers, they agree, is keeping their games
from becoming truly mass market. And with so much potential revenue
out there, where are the games that aren't sci-fi or fantasy? "We're
all the Star Wars, D&D, Tolkien fans; those are the games we
create," another developer admits glumly.

Both Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online aim to break out of the
hardcore ghetto. And so, for varying reasons, the eyes of the gaming
world are upon them.

"Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online probably impressed our
editors more than other MMORPGs this year," says Ken Brown, editor
at Computer Gaming World. Set to launch sometime this December, both
these games -- from Sony Online Entertainment/LucasArts and Maxis
Studios/Electronic Arts, respectively -- represent the game
industry's first (and perhaps last) chance to prove how large the
market for massively multiplayer games can really be.

"We think Sims and Star Wars Galaxies will be a real indication of
the potential for the market," says DFC's Cole. As indicators of the
MMORPGs' overall appeal, he added, "either or both could be the
first games to top the 1 million [subscriber] mark."

Set shortly after the destruction of the Death Star, from the first
Star Wars film, Galaxies provides players with eight to 12 planets
to explore, including four (Tatooine, Naboo, Endor, and Yavin 4)
featured in the movies. (Spacefaring is planned in later releases;
for now, automated shuttles ferry players between these
destinations.) Each planet, according to LucasArts producer Haden
Blackman, is bigger than the entire Everquest landmass.

Major characters from the first trilogy are on hand: Jabba the Hut
offers assignments to prospective bounty hunters, for example, while
Han Solo or Boba Fett may drop in on the player, when the right
circumstances obtain. The designers also plan to have special
events, in which their "digiteer" staffers will take control of
Lucas' most beloved characters, in order to engage players in live,
semi-improvisational online theater. Killing any of the franchise's
key archetypes, however, will be impossible, as they'll usually
appear in contexts where fighting is prohibited, while only the best
player characters even stand a chance of beating them to a
draw. (LucasArts staffers doggedly maintain the game's internal
consistency to the world conceived by Lucas, even squaring it with
the films' other cross-media tie-ins -- books, comics, and so on --
the aggregate of which they lovingly refer to as "the continuity." 
They also speak with quiet pride of the role Galaxies will play,
after Lucas releases the next and final film -- when the MMORPG will
alone remain, as LucasArts publicist Tom Sarris puts it, "to carry
on the canon.")

It's the kind of space, in other words, that you can imagine "Star
Wars" devotees spending their entire lives in.

And that may be a problem. Is there room for a normal person in a
world of Lucas fanatics?

"Casual gamers -- even gamers most people would consider hardcore --
are intimidated by the zealots investing four to six hours a day
into an MMORPG character," says Erik Peterson, a freelance game
reviewer. "It ruins the game for them and turns playing into an
escalating arms race of online gaming hours that they just can't
win." Not to mention the even more noxious subset, who hack cheats
into a game, or still worse, the "griefers" who actively sabotage
the game, harassing newcomers (often sexually) or springing
practical jokes that leave their hapless marks lost, poor or
dead. "Making it so the hardcore experienced players don't totally
take advantage of and ruin it for the newbie players is essential,"
says Cole.

According to Star Wars Galaxies lead designer Raph Koster, they're
making a concerted effort to bring in more casual players as
well. "We're hoping that we can reduce the time commitment required
to play these sorts of games," Koster tells me by e-mail. "Until
now, it's not been uncommon to see the average player spending 20
hours a week online ... So we're hoping to cut that in half. Of
course, the die-hard Star Wars fans may well prove us wrong on that
in the end."

To ease the players' anxiety of leaving their world, Koster and his
team have implemented ways for remaining engaged with it
offline. For example, if you choose to play a merchant, you can hire
a computer-controlled character to staff your shop for you while
you're grappling with real life. You can also give missions to other
players, subcontracting tasks while you're away. Features like these
have helped mesmerize gamers during Galaxies' long production cycle
over the last couple of years.

"The sheer number of skills and professions is exciting," says Rick
Moffat, 36, a hardened veteran of games like Everquest and Asheron's
Call. "If they can actually make some of the professions viable --
bounty hunters, explorers, smugglers -- it's going to stretch the
boundaries of what's possible in an MMORPG."

It's impressive, to be sure, but I wonder if Koster and Rich Vogel,
his design partner, underestimate the militant devotion that the
franchise has accreted. There are people who actually waited in long
lines for the premiere of "Attack of the Clones." You have to ponder
how the same kind of Jedi masochists -- who kept the flame burning
even after the disheartening "Phantom Menace" -- might drive off the
more blas fans. Who wants to hang out in cyberspace with the kind of
guy who spent a week outside the multiplex in a pup tent?

"That's a definite possibility," says Ken Brown. "But I think guys
like Raph Koster and Rich Vogel are among the smartest online
designers in the business, and they know how to make a game
appealing to as many people as possible." Wright speculates that it
may come down to how well Koster and Vogel can mediate a balance
between the players who "are just hardcore -- they've been playing
this thing 40 hours a week, and now they're a super Jedi -- versus
somebody who just dropped into the world and is just cannon fodder."

LucasArts' Blackman insists this won't be the case. "The interaction
we've seen on our community message boards have been heartening," he
says. "The hardcore Star Wars fans have patiently educated all the
less-informed board members on the nuances of Star Wars, while the
hardcore MMORPG players have done the same for MMORPG newbies." (And
the zeal of the former group has an influence on the design team as
well: On learning that Wookie characters would speak English, as
opposed to the grunts and trills they associated with the beloved
Chewbacca, "the hardcore fans," says Blackman, "freaked out." Now,
before you can understand a Wookie, you must first learn the lingua
franca of Wookiese.)

Many in the industry argue that MMOGs won't become a breakout
success until they can bring in a substantial number of women into
the audience, and the Galaxies team says they have accounted for
that.

"We're definitely including elements that will appeal to women,"
says Blackman, pointing in particular to the many ways players can
customize the social interactivity aspects (like stylized chat
text), and a far more granular selection of female character body
types. (In previous MMORPGs, women often complained that the options
for their online alter ego were restricted to thin and busty -- or,
well, curvy and busty.) You can also customize appearance to an
infinite degree-- every facial feature can be subtly altered with a
slider control, as can skin tone -- to create a persona that's truly
unique. Of the 700 or so learnable skills available, only a third
are combat-related, with a number designed to appeal to women -- or
at any rate to those less interested in a life of galactic
swashbuckling. "I'm kind of embarrassed to mention this," says
Blackman, "but we have a hairdressing skill tree."

This attentiveness will also be evident in the game's handling of
the griefer problem, which anecdotal evidence suggests plagues
female players disproportionately. The anti-griefer policy hasn't
been totally enumerated yet, Blackman says, but will operate on a
basic principle: "Anything that loses revenue is bad." So bad, the
game will include a hot key for instant harassment reporting. (It
also transmits a snapshot of the victim's last five minutes of
conversation with the accused, allowing the company moderator to
make a fair deliberation between them.) Still, of the 250,000 people
registered on the Galaxies community site, LucasArts staffers
estimate that only 10 to 15 percent are women.

The breadth of choice may end up overwhelming the uninitiated. "It
might be too deep for casual players," says Computer Gaming World's
Brown, "but it will offer a rich, detailed, engrossing world to
those willing to spend a little time with it." Which might also mean
a game that's all things to all people -- but beloved by none. "The
gamers who would consider themselves mild Star Wars geeks won't
subscribe to the game," game reviewer Peterson predicts, "because
either they don't enjoy MMORPG games or they feel intimidated by
both the more hardcore Star Wars geeks and the more hardcore gamers
who play MMORPGs like they are a part-time job."

Not all the prerelease hype has gone to Star Wars Galaxies. "In
addition to Galaxies and The Sims Online," says Brown, "we're also
very interested in World of Warcraft, which will of course be huge." 
No doubt, given the phenomenal success of the strategy games that
inspired it -- but given Blizzard Studio's equally phenomenal
release delays, it's anyone's guess when Warcraft will
manifest. Another potential standout may be Asheron's Call 2, set a
hundred years after the first game, when the world has declined into
a chaotic wasteland -- which players must work together to tame and
rebuild.

"Game journalists are hardcore gamers," says Peterson, who attended
E3, the game industry's premier expo, held last month in Los
Angeles. According to him, the title with the most buzz among his
peers (after Galaxies) was City of Heroes, in which players take the
personae of costumed superheroes fighting crime and evil in a
virtual metropolis. "Despite the prevalence of fantasy tropes in
online games," says Rick Dakan, lead designer for Heroes, "very few
people can actually relate to what it's like to be an elf or wizard
or what have you. Players immediately understand superpowered
heroes."

But gamers understand The Sims even more. A networked variation of
Wright's game, The Sims Online arrives at a time when the original
title is still a bestseller (two years after its release), joined by
numerous expansion packs -- 6 million and 8 million sold so far,
respectively, easily making it the most popular game of all
time. Expectation has been building on the games' numerous fansite
communities. (Wright says with winning understatement, "If we can
convert a good percentage of that community to Online, then it'll
probably do very well.")

"Fans are already posting for roommates!" said the producer demoing
the game for me at E3, as she maneuvered her space alien alter ego
through her ornately furnished apartment, pausing to dance with,
then slap, a gentleman caller. As in the single-player game, you can
buy your own property, or share a lot with several housemates.

What you do there is entirely at your discretion. "Naked-clown
beauty pageants, superhero cowboy bars, and exclusive mountain
hideaways are just a few of the many strange possibilities this game
offers," says Computer Gaming World's Robert Coffey. This is because
the game comes with no overarching theme. Wright's idea is to
provide tools that are robust enough for players to shape their own
world, at their own leisure. "We're trying to make [success] more
correlated to your creativity than your time investment. What I want
is a game where people play three, four, maybe five hours a week,
and feel like they're getting a lot out of it."

While the world is laid out in a way that'll call to mind Sim City,
Wright's earlier hit, the game itself is expansive enough to include
genre elements of other MMORPGs. "A lot of neighborhoods will be
themed areas," says Wright. He envisions players with like tastes
naturally migrating together, and using the diverse range of objects
(homes, furniture, and so on) to create their own unique
communities. "So I look at the neighborhood, and I see, say, Western
town, or Futureville, or whatever... And that'll give me a good
sense of, 'Oh, if I'm into science fiction, I should go to
Futureville,' and I zoom down to Futureville ... and if I'm really
into that, I probably would want to move there and build my
futuristic house in that area ... You can buy a chair that looks
like it came off a starship, you can buy a chair that looks like it
came out of a castle or one that looks like it came out of a Las
Vegas casino. I think the range of objects that people have to build
with are going to suggest the breadth of theme that we hope to see
in the world."

There will be no segregation between hardcore and casual players;
rather, Wright is working to make their differing preferences
complement each other. "If you have everybody in one area, and
they're all trying to do the exact same thing, that's when it starts
feeling kind of repetitive. But when you have people all mixed in
pursuing different goals entirely, then it starts feeling like, you
know, the real world." He guesses that the more dedicated gamers
will devote their time to creating fictional businesses or pursuing
other economic goals. But doing this creates, in his words, a
"pyramid of dependency." A group of hardcore gamers can unite their
properties to create a grand theme park with rides and
entertainment, for example -- then sell tickets to casual
gamers. "I'd like to keep the game structured so that the hardcore
people are continually interacting with the casual people."

The user objects are designed so that players can even create their
own games within the larger game. "You could easily build a treasure
hunt with this one object that we're making," says Wright, "and
strew clues all over the world, and you kind of have to search the
world and find the clues. Or play a game like Assassin, where
everybody has an envelope and a name in it, and you have to go find
that person ... We want to have a lot of activities that kind of
span the world."

As with the original version of The Sims, another feature in the
online version enables players to define their relationship to other
people. But in the multiplayer realm, the function allows for all
kinds of wacky sociological chess games. During a testing session,
for instance, Wright competed with a member of his team to become
the most popular Sim on the server. "So we were being nice to
everybody, and they were making us their friends," he says. "We both
got very competitive about it, and we started paying people to be
our friends. And from that point it kind of escalated, and we
started hiring people [to become an enemy of the other person]
... It was kind of twisted."

Unlike every other game on the market, The Sims enjoys a fan base
that's roughly equal male and female. Which must be partly why
Wright has devoted so much attention to the griefer problem. While
the Ignore/Ban function allows players to summarily remove offending
persons from their lot, he's gone a bit further with The Sims
Online: Wright is trying to grief his own game. "Lately I've been
trying to play as a grief player in our internal tests of TSO," he
says, "both to explore what the likely tactics will be and also to
get a sense for how motivating or satisfying it is to play that way
-- and, hence, how to make it less so."

Some aren't so sure dedicated game fanatics will descend on Wright's
game. "I doubt TSO will appeal much to hardcore gamers," says
Computer Gaming World's Brown. "But I don't think that matters
much. Millions of non-gamers have discovered the fun of playing
games on their computer because of The Sims, and TSO may encourage
many of them to try online gaming for the first time. That's good
for consumers, good for game companies, and good for everyone
except, possibly, TV executives."

But even if TSO and Galaxies are the blockbusters they'll surely
become, it's unclear whether their success will mean a revolution in
online games. They may just sponge up the market so thoroughly that
the competition will be left to pursue increasingly smaller,
unsupportable niches. ("The worst case, really," notes Wright, "is
when you launch one of these things and it's just marginally
successful. Because then you're in a position where it's hard to
kill it, but you still have to incur the expense of just running
it.") TSO and Galaxies may be perceived as too exceptional for
others to follow the trail they blaze: Few developers, after all,
have Wright's ambition or commercial track record, and no other film
or book franchise has anywhere near the draw or scope of "Star
Wars." (Except, perhaps, "Lord of the Rings," the MMORPG adaptation
of which currently languishes somewhere in preproduction.)

But what happens when almost all of the upcoming fantasy/sci-fi
MMOGs fail and investors lose countless millions? Publishers may
cede the field to LucasArts, Maxis, and the current hits, convinced
that the genre takes too much time and money to be worth the wager.

"If they're all in the mold of, you know, the men-in-tights
Everquest model," says Wright, "we're pretty close to the limit
right now." Perhaps hardcore fantasy gamers will move away from
MMORPGs entirely, gravitating instead toward games that allow them
to customize an online experience according to their own
obsessive-compulsive calibrations. Toward titles like the
long-awaited Neverwinter Nights, for example, which enables player
to create and host mini-multiplayer worlds for up to 64 players.

"But as they start to diversify into these other themes," Wright
continues, "I think potentially the market is much bigger than it is
now. Maybe ten times bigger." This has proven true in the Asian
market, at least, where games like Lineage (recently imported into
the U.S. by Ultima creator Richard Garriott) enjoy subscribers in
the millions.

But all that depends on whether developers are willing to risk
creating games that appeal to other people besides themselves.

"Here's a little thought experiment," says designer Andrew
L. Tepper. "Ask yourself which of these stories is more appealing:

"1. A story about saving your family. 2. A story about saving the
world."

Tepper continues: "I can relate to a story about saving my family,
and so can most casual game players. So why does every game designer
insist on writing games about saving the world? MMORPG designers are
especially guilty of this, and it's the reason they have trouble
moving beyond the hardcore gamer market." Tepper is behind A Tale in
the Desert, an MMORPG being developed by his staff of three. Besides
The Sims Online, it was the only game that the GDC round table could
point to as being truly innovative. "It is a game about building the
perfect society," Tepper says. "After [life's] necessities are out
of the way, you advance your character spiritually ... Once your
character reaches a high enough spiritual level, you can lead large
projects that advance the entire civilization."

"When massively multiplayer games become simpler to learn, offer
more of a sense of online community and interpersonal communication
and different rewards than just killing and leveling up," says
Brown, "then these games will break through to a wider audience." 
Citing the massive sales of the sleeper single-player hit Roller
Coaster Tycoon a couple years ago, Brown suggests "a massively
multiplayer theme park game, where users of any age could ride other
players' rides, build their own rides, and hang out with other park
visitors."

But some prominent developers aren't sure the time for significant
change is now. "To me," says Everquest creator Brad McQuaid,
"'leveling up' ultimately just means a focus on character or persona
development." And he considers it an inextricable part of the
genre's appeal. "I'm not saying someone won't invent alternatives
one day ... maybe they will. But, at least short term, I'd advise
against it -- we need to see one or two more successful generations
of MMOGs before we get too experimental." Presumably this will be a
guideline for the online game McQuaid is working on now, under the
auspices of Sigil Games Online, his new studio.

"When it comes to attracting women and the mass market in general,"
says City of Heroes designer Rick Drakan, "I think the games need to
expand in both genre (out of the fantasy ghetto) and in gameplay
(out of the repetitious cycle of killing and looting)."

But are they ready to give women what they want? According to
longtime MMOG player Jennifer Powell, that means giving them "[a]
safe environment, definitely. Free of harassment and most forms of
vulgarity or verbal assault." But getting that might require a
cultural shift that the industry isn't ready for: "In the past,
continuing into the present, MMOGs have been designed and run mainly
by game geeks ... they are great, fun people in many ways," she
says, but "they are not for the most part socially skillful." It's
part of what makes customer support for the games she's played, by
her estimation, dictatorial and arbitrary. "I'd love to see that
replaced with something less personalized and more equitable, not to
mention more thoughtful. But that requires a level of maturity most
customer support departments in MMOGs don't yet display." For now,
there is no developer patch for social skills.

It might take some time to "level up" that social-skill stat. So the
first step might be for designers to confront their mania to become
micromanagerial gods in the universes of their own design. Wright
suggests it may require confronting a "moviemaker wannabe" streak
evident in many developers: "You know: 'Well, George Lucas made his
world -- here's my world!' And of course for them, in their
background and their interest, a cool world usually is either
postapocalyptic science fiction, or it's Tolkienesque ... Somehow we
keep falling into these two well-worn themes over and over and over
and it's getting a little, you know, worn out.

"I think another approach to this whole thing is that you give the
players that canvas," Wright says, "and let the players create the
back story and the theme and whatever, and you focus on being
innovative through the [game] mechanisms." The future, in other
words, may depend on an equal collaboration between game players and
game developers, working together to create worlds that neither
could dream up alone.

Or they can continue as they always have, playing heroes in the tiny
worlds they've made for themselves, designed to keep anyone unlike
them outside, drawing their virtual swords, once more, to fend off
the same stand-ins for innovation and genuine social intercourse,
and -- as the economic realities threaten to pierce the veil -- keep
whacking away.
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