[MUD-Dev] Future of MMOGs

[Sean Kelly]

On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Jeremy Noetzelman wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Crosbie Fitch wrote:

>> IP is irrelevant to users. IP owners will just have to deal with
>> the fact that IP is an oxymoron. Or on the other hand it's quite
>> accurate, i.e. once intellectual property leaves the intellect
>> and is transcribed into digital form, it is no longer
>> intellectual property, but public property.

> Without IP, there is no revenue.  Without revenue, there are no
> corporations.  Without corporations, there is no Internet.

Why is revenue a function of IP?  It may be a controversial topic,
but I think the software industry would benifit greatly if IP laws
were relaxed.  Unlike other engineering fields, the software
industry has yet to settle on any basic design standards.  In other
fields, part compatibility and interchangibility is considered a
good thing, while in the software industry is seems a sin of the
greatest magnitude.  Because of this, software engineering is still
in the days of pre-industrial metalsmithing, where proprietary
skills were closely guarded and considered the only competitive
advantage over the next guy.  At some point, however, people
realized that part standardization was a good thing.  Perhaps
someday the software industry will realize the same thing.  Patents
may provide a competitive advantage, but the sweeping IP laws
governing software development is only holding the industry back.

And while the internet may have massively gained in popularity after
corporatization was legalized, it by no means came into existence at
that time.  And most of the tech we use online today was developed
before this time and more for scientific purposes than commercial
ones.  You could say that the internet would not exist without
corporations, but then you could make an equally valid statement
about telephones.

> IP may be irrelevant to users, but it's not to the people who own
> IP, and it's certainly reasonable for them to expect compensation
> in exchange for letting people enjoy their content.  I don't
> begrudge hollywood for taking my $8.50 for a movie, nor do I
> begrudge Sony their $15/month for MMOG X.  They spent money to
> make that content, that IP, and it's theirs to do what they want
> with.  The thought that a movie, once aired, becomes public
> domain, is ludicrous.

See, I think there should be some way to differentiate media from
software or knowledge.  The term IP is far too broad to be useful.
What IP means to me is that if I go and write software on my own
time my company may make some attempt to claim ownership of that
code.  This is far different in my mind from a movie produced by a
film company.

Media is a weird animal.  If I see a movie I'm allowed to describe
it to my friends in excruciating detail.  This may convince them to
not go see the movie.  But if I film the movie with a video camera
and give a copy of the tape to my friend, and his viewing of that
tape has the same effect then I'm in a whole heap of trouble.  In
neither case did I deprive the creator of that media of anything
other than the potential revenue from a ticket sale.  So what's the
problem?  Is it merely a matter of detail of reproduction?  In one
case I have a poor copy of the film (my meory of it communicated to
someone else) and in the other I have a pretty good copy of it (a
filmed copy of it given to someone else).  I gues the problem is
that giving a friend a duplicate of the movie may keep a person who
would have liked the movie and planned on paying to see it while
describing it to them would not.  And it's ultimately just easier to
criminalize exchanging copies than to rely on the goodwill of
moviegoers or change the business model.

> Perhaps you can explain why we NEED a public 3d cyberspace system.
> Personally, I think 95% of the free content online sucks.  Most
> MUDs, game mods, etc, all suck.

you could say the same about commercial content, though I grant that
the median of quality for commercial contentis higher than the
median of quality for free content.

> There's always a few good and innovative games, but by and large,
> the content that's good is commercial.  There's good reason for
> that ... providing content people are willing to pay for is how
> companies make money.

More to the point, people have to make a living somehow and they
can't do that by giving everything away, unless you want to get
fancy and ask for donations or some such.

>> But it's a chicken and egg. Does the first version happen first,
>> and then a community of Open Source coders join in, or do you
>> gather the coders first, and the first version happens later? The
>> pump needs priming, and so we need a CERN equivalent....

3d internet was tried years ago.  It sucked.  The fact of the matter
is that there's very little content out there that is experienced in
3d more effectively than it is experienced in 2d.  Even computer
interfaces favor 2d (or 2.5d, if you want to nitpick) over 3d.  This
isn't because 3d can't be done so much as because it's cumbersome
and unnecessary.  Perhaps when i/o gets better that will change,
however.

> That said, I think commercial efforts will always be at the top of
> the heap, primarily for financial reasons.  Bandwidth alone is a
> staggering cost for 3d environments, and you'd be amazed at the
> costs generated by FPS games, let alone the costs associated with
> a fully p2p mmog system.  Peer to Peer mmogs are definitely a
> viable model.  However, I think the best place for them to be
> adopted is in a loose network of commercial nodes.  Expecting
> there to be a Napster-like MMOG is just foolish.

I don't know that I agree.  If Neverwinter Nights were modified to
support a persistent-world design it would basically be a p2p MMOG.
Unreal tried the same thing way back when with arbitrary server
interconnecting, though I'm not sure if it ever got past the
conceptualization stage.  The biggest problem with p2p is
consistency.  It's techincally pretty simple to hop from server to
server, but connection performance and fiction continuity would
suffer without some real cooperation.  But then maybe this isn't
something that matters a whole lot in a p2p world -- you can always
just avoid the places that you don't like.  Neal Stephenson's "Snow
Crash" envisioned a cyberspace that was effectively p2p and it
worked pretty well.


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