[MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?

[Sean Howard]

"Amanda Walker" <amanda at alfar.com> wrote:

> one of the more fun SWG sessions I've spent recently was "casino
> night", where a guy in my guild decorated some player housing as a
> casino, figured out how to play some chance-based games with the
> tools available in SWG (*very* minimal), and set out a bunch of
> invites.  There were maybe a couple dozen people present over the
> course of the evening, but everyone raves about how much fun it
> was.  I don't think it would have been nearly so much fun as an
> isolated game: part of the fun was the SWG-provided context.

A similar thing happened in Club Caribe. There was a wand where you
could smack people and make them say random silly things. An entire
mafia and gambling community built up around such a simple thing. I
mention this because I'm surprised that the exact same thing has
happened as 15 years ago and it still makes the same compelling
argument. :)

> One of the things I've talked about before is the promise of
> virtual worlds as gaming (and storytelling) contexts, rather than
> as "games" per se.  I think that the move towards
> games-within-games is a sign of this happening.

Most of the literature I've read have chosen to call these things
"virtual worlds" rather than "online games". The difference in
lexicon shows an interesting bias - a split I've seen on this
mailing list many times. One shows an abstract understanding of the
possibilities, and one shows the concrete appreciation of the now. I
find it most interesting that the ones who use "virtual world" are
the ones who write all the literature... :)

I do feel that I should point out that we've had real live
communities a lot longer than we've had computers. I doubt that the
social aspects of virtual worlds will provide any new way to game
that the thousands of years of written history haven't already
discovered. However, that is not the case with computers, which
provide more indepth simulations far beyond our own abilities.

I guess what I'm saying is that, communities... we get. But
designing games for thousands of simultaneous players is something
which we can only do in the past few years. I'm personally more
excited about what games can do if we study them than how people can
imitate things they could do anyway...

- Sean Howard
www.squidi.net
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