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

[Koster, Raph]

From: Amanda Walker
> On Jul 9, 2004, at 12:05 PM, Koster, Raph wrote:


>> The single biggest difference I see right now other than graphics
>> is the push on the part of graphical commercial game makers to
>> make the games less like online worlds and more like limited
>> multiplayer games, via instancing and massive streamlining of
>> feature sets. This is something the text games could do, but
>> never did to this degree, and whether it is the right direction
>> is, I think, debatable (though no one doubts that some of the
>> resultant games are fun).

> It's also not an all or nothing thing.  I'm not so sure I'd say
> that MMOs are going from virtual worlds to limited multiplayer
> games, so much as creating limited multiplayer games *within*
> virtual worlds. This, I think, is a fine development.  The virtual
> world provides the context, but you avoid having to stand in line
> for hours waiting for a rare spawn because there's only one.

I've been banging the "embedded experiences" drum for many years
now.  That said, I think there is a qualitative difference between
the philosophy you describe, and the philosophy that I hear commonly
expressed by commercial developers and players of their games.

In yours, you cite creating a virtual world, and then embedding game
experiences within it. The commoner reaction is "just make a game."
I recently had a very lengthy discussion or three with the folks at
f13.net regarding this issue, wherein I tried to point out that
presupposing "game" as opposed to presupposing "world" may prevent
you from adding more embedded games later, may prevent you from
extending the game later, and in general may not even play to the
strengths of the medium.

But the fact is that the market is wanting stuff that is more fun
more immediately. I can't really blame them for that--the danger for
those of us interested in the larger potential of the medium will be
throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

> it's not just developers that are doing this, either: players are
> as well.  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.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I think we will see less of
with a "start with game" philosophy. One of the commoner refrains I
hear is "give players a more directed experience." The huge push
towards instancing is all about this, and the risk is seeing the
massively multiplayer part reduced to being a chat lobby--an
experiment which we already saw tried in the mid to late 90s and
which failed pretty dramatically.

There are probably very sound business reasons for single-player and
limited-multiplayer game developers to go ths route (piracy
reduction, recurring billing, etc) but I'm wary of the tentative
identification I see many people making with "virtual world" and
"not a good game." The real reasons why "world first" muds may be
inferior games is largely one of resources and focus, I suspect, and
not inherent to the model.

> 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.

Platform, platform, platform. :)

-Raph
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