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

[Koster, Raph]

From: Sean Howard

> 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... :)

Well, I for one prefer the term because it's evident that these
things are used for plenty of non-game applications all the
time. Ergo, calling them all games is disingenuous at best and
misleading at worst.

> 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.

Hmm, I think I'd argue that we have already seen very interesting
variants on real world social patterns?

> 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.

Sadly, I would say that our understanding of communities and humans
in large groups is far from a settled science. :) There's quite a
lot of learning to be done there, particularly given the differences
that emerge based on the setting in which the community
develops. I'd also say that there's plenty of research showing that
community as it is traditionally defined has been steadily eroding
over the course of the century.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really out there advocating that
community is the sole point. It's not.

> 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...

By and large, I'd argue that we haven't been designing games for
thousands of players even n the largest MMOs. Instead, we rely on
distance and asynchronicity to allow hundreds of smaller scale games
in parallel instead.

-Raph
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