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

[David Kennerly]

Raph Koster wrote:

> 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.

What is an example of a potential that is being pruned?

> presupposing "game" as opposed to presupposing "world" may prevent
> you from adding more embedded games later, may prevent you from
> extending the game later

I consider MMPs to have some prominent design traits such as:
fairness, replayability, fault tolerance, reversible consequences,
asset appreciation, and asynchronous interaction.  These traits may
exist to lesser degrees in non-MMPs, but they take priority in the
MMP.  What design traits do you imply when you state a world-first
approach?

The term "world" is attractive.  I like it and use it.  It sounds
cooler to work on a world than to work on a game.  In addition, MMPs
are the worldliest of the games.  Marketing them as worlds is
legitimate and has precedence: The "Kingdom" of the Winds,
Toon"town", Star Wars "Galaxies", "City" of Heroes, "World" of
Warcraft.  And Origin: "We create worlds."

Yet, for the uninitiated, there is about as much danger in
presupposing a world as a game.  Then one is no longer the geeky
miscreant game designer, but instead only second to God and Tolkien
as a World Designer.  What, short of God, does the title World
Designer connote?  Nothing less than priesthood.  That is not a good
direction for a worldly service.

I started in MMORPGs because I wanted to work on a world, something
much more than just a game--something that would provide insight
into society.  It has.  Wonderfully.  But to say it has provided
insight into all aspects of a world would be to claim too much.
And--at least my--MMP experience has also provided equal insight
into games.

A game has points and players, whose behavior correlates, to some
degree, to their points.  Any world that has points and
participants, whose behavior is influenced by these points, is also,
at least in part, a game.  A persistent world is an infinite game,
in that it has an infinite duration with a score that remains for
indeterminate duration.  Therefore, MMPs meet the criteria of both
games and worlds.  What is wrong with the marriage: MMP = World +
Game?

To attempt to swallow one term with the other, to me, sounds like
the heart swallowing the liver, or a photon swallowing a light wave.
The word "world" obviously implies superset to anything "in" it, but
in the case of MMORPGs, the primary activity is playing an infinite,
persistent game.  Much other activity exists, but from my experience
and observation in a few MMPs, the modal activity is play.  I don't
think that fact tarnishes the silver of either term or limits the
potential of things to come.

The PR of "worlds" has sometimes been the herald of a tedious drivel
from people who don't know how to entertain.  I hold myself up as a
prime example.  When I started, I started with the intention of
world-first.  Or that's what I told myself.  Years later, I realize
that I was deluding myself when I said world-first I
(subconsciously) really meant Director-first.

Although having curmudgeoned, honestly, I have no qualm though with
world-first or game-first, especially in the design phase.  You have
to start somewhere.  It's what you accomplish by ship date that
matters.  I can see that community-first has made a big impact.
Many of the world's (Earth that is) largest MMPs are from companies
who got their feet wet with community design.  Moreover, many of the
failures are from game companies.

Nevertheless, the term "world" needs qualification.  For one
important reason, at least: There are ethical trepidations.
Obviously no one considers these as physical worlds, but they often
make the mistake of considering them as somehow equivalent, even as
social worlds.  They are not equivalent.  Some essential
characteristics differ.  In a virtual world, physics are arbitrarily
defined in ways that need bear no relation to physical worlds.
While this fact is germane, its actual history is interesting.
MMORPGs have consistently migrated toward defining the basic
structure of the physics of the world to selectively prevent certain
forms of malice.  In some MMPs, you literally can own a gun and can
shoot a gun, but its bullets do not kill people.  More accurately,
its bullets only kill bad people (the ones not being played by
humans).

Anyone attempting to use a virtual world as a model for ethical
behavior should consider this.  This fact alone is significant
enough to make the user of the term "world" employ trepidation and
make extensive qualifications.  It is a community and society.  If
one must brush their ego, it is a constructed world.  Did Edward
Castronova use the equally apt term: synthetic world?  Anyway, the
MMPs today are not virtual worlds.

Perhaps one in the future could be.  Yet, proceed with caution.  We
already get the real world for free.  We pay not to deal with the
crap in the real world that we despise.

As a place for experiments, a virtual world is fascinating, but what
players are telling us is what kinds of activities they want to have
and what kinds of interaction they want.  To claim these are
"worlds" requires proof, and ... well ... a world-load of it.

The term world is vague.  MMPs are more like apartment complexes
with extensive amusement facilities than complete worlds.  Still, I
use sometimes use "world" because it sounds cool.  However, an MMP
is a subset of a world, a world within a world.  It is a superset of
a non-MMP game, yet it is still a proper subset of a world.  Maybe
one day people will want to spend time in a virtual world, and they
will be built.  But today what we make is has a more limited scope.

The presupposition of the unqualified term "world" evades scrutiny.
For every attempt to pin down a skill set, a wily charlatan can
declaim such is beneath the scope of a world, that the world is the
superset.  Of course this is a fallacy, but it occurs and leads to,
if publishers let it, vaporware.  I've listened to professors praise
(and even teach) virtual worlds, and well-educated groups decry the
coming of virtual worlds.  These well-educated and technically-savvy
persons overlooked the business issue: Is the feature set justified?
If a user base will use it as a game, every extra feature was a
waste.  MMPs are a different species from non-MMPs, yet they should
not be presupposed _nebulously_ as a "world", since the MMP's
intersection with a world is systematically less than complete.
Now, if they may be presupposed _precisely_ as a "world", with
explanation, then that's useful knowledge.

> 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.

Could you explain why a game-first mentality was the cause of
failure?  I am forced to be skeptical.  The most played online game
of 2002 reduced the MMP part to a chat lobby.  BnB had 300,000
simultaneous players, and it is developed and published by the MMP
company, Nexon.  BnB is certainly not a world, and is not even an
MMP, but at the time was the biggest phenomenon to date in the
capital city of MMPs.  A financial disaster?  Completely the
opposite.  It was a national phenomenon; more popular than Lineage.
The team wasted no money on space when a chat lobby was sufficient.
Not worlds, but who cares?  The players didn't.  They were played in
the similar manner as the "worlds" and developed in the similar
manner with the same technology.

As a designer, I find nothing sexy about a chat lobby, but it's
functional and meets some (very) limited design objectives.

In either case, world or game, a title is much less relevant than
competence.  If one pleases its user, then by all means, title it
"world" or "universe" or "alternate reality" to the heart's content.

David
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