[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Spore and MMOs

[Michael Chui]

Hello all,

So, I've been at PAX the last two days and today, there was a panel
entitled "Future of MMOs". Great. Reasonably good stuff, though nothing
really got my attention more than the casual and regular mentions of,
"Well, EVE does this..." I got up to ask a question, didn't get the
chance to toss it out, and realized that MUD-Dev might be interested.

What I wanted to pose was this:

Will Wright and Spore have a decidedly advantageous position. Everyone
is expecting miracles and wonders etc. One thing I want to focus on,
however, is his coinage of "massively single-player": the idea that you
are affected and effect everyone else who plays, but the game remains
single-player in its essence. Spore implements this by uploading your
creations to a central server and pushing it back out to people to be
controlled by AI. And I wonder... will we start seeing ports of this
concept to more traditional genres, like the Strategy, the FPS, the RPG?

My thoughts:

I see two paths for this. One is the "truly single-player" approach. In
this case, you'd be doing what Spore is doing: making stuff, uploading
it to a server for inclusion into others' games and that'd be the end of
your contribution.

The other is a kind of PBEM/Hotseat Civilization-type of approach,
wherein there are periodic updates of changes. For instance, consider a
game of Battlefield played across a couple dozen sessions of
Counterstrike, each session involving different groups of related and
allied persons. You'd have specific missions: essentially, "Capture this
point." and the outcome would be saved and the next group to play would
have to deal with it thusly.

-- 
-Michael Chui