MMORPG has to be spelled out. I once heard someone pronounce it as more pig, but that just sounds really dumb. Sure, you have to spell out FPS, RTS and RPG, but adding three other letters steps away from the whole purpose of having an acronym in the first place. You might as well say the whole genre title, since it will take you just as long. Still, you can't help but to feel a little smug when you drop this on your non-gaming friends and family. Not only do you have an important sounding acronym, but you get to make them feel stupid in the process. It's a novelty that you can enjoy even if you don't like and/or play MMORPGs.
So, as you may have guessed, this week we'll be talking about the novelty of MMORPGs. More to the point, it will be about the novelty that drives MMORPGs. Those of you that have been reading this series are probably nodding and thinking "It's about damn time!" Those of you that dare to care about this series are probably yelling "Get on with it already!!" at your monitors. So without further ado...
The problem with talking about MMORPGs, in and of themselves, is that you really can't do so without also talking about MUDs. I could go into a long spiel about the history of MUDs and dovetail it into the history of MMORPGs, but I think that there are enough articles covering that floating around the internet as it is so I'll spare you. It's enough to say that the two are so related as to be practically siamese twins. The only real difference between the two being that MUDs are text and MMORPGs have graphics. One person actually stated, on the forums here, that they believed a game could only be considered an MMORPG, not a MUD, if it had graphics. Long story short, they both have the same attraction and, for the purpose of this article, can be used to investigate the draw of these games.
For those of you that have never played a MUD, imagine a series of chat rooms that are linked together in a very specific way so that you can only get to a particular room from a connecting room. The links between rooms are designated in ten directions (north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest, up and down respectively) and each room displays a description upon entering like a MOTD. Furthermore, each room can contain a series of objects that you can interact with. For instance, if you enter a room and the description reads: "it's pitch black, you can't see anything" you might type "clap" and enter twice to turn on a lamp and get a room description. You can also pick up and carry some objects. And some objects are "mobile" and move freely from room to room. Ultimately though, MUDs are just collections of fancy chat rooms where you have to specify when you're interacting with objects or talking/emoting with another player. The line blurs when you interact with another player character that acts as an object under a player,s control. This is just meant to sum up so I won't go into all of that.
Back in the late 70's and early 80's, this was a big deal. It was amazing enough to just be able to interact with a virtual environment, but to do it with 20 or 30 other people at a time was downright awe inspiring. The original MUD was hosted for free on a university computer so people either had to play from a dumb terminal on campus or pay for phone service to connect. I've heard stories of people that paid hundreds of dollars a month in phone bills just to play. And you thought $15 a month was bad.....
It would be really easy to chalk all this up to the ability to interact with the environment in a manner such as Zork, or Colossal Cave, but MMORPGs have grown to several million players world wide and we've been able to interact with virtual environments for 30 years now. We've been able to do so graphically since, at least, the release of Kings Quest. So it's obvious that the novelty here is multiplayer, right? Um... Not exactly....
We've had multiplayer games for almost as long as we've had MUDs. Gauntlet and Contra spring immediately to mind, with Space War! and Pong representing the very earliest multiplayer games. Online multiplayer games have also been with us forever with Legend of the Red Dragon and Hundred Years War representing the point of origin on BBS. Later games like Air Warrior and Doom would refine online multiplayer near to the point that it's in today.
At this point you're backing all way up to the first M and thinking that it's the massive number of players, but that's also not quite accurate. You see, the novelty here isn't really any part of the acronym. It's not really anything that's readily apparent on the surface or hard coded into the game. To understand this, you have to think of features that aren't included in any other online multiplayer game. Things like messaging, buddy lists, guilds, systems for managing parties of gamers. Am I the only person that thinks this sounds a lot like MSN / Yahoo messenger, ICQ and MYSpace? You see, the major draw to MMORPGs isn't so much a novelty as a driving force of human nature. The "novelty" of MMORPGs is community and the need for social interaction. This is the reason why MMORPGs hold the key to a future for the gaming industry. This is also a reason why gamers should be concerned.
Why concern? Because it wasn't WoW that got the cover of Business Week and a write up in Time Magazine, it was Second Life. Because purely social web MMOs like Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin are making astronomical profits and headlines to boot. Because the numbers speak for themselves and they're telling the boys in marketing to drop the G from the end of the acronym. Up until now, MMORPGs have tacked community onto multiplayer games. In the future it seems, multiplayer games will be tacked onto the back corners of online communities. See a problem?
It also doesn't help that MMORPGs are designed almost exactly like single player RPGs. EQ may have forced players into grouping by making enemies too strong to defeat without the Tank, healer, Buff wizard and Damage dealer combo but, from a design stand point, that's exactly the same as The Bard's Tale. Socializing isn't really integrated into the gameplay beyond who you need for your group and knowing your job. Many modern MMORPGs have a player search function so you don't really need to socialize beyond sending invites and a few macro'd communications to your team. The most popular MMORPG out is WoW and you don't need to interact with another player at all if you don't want. Sadly, it's the fact that you can solo through WoW that makes it so popular. The "hardcore" gaming crowd is antisocial by nature. Any game that incorporates social interaction as a major component of gameplay is doomed to fail with the core gaming demographic. Thus forcing MMO developers to aim for a market outside of the the core gamer demographic.
Don't believe me? Go look at the subscription numbers for A Tale in the Desert. Back in '98 they released an RP/community focused MMO called Underlight that almost no one has ever heard of. What's the first thing you hear of when people start talking about Asheron's Call? Bet you it's not the alliance system. This was a very loose political pyramid scheme that was much hyped at AC's release. Too bad nobody cared. Even casual friendly and community oriented Puzzle Pirates only has 34,000 paying subscribers. Given, that's not a bad number when you consider that it only cost about $3 million to make Puzzle Pirates, but it just shows that gamers want to play games rather than talk or piss around about who's in charge. How many rants have you read about guilds detracting from the enjoyment of a game? Yeah....
There are ways to make socializing and community part of the game without distilling everything down to a glorified chat room. Some of the best board games ever made so this seamlessly. Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Diplomacy, all integrate and rely on social fencing that isn't specifically referred to in the rules. One of the greatest computer games of the early 80's, M.U.L.E., did this to a degree that has never even been attempted in the computer/video game industry before or since. Seriously, go here, gather together three other people and play this game. You'll know pretty quickly what I'm talking about.
So there it is. The greatest hope and despair of the industry. MMORPGs hold the key to something greater, but with development being considered expensive in comparison to $20 million dollar single player games it seems rather unlikely that the full potential of the genre will be realized by the commercial segment of the industry. With core gamers being antisocial by nature and uppity about indie games, it's highly unlikely that small development houses and freeware developers will even be noticed if they do manage to realize that potential. We'll just have to wait and see....
I don't know... "More Pigs" seems pretty descriptive.
Oddly enough, I started to write an entry this morning about games catering to the Achiever demographic, while largely ignoring the Socializer and Explorer folks. It's probably the easiest thing-- as long as there's more cheese, achievers will keep running around the maze. The infrastructure (in terms of chat channels, etc) and the opportunities are there, but the environment just isn't conducive to socializing, and it is less and less so all the time, in my observation over time.
I think a lot of the time, the achiever types assume that social players should be happy in purely social venues (like chat rooms, instant messaging, forums, etc), which ignores why social players *want* to play MMORPGs. Socializers want to talk, but they also want to do something with their friends. It's the rat race that they can't win that seems to drive them away in the long run. Making a game more "casual" doesn't address the issue because it simply makes it more accessible to more people who want to beat the game, rather than encouraging people to want to interact with each other in a virtual world.
I don't know if I am writing very clearly at the moment. Just spouting my pet theory of the week.
Sun Aug 12 2007 8:10PM ReportMMORPG.com writes:
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