Terra Nova: MMOG eSport?

Terra Nova: MMOG eSport? asks the question of whether MMOGs are amenable to eSports.

Are they good as spectator sport? Would something have to be tweaked in the genre (and in the whole field of play around it) to make them so. And even then, would it be an interesting or good idea?

It’s sort of an odd question to ask, in some ways, given the history of the genre. Arguably, the games started out with a heavy degree of sport built in. The early games that were full-reset or “Groundhog Day” MUDs had a degree of inspiration from games such as Zork. The core mechanic of an early AberMUD, for example, involved gathering items from around the game and bringing them back to a pool where they were dumped; you earned XP for doing so; in the original Zork, you gathered items from around the game and returned them to a trophy case in the small white house.

I believe several of the early British MUDs had a similar core mechanic — play until the content was exhausted, typically by solving puzzles, killing monsters, and gathering items — then reset the entire world. This made the games somewhat less than persistent (sometimes there was no character persistence, even), making the game instead session-based. And where there’s a session, there’s a winner.

This carried on into later games; HoloMUD is far from the only example of a mud with session-based areas (their conceit was that of session-based holodeck zones); various PK-based games made use of free PvP paired with full-reset environments to provide scoreboards, “matches,” and ongoing rankings. And of course, we eventually got Planetside and World War II Online and Shadowbane.

I’ve even commented in the past that the charitable view of Bartle’s Killer player type is that they view the mud primarily as a sport, rather than a game, entertainment, or hobby.

Among the common sport-like activities held on later generation muds (I’m thinking here of early to mid-90s), and even on some MMOs, are

• Scavenger hunts. Timed games to gather as many of some object as possible, with prizes to winners. LegendMUD did this every Easter with randomly placed Easter eggs spawned by a teleporting Easter Bunny.
• “Level up” races, wherein individuals attempt to race each other to a certain level of achievement in the game. New characters would be created specially for the purpose.
• “Doesn’t count” days which permitted more extreme versions of the above — for example, April Fool’s Day on LegendMUD (where random factors were changed about the game, such as reversing the map, remapping commands, changing every mob to silly names, etc); or the time period right before a server shutdown on UO back in the days when doing a save took an hour.
• As assortment of embedded games ranging from regular trivia nights to “monster bowling,” a somewhat popular feature on several Diku-derived muds. In the latter, you could behead certain monsters, then take their heads to a bowling alley and bowl with them for prizes.

(Aside: this also all serves as a reminder of the degree to which PvP has always been intrinsic to the core vision of muds and their descendants.)

The examples could go on and on… You’ll note that these are generally held as embedded games, rather than as the core activity, which therefore permitted resetting the game. I’ve said for a long time that embedded activities are a huge part of the future of muds and MMOs; instancing is to my mind just the clumsy way that the industry is backing into this, when really, the types of activities should be much broader than just playing the game game in a pocket zone).

The common features with these is that they are all session-based, are mostly skill-based, and are not iterative — persistence may come about via ranking, but not via actual improvements in the game. These are, of course, required because of the nature of feedback loops, rich-get-richer scenarios, and other such phenomena (which I described here.

If we want more eSports using MMOs then we have to provide the same basic functionality that sports provide:

• Well-balanced competition. No overwhelming advantages for one team.
• Serious effort at eliminating rich-get-richer. This almost certainly means no character persistence and a dependence on skill.
• Decent matchmaking. This means leagues, ladders, and so on.

Non-massive games have managed this quite handily. Since (I’ll state it baldly yet again) any single-to-multiplayer game can be entirely embedded within an MMO, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be done with MMOs. If Blizzard wanted to make eSports take off within MMOs, they could do worse than pasting Starcraft into WoW and seeing how many folks in Korea take it up. 🙂