Massive Magazine editorial

This piece was written as an editorial for the first (and only!) print issue of Massive Magazine.

When I was asked if I would write an editorial for this charming new magazine you hold in your hands, I thought, “Sure! This should be fun!”

Then I realized that virtually everything that can be editorialized about already has been. We have already heard the demands for better customer service, to the point where we weary of ever seeing movement on that front. The laments for the descent into the “grind” that seems so prevalent have grown stale, and those few who still express wide-eyed nostalgia for the days of immersive roleplay are patted on the head condescendingly. And don’t even get me started on PvP debates – ugh.

I suppose we could argue real-money-trades or RMT as the latest buzzwords have it. Or I could evangelize the notion that closed monolithic servers like we see today are antithetical to the way the Web works. We could get down and dirty on a topic like reputation systems and how they might be applied to MMORPGs, or re-open the grand old debate about worlds-as-games or worlds-as-simulations.

There’s no shortage of debates. But there’s a distinct lack of new debates. Each time I think of maybe writing my 800 words on one of those topics, I think of how many thousands of words I’ve already written on each of those, and I cringe. Could I possibly add anything to the discussion? More importantly, do players even give a toss?

Some argue that the dominance of World of Warcraft means that many of these questions are now settled. After all, it’s hard to argue with the money hats that Blizzard execs are wearing. On the other hand, these are arguments of long-standing. The answers go in and out of fashion, rather than being arrived at definitively and conclusively. It’s a business of fads, like any other entertainment business; just as Hollywood occasionally tosses a Johnny Knoxville to the top of the heap and then quickly destroys him, the business of MMOs has if anything grown even more hit-driven, and the userbases even more fickle.

Lately, I have seen more calls for the term-limited MMORPG. The game that runs its three or six months and then closes up shop, never to return. Leaving aside the question of how we afford to make that game, there’s something about it that rubs me wrong.

After all, the whole point of these things was building castles in the air. The notion of homesteading a few acres of distant hard drive, slaying a couple hundred ravening bytes that wanted to delete my database entries, maybe collecting a rare hexadecimal index number or two – this was at the heart of the romance, especially for anyone who grew up reading much-thumbed paperbacks with dragons and wizards on the cover.

These days, Minas Tirith has been boiled down to a concrete image on the screen, and also a molded plastic playset where you can play with your Frodo action figure. Your mother knows all about Aragorn (and watched Hidalgo just because he was in it). And with this mainstreaming has come the money and with the money the debates, well, they have to stop. You can’t make money if we don’t actually know what the genre is. And we need our worlds to be disposable so that they clear out and make room for next year’s shiny new model.

It may be this is just a stage we have to go through. The debates I really want to have are ones that we cannot quite have yet. I want to discuss whether the votes of the player-elected ombudsmen panel can be binding on the game administration given that they are shareholders in the venture. I want to talk about whether the fact that the games are now treated as banks and have to issue 1099-Gs is right under the law. I want to discuss whether the intergame protocol of 2011 is going to bridge the gap between action and RPG style games, and whether the old 3DO patent on avatar translation between worlds applies.

These things seem like they may not be much fun. “It’s only a game!” goes the rallying cry. But the building blocks of fun are often mundane. If anything, it’s the mundanity of the debates today that grows wearying. One more argument about drop rates or about the qualities of the proper LFG tool and I may scream.

Sometime, the old debates will get reinvigorated by fresh new arguments. I look forward to the legal case over whether the VR-embedded team of handicapped kids and geeks can claim the WNBA trophy after beating the VR-embedded women’s basketball team.

If there’s one thing that the history of virtual worlds thus far teaches us, it’s that the arguments won’t stop, because the passion players feel for these collections of bits and bytes on some faraway server is quite real and quite strong. Arguments may come and arguments may go, and worlds will rise and fall. Everything we know about the business today will be proven wrong, and huge hits will continue to be built on the shoulders of those who came before.

And then we’ll have plenty of material for new editorials.