What is the appeal of MMOs?
Michael Tresca, a fellow MUD-Dev list member, was arguing that MMORPGs reduce roleplaying (a statement I agree with) and that they offered a fundamentally different appeal to the player than text muds did (a statement I disagreed with).
The appeal of massively multiplayer games
To the player, I really don’t think that’s the fundamental appeal. [Tresca had argued the fundamental appeal of MMORPGs was broken down into three things: graphics, size, and professional development]. I would have characterized the fundamental appeals of MMORPGs the same as the ones for text muds, with the addition of graphics: taking me away to a different place, being a different person, doing things that I could not do in real life, and lastly, doing it with other people, etc. Graphics and massive amounts of players would not fulfill the needs of the market alone. If the wish-fulfillment isn’t there, then you have no audience.
Focusing on the graphics and the size and the bugs feels like a mud developer’s take on what the MMOs use as selling points.
A while back I read a great business book called “Discovering the Soul of Service,” by Leonard Berry. In it, he made the point that great service companies are those that serve some altruistic goal. They seek to make their customers’ lives better in some fashion by fulfilling some need. They are not wedded to the means of fulfilling that need. Companies that get wedded to the means are ones that perish when the nature of the market changes. As examples, he offered up the train companies. They should have been focused on how to ship people and products in the way that made their customers happiest. Instead, they were focused on the fact that they were rail. As a result, they crumbled when the rail aspect they were so wedded to became irrelevant in the face of newer technology. Who’s the winner in the transportation game? The guy who said, “hey, if we have a universal container with a coherent tracking code, we could ship stuff by plane, train, and ship, never having to repack it, and we can track it safely anywhere in the world!”
Think about MMOs: The graphics are there because people don’t want to have to do work. The box with the CD is there because people don’t like to have to do work. The larger and larger worlds are there because they reinforce the illusion of a different place, an alternate world. We can argue all we want about how larger worlds shreds the fabric of community, about how download is a more efficient way of distributing the games, about how text frees the imagination. It’s not going to matter because these developments are implicit in the underlying promise.
(That’s why Neverwinter Nights is smart to present itself as not being a mud. And the people who are ex-mudders who are flocking to that product SAY they want to build a mud with it, but really what they want is something cozier. To which I say, great! That’s why I am skeptical about NWN “replacing” the MMOs. The implicit promise is different).
- much, much higher production values. This is just a natural evolution.
- MUCH more formalization of social mechanics than exists in any text mud I’ve ever seen, much more creation of interdependencies and social networks, etc.
- an explicit focus on microcommunities within the larger environment.
These three things are in large part dependent on scale. In other words, they are things that only the big worlds and big games can do effectively.
Will the player’s ability to perceive these attributes diminish? I don’t know, you tell me. They don’t seem to be attributes that are currently present.
Six months after UO came out, the industry still thought it was a failure, unaware of just how successful it was because its launch was so rocky and the publicity so bad. After EverQuest, it could no longer be ignored. So everyone and their cousin jumped in. The vast majority of them wiped out. This has not gone unnoticed. There aren’t a ton of people making tons of money off of this right now. There’s definitely less of them than there were during the height of the AOL gaming era. Frankly, it’s a fragile time for the MMORPG.
