 | KGC 2005: The Destiny of Online GamesNovember 14th, 2005 |
I have placed the slides for my keynote up on the website (finally). Apologies for the delay.
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I only have experience with 3 large online games (UO, SWG, WOW), and I’m actually surprised by how well 2L seems to do among certain crowds. Frankly, I thought the user-generated parts of UO and SWG were the weakest parts of the game (I’m thinking empty user cities wasting space, especially). In fact, after abandoning both and finding WoW, I think the idea of making open-ended games in which users generate the game may not really be feasible. It sounds great in theory — throw a bunch of gamers in a room and see what cool plots and ideas they develop — but I doubt it would be much fun to play.
The most pleasant aspect of WoW has been that it’s essentially no more than a regular desktop RPG — you go kill things, you raise XP, repeat until your hand is numb — with social interaction. You can definitely play alone and have lots of fun, but grouping greatly enhances gameplay, and by grouping you turn a solitary gaming experience into a social one. It reminds me of playing Dungeons and Dragons around a card table.
Granted, SWG and UO had the same thing, but without any real sort of story arc. WoW’s quests make the player feel like they’re an active part of the Alliance/Horde battle story, even at Level 5. It feels like Blizzard figured out exactly the points where SWG and UO failed and figured out how to make them work.
User cities clog the land and don’t work? Don’t have ‘em!
Economy is player-based with no loot from monsters, tending to make for boring game play? Don’t worry about a real economy! Realize it’s a game!
Weird profession/class sytem confuses players and detracts from the fun? Do something more standard and enjoyable!
Apologies, I’m rapidly getting off-topic. My point is simply that I doubt the future of games is user-based. There needs to be some sort of structure and order, and gamers will gladly accept more constraints in their gameplay as long as it means better gameplay (as the swarms of people that have abandoned UO and SWG for other games can attest).
Obviously, I disagree. 
First off, if everyone does what already worked, we’ll quickly end up with only one sort of game. We’ve actually lived this history before in the text MUD world.
Secondly, the fact that you say “Realize it’s a game” shows that you’re misunderstanding online worlds in general. They are spaces that CONTAIN games, not games in and of themselves.
Try replacing everything you said in your post with AOL for Blizzard, and the Web for user-based, and tell me that it still makes sense.
Hi,
What about sites like miniclip.com? Most of those games are made by users, not companies.
Carlo, the context of the talk was virtual worlds, MMORPGs, that sort of thing.
But I’m a huge fan of the indie game scene, and I think that it kinda argues for the same thing.
Hi Raph,
a friend of mine forwarded your slide presentation to me. Anyhow, as I was reading it, a lot of what you describe in the end resonates as something already being done in Second Life.
It’s a platform where you build your castle in the sky, or invite friends over to listen to music in the virtual saloon you made, or go slay dragons, or whatever. It’s a platform, full of mini-games and content all user created.
Anyhow, I would invite you to check it out.
-Max
I get what you’re arguing about. The only way it would work is to get some kind of generic, interoperable protocol that worked across platforms. Like a web browser, you could surf around various games within the 3D space created by all of them.
Right now MMORPGs are like home computers pre-IBM clone interoperability. They are each closed universes to each other.
To open up the platform would open up the universe.
It’s essentially Gibson’s vision – a 3D virtual reality that encompasses everything.
If WoW and SWG and all the rest could exist as destinations (like websites), where your universal avatar could surf (or to smaller, bloggy sites), then it would create a single virtual universe.
Instead of monthly fees, there could essentially be taxation on what people were doing in the particular worlds.
There just would need to be standards agreed upon, like HTML, DNS and RSS, which all virtual worlds would share.
It seems like a viable goal.
Except that they’re not spaces. They’re metaphoric representations of spaces. And to let those collapse into “online worlds” is the same error as thinking that we “become” our characters. We don’t – there’s a complicated process of imitation and metaphor involved in playing the game and in recognizing the setting of the game as a world. There’s even quite a lot of imitation and metaphor in recognizing the other players as a social dynamic. And I think your conception of destiny ultimately amounts to magically smoothing over most of those distinctions and arriving at what remains, to my mind, fundamentally a science fiction fantasy. A very satisfying fantasy in many ways, but one that is, I think, doomed to remain a fantasy, and one that gets in the way of a better understanding.
Max, I’m very familiar with Second Life. However, it’s still fundamentally a client-server walled garden.
Phil, “online worlds” is just the handy way of referencing multiple-user persistent metaphorical representations of spaces. I am unsure what you are saying by “letting those collapse.”
Of course there’s a lot of imitation and metaphor; if you browse around the site, you’ll see that I’ve been working with and writing about those phenomena for a while now. I’m curious as to which distinctions you feel are getting smoothed over?
By “letting those collapse” I mean that the image of an online world – which evokes, as you’ve called it elsewhere, the Snow Crash promise – and the reality, which is an often awkwardly constructed set of metaphors and interfaces are, in your account, joined seamlessly, or at least near enough to seamlessly.
Ultimately, I think you identified the fantasy of online games very accurately – I’m less sure you’ve identified a destiny.
My argument is that because it is such a pervasive fantasy, the industry will keep working towards it. It’s just too big a dream.
I think that the reality today on the Web is, as you put it, an awkwardly constructed set of metaphors and interfaces, but I also think that it’s been getting more and more streamlined every year. When I first used the Internet, I had to type in the routing info on email addresses. 
But your talk doesn’t make it sound descriptive – you end on a note of arguing for pursuing the fantasy, instead of just observing an inevitable pursuit of it. Which isn’t a critique so much as a question – do you really mean to explicitly pursue a fantasy that can’t be fulfilled in your game design?
As for the awkward metaphors, I’m not sure that the awkwardness of typing routing info is a metaphoric awkwardness – it seems to me the opposite. I’m not arguing that metaphors are innately awkward or bad – far from it. I much prefer my shiny OS X interface to a command line. But I do think that, to continue with this train of thought, what is good about OS X has very little to do with the original concept of the GUI and desktop interface, where the computer just became an extension of the desk.
Keep in mind that you’re not seeing the talk — you’re only seeing the slides that sat alongside the hour’s worth of rapid-fire talking. So yes, there was discussion of the inevitability of it, in a descriptive manner.
As far as explicitly pursuing it–sure. I do end on the call to pursue that direction. I don’t believe that it cannot be fulfilled in most of the ways that matter; the list near the end of the presentation is all doable today with current technology. I don’t pretend to know what sorts of interfaces or metaphors that might be used when it comes to fruition, however. The thing I am fairly sure of is that it will retain the spatial metaphor that is central to virtual worlds. In fact, I am pretty sure that this metaphor will be misapplied towards applications where it is far from ideal — shopping, for example.
Mr Koster, thank you *so much* for this. Some friends and I have been raving about this for a few weeks now (and I imagine there are a few out there who have been as well for far longer). We’ve been refering to it as “Immersive Web” – we needed a quick term and felt that immweb summed it up very well, it being many of the points you make in these slides.
We’ve been del.ico.us tagging relevant URIs with “immweb”, if you’d like to see…
http://del.icio.us/tag/immweb
Anyways, so glad to see we’re not alone! Yay! nor are we crazy! hehe 
The difference between real and virtual appears to be subjective. I read the slide as a statement which supports the weight of the virtual side.
Neverwinter Nights is an online game with loosely connected servers with user made content…
Interesting thoughts. I recently posted to Freeman’s blog, wondering when the next “Koster Game” was coming out. I can only wonder how this philosophy will affect your future designs.
This harkens back to when the Big Three dominated the market, and we would passingly wonder what it would all be like, if you could log onto the MMO World, and take your character from UO to EQ to AC. Many of us try to do that already, and if you ever see someone named “Slyfeind” in any virtual space, it’s almost certainly me. (However, if you ever see someone named “SlyfIEnd,” it’s definately someone else.)
But yeah, this has the potential to be huge. I don’t know if it’s inevitable; maybe we’ll be stuck with this strange, stagnant state of affairs forever. On the one hand, it’s turning a profit. But as with any asset of any business, eventually these things take on a life of their own, and evolve or die whether the corporate executives want them to.
Second Life is not only a closed environment, it’s still too complex to deal with for the average user. And perhaps more importantly, it lacks sufficient compelling content for mainstream users. SL is to the original TinyMUD what EQ/WoW/etc. are to DikuMUDs.
Fundamentally, widely-used online services require two components — inexpensive and reasonably easy-to-use access, and compelling content that it’s worth obtaining access to.
Some of that content will be user-created and other content will be commercially-created.
In order to have user-created content, you must have stable and inexpensive technical platforms for hosting content, as well as easy-to-use tools for content creation — preferably tools that provide near-instant gratification. Moreover, you must have open standards and interoperability.
But it’s also worth thinking about the history of MUDs — an increasingly large number of users created increasingly sophisticated games that drew ever-shrinking and ever-more-fragmented audiences, and few games managed to achieve critical mass. Multiplayer environments are dependent on communities that exist in real time. “Long tail” multiplayer content nonetheless has to gather sufficiently large audiences to form a critical mass for real-time community.
I think the Web equivalent for virtual worlds lies in the future, but it’s going to be a long time in coming.
There are some tentative steps towards the sort of games you identify as the near future, mostly among people who are familiar with the sort of co-operative content creation practices of the blogosphere and using the conventions and established function of the blogosphere with which they are already familiar. See the many RPGs on LiveJournal (as good a place as any to start is this discussion of Milliways Bar) and also Patchwork Universe.
Now please explain how I have completely misunderstood your premise. 
Raph -
I really enjoyed seeing your presentation and it did raise some interesting points.
I think there are at least three different issues about the structure of online games in the future that you are combining which need to be separated in some sense:
1. “Portable Presence” – Persistance of identity across multiple games and services. This is an intriguing idea, but given the lack of real momentum for strong identity systems and players’ desire for anonymity, I just don’t see this happening. My current “void” presence (excluding all of the marketing cookies that follow me around) seems to be a best case scenario. Interestingly, I raised the importance of this from a company perspective during my talk at the conference. Companies should want this… players, not so much. As interestingly noted in an article I read recently, Snow Crash was fundamentally in error for the basic model of the Internet – there is no geography & therefore no “Bar at the Center” – hyperlinks and browsing have destroyed any shared notion of a “metric space” for the Internet.
2. “Portable Characters” – The notion of moving a character from game to game is kind of intriguing in theory, but a disaster in practice. Years of D&D and other games have shown how poorly this works… the uniquenes of the game master’s (or, for Online Game’s the developer) world view would make such portability virtually impossible. Even a shared game/play/economic engine would not make this work.
3. “Rich Gaming” – We seem to be at a crossroads where computer games are getting exponentially expensive to make even as the power to distribute and play them has plummetted. This is the opposite of what we are seeing with traditional board and card games – a renaissance of independent publishers and innovative titles. Pretty much all of the of the other creative arts are also seeing a rise in creativity and lowered cost of entry. Casual games are rapidly suffering from the bloat of other computer games.
Something is horribly wrong with how the industry is structured and operated. The art of computer gaming is rapidly degenerating into the shape of the US auto industry.
Steve
Take this how you may, but the “game thinkers” need to sit down with the “web thinkers” and learn a few tricks. I’m sure we’d learn some awesome stuff in return too, but the key I’m trying to get to is we’ve learnt alot about interoperability and wide-scale cooperation over the last few years…
It’s not about hooking up WoW to SL… it’s about connecting my “weblog” to “the blogosphere”… in Immersive style. My backyard is connected to my municipality, etc etc etc.
Boris, I completely agree. I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year hanging out with the Web 2.0 types, and it really is a different view of the world. That’s what inspired a lot of this talk. It isn’t about hooking up WoW to SL at all.
BTW, I do think that NWN (well, NWN with all the glorious hacks that have been layered on it) and SL and the LiveJournal RPGs are harbingers.
BTW, I do think that NWN (well, NWN with all the glorious hacks that have been layered on it) and SL and the LiveJournal RPGs are harbingers.
I hope that’s true. “What I Want In A Game” has changed quite a bit since 1998, when I was pleading for new shades of green. Now the questions I ask are something like: Can I play with my husband? I forgot to tell you that he’s on a Mac — can I still play with him? And can we play for about 2 hours every 3rd night and still have an enjoyable experience? Can we have a small expense for this enjoyment ($40/month being much too much)? The answer to each of these questions is Yes, as far as NWN goes. I think it is quite possibly the world’s most perfect online game. The user’s only fee is the box, and any modules s/he decides to buy. User-created content is (can be) free. It works on multiple platforms, and can be played via LAN.
B and I have the Platinum Edition on our Christmas List. He likes to play a Paladin. I’ll let you know how it goes.
My experience with MMO goes as follows in order: Asheron’s Call (DarkTide, totally different game that on the white servers), Everquest 1 & 2, World of Warcraft, and various betas including SW:G, CoH, AC, EQ2, WoW.
I have one really great experiences with “user-created” content in a MMORPG. That is in Asheron’s Call playing on the DarkTide server.
To give a little background I got introed to this game from a friend while it was in open beta. This pretty much started my MMO addiction from this point foward. I started playing Asheron’s Call by playing on a non-PvP server during beta and gold release for the first three or so months. I got bored with this game rather quickly, and decided to go back to my original addiction at the time (StarCraft). After about a month and half break from the game, I somehow got convinced to reroll on the PvP server known as DarkTide.
Now I am not sure if anyone is familiar with the game design on DarkTide, but it was probably one of the harshest PvP servers to date. Basically there were no rules, PvP was in a FFA type mode, where newbies spawning points were regularly patrolled by RPKers anywhere from level 20-30 which basically meant insta death. The only exception is that once you were killed you were given a 5 minute “grace” period were you were non-PvP (otherwise known as white).
So where I am going with this? Well there really wasnt a “goal” in Asheron’s Call. Yes the monthly content was great, but if you were not in the level range or had the time to investigate what was going on you were kinda SOL. So basically you were left with a skill driven system. You would grind to get xp to spend on skill points. Gets boring real quick, hence why I left in the first place.
What kept me around was the “user-created” content that DarkTide players were generating on a daily basis. The system of monarchies present players with choices. Those choices were generally between RPK guilds (encouraged random player killing guilds) Antis (against RPKing in general and defended newbies from getting RPKed) and your neutral and/or trade guilds. Also you could also play the role of lone wolf if you so choose which would allow you to choose who you were enemies with and who you were allied with.
Because the world generated was so huge in Asheron’s Call this allowed players to settle in towns and “claim” territory (otherwise known as LifeStones). This in turn allowed players to “claim” dungeons that their guild or allies could use to gain skills in order for the betterment of the monarchy. The opposing force would then “raid” these dungeons and towns for various reasons such as crippling their leveling efficiency, general harrassment which could some times cause turncoats to switch allegiances, and the overall fun of raids in general.
Without making this a 10 page essay, the politics and territorial intrigue caused in DarkTide from the above were truely more engrossing than the game itself at times. Guilds like Black Rose, Blood, The-Feared, (some of the anti guild names escape me at the moment) that were involved with teritorial deals, declarations of KoS (Kill on Sight), betrayels were a story folded inside of the ongoing monthly updates.
My point is the users themselves created the history that DarkTide is steeped in, and it was then a far more interesting place to play than the other servers. If it were not for the harshness of starting a character in DarkTide it probably would have been a far more popular place to play.
I am suprised more devs have not looked at AC DarkTide model as a good starting point for allowing players to generate content/events on their own.
Interestingly, while the big games these days “open big” and then acquire fewer and fewer customers each day (in a perfectly regular mathematical curve, by the way), there are some exceptions, games like Habbo Hotel, Second Life, Eve, and Runescape. These games show instead a J-curve, rising gradually and virally.
One of the common elements about the non-social games in that list is that they have very open PvP and very “worldy” worlds.
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, (KGC2006, formerly called KGDC, Korea Game Developers Conference), will be held November 9th & 10th in a suburb of Seoul at the KINTEX convention center. As long as I’ve been in Korea, I had no idea there was ever a KGDC until last year when I read about it on Raph Koster’s blog. He gave a keynote last year. Had I known beforehand, I would have attended. So this year I’ve been keeping my eyes on it. Tickets at the gate are 100,000 won (around USD $100) for two-day access and 60,000 won (about USD
Bartle?s 5 most important folks in virtual worlds [IMG] Posted by Raph’s Website [HTML][XML][PERM] on Fri, 20 Jul 2007 03:12:38 +0000
The Destiny of Online Gaming
As I said in an earlier post I’m reading a book about ARG’s at the moment and as I read Raph Koster’s keynote speech from KGC 2005 I couldn’t help but twist the two together.
I’ve banged on to many people about the ̶…
[...] Ralph Kosters speach “The Destiny of Online Games” Een mooie presentatie over de toekomst van online computer spellen van de schrijver van Theory of Fun (PDF-file 4,7Mb). De pagina met alle slides van de presentatie is vrij groot – heb geduld, je wordt beloond
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