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World or not?

January 7th, 2006 (Visited 6085 times) Tags:

Mike Ashley has a good post on why XBox Live can be considered a hub-and-instances massively multiplayer game.

Not a “world,” mind you. I agree with him in that sense.

One of the comments he makes caught my eye:

Today worldly games have just a few embedded boxes, but Koster believes that MMO games will migrate towards worldly games with embedded boxes enumerating more and different kinds of games. I think he’s biased, because of his background, but he recognizes that development budgets are going to be a limiting factor. I’ll come back to this later.

I define a virtual world by only a few elements: a spatial metaphor, avatar representation, multiple users, persistence of the space.

If XBox Live created a persistent virtual space for their “lobby,” and had spatial presentation of the profiles within it, it would not only be a virtual world by my definition, but it would also be very much an example of a a virtual world with a ton of embedded mini-games.

To make it an interesting “worldy” game as opposed to “hub-and-instance” game, some of those games ought to be playable within the setting of the lobby, of course, and not just in instances.

Mike spends a while on how cool achievements are, but seen in this light, they’re nothing new — he analogizes them to equipment, but that’s not really what they are since equipment modifies the statistical profile of an avatar; they’re exactly like the badges in SWG or LegendMUD or many other online worlds, historical elements of a profile.

There is a perfectly valid question of “why do all this? Isn’t XBox Live fine as it is?” Ironically, at some point FFXI is going to launch, and then something that does meet at these criteria is going to be shoved into one of the instances! And then Microsoft will have itself a curious hub-and-hub-and-instances setup.

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The Daily Graze wrote on May 8th, 2006 at 11:55 pm:

[IMG Virtual World] At the SDForum Virtual Worlds – Rules for Engagement Conference, Millions of Us CEO, Reuben Steiger, proclaimed “I think MySpace is definitely a virtual world”. It is not. Raph Koster had agreat post on why Xbox Live is not a virtual world and the post holds even more truth in regards to MySpace. Raph defines a virtual world by spatial representation, avatars, multiple users, and a persistent space. The

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MikeRozak said on January 7th, 2006 at 1:26 pm:

I disagree with Mike Ashley’s conclusion.

The problem with X-Box’s “instances” is that there’s no synergy between the instances.

1) You can’t take a Ferrari from a racing game into Halo2, and vice versa.

2) Nor will changes to a character’s skill in one game affect another.

3) Nor are the games integrated together into quests where players first race ferraris to the airport, then jump into their jets, and then fly to the secret island where they might do hand-to-hand combat with the enemy.

4) Finally, adding a new sub-game to X-box live doesn’t magically make the new sub-game (or other sub-games) more fun.

Yahoo Games’ hub has the same issues.

Hub-and-instances games, like GuildWars, meet these criteria. You can transport objects/stuff between instances, character changes transition between instances, and a larger quest arc exists between instances. If you just split guild-wars into lots of small quests, the individual quests wouldn’t be as fun as the sum of their parts.

Furthermore, I claim that you can’t really produce a set of sub-games with such synergy without doing extensive design work to ensure the sub-games “work” well together, and don’t break one another. For this to happen, the sub-games pretty much need to be created by one company… which is why I think creating a meta-VW where players are able to move characters and equipment from company A’s world into company B’s world won’t work.

Mike Ashley said on January 7th, 2006 at 2:34 pm:

Certainly a valid question is “why change anything about Xbox Live?” My understanding is that the Xbox Live team wants to foster a community of game players. They’ve continually improved the service to do that, but I assume they want to go further. If so, what ideas can they borrow from MMO games to make that happen?

I don’t know what to think of spatial presentation. Is it necessary? Without it could I somehow get the same sense of community I had in Ultima Online? Spun another way, what does spatial representation buy you? If I was on the Xbox Live team, that’s the first question I would ask, because I’m being asked to tease apart what makes MMO communities thrive, and spatial presentation is intertwined with everthing else.

Is being a virtual world by your definition a *requirement* for being an MMO? I don’t know. Just asking.

A friend who reviewed my post thought along the same lines you did about armor. He thought it should be possible for achievements gained in one game to affect what the player could do in another game. It will be interesting to see if any game designer pursues that, but it obviously makes the game’s design more complex and may constrain the market for the game. For what it’s worth, Xbox Live Arcade may make that kind of experimentation possible with less of an economic risk to developers.

Raph said on January 7th, 2006 at 3:01 pm:

Of course XBOx Live doesn’t need to become a virtual world. On the other hand, if they did, then users could have, say, housing where they could display trophies from their games, and bring people over. They could have a chat space that is better contextualized, for those times that they just wish to hang out. They could have a virtual arcade for all those Live Arcade titles, where you could actually see your friends playing, walk up, watch over their shoulder. There’s lots of stuff that a spatial metaphor for interaction gives you.

Is being a virtual world key to the definition of MMO? Right now, MMO means virtual world, which is one of the problems that I and others have with the acronym.

Q said on January 8th, 2006 at 6:07 am:

My favorite new acronym is OOG, Online Only Game. Actually the first time I heard you say MMO to me I thought to myself… mmoWHAT? as it seems incomplete. =) I think it’s like when Bush Sr said “Baar” so much that when they hear an impression they know it means Barbara. So it’s probably you’re fault we use an incomplete acronym. I’m assuming so most of the MASSIVE games are RPGs, MMO comes to hold the expectations of an online world or RPG. I don’t want to make just RPGs but I don’t want to make single player games either. So OOG fits my development goals more appropriately.

The other side to the XBox Live lobby system is the intent to be accessible. They’re surely fooling themselves if they think mom is going to log in and load up Bedazzled My wife can’t even figure out how to watch TV after a power outage let alone get it set up to play 360. However that does seem to be their goal and building it into a world could be a another barrier to entry. A choice between visual interpretations of the service would probably be best though. Either way they need to streamline because finding anything now can be frustrating and time consuming.

For my own part I would blow money out the broadband pipe if they made it a world. I buy preorders and Betas and digital downloads just to have the virtual crap I get along with it. It’s a sickness. I don’t feel any need for that on Live. Not yet anyway. I might pay an extra $20 for an online game’s Special Edition to get a Purple Cloak of Uselessness but I’m not paying 80 points for a new icon. Make it a world and make the icon a new avatar face and I’ll spend $5, $10, or more to get the one I want.

Igor said on January 8th, 2006 at 8:08 am:

I must say that I’m beginning to appreciate Xbox a whole lot more recently. Since I first played, say, Doom, I longed for its world to get broader, to become a real living place where people went about their business and had a persistent community. The traditional MMO such as Ultima Online and Everquest strives to achieve such a thing by expanding on the Multi-User-Dungeons of yore.

But the article raises very good points. The features and quality of a single MMO by a single developer can never truly suffice. Thus, we get into player-created content, and we see games like Second Life, where all players are free to code any addition to the world that they want. But, firstly, such an approach isn’t casual-friendly at all. You have to know how to program, model, and the rest to enjoy a game? Get real. Rather than resembling a self-contained microcosm of the world such as an amusement park, the game will resemble a boardroom where roller-coaster engineers come to show off their ideas to each other. That’s nice too, but not quite the world that we’re looking for. Sure, you can play Second Life simply to witness the creations of other players, but people who aren’t ‘creators’ themselves won’t be likely to do that. Thus, as a world, it fails.

Xbox Live, however, as the article says, is definitely a casual service, but also one with no clear boundaries on potential creativity. Why, people who just want to play Halo deathmatches can play. But, those interested in, say, machinima can meet people to make movies with online. The movies they create will also appear to all of the deathmatch folks, which is a huge group, as well as people who don’t even play on Xbox Live. Contrary to this, anything of the sort done in a game like Second Life would only appeal to the limited playerbase of that game. No world there because anything that tries too hard to be a world only appeals to people who want to see a true world-game realized, a very narrow group of people who are not varied enough or large enough in numbers to ever create a true world-like virtual community among themselves.

And, again, on the subject of developer-created content: As the article says, with an unlimited number of independent developers working on Xbox live’s “content,” there’s no limit to what can be seen, while even the most ambitious individual MMOs generally reach a limit. Plus, the quality of each individual component (racing, shooting, fishing, role-playing, sports, etc.) will also be of far greater quality than the products of a single MMO dev-team trying to create every single activity that players want to do in their game. The dev-created content will be of the absolute highest quality among all of gaming. There is also no problem with Xbox Live being overloaded with sub-par player-created content, such as the case often is in Second Life. Although a “persistent (

Igor said on January 8th, 2006 at 8:09 am:

Part 2:
Although a “persistent (

Igor said on January 8th, 2006 at 8:10 am:

(sorry about that. not sure what’s up.)

Darniaq said on January 8th, 2006 at 11:04 am:

I’ve been wondering about this since Diablo 2 (this conversation sounds familiar ). The chat front end was the “global” space facilitating the interaction for both adventure and trade.

To me, it’s half a question of whether this aligns with definitions and half whether it’s what people want. Guild Wars is a good example of Diablo 2 with a persistent world replacing the chat interface. Does this give people more of a sense of “massive”?

Maybe. But I’ve been wondering since beginning in MMOs just how much massive people want

Raph said on January 8th, 2006 at 11:11 am:

I would say it does give a bigger sense of “massive” since so many more people are willing to call Guild Wars an MMO than were willing to call Diablo one.

Q, I use “MMO” because of its brevity and because it encompasses “MMORPG” and “MMOFPS” and “MMORTS” and all thos eother horrible acronyms. I’ve given up on getting them all called “muds” so usually I use online worlds if I can.

Amberyl said on January 8th, 2006 at 3:05 pm:

Igor wrote: We get into player-created content, and we see games like Second Life, where all players are free to code any addition to the world that they want. But, firstly, such an approach isn’t casual-friendly at all. You have to know how to program, model, and the rest to enjoy a game? Get real.

This is a limitation of the current generation of tools, more so than anything else. There’s certainly room for creativity-driven worlds in the future — look how many people in the real world knit, woodwork, etc. The tools need to get vastly better first, though, before virtual self-expression can be a mainstream reality. (Though look at what people are doing at CokeStudios, say.)

I’d agree that Xbox Live meets the requirements for a virtual world if, in addition to the criteria Raph listed, avatar identity is consistent across all games within the service.

Darniaq said on January 8th, 2006 at 4:34 pm:

I would say it does give a bigger sense of “massive” since so many more people are willing to call Guild Wars an MMO than were willing to call Diablo one

Makes me wonder how much GW’s status as an MMO is based on marketing, versus how much of D2′s was based on timing.

There are quite a number of folks who don’t think GW is an MMO really, due to how it compartmentalizes players. But it was heavily marketed as a “free MMO”, published by an emerging MMO publisher in NC Soft (“emerging” at least to Westeners) and “free” carries quite a bit of weight with those on the fringe of interest in the genre.

Meanwhile, D2 came out at a time when MMOs were still very niche, the term itself was not well known, and it was specifically billed a an RPG sequel rather than a new way of playing.

Granted, I don’t think it’d be called an MMO today, lacking as it does any form of persistent world. But as part of the genre “matures” into games more evocative of D2 than of truly persistent worlds, I wonder just how much further the “massive” can be diminished until we’ve come full circle to where we’ve been. At least in terms of AAA titles.

Blizzard came to RPGs and RTSes and sort of delivered the best iterations of what those were for the day. By being victorious, they forced a rethink in those genres that we’re still seeing the repurcussions from today. I wonder if this is what will happen in MMORPGs. Will the EQ-style game continue to be so well-iterated in WoW that only games that toss the rules can even compete?

Man I hope so. I want games like Eve and SL and anything that emulates UO to be successful, to capture their niche and grow it. Devolving MMORPGs to just narrative RPGs does not move humanity forward

World or not?

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