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American Idol: the world’s most popular MMO?February 21st, 2006 |
Sure, I mean it semi-seriously. You have (until Thursday, anyway) 24 avatars, and you have millions of people performing their one move, trying to move their token past a particular hurdle; the tokens have a degree of free will — at least, as much as the producers will allow — but ultimately, I don’t think that they are the ones playing the game, I think the audience is. Over the next few weeks, we’ll see lobbying, we’ll see cheat codes posted on forums, we’ll see walkthroughs of performances, and we’ll see “guilds” forming…
This sort of participatory television is far more passive than a typical MMORPG, and yet it still results in impressive levels of emotional investment. And we end up with player types: the aloof critic-wannabe who tries to judge performances impartially; the ones who fall for the sexy contestants; the rabid followers of a given musical style, who manage to push mediocre singers further with their voting bloc…
It’s surprising, in a way, how little collective action matters in most MMOs. Here’s a medium that allows it better than any other game type, and yet we still see fairly little collective action — and when we do, it’s raids — arguably, exactly the wrong sort of collective action to really play to the strengths of what virtual spaces can do, precisely because what MMOs offer is spaces with thousands in them, not spaces with a few dozen.
Just some random, perhaps fever-addled thoughts on a night when I really need to take some meds.
Oh, and among the girls, the clear standouts were jazz singer Paris, sixteen-year-old Lisa, and Catherine McPhee. I predict the opera singer and Brenna (already dubbed the “diva brat” at my house) among the first eliminations.
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