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The march of commodificationDecember 12th, 2007 |
So I got an email announcing ChatBlade, a new MMOG chat system middleware package; a specialized enough need that it would have been kind of inconceivable a few years ago as a business. Which leads to speculation on where we are headed in terms of innovative virtual world tchnologies. And now, I have to open this post with an anecdote (even though they say to write for blogs the way you write for newspapers: put the lead first!).
Once very long ago (”long ago” here defined as circa 1995), I logged into some random LPMud. I don’t remember which one it was, but it had an idea I liked a lot and decided to steal for LegendMUD. In that mud, you see, they had simple moods & what today gets called by some “say alts” — commands that were exactly like the SAY command, only you could grunt or groan, wail or whine, and these say alternates carried emotional content that you didn’t get with plain old SAY, WHISPER, SHOUT, and TELL. I went back to Legend and designed a speech system that handled moods and say alternates.
At the time, it was common for muds to have those four commands, which do four very different things; and it was common to have language systems, which made elves not understand orcs, etc. Drunken garbling of text was also a common feature.
At first the system supported a sort of “natural language” reading of text:
Herodotus says absentmindedly, 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.'Herodotus whines, not really paying attention, 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.''Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,' Herodotus proclaims absentmindedly.
You could make your whole character moody (”sticky” moods), or you could use a mood as a one-off prefix.
Because the natural language look didn’t always have the name first on the line, some folks disliked it; it made it harder to scan text to visually filter the chats you were interested in. But stats a while after it was introduced showed that the vast majority of players were using it. It turns out that prose is plain old easier to read for a lot of people, perhaps because we get so much practice. And roleplayers loved it. Over time, moods support got added to entrances and exits:
Herodotus wanders in from the north, staring vaguely about.Herodotus wanders off to the north, scratching his head in befuddlement.
and to global chat, socials, and so on. Meanwhile, those who hated it (powergamers, mostly) wanted more efficient text streams, so from that side, support was added for a variety of highly concise text layouts that looked more like IRC. These spread eventually to combat messages, so you could get a highly mathematical view of the action.
Later on, we put pretty much the same moods system wholesale into Star Wars Galaxies (and even made room for a pretty concise combat text stream on a tab, for powergamers to use in fight analysis). I think EQ2 then also integrated moods. And in SWG, taking a cue from Microsoft Research’s Comic Chat, I got the chat parser to also detect certain keywords — but more importantly, emoticons — and automatically play socials and moods, tie into chat bubbles and their artwork, and so on. This turned out to be incredibly powerful, just like “sticky” moods were, and most everyone used it. (Footnote: I had almost forgotten about Comic Chat at the time, but was prompted to recall by this MediaMOO panel, plus seeing the wonderful implementation in There, which supported intensity by doing emoticons that looked like this: :)))))
I could walk through almost the same narrative all over again with chat bubbles, by the way. But it doesn’t matter. All of this is by way of pointing out that ChatBlade supports moods out of the box. And elvish. And drunken speech. And even stuff that back in 1995 when we were doing moods was weirdo cutting-edge roleplayer stuff that few muds implemented, like nickname support; and stuff that was added over time like verbose versus concise chat formats.
It’s part of the march of commodification: what once was basically an R&D effort (in the case of Comic Chat, quite literally an R&D effort) is now an out-of-the-box feature in middleware. This is a natural progression: something useful comes along, it raises the bar, competitors have to adopt it, then over time someone makes it a common piece of tech and everyone has it.
Well, MMOs used to be moon shoots and increasingly aren’t. In fact, even some of the really tough stuff is starting to get incredibly easy (and I am not just talking about Metaplace here, though we keep finding that stuff that used to be scary huge engineering effort turn out to be easy).
Commodification is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it theoretically enables greater innovation because “the basics” are covered for you. On the other hand, you can end up with “stock mud syndrome” where all the games look the same. On the gripping hand, having lots of offerings that are basically the same limits the audience, creates monopoly situations, and caps the market.
At some point, of course, even selling chat middleware will make little sense because even big complex systems like this will be commodified as well: so common that they get given away. It’s instructive to think about what the crazy things are that will be commodified to the point where they are given away: software for seamless multiserver clusters? RMT-in-a-box Station Exchange style systems? Spore’s procedural modeling and animation techniques? Robust alife-based procedural world simulation systems?
At some point soon, all of those things which seem somewhere between hard and R&D are going to be off the shelf components. And perhaps the key sign of it is that the current big wave of mainstream MMOs have virtually no R&D in them. Off the shelf SmartFoxServer, Makena engine re-uses, simplified versions of AAA MMO game systems… It’s time to start thinking about what the new R&D is now, because based on this press release, it takes 10 years to get from R&D start to middleware end. 
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