What fearfully interesting discussions you guys have! I just stumbled on Ralph’s website while I was tootling around the interwebz musing about MMOs and virtual worlds, and I’ve just spent the last couple of hours following some of these fascinating exchanges.

One thing I’d say to maybe add to the discussion – I think two things that I haven’t seen mentioned hardly at all are “story” (or “lore”) and art design. To me, a virtual world is more than just a shared or persistent space, it’s also to do with the sort of background tapestry that’s made by the lore and by the looks of things (the “gestalt” might be the right word).

One is attracted to a virtual world, IMHO, because one has some affinity for the “stuff that’s happening/has happened” in that virtual world, and/or for the look and feel of it. (Outrageously spikey armour and cutesy creatures happen to be “in” at the moment )

Otherwise you might as well be playing Pong or fiddling with a database.

And the flip side of that is – are you (as a game designer) going to luck out on the artists and writers who just happen to have a hotline to the Zeitgeist (or, perhaps also, to the deep yearnings and hankerings of our evolutionarily-designed biology and psychology)?

All rather imponderable and mysterious (but of course I would say that, as a musician ).

Am I just dreaming? Is this sort of game never to be? Will no one with the funds (aka big corporate gaming companies) ever decide that maybe players might want this sort of game?

I’m not convinced the big companies will. They might, but their approach is generally slow, risk-adverse, hierarchical and expensive. Too many of them have decided that the path to glory is to retool the virtual world into Facebook 3D.

On the flip side, the tools to create and publish content keep getting easier to use, and independent games are getting a level of polish they’ve never had before. You can still tell the difference between an AAA title and an independent (in most cases), but the quality gap is getting narrower.

I think the likliest source for the type of game we’re envisioning is a kid in a basement, or six kids in a tiny studio, who are smart enough not only to revolutionize the genre while holding true to its roots, but to cut clean, modular, easily-scalable code and utilize free/cheap marketing techniques to their fullest.

Well, Raph, you guys did put in those once a month spawns and variants, correct? Or was that a result of the emergence of player behavior rather than at release? But if it was an afterthought, then I don’t understand the “Gold Belt” which I always thought was in at release. I mean, why was it there at all if it was just supposed to sit there with no meaning and no context.
At any rate, it doesn’t matter what intent was or wasn’t, UO still had that great rares thing as a feature.

“Hrmmmm? UO doesn’t have levels or classes… most of us were GM tank mages in those days. Nor are there zones. Sorry, sometimes I forget that “Siege of Trinsic” isn’t up there with “Battle of the Bulge” in instant name recognition ”

Heh, what?! You mean UO didn’t have level grind to the point of social segregation and zones to enhance it, and you still had great memories of great game play?

Actually, I was there and I’m just being a snark. Just trying to point out that the best game play has nothing to do with grinds and their associated hooks.

But let me take it a step farther and suggest that, instead of game companies take more and more away from us players, they go the other way. They…*gasp*…give us more?

And that Trinsic invasion can be used as a good example of how to go about it. Lets take it farther. What would have happened if upon his destruction, Juo’Nar (a liche who was a human antagonist earlier in UO’s game play) “shattered” into bone pieces, that layed on the ground for players to pick up as rares. Souvenirs. Valuable in that context, as UO had a great “rares” feature.

And what if those bones of Juo’Nar could be joined together by players, a ritual or powerword spoken, and he comes back? If clues could be left in the game as to the possibility and means?

Of course, most game develpers will instantly start thinking of problems with doing that. And most of them will conclude that it “can’t be done.” But I suggest that if the game were built around this sort of thing in the first place, it can be done.

What if special things never decay, never leave the game world through quitting player’s inventories, and ongoing scenarios are built around such things?

What if it’s up to the “good guys” to seal away Juo’Nar’s bones, hide them, guard them, from the “bad guys”?

What if standard trade constructions are made via the same mechanisms. Put things “in” a workbench, “do”, and you get a thing. The same as putting Juo’Nar’s bones in a Blackrock coffin, place runes “in” it to seal it, and “do”, and presto! Juo’Nar is back. And Juo’Nar the NPC is seeking recruits for his evil, “tags”. While Juo’Nar the GM can refer to this list of such Tags and go from there.

What if a game were about the experience, the history, the happenings, the world around the players? Instead of about levels and hooks and ladders and repetition?

Am I just dreaming? Is this sort of game never to be? Will no one with the funds (aka big corporate gaming companies) ever decide that maybe players might want this sort of game?

@Yukon, what level were you, and what zone were you in?

Hrmmmm? UO doesn’t have levels or classes… most of us were GM tank mages in those days. Nor are there zones. Sorry, sometimes I forget that “Siege of Trinsic” isn’t up there with “Battle of the Bulge” in instant name recognition

I’m not quite sure of the specifics you outlined because I played UO and know about Malabelle and such, but I know you’re just trying to set up an example.

I know it’s a tangent, but here’s the story: Duncan is an actual character of mine, and he was at the Baja Siege of Trinsic along with most of the rest of the Golden Knights. We stood in good order against the first couple waves of undead, but since my connection was really bad, it started to get more and more like a chaotic slideshow as more players and undead appeared on the screen. Somehow, trying to escape the lag, I ended up seperated from the main battle, and stumbled upon one of the villains wandering about unopposed. My memory is fuzzy… it may have been Malabelle, but it may have been Jou’nar (a small part of my mind insists it was Minax, but I doubt it). Rather than beat a hasty and prudent retreat, I raised my mace high and charged.

Fuzzy it might be, but that was my most memorable, and quickest, defeat. But I did manage to count coup before I fell!

@guy burse- I guess making social interaction in games almost just like on message boards brings the same problems. The disconnect to “real people” is getting heavy.

@Raph-

The reasons why NPCs stopped reacting to players individually in UO were

- localization and building custom strings
- content generation load
- players found it annoying (!)

Isn’t this exactly what you’re lead topic is about? Taking things out of the MMOs because the problems aren’t being solved? We players have been saying something about this for a long time, you’ve probably heard it:

“Since UO they are giving us less and less.”

(And that includes UO itself, over the years.)

I thought I was gonna be able to stick it out with the game until CATA, But honestly.. I’m just not having fun with it anymore. Its not an mmo anymore in a lot of ways. The Dungeon finger nailed the coffin in any social interaction outside of guilds, and when there is social interaction its in the form of complaining and yelling. Out of 10 dungeon runs, 1 group was talkative in a non threatening manner. All the adventure and such has been completely sucked out of the game. I wanted to hold out until the world gets revamped, but I just fear more of the same. It was once a fun game.. but now its just a lobby/game room.

It is my belief that a system like this is already possible with current technology. Whether it is practical or profitable at this point in time is another matter. But I feel it’s a worthy goal for the narrative quest form.

It’s definitely possible. One of my holy grails was to make a useful representation of a character’s personality as data, and for it to be developed organically from a history.

The hurdle for this stuff isn’t technological: as long as we have enough storage space for the data and a fast enough way to search for the desired information (both of which are thoroughly solved problems), we can do it. Scaling that up to massive, again, debatable and probably not profitable. But in algorithmic terms, what we’re proposing here is not meaningfully different from what Google does: based on an input (the player’s character), find a document (a quest pattern of some kind) that’s ranked highest in relevance, and then feedback based on clicks (doing pieces of the quest) and modifications to the input (changes to the character).

The difference is in the shape of the data. It’s a character gestalt, not a text document, being processed and stored and searched. It’s a lot more volatile. The fuzziness of the match is far, far more extreme. Etc.

Michael, it sounds to me like you’re thinking along the same lines as Yukon. Correct me if not.

I feel a level of disconnect from Yukon’s perspective, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s not from disagreement but from approach: I tend to think about infrastructure, while he’s coming at it in terms of the experience.

I mean, he flippantly pulls an orphan out of hammerspace, whereas I look at that and go, “That orphan came from somewhere. He has his own story. Why was the orphan in that shop? Why that story? How did he come by it?” And I feel that this stuff matters, because it’s a way to stretch Duncan in a completely different direction possibly contrary to his previous alignment. (And yes, I know you made that up on the fly; it was good. )

One problem with the personalized quest is that, executed poorly, it makes for fewer shared experiences. I think that can be surmounted… but it’s Yet Another Problem that needs tackling.

Btw, Yukon, Amaranthar, I don’t have ways of contacting you guys outside of Raph’s site. My spam funnel is blizzard36_2002@yahoo.com if you’re up for a wave.

It of course sounds like an FPS game with matchmaking, and that is exactly his point. Thanks

I’m curious how you guys mean this personalized quest idea.

Short term, I’d like to buy all the NPCs glasses. By that, I mean that they read the character’s gender, species, profession, and maybe run a quick scan of badges and accomplishments, and modify their interaction with that character accordingly. At its most basic, this means the quest text (and mob dialog, and cut scenes) always refers to you with correct pronoun. More to the point, if you’re a dwarf travelling through an elvish forest, NPCs might express attitudes ranging from distain to bemusement to enthusiasm, depending on the personality of the speaker. At this stage the quest is structurally the same, but there’s a greater sense that the world knows you’re there and acknowledges you as an individual rather than Generic Adventurer.

But longer-term, I’d like to see a quest engine capable of building an adventure from the ground up based around a given character or party. For example, my character Brother Duncan walks into a shop. The game knows all his stats, but it also knows that he’s a former con artist whose order grew from a scam into a sincere if somewhat chaotic force for good. It also knows that he fought in the battle of Trinsic, during which he was slain in single (foolhardy) combat with Malabelle and later resurrected. Churning the data, the game dispatches an orphan to beg Duncan for some food. In return for food, the orphan tells Duncan a ghost story of a strange, malicious spirit haunting the streets of Trinsic at night, a banshee keening for her lost lover. If Duncan decides to follow up, while searching for the spirit he encounters a band of his former criminal associates who hint at a robbery at the Trinsic bank. Duncan can choose to fight them, but the quest also affords him an opportunity to con them into abandoning the heist and helping him track down the spirit of Malabelle.

And when he finds her, she remembers Duncan, remembers killing him, and cackles gleefully at the opportunity to do so again…. even if the Seige was ten (real) years ago.

It is my belief that a system like this is already possible with current technology. Whether it is practical or profitable at this point in time is another matter. But I feel it’s a worthy goal for the narrative quest form.

Hi Raph

Lobbies (and instances), however, have zero persistence, and there is no sense of the character’s persistence being tied to the lobby.

I’m not sure I agree, because of Diablo II, and any game lobby during server downtime Your character isn’t there, but you are. The username is a veil of anonymity, but you’re as much a part of this stream as you are in the /ooc or /shout channels in an environment. Heck, Twitter is a meta lobby after a fashion, disconnected though it is from any one game.

But back on virtual worlds and mass marketability, couldn’t it be argued we’ve already achieved that, at least insofar as how the “market” has wanted virtual worlds? Virtual worlds are marketed with game play atop them, giving game-related purpose to that world.

Or are you wondering if there’s mass marketability for a virtual world that exists because it is a virtual world at all?

>Amaranthar wrote:Is the internet a virtual world?

That’s an interesting philosophical question. I personally don’t feel it is, because it exists above/below all of the internet-enabled experiences people have. I liken it to the universe itself, with experiences being the planets, and experiences that connect planets being solar systems. Actually, isn’t there some crazy complicated mindmap-type diagram that depicts that?

The internet is icing on the cake of reality!

Is the internet a virtual world?

I can see the point with tabletop RPGs — they’re multiplayer, but not massive. In effect, they’re a fully-instanced world, with each GM and campaign being an instance: your group can explore the world from pole to pole, but you’re never going to stumble across the players from Fred’s campaign down the street, even if they’re playing the same setting.

I think we’re artificially limiting ourselves if we insist on either/or in this debate. You can have a mixture of instanced and persistent content. Further, you can design and balance it so the persistent component is something more than an unavoidable space you must travel across to get to the real adventure.

I’m thinking of City of Heroes during the Rikti invasions. The bulk of the mission content is in instanced settings, but during the invasions most players set that aside for the sheer chaotic joy of piling on the evil invaders. You don’t need an invite, group or guild to join in. You don’t need to be sidekicked, you don’t need a particular level to make a difference, thanks to a system that scales damage on the fly for the individual. You just charge into the fray and do your part to save the world.

I’m in favor of future quest systems that are adaptive and strongly personalized to each player, and that can work against casual cooperative play. But it doesn’t have to. You can weave vastly different threads into beautiful cloth. Just find a way to produce millions of unique personal narratives and join them into a coherent whole. Nothing to it

Er… the single player games with a Guy Behind the Screen and a bunch of people around a table rolling dice, making cryptic remarks, and jotting down notes on their sheets? Occasionally spiced by the fellow who insists on wearing a dark cloak and speaking with an unconvincing rasp?

Yes, Michael, the single player games where people get on the internet or read articles and talk about what to do in their shared experience, and these days play also in multi-player mode. You know the game style that the majority of MMOs are trying to emulate with zones and groups and instances, having given up on “massive multiplayer” and even “place” because they just can’t figure it out.

Not 3d, but yes, a simulated space. To broaden the definition of virtual world to include any sort of virtual community just muddies the issue.

I already wrote about whether placeness was important… Check the blog archives for placeness and for virtual worlds being over…

I don’t agree with the original premise, mostly because I don’t consider “MMO” a genre. It’s just a platform upon which collaberative RPGs became the dominant experience. And even the platform itself can be split between the player motivation models and the underlying architecture.

In other words, I consider “MMO” the promise of the experience.

Concepts of short, medium and longterm investment in a persistent account alongside other persistent accounts works in any game mechanic, or at a meta layer that connects games. MMOs haven’t been held back by the “MMO” but rather the “RPG”. Meanwhile, Call of Duty, Zynga and whole websites with metagames continue to break records using conventions without ever words like “massive” and “multiplayer”. The “MMO” brand has been held back by “RPG”. But the underlying concepts have long since left MMORPG behind.

It’s through these other genres that I think alternate worlds are accessible. Sure, Farmville isn’t Ironforge and City of Wonders is no Civ. But they’re both a heck of a lot more accessible to a far wider array of people too. They’re worlds in the way those audiences want worlds.

If by “world” we mean simulated ecosystems of vast scope, yea I agree the appeal for those hasn’t broadened. But here again, I think that isn’t about the world but rather the game mechanic and playability offered within them. Otherwise, they’re scientific simulations, which just makes them niche for a different reason I guess

I think it comes designing down to the player. Having structure to guide players that need/desire pathways vs. openness for those looking to explore/socialize. Having a lobby with a back exit.

Given that a rough half of the stated “inevitabilities” are at a layer above the game proper (matchmaking/friend-finding/guildmate-tracking interface, and the move away from the subscription revenue model), I don’t think a lot is really being said.

MMOs key distinction (versus action FPSes and “console games”) is indefinite persistence. As soon as you have my character instead of a character (and that more personal sensation of identification and ownership), you have a demand for progression/advancement and a demand for customization/specialization (even if these are non-game-affecting). Stat-tracking and achievements are a minimal form of this; MMO character advancement systems are highly evolved, intricate, and advanced form. Some absorption of the latter by the former makes sense.

Parallel-ly (is this a word? ), the statistic-mediated interactions between characters in MMOs (whether between characters or the environment) is a fairly primitive system that was technologically necessary up until a short time ago. Levelling is a solid mechanic, but it’s how old? A gradual adopting of the more organic interaction mechanics evolved by FPSes likewise makes sense.

The interactions go both ways, as each type of game evolved under different environmental pressures. This is separate from the meta-layer of convenience that allow people to quickly find their friends and choose the portion of the game they want to play. In this case, the only difference is that non-persistent games don’t have a fiction to break when they do this (you want to have a 4×4 match in the abandoned cathedral? Just pick the map and the players from this handy list), which hasn’t prevented MMOs so much as slowed them in taking it up. And in both cases, this is becoming less an adoption from each other as it is now an absorption of the evolved social media platforms that allow players to much more easily communicate and coordinate. (A third circle for the Venn diagram, in a sense.)

Which all is to say, I have the same concerns about the original article, that it’s only looking at things from a single, somewhat narrow perspective. Not wrong, but missing part of the picture.

I’m thinking about television.

When television first debuted, the programming largely followed the models of entertainment formats that preceeded it — live theatre, radio dramas, and cinema. It took both time and technological advances for television to build an audience and find its own artistic voice.

But broadcast television was in a plateau state of mediocrity for many years, until the advent of cable. As broadcast started to lose viewers to the new format, they were forced to step up their game with sharper comedies, compelling serial dramas, better effects, better writing, better production. With the introduction of video recording and the fast-forward button, even commercials have been forced to become more entertaining.

I think the MMO industry is in similar straits, with social networking games taking the role of cable as the competition. To survive, the MMO may well need to borrow some tricks from social games. But the primary key is quality. You can’t coast on “good enough” or “we’ll finish it after launch” anymore.

If you build it, they will come. But if you build it well, they’ll come back with friends.

It’s been bothering me for years as MMOs are published listing “Persistant World” as one of their features, but rather than meaning “A world where the changes you make persist in a virtual world.” it means, “A world that is always the same every time you log on.” The villain respawns after a few minutes, and you can’t drop anything on the ground.

I was disappointed when UO added rapid item decay for objets on the ground, but I understood the neccesity. It stinks that few MMO makers are even willing to go that far, you can’t drop something on the ground in WoW or EQ. Most of the time you can’t even give stuff away, because it’s “Soulbound”.

Yukon hit on something important: “The lobby is the world. It’s the persistent shared space. Everything outside the lobby is instantiated.”

One of the many ways in which common sense hasn’t yet caught up with virtual worlds is that it’s both technically easier and more natural to have many independent and transient virtual worlds than one singular and persistent universe. It’s what people want from a game (or really, from entertainment in general) — a “what if” experience that has a defined lifetime, even if certain traits follow a player from game to game.

If you step back a little you realize that “independent and transient virtual world” is a pretty good definition of “game”, where a unitary persistent all-in MMO (or a Gibsonian cyberspace) is kind of weird and anomalous and even tedious, more like an afterlife or delusion.

People had similar dumb ideas early on about 3D UIs, typified by the scene in Disclosure where Michael Douglas straps on a VR headset and walks through aisles in a virtual library, only to find what he’s looking for by opening a flat video chat window and having a conversation in English with a librarian AI. Just as three dimensions is not nearly enough to represent information storage, retrieval and analysis, one universe is also not nearly enough to represent the many desired “what-if”s of entertainment. Most MMOs have many servers, and even single-server MMOs have a multiplicity of instances and games, which reset, play, disappear, and repeat.

It’s like, the real world already has persistence; it’s a feature, not a bug, when fantasy worlds transcend that limitation.

I just want an MMO in which most of Koster’s Laws are actually false.

“…because the market couldn’t crack the problem.”

Or the perceived problem ceased to be a viable market …

I definitely think MMOs have a future, but it’s a future fraught with higher user expectations, tougher competition (albeit from other types of games) and a radical departure from a customer value/payment model (to micro-transactions – away from subscriptions) for all but the largest and best established.

Several years ago, Henry Jenkins made some noise about the idea of “transmedia” and highlighted The Matrix franchise as a forerunner of this. Considering what CCP is trying to do with DUST 514 (and what Sanderson is doing with his Cosmere concept), I think Morgan is on the right track: the notion of a world is going to be an abstract tying-together narrative around several games with various genres.

You’ll undoubtedly still have persistent worlds/games, but they’ll increasingly have data traces walking back and forth between more ephemeral media with different kinds of effects. None of my friends have gotten Settlers 7, but its integration with Facebook (the main reason I didn’t buy it myself) suggests the foundation for an MMO. There might be a zombie MMO that tracks outbreaks based on Foursquare updates, for instance. (Granted, the zombie craze seems to be dying down, so maybe that won’t happen.)

You might have static media like books and movies that depict the history of the MMO… or perhaps next generation Kindles and movie editors will allow you some kind of feedback effect on the world they were spawned from. Instead of having to tediously grind crafting trees, you might instead be able to set a production capacity based on your high score in a standalone puzzle game. Large-scale battles might be crowdsourced out across a week or a month during which various strategy and tactical games could be brought in and amalgamated into a decisive result.

…okay, I didn’t remotely anticipate this kind of creative outpouring when I started this comment, heh. How’s about I just stop here and someone can go make it for me, yes?

Doesn’t that mostly describe Diablo?

It may be “inevitable” that there will be products of that nature. They may be marketed as MMOs. If so, it means there will be an additional type of “MMO” available. It does not mean that existing types will disappear, or that new ones examples will cease to appear.

The history of entertainment media is accretive.