Why can't MMOs be as good as my imagination?Who am I?

[Akasha]

Who am I?

I’ve been a gamer since I was seven years old and developed my first pen and paper RPG at the age of nine. I was hooked on design ever since.

Over the next twenty-five years I tweaked and modified PnP games and even began creating my own RPG which became the foundation of the upcoming title Glympse by Sojourn Development.

Though I was never a college student (I spent those years driving a tank), I have always been a student of cultural anthropology, theology, and linguistics. In each of those fields you see an organic growth that spreads across the world. Mutating and changing as environment dictates, all of them culminating into the cultures that we see in the present day. None of those “systems� are capable of sustaining themselves, each requires the other to survive and propagate. The same can be said for games.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case in most of the designs that I have seen and played. I do not have the experience of a John Carmack, Sid Meier, or Ian Klimon, (though David Allen and I have something in common) but it really seems to me that every aspect of some, if not most, games are developed individually and then cobbled together with the digital equivalent of duct tape so that they work together.

Now I know there are many factors that control the development of a game, publishers want to make money and place restrictions and deadlines on development teams to appeal to the lowest common denominator, often scraping innovative design, because of risk or some other reason that the bean counters feel won’t make money. No problem, I understand, money needs to be made. Some designers simply want to make the next “insert popular game name� and promptly go about it by making a clone. Ok, no problem, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and some people need to make a name for themselves at the expense of others with talent.

Tradition is another aspect that stifles game design. The “It’s just always done this way� mentality, while safe, breeds a stagnant environment and seriously curtails innovation. Innovation is good; it generally fails if your first, but it plants the seeds for future growth. Just be careful to avoid innovation for the hell of it.

This last point is what I am going to talk about first. We all grew up playing games, whether you’re old like me and used to play tag with your pet Brontosaurus or had a PlayStation 2 given to you for your fifth birthday, we’ve all played games. Games have traditionally had a beginning, an end, a winner and a loser. That is until persistent state games threw a huge monkey wrench into the whole shebang. Back in the 70’s a pair of college lunatics created Chainmail which introduced fantasy to the wargaming community and blossomed into Dungeons & Dragons, the first persistent state game.

This revolutionized the gaming industry and promptly set the definition of a game on its ear. Here was a game with no end, no winner, and no loser. It just kept going and going and going – you get the idea. The whole concept even offended God’s Google Page Ranking agency and they promptly began calling it Satanism, now that is innovation!

It wasn’t long before the computer was brought in to expand this even further. Soon college geeks could play with their friends across the hall or across the world with the advent of Multiple User Dungeons (MUDs). Richard Garriot and Richard Bartle were instrumental in the success of this style of gaming (it’s a Richard thing, you wouldn’t understand). What pen and paper RPG’s established, MUDs expanded upon, taking their persistent worlds into the realm of dozens even hundreds of players who could experience the game world together as long as the server was running. It wasn’t long before communities developed within these “games� and people would sign on just to chat and keep in touch with their distant friends.

Richard Garriot soon pioneered the game once again when he gave MUDs graphics. This began the massively multiplayer revolution that we are still riding through today. Since then many, many, many more MMOs have been created or are in development. All of them based on the foundations set by the early pioneers.

However, an unfortunate thing happened along the way. Pen and paper RPG’s, though persistent, focus on a small group of players which, generally, have the same goal in mind. Video games were traditionally single player affairs with a single goal in mind. When these two styles of games combined, the focus of the games never changed. MMORPGs maintained the single player/small group mentality. Let’s all go to the dungeon and kill the Orc King or slay the dragon. While this is great fun in a PnPRPG or a single player video game, it becomes a bit ludicrous in an MMORPG.

EverQuest is far and away the most notorious example of this. Soon after its release it became widely known where the best magic items could be found. So people literally lined up at the lair of the monster like a bunch of 60-somethings at a Don Ho concert. Calmly waiting in line to kill the monster and take the treasure and then, intermission while the monster spawns again. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

While this assembly line adventuring is apparently exciting and fun for the EverQuest players, it leaves a little to be desired as far as I’m concerned. I mean, c’mon, how many times can Hercules kill the Nemean Lion after all? How many people can own the Ruby Slippers of Going Home? Where’s the dynamism? Where are the special stories and tales of heroics that were so important to PnP RPG’s?

Ok, ok, what am I getting on about anyway?

Worlds. Living, breathing game worlds. Not single player games being crammed into a map and repeated ad nauseum. In my column, I will go into greater detail about my philosophies about game design as it concerns MMOs. If you’d like to offer up your own opinions or things that you’d like to see mentioned feel free to drop me an email: admin@kamarathin.com or jump on the messageboards or comments pages.

Article Source : Gamemethod.com