A few days ago after the fog of battle finally cleared, Raph Koster the resident Yoda and Zen master of virtual worlds weighed in on the Richard Bartle controversy. I knew it was just a matter of time before Raph would deposit his pearls of wisdom into the debate. Leading his article off with a direct rebuttal to the circling of virtual wagons from the designers at 38 Studios, he made some noteworthy observations that seemed to echo what I discussed in my previous article on the subject.
While I respectfully disagree with some of what Blackguard and Moorgard have said on this Bartle issue, they have my genuine admiration in that they are a rare breed of developer that actually believes in engaging the MMO community by means of open discussion. If the Bartle/MUD issue has taught us one thing, it’s that we can most certainly all benefit from the free exchange of views and ideas. Hopefully the MMO industry will benefit by producing better MMO’s.
Getting back to the Raph’s comments, here’s one quote from that he posted on June 27, 2008 that caught my attention and has seemed to generate a lot of buzz and interest:
MMOs have removed more features from MUD gameplay than they have added
I completely agree with him. Successful MMO’s like WoW are reducing the number of features that are available to players from previous MMO’s. Instead of a lot of features poorly done, Blizzard has taken a few features and polished them to great success. Having a polished MMO has obviously been a great boon to the video game industry. But, there is a downside.
The problem is that those features are designed to attract the achiever and killer archetype while starving out explorers and socializers. By driving out the latter group and pandering to the former group, it has the effect creating a player demographic that is one-dimensional, bland and uninteresting. Just as a normal person would soon find a steady diet of pizza and burgers boring, why then would someone want to be part of a virtual world that is utterly dominated by two types of players? I would content that players are the greatest asset that a MMO has. It makes sense that more player variety makes for more compelling and interesting virtual worlds.
The Influence of WoW on New MMO’s
Now we can clearly see that WoW’s success has affected the design philosophy of other MMO companies such as EA Mythic. Check out the following telling quote from a G4TV interview with Warhammer Online Creative Director Paul Barnett where he said the following:
It’s fantasy with all the crap taken out…it’s all the boring bits taken out
This is a reference to the *hardship* of having to run back to your corpse after dying. It’s difficult to imagine what could be left in MMO’s that is “boring” that Blizzard hasn’t already surgically removed but I’m sure they’ll find a way.
The Cost of the Cult of Polish
There’s been a price for the focus and polish that Blizzard has introduced as the new gospel of MMO development. Here’s what I said on June 24, 2008 with regard to the idea of player freedom and the apparent devolution of MMO’s which I feel are somewhat parallel to Raph’s observations:
Today’s MMO industry is literally devolving instead of evolving. We see less freedom, less community and fewer consequences. Instead we get more restrictions and control.
Fewer features and mechanics definitely reduces the ways a player can express themselves in the game world and has the effect of reducing player freedom. The fact that MMO’s like WoW have reduced the ways that players can enjoy and express themselves is I feel one of the major thrusts of what Bartle is saying. Without more emphasis on exploring and socializing, those kinds of player archetypes will migrate to a MMO that supports those features. What’s worse is they may even stop playing MMO’s altogether. You would think that Blizzard would want to broaden their demographic appeal by being more inclusive then exclusive.
Raph addresses this lack of variety and monotony with an analogy about popular music:
By analogy, Bartle, like many of us, is arguing from the perspective of all music — all virtual worlds. And his detractors are people who only listen to indie rock from the Athens, GA, area circa 1989. All Richard is asking for is for someone to please play some jazz.
That’s exactly the point that Bartle is making. It’s a call to arms to MMO developers to start widening the appeal of their MMO’s by serving more then just pepperoni pizza and cheese burgers on the menu i.e. content that just isn’t directed solely toward achievers (PVE) and killers (PVP).
Blizzard’s Admission
Tim Howego in a great article entitled Peeking Into Blizzard’s Development Process explains that Blizzard at the recent World Wide Invitational in Paris revealed that they have a very small staff that works on non-item generating parts of the game such as holidays. That’s a staggering admission when you consider the $520 million in profits that they have earned from WoW and the economies of scale that having 10 million subscribers gives them.
Blizzard could be doing much more to enhance their game world for explorers and socializers. Instead they are putting funneling their profits into e-sports, motion pictures, card games, action figures and sword replicas. All well and good but why so little content for role-players? Where are the GM events? Where are the tools for players to create their own events and content? Where is the player housing? Where are the guild halls? Where is the ability for players to make a profound and lasting impact on the world?
At the end of Koster’s piece he states that incremental evolution toward a true virtual world may not a bad thing after all:
Failure to evolve more radically isn’t a flaw — in that sense, I agree completely with Moorgard. But then, I tend to think that all the current MMOs in the game industry are already the Old Guard relative to the new webby folks.
And all’s well that ends well in the warm and fuzzy MMO blogosphere. Or is it? Here’s where I disagree with Raph Koster. I feel that most MMO’s today suffer from a lack of ambition. Those dozen or so MMO power brokers that have a stranglehold on the medium are a timid lot. Like Blizzard, they and their investors are afraid to try new things. The result is a trend to go backwards and do the safe thing. It’s been almost 10 years since the release of EverQuest yet we are truly no further ahead in MMO development.
The Crux of the Problem: A Lack of Will
Before you can evolve you have to *want* to evolve. You just don’t stumble upon greatness; you need to aspire to something greater. First comes the desire, and then comes the attempt to fulfill that desire. When we stop talking about virtual worlds and instead talk about MMO’s we risk removing the “world” from the game. That is precisely the mindset of Blizzard and the rest of the MMO industry. They are comfortable where they are right now. Evolution toward creating a true virtual world is not a priority.
In the end Richard Bartle’s provocative and sometimes misunderstood comments have been a boon to a MMO industry that has grown complacent and predictable. The recent campaign to discredit him and the importance of MUDs has essentially backfired. Bartle’s case for making better MMO’s has received a great deal of publicity as a result. Hopefully this debate will inspire someone in the MMO industry or some other field to start dreaming of the endless and exciting possibilities that will someday await us in fully realized virtual worlds.
-Wolfshead
I had a thought, but I think you’ll believe these guys more than you’ll believe me:
“Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”
— Thomas Edison
“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”
–Leonardo da Vinci
I think that the successful MMO makers such as Blizzard have been willing to “do something else” whenever they reach the point that whatever they do already, they do well enough for others to copy.
The ones that have failed have been the ones who didn’t take to heart what Thomas Edison had to say, believing that merely having great ideas, they had already done the hard part. The iteration of getting it perfect is the hard part. The new ideas part can be taken care of by a five year old child.
We are in a time period when MMOs are starting to look and feel much the same. The next big success will not be the one that does exactly the same, nor the one that tries to change the entire equation. It will be the one that does something else well enough for other people to copy.
I don’t know that Bartle and Koster are advocating making better MMOs per se, so much as different ones (I base this statement on Raph’s posts about how lots of people making content will result in good content rising to the top). I heartily concur that there is a lot of room in the marketplace for variations and new ideas. I’d love to see an array of boutique MMOs with disparate rulesets built with budgets that allow a sustained subscriber base of 50k to 100k to turn a nice profit.
At the same time, why fuss about companies going for something with mass appeal and a wider commercial success? It is not the responsibility of every game developer to innovate or turn a genre on its ear with every project. One could argue that evolving a successful idea is the foundation of the vast majority of businesses in the world.
We debate whether games are art, but hell, it’s not even the responsibility of bonafide artists to revolutionize with every creation. Even the most avant garde artist eventually establishes a style that people can relate to and build expectations upon (though many such artists also enjoy reinventing themselves, but let’s not take this metaphor too far).
Making games is a commercial endeavor. Sometimes that means doing something revolutionary and new, but more often than not this involves producing a variant on something that already works. And that’s okay, because the mass market tends to gravitate toward improvements on the familiar.
Let’s face it; there are times when you want to go to a McDonalds or a Wendy’s because you know exactly what you’re going to get. And of course there are other times when you want to try something new and different. I surely want to live in a world where both those options are available to me.
Thanks for the great comments Iconic and Moorgard. Both of you have made some compelling arguments for a slow and gradual evolution of MMO’s.
Blizzard’s contribution was the idea of polish to the extreme. That was enough to propel it to heights of success previously unheard of. Maybe the next big MMO will find another facet and focus on that and grow the player base even further.
I think what many of us want is thrill of something completely new and revolutionary to knock our socks off. MMO’s have been deconstructed ad infinitum by first the expert players and power gamers and finally even the average player has figured out the “game”. The sense of repetition and familiarity is causing the tedium and shorter retention spans of titles released after MMO’s like EverQuest. You feel like you are playing the same game except with fresh lore and a different skin.
Pausing to examine the impact of EQ, it was a pivotal moment in MMO’s as it made a quantum leap from what came before. The leap from a text world to a 3D graphic world and the leap from a single-player game to a massively multi-player game. For me, EverQuest was a completely fresh experience that took a few years to fully comprehend. There was a sense of newness, wonderment and discovery is that ever elusive “magic” that many of us are trying to find in these new MMO’s. Koster talks about this in his book A Theory of Fun, where he says that we stop having fun when the brain stops learning.
So if MMO’s are going to be produced like EQ and WoW but with small evolutionary advances, I have to ask: are those basic mechanics enough to keep people interested year after year? I’m not so sure. However, WoW’s success is that it brought new players into the fold — people who know nothing at all about MUDS, Ultima Online or EverQuest. For them the MMO mechanics in WoW are just as *new*and fresh as EQ was to me 10 years ago.
I think the point that Bartle and others are making is that MMO’s need to be more ambitious then they are currently. It’s really a wake up call to developers to stop playing it so safe and take some chances. There are many ways that these developers could be doing much more to advance the MMO genre. I do think that most current devs are set in their ways and the “next big thing” paradigm shift will come out of nowhere from an unlikely source.
Maybe virtual world advocates are like the 1960’s hippies hoping for a society of progress and justice that have found our way to the 1980’s but now we are jaded and resigning ourselves that things will never really change. Say what you will about him but Bartle woke up the MMO community and made us all think. At least for a few weeks.
“Like Blizzard, they and their investors are afraid to try new things.”
Categorically, investors are the bane of progress. They are a cancer impeding innovation, the choker on commerce, and key instigators of the inflation death spiral.
Ahem. With that out of my system, as a solid Bartle Explorer (200% if allowed), I find little in existing MMOs to interest me. WoW has a beautiful world, ripe for exploration, but it is sorely underutilized. A quick peek at a server census shows a glut of players sitting on the level cap, grinding away in raids and PvP. The “world” of World of Warcraft is all but dead, a virtual ghost town, waiting for Northrend to juice things up a little before the next “endgame” cycle.
As a confirmed solo player, I don’t mind it when I have an area mostly to myself, I’ll admit. Still, it seems that the “world” has been abandoned not only by the players, but by the devs as well, and that’s the true tragedy.
Great point on investors. That is exactly why there are so many horrible video games being produced right now. Investors know very little about innovation or creativity. Sure they pay those precepts lip service but when it comes right down to it they always go for the sure thing, the safe thing.
MMO’s seem to have a strange paradox: the bigger the world gets, the emptier the world feels.
You are correct when you say there is a vast “world” in WoW that is largely underused and empty. With each expansion the same number of people will be scattered across more areas and of course we’ll have the usual top heavy numbers of people at the level cap grinding away.
So… is there a way to make content interesting enough to encourage players of all sorts to wander the world and interact with all levels of players? Say, location-specific quests for all levels in all/most areas? “Guide” quests that require a high level player to mentor a mid level player (with power limiters, such that it’s the skill and experience that matters instead of level/loot imbalance)?
Also, on the way through the level treadmill, maybe make crafting a more creative thing (freestyle recipes) and actually grant experience? Grant experience (and loot?) for map exploration?
…this is just me brainstorming, and possibly covering old terrain. I also suspect that the ideas I’ve got rattling about aren’t really for shoehorning into WoW, but more of a way to address future design.