WoW-nnui
Since its release not quite two years ago, World of Warcraft has been the undisputed market leader in MMOs. It smashed through the formerly unattainable one million user mark and kept right on going, now steaming toward 7,000,000 paying users. WoW has blown out all previous expectations for MMOs in US, European, and Asian markets and keeps right on going.
And yet.
Last night I logged in to WoW for the first time in a long time. I visited my characters one by one, but didn't stick around to play very long despite finally having an evening free to play. I felt a distinct detachment from my characters and soon recognized my old friend, game ennui.
Now I don't mean to sound like I'm spelling doom for WoW (or MMOs in general!). Far from it. I don't know WoW's sales numbers, but as far as I know their box sales remain at or near the top of the charts. And of course there's a much-anticipated expansion pack coming up that will give them a welcome, if perhaps temporary, bump in their usage numbers.
But in my case, not only could I really not gather any excitement about playing these characters, knowing as I do that I just don’t have multiple hours per week (much less per day!) to play them, but the more advanced the character the more difficult it was to get back into. I could sorta drive my 22lvl hunter; my 37 warlock was almost incomprehensible -- and for many more expert players such levels are "lowbies." Remembering all those spells, weapons, abilities, talents, etc., just seemed like way too much trouble. And all the quests that were driving these characters’ progress were entirely meaningless now (this is the danger of external motivation—it’s just too easy to lose all sense of why I should care about an entirely artificial set of quests).
I'm involved, loosely speaking (given my lack of attendance), in several different guilds on PvE, RP, and PvP servers. In each, multiple people I know -- both those with multiple level 60 characters and those who have never come close to that -- have sort of run aground on the over-and-over again gameplay, whether that's yet-another-kill-X-creatures quest or yet-another-raid for yet-another-piece-of-armor. No one I've talked to dislikes the game; there's no sense of having been spurned or that the experience has curdled. But in even the best parties there seems to sometimes come a moment when, amidst the music and noise you and your friends silently agree "great party; we're outta here." For some people that moment has come with WoW. And I'm guessing that trend is only going to accelerate.
So if this isn't just a local phenomenon -- if I'm not just hanging out with multiple groups of all the wrong people -- then it seems possible that while WoW continues to be grow (bringing new people into contact with MMOGs all the time), it may be approaching that point where significant numbers of long-term satisfied players nevertheless begin to cycle off. That's not too surprising given the typical longevity of any individual's interest in a particular MMO. But if that's so, then two big questions leap out: where are all these players going to go, and, as I’m so fond of asking, what comes next?
I know for example that Vanguard is jockeying for position as WoW's successor, but I wonder about that. It is supposed to have more flexible grouping and a few other innovations (in addition to expensive and detailed, if perhaps less-than-stunning graphics), but when it comes right down to it, what's the draw for games like this? Are those struck with WoW-nnui (whether this is their first MMOG or their tenth), who may have taken a handful of characters to level 60 in WoW, and then stuck around or come back to see what's new on the way to level 70 in the upcoming expansion, really going to be excited to play YAMITG (yet another men in tights game)? If a player has become bored with the by now well-trodden traditional MMOFRPG gameplay, how will another game bring them a new sort of experience, and not just present old dwarves in new clothing? (For example, the nifty dwarf shown above comes from Warhammer Online, but would be right at home in any of a number of existing and upcoming MMOs.) IMO this is the question to which Vanguard, Warhammer, Conan, LOTRO, Hero's Journey, and any other contenders must have a clear and ready answer.
Posted by Mike Sellers on August 29, 2006 | Permalink
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» WoW isn't forever? from Dragonchasers
There's a post over at Terra Nova entitled WoW-nnui where the author discusses his lack of interest in World Of Warcraft after, presumably, playing for quite some time.
His main point, admittedly, is to ask what happens to the MMO market as more and... [Read More]
Tracked on Aug 30, 2006 10:13:34 AM
» As SL Grows, Is World of Warcraft Shrinking? from 3pointD.com
The population of the virtual world of Second Life passed the 600,000 mark sometime early this morning at least in terms of the number of avatars that have ever been created. But many of these are people who have looked in once an... [Read More]
Tracked on Aug 31, 2006 11:29:54 AM
Comments
And I was just thinking the same thing about chess. I just picked it up again and now I have to remember what all these pieces do, and all of the different openings and defenses that go along with it. And when I player more advance players, I have to remember all of the sublties, forks, skews and the like.
I'm surprised it's been around as long as it has. I knew several of us that played together in school, but now they all have grown tired of it and moved on to, of all things, poker.
Now they go to different casinos and on-line web sites to play and watch all those tournaments on tv.
Good thing we now have computers that play chess so I don't have too. Now we just need a good computer to play poker, so I don't have to, I can just sit back and push a button instead of thinking of what combinations and odds associated with them.
I wonder what they will play next after they get tired of poker?
Posted Aug 29, 2006 6:16:41 PM | link
I can definitely sympathize with this.
The problem is that market sales don't define a good MMOG. Infact, 7 million subscribers to me just seems like it's 7 million people all showing you how worthless your accomplishments are.
In a World like WoW, where everyone can do everything no matter how much they play.
-- Nothing means anything. --
Posted Aug 29, 2006 9:13:02 PM | link
I suspect about a quarter million accounts per year go to replace gold farmers who get banned.
>I wonder what they will play next after they get tired of poker?
Probably porn. After all, the internet *IS* for porn.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5430343841227974645
(link is safe for work)
Posted Aug 29, 2006 9:29:25 PM | link
There must be kiting in the game for it to be satisfying.
Posted Aug 29, 2006 9:36:34 PM | link
Well Disneyland and tourist traps are designed to be enjoyable for decades and generations. Are MMO properties and franchises design to last?
If the grind is the premise for the game, then the game will no longer hold you when you get off the grind.
If the great solo or first-person experience is the premise for the game, then that is also fleeting.
So is the industry designing flavor-of-the-month virtual tourist traps where you go there to see the sites and then off to see the next and new tourist destination, never to come back again?
All the carribean islands look pretty much the same, but many still go back yearly for their moments among the islands. The cruise ship vs guide tours vs. self-design tours are different modes of tourism. Guess which one is currently the most popular mode?
So perhaps we can look to the tourism industry for inspiration. What's no longer innovative in one industry can be innovative in another.
Frank
Posted Aug 29, 2006 9:46:36 PM | link
Magicback wrote:
All the carribean islands look pretty much the same, but many still go back yearly for their moments among the islands.
Interesting analogy. Although the topography of the Carribean isles is sometimes similar, there are dramatic differences. Saba, for instance, is a mountain that rises nearly straight out of the ocean, Aruba is basically a desert, while Grand Cayman is largely a swamp in the interior. Still, even granting the similarities, I think the analogy can be taken even further: What makes different islands attractive to me are the different cultures. The culture of French St. Martin is very different from, say, Anguilla or the BVIs. Perhaps the culture of a game alone can serve as a distinguishing factor to some people.
--matt
Posted Aug 29, 2006 11:43:56 PM | link
Disney World and the Caribbean islands are fun in short doses, but most people choose not to live there. Information overload and boredom set in eventually, even in paradise or in toyland.
In my experience, people stay much beyond the point where they are bored with the sameness of the grind due to the friends and social networks they have setup. Everyone is depending on them and expecting them to show up, so they do. They get involved in petty guild arguments and politics... guilds split and re-merge in different ways, like a genetic search with no fitness function.
Eventually, something in your r/l causes you to be away from that petri dish for a week, or two weeks, and when you come back, it just doesn't seem as real as when you left. The expectations of the people still enmeshed in the suspension of disbelief don't seem reasonable anymore, and you eventually can't get that suspension of disbelief back, or even pretend it is back.
Then you're done. And with no dramatic farewell posts on guild forums or tearful farewells. The people that really leave just disappear.
- Keith
Posted Aug 30, 2006 12:53:00 AM | link
Vengeance wrote:
Then you're done. And with no dramatic farewell posts on guild forums or tearful farewells. The people that really leave just disappear.
Truly written.
--matt
Posted Aug 30, 2006 1:55:24 AM | link
About the chess and poker thing; a major factor that's missing from MMORPGS is any physicality. Whereas in poker I can drink with some friends and play some hands, laugh, etc. a computer game leaves you feeling much more hollow than any game that involves the kind of interactions engendered by chess and poker.
What makes the next game a good game? A decent PvP system. I chroniced on DAoC for 3 1/2 years, had multiple 50s and everyone ToA'd out, had a huge guild that was mildly successful, but I never played the kind of PvP that I wanted to, for which you have to be a bit of a dick a lot of the time.
I can understand playing another MMoRPG if you have the objective of a great game against other players. For whatever reasons, I simply don't have the time for that level of distraction anymore. And surfing tops PvP.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 5:00:51 AM | link
V>
In my experience, people stay much beyond the point where they are bored with the sameness of the grind due to the friends and social networks they have setup. Everyone is depending on them and expecting them to show up, so they do. They get involved in petty guild arguments and politics... guilds split and re-merge in different ways, like a genetic search with no fitness function.
--------------------------
Well written. Are you suggesting that most of guild politics is fundamentally driven by boredom with the game?
Posted Aug 30, 2006 6:45:37 AM | link
Nate,
V can answer for himself, but using the regular poker night analogy there are some people who show up to regular poker nights already bored. They are the one that have a tendency to throw peanuts at people, bring the no-no girlfriends to an all-boys poker nights, or make their own fun. They like to hang around with the same set of friends, but they no longer focus their energy on the game. Instead they focus on other things or create their own fun.
I don't think boredom is the fundamental reason, I see guild politics as organizational politics, something that happens in the office, the regular poker nights, the softball league.
Personally, I think we are starting to see a generation of youth who experienced guilds as their first social organization. It would be interesting to see how their perception of social behavior or norms are shaped by them.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 7:17:38 AM | link
Matt,
You are right in that each island ARE different and unique.
People go back yearly for many different personal reasons, but one common theme is to be immersed wholly in another world.
You point to the unique physical features and also the unique cultures. These are key components. Another component that comes to mind is seasonality: the weather, the festivals, the special events. People sure try to revisit the islands around the same time as before.
The seasonality of the game could be another unique factor. LIke Animal Crossing and other similar games, Mike can go back for a visit and recognize another old friend, fond memories.
Like the kids that walked through the closet into the world of Narina or players returning to the world of Ultima once again, the sense of "here we are once again" is powerful.
Frank
Posted Aug 30, 2006 7:29:05 AM | link
How long are you *supposed* to enjoy WoW? And I ask that question both as a player of the game, and as someone interested in the marketing/business end.
2nd part first. When I was in the wireless industry, the "break even" point on new customers was (on average) about 6-months. It took that long for someone using the service to pay off the total COA (cost-of-aquisition). I'd be real curious to know what the COA for WoW is. After you pay for the box, is it immediate gravy? Is their gravy in the box itself? Or does it take a couple months before a player goes into the black? If Blizzard is making money on the box itself (i.e, if it costs them less to acquire a new customer than whatever they take home on the $40-50 we pay for the software)... holy moola. Subtract whatever the operating cost is from the monthly subscription rate, and that's their cream per customer per month. Nice. Anyway... whatever the metrics are, from a biz perspective, as long as they are keeping people out of "ennui-ville" long enough to pay of the COA and cover expenses, they're good-to-go.
From a customer perspective... well... whaddya want? How long did you play the game? How many hours of pleasure did you get? I tend, in my own obsessive compulsive mind, to figure out "entertainment value per hour per dollar" against books and films. A paperback novel is around $10 and takes me about 3 hours to read. So that's $3/hour of fun-value, if I enjoy it, and I do like to read. A first-run move is about $8 and goes about 1.5 hours on average, so that's about $6/hour of fun-value.
If you played $50 bucks for WoW and subscribed at the $15/month level and played for 5 months (makes my math easier), and played for only 10 hours a month, that's 50 hours of fun for $125, or $2.50/hour of fun value. About the same as a book, and way less than a movie.
But who only played for 10 hours a month? That's about 2.5 hours a week, eh? When we played like mad, we were playing for 2 hours a day, minimum. So... let's say, on average, for those 5 months, we played 2 hours a day x 30 days = 300 hours. That's 42-cents per hour of fun.
That's damn good fun-value, people. And that's not counting the time we spent on message boards, reading the blogs, chatting with guild buddies off-line, etc. etc.
And we know people who played WAY more than 2 hours a day, and WAY longer than 5 months before hitting the ennui mark.
For my money, as a marketing guy and gamer, 42-cents per hour of a game as rich and complex, and with as much opportunity as WoW presented, is a huge entertainment value when compared to almost any other media.
Now, if you want to compare it to free fun stuff -- getting that book out of the library, playing poker with friends, chess with your roommate, talking with your wife, playing whiffle ball with your kids -- that's just not fair. It's not just an "entertaining experience," it's GENERATED CONTENT. There are paid, professional people on the other end of the HUD putting stuff in for you to consume. It's a designed experience. Like a book, movie, TV show, stand-up comedic routine, etc. To compare it to a night of poker with your buddies is somewhat odd. There are social elements to WoW that make it more valuable, yes. But unless you hire someone to come in to your poker night to provide entertainment (carefull...), it's unfair to compare the two.
Most crafted entertainment gets boring after awhile. I saw the original "Grease" in the theater 11 times (hey, I was 12 and in love with Olivia NJ). Then? Boring. I read the original "Dune" about once every 8 years. More often than that? Not so much.
What are you complaining about, Mike? Did you expect the love affair to last forever?
Posted Aug 30, 2006 9:35:53 AM | link
Andy pretty much stole my thunder. I'm continually amazed that people complain about being bored after playing a game for hundreds and hundreds of hours, day after day.
As to why the next game will work, my answer is exploration. A lot of people enjoy exploring new worlds and seeing new cool virtual sights. WoW's "failing" if you can call it a failure in any way, is taking so long to bring out their first expansion pack. EQ2 launched at about the same time and they've put out several expansions already.
If you took the WoW engine verbatim and laid it on all new content, and assuming that content was compelling, I suspect you'd have another hit.
When you get to the point where you've done everything and been everywhere, it *is* time to move on to find something new. I don't see that as a particularly revelatory observation.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 10:03:02 AM | link
I play on multiple servers, and raid on 2. I've found that my heavy raiding guild is facing a burn out from many core members. They aren't abandoning the game, rather taking 1 week to 1 month vacations from the game. Many of the top-tier raiding guilds across servers seem to be disappearing due to the core members of these guilds quitting the game, or giving up until the expansion. A lot of players are being displaced if you will, from their longstanding guilds due to inactivity.
I think this is the calm before the storm. Once the xpac comes out, we'll see a resurgence in populations and players. I also thing guilds are going to fall apart, and lots of smaller guilds are going to appear (raid cap 40>25). That will also contribute to people wanting to play more imo. Instead of logging in and running zones with 39 people, some of which you may know well, some you don't, you'll be able to login and run very challenging 10-25 man zones, with mostly people you've gamed with or know much better in person.
And with blizzard promising an xpac every year, I think that's how they intend to make WoW's lifespan extend past most MMO's. We'll see how it all plays out...
Posted Aug 30, 2006 10:14:36 AM | link
Andy> What are you complaining about, Mike? Did you expect the love affair to last forever?
Pete> When you get to the point where you've done everything and been everywhere, it *is* time to move on to find something new. I don't see that as a particularly revelatory observation.
This is a good discussion thread, but I think this these comments are a bit unfair to the OP. I think he was just observing how all good group MMOG things tend to come to an end with a whimper, not a bang -- no harm in that -- and then his call question was "what's next?"
Posted Aug 30, 2006 10:21:17 AM | link
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Posted Aug 30, 2006 10:23:36 AM | link
What are you complaining about, Mike? Did you expect the love affair to last forever?
greglas above has it right. I'm not complaining as I think I indicated in the original post. I have a lot of respect and affection for WoW (and the people who make it), but... well, I'm bored easily. Always looking for the next thing. And, given WoW's phenomenal popularity, it's interesting to me to see myself and others emotionally detaching from the game. It's still very pretty and fun, but it's not an entertainment-driver for me.
What's new about this situation is that in MMOs we've never before had millions of people who were likely going to be cycling off looking for the next thing. In the past -- in the early days of MMOs -- it's been a much smaller set of people and there's always been a game that was new, cool, and at least somewhat different in the offing. As part of the industry, I'm a bit concerned that now that the MMO market has begun to mature, we haven't matured our designs along with them. We don't really have anything new for them. "Hey that was great soup - what's next? Uh, more soup? No thanks..." It looks to me like a situation caused by a failure of imagination, which is at the very least ironic for our industry.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 11:06:06 AM | link
Personally, I play Dark Age of Camelot and PvP (RvR) is the only thing that is keeping me in the game. I have been playing the game for about 3 years and PvE got boring about 2 years ago. Even RvR gets boring sometimes, but that passes. :)
To answer the question "what's next", I haven't seen a PvE game that I would like to play. To be honest WoW and GW (even though it's sold as PvP game) PvE were somewhat interesting. I still doubt that I would buy them if DAOC ceased to exist. From upcoming games Warhammer Online seems to be interesting, Age of Conan might be too.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 11:11:11 AM | link
This phenomenon isn't true for all games -- bridge clubs, poker clubs, chess fanatics, and weekly tabletop game groups all show that it's possible to design simple games that entertain people forever. Why are MMORPG's different?
The answer is player interaction. Those games I mentioned provide an arena in which player interaction is the focus of the game. I think the pvp experience needs to evolve to improve longevity.
The WoW pvp experience is an unengaging one. Few enjoy it very much. Now you're left with team pve content to work through, and no matter how much money you pour into that, at some point your players are going to run out of it. Like any computer RPG, you'll get through everything and be "done."
Of all the MMORPG's I've played, I liked DAOC the most, because it focused on pvp. Ultimately I (and my guild) gave it up because of frustrations with the gear/raid arms race that ToA forced upon us. Would be curious to hear what others think of the pvp games that are out there and have successful long-term followings.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 11:16:46 AM | link
Play is always fun. Loot is always boring. Money can't buy you love.
Fury seems to be one of the more anticipated next rounders, which begin, perhaps, to migrate toward more basic and, therein, less narrative-infected forms of play.
Desire of self > desire of society; pvp self > pve self.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 1:03:01 PM | link
Andy said, 'That's damn good fun-value, people. And that's not counting the time we spent on message boards, reading the blogs, chatting with guild buddies off-line, etc. etc.'
Not all that time is fun. Standing around LFG isn't so much fun. Getting ganked while trying to get to an area isn't fun. The sad part of MMOs is the total time spent having fun is too small a percent of total time spent in game.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 1:42:42 PM | link
Mike said:"What's new about this situation is that in MMOs we've never before had millions of people who were likely going to be cycling off looking for the next thing."
Now THAT is a good, smart question/observation. Does WoW count as a "whole new thing" for these people -- i.e., will they be ready to try another MMO, or two, or ten... or is it just a one-off alternative gaming/entertainment experience.
When I finish a book, I look for another book. I see a good movie, I probably caught a preview of another that I'm interested in.
An "exit survey" of people who left WoW would be fascinating; what are you doing now with that time...
Me? I'm building wikis, reading, writing, commenting here, spending some time on SL. I haven't picked up another MMO, because nothing out there has really appealed to me. Tried "Guild Wars." Found it to be approx. the same experience as WoW.
What's next? Hmmm....
Failure of imagination. I agree.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 1:56:55 PM | link
Andy said, I haven't picked up another MMO, because nothing out there has really appealed to me. Tried "Guild Wars." Found it to be approx. the same experience as WoW.
I think that's the crux of the issue right there. If you've gone through everything WoW has to offer and find yourself bored, what do other MMOGs offer that isn't basically the same experience as WoW? Or worse, the same experience, only not as fun, not as pretty, and not as cohesive? If I'm bored with WoW, why on earth would I play Vanguard or Warhammer or the like?
I think for some people, WoW really was a one-off experience. They may try another MMOG with Blizzard's name attached, but other than that they aren't likely to continue to spend money on online games.
But for many other people, MMOGs are their new entertainment of choice, and so they will go looking for the next great MMOG. If all the rest of the industry can offer is the same gameplay without the Blizzard level of polish, what choice are we giving these people? My fear is that they will either return to WoW and stop looking for other MMOGs, or will leave MMO gaming entirely.
It strikes me that what we need is new gameplay. If other MMOGs offered an experience wholly different from WoW's, I think we might stand a chance of drawing in some of those who have grown bored with WoW's gameplay.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 3:20:03 PM | link
>Frank: "The seasonality of the game could be another unique factor. LIke Animal Crossing and other similar games, Mike can go back for a visit and recognize another old friend, fond memories.
Like the kids that walked through the closet into the world of Narina or players returning to the world of Ultima once again, the sense of "here we are once again" is powerful."
An issue with returning to so many games, console, online, whatever, is that re-learning the controls can be too much of a hurdle to even follow through with it.
Mike says "my 37 warlock was almost incomprehensible".
I don't think it's impossible to design games to avoid this.
I stopped playing WoW about a year ago. I've gone back in a few times thinking I might like to get back into it for a while, but I don't want to have to do nights of homework to get there, so I don't bother.
It's interesting how quickly this can happen I think.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 4:05:06 PM | link
Andy: "That's 42-cents per hour of fun."
Looking at this strictly from a cost/hr of fun angle is misleading. Not all fun is created equal, nor is it all equally valuable. I, for one, heavily discount the 'fun quotient' I get from virtual worlds relative to movies. In the latter, the creator's contribution to the fun factor is almost absolute. In the former, since I am the engine of a great deal of my own fun, I _expect_ a MUCH cheaper cost/hr.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 4:28:39 PM | link
As long as people are throwing in with other games for contrast, I wanted to mention EVE Online. Though its got a single digit percentage of the number of subscribers as WoW, it is believed by some to have the opposite sort of "interest path."
Even the developers concede that its hard to get into, but it seems to be a MMO people stay in long term.
Perhaps it is the skill mechanism being time-based...when you come back after a month off you can do more than when you left. It may be as much the fact that the significant content (of the sort that keeps your attention) comes from the political evolution in the game.
The fact that all the 150k subscribers inhabit the same "shard" may provide critical mass to make the politics interesting.
Don't know myself, but I am more interested now than I was three years ago - and I'm still a year away from being able to fly the biggest ships (much longer than that from being able to afford them).
Not here to be a fanboy, but it seems to serve as a nice contrast.
-Aeco
Posted Aug 30, 2006 5:00:01 PM | link
That's a good point about EVE. Gamasutra today referenced an insightful report by DFC Intelligence regarding the MMO marketplace. It notes that the stratospheric nature of WoW's user population may have beguiled some investors, but that they shouldn't expect this nor be disappointed by smaller but still highly profitable games, many of which are 'merely' in the hundreds-of-thousands of users (recall that this was territory formerly reserved for the likes of huge successes like EQ and SWG). The report ends with
The fact of the matter is that most success with MMOG comes with smaller, dedicated online game companies that use small amounts of investment money to great effect. Jagex’s Runescape, CCP’s EVE Online, and Three Rings’ Puzzle Pirates are three games that found niche success by scaling their efforts to what was feasible. Jagex’s Runescape has even crossed into mainstream territory with over 800,000 subscribers as a result of its less demanding computer requirements and low cost ($5 a month). This is another example of how innovation with gameplay and business models tends to produce hits. For the health of investors and the MMOG space, let’s hope that this lesson doesn’t have to be relearned the hard way. However, when a product generates as much money as WoW it is inevitable that the dumb money will start flowing freely. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you." [Emphasis added]This highlights the point that 'smaller' (relative to WoW-scale) MMOGs can take more risks, try new forms of gameplay, and advance the industry faster than can "40/40" games (40 months production, $40 million budget) striving to replicate the past.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 5:31:32 PM | link
@monkeysan:
Who said: "Not all fun is created equal, nor is it all equally valuable." I agree wholeheartedly. Which is why I often rate movies as, "Must see, first night, first run, full price." And others, "Might watch, on HBO, for free, in hotel, while drinking, on business."
I didn't mean to imply that "all fun is equal," just to compare, in some way, some metrics for entertainment value. On the one hand, we have "Warcraft Widows" complaining that the game is stealing their husbands, sons and lovers away for 80+ hours a week. On the other... we're wondering, "When will the next, better, Virtual Crack 2.0 be released?" Interesting dichotomy.
I don't think anyone expects a single movie -- or franchise -- to be the be-all-end-all of our film existence; same for books and authors or TV shows.
There's always been a strange "forward looking ennui" when you know a beloved TV series is about to be cancelled (Firefly!) (or when it jumps the shark), or when you get close to the end of a great book. You miss *that* feeling, *those* characters, etc. If we plug a few thousand hours into WoW... of course we feel strangely... strange... when the thrill is gone. Where's my Azeroth? Who took it from me? I didn't play anywhere near as hardcore as some of my buddies, and I still miss going out by the lighthouse for a fish...
So... this has raised a point I hadn't ever considered before in my own gaming. Is the MMO experience a "one off"? Is it essentially more "Disney World" than "reading?" I can't live without having a book on my bedside table. But I can live without Disney. I like to go every decade or so... It's a novelty.
The BIG QUESTION then: Is the overall entertainment value for MMOs essentially, for the majority of the population, a novelty?
Posted Aug 30, 2006 6:07:02 PM | link
And to add to that and to what Samantha said, isn't the most effective way to get "wholly different" game designs to enable different game designers to make it to retail?
As long as only a few designers can afford to make and distribute quality games, we'll keep getting the kinds of games they like (and know how) to make. More diversity in games, I think, requires more diversity in designers.
How that can happen, I don't know. Maybe Multiverse's "piece-of-the-action" revenue model will be the key that opens the door....
--Bart
Posted Aug 30, 2006 6:16:03 PM | link
"Hey that was great soup - what's next? Uh, more soup? No thanks..."
There are certainly some people who are going to say No thanks to more soup, but they'll be the ones who go play the steak dinner of Vanguard, or the Thai Fusion of Pirates of the Burning Sea, or the Ice cream sundae of EVE.
However there are plenty of people currently eating soup who will just want more soup, in new flavours, but it will need to be as good as the current WOW soup, and maybe with croutons of improved PVP.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 6:17:46 PM | link
It's interesting how irritated people get with the idea that a service which has an annual fee should provide ongoing entertainment in part through the provision of novelty. If what was on cable next month was EXACTLY what was on cable next month (no jokes re: 500 channels and nothing on, please), at some point, we'd be in our rights to question the cost of the monthly fee.
But it's not just that. Part of it what we expect from the best games. Lots of casual slinging about of poker here in the thread, but poker's ceaselesly recombinant nature is essentially the opposite of chess. Predictable rules, hands you've seen before, sure--but also always different both because of how the game plays and how the people playing it are acting. Every time is new, no matter how often you've played.
The more important part is what we expect from virtual worlds. We expect them to be, well, world-like, and like worlds and life, constantly renewed, surprising, unexpected. Yes, nobody's gotten that trick right, yet, but I don't think it's wrong to suggest that Blizzard went down a bad design cul-de-sac not long after the game went live and started pouring all their design energies into rarified experiences which contradicted the appeal and energy of the game for most players. It's hard to make a virtual world come to live with vigor for most of its inhabitants, to give it a shifting, recombinant flavor, but putting endless hours into designing endgame instances that utterly contradict the feel and excitement of the rest of your world seems a fairly perverse way to go about putting continuing value in the experience.
All things come to an end, but it's not wrong to ask why they come to the ends that they do, in the fashion that they do, in the time that they do, and at the price that they do. It doesn't seem *inevitable* to me that a game with 7 million users paying a significant monthly fee should devolve towards grindathon entropy with such relative rapidity.
Computer game players in a way have an incredibly short horizon for how long their cultural experiences should last. Games made in 1998 now seem like ancient history; games which are playable for a month seem like incalculable value. Maybe we should readjust our expectations a bit. I buy books which cost me half of a game (or as much as a monthly payment for same) which provision me six or seven times as much surprise and novelty. I buy movies for half the price of games which reward four or five reviewings, probably about equal of what some games give me in time, but at far greater cultural utility.
E.g., all the time we spend in games is not time which we make use of in the imagination, or as cultural capital, or in the giving of imaginative pleasure. I can remember and talk about and allude to a memorable scene in a film, and films have far more such memorable moments in relation to the time they take than most games. Some of game-time is time spent for the sake of spending time; it reminds me a bit of what Richard Klein said about cigarettes, that their chiefest virtue was that it took time to smoke them and that time was unrecoverable and dedicated to no purpose. Sure, games provision great scenes, unpredictable social experiences (in online contexts), memorable quotes, visuals you will never forget, and even occasionally, these things are truly original to games rather than derivative products born from putting a cinematic or literary experience into an interactive format.
I love games. I love virtual worlds even more. But I don't think it's wrong to ask, often, if they couldn't be far more than they are given their technical and imaginative capacities, and given the money that flows into their making. Why couldn't World of Warcraft deliver something surprising or novel every single month? Why not put productive hours into doing that for the bulk of the players instead of building the Naxxramas instance, for example? That seems like both good creative sense and good financial sense.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 8:55:26 PM | link
Total aside:
Holy crap! Timothy quoted Richard Klein on TN! Dick was my French Lit prof at Cornell and we talked about the pleasures and meaning of smoking back when "Cigarettes are Sublime" was in the "notes" stage (and back when I was still lighting up).
Interestingly, Dick was also intrigued by the idea of my helping him use database software (Dbase III+ if I remember correctly) to create a kind of threaded, hypercard-esque, "adventure experience" where students could explore the contents of a lecture, poem or any other written space in a kind of text-adventure way, but "programmed" by a non-technical user (i.e., a prof). It was, in a very loose, weird fashion, kind of a precursor to the wiki-way; users enter chunks of text and keywords that link to other text...
If you're lurking... "Hi, Professor Klein!"
Posted Aug 30, 2006 9:10:17 PM | link
One thing about poker is that you can have absolutely nothing in your hands and win huge jackpots against someone who has a great hand if you play the psychological aspects of the game better than the other guy. And if you get him to fold, you don't even have to show him that you had nothing. It starts with you against the table, and one by one people weigh the odds, judge the other person, and drop out until it is down to two, then one victor.
You need: A good knowledge of the game, what the odds are your opponent has something better than you based on the cards showing, luck, guts, and the ability to judge your opponents. My regular poker group dried up because in the end, we were all friends and knew each other too well. I know when N is bluffing, and that S can't always remember which hand is better and so he sometimes gets all excited over a hand and wants to raise, and G will get in trouble with his wife if he loses 50 bucks that night, etc. But take the same texas hold 'em rules and put any of us at a table with complete strangers and we get excited. People who like poker, like taking risky positions in the stock market, have something in them that says 1) I'm better than anyone else (or have an edge, or know something the others don't) and 2) need some danger and possibility of a big win or counting coup.
Most games these days expect you to deposit 10 bucks into your IRA every paycheck and you'll have a nice retirement from the grinding grind, that is, top level where you get to PvP with the other big kids, or can now just PvE to help your friends or for more loot.
I don't know. Would you get excited if your character in a game you're bored with suddenly got transplanted into another server full of strangers? For every player that quits because of ennui, and I've faded away from several MMO's for the same, how many quit be cause of 'enhancements' to the game, e.g. TOA in DAoC, that were meant to provide new content but instead made those comfortable with being the top of the food chain no longer the top?
I wonder what are the relative numbers of those playing things like Call of Duty and other FPS's online, forsaking the "massively multiplayer" for "This is my first time on this server, I know what their weapons can do, but I've never seen these guys from this squad and don't know if they're any good."
I love those games too. If I could find a game that combined that aspect of the small FPS's with the community experience and content of a large fantasy MMO, I'd have something to keep me busy for at least a few billing cycles.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 10:17:14 PM | link
Games need to get quicker on the pace and hardware manufacturers need to stop dicking with such closed hardware conventions. If some weren't so worried about their old school licensing mechanisms I think we'd see a new wave of games that hit like the whole web 2 model of cheaper hardware, rapid development, power curve laws, and long-tail tapping. The gaming market is freaking huge, speciality gaming for niche's could be a likely future.
Anyhow, I played TSR80 games, I loved my muds, mush, moo, mu*'s during college, the list rolls to present and I dip my fingers in near everything that comes out. Every game I leave is because the games bounderies have been found, and they are found to be boring. Life is dynamic, a game has an end, but they don't call it that. I'm waiting for the games that encompass universes, maybe thats why I stay around in Eve. The overhead is so damn low and the scope so large. If only their trade-mechanics weren't so wonky. Nothing happens in their universe, well really happens. When you sell to a station why did they need to buy it in the firstplace? What's it building? Better AI NPC's.. that'd be a hoot.
To those who remember it, the bbs door game Trade Wars. Make that into a real mmo that is thick and lush and near infinite in scope.
Why haven't we seen a Mechwarrior universe enter the picture? Drop ships, large universe, you can layer everything from space battles, air battles, ground battles, tactical people, fps people, so many roles to fill.
A game needs to live and breath and be, and everything we play right now just feels like a digital board game in one way or another. If you reaaaaly think about it, how much in a game is still like a mud? Where's the evolution? We have so much growing room in games all we need are smart people and the opportunity.
I look forward to the future of gaming, I just wish it were sooner than later hehe!
-a
Posted Aug 30, 2006 10:55:14 PM | link
I used to play on Battletech 3056 and the other online Btech MU* back in the day. Great fast paced action, teamwork, dramatic events (bases being raided, armies wiped out in single battles, entire companies dropping from Union dropships and misdropping, etc.)
But it was free. The guys who wrote it ran the factions, appointed the officers, decided who got what 'mech's. Bad enough to go linkdead and lose your Battlemaster because it stood still for 30 seconds in a firefight and got whacked by a lance of strike mechs. Imagine leveling your guy and grinding your way to it in the first place! I'd hate to be the guy to figure out the in-game economy that 'works' for an MMO like that :0
Seems like everyone's working on a bigger and better airplane. Be nice if someone said, let's try blimps instead. Then again, we all know what happened to the Hindenburg.
Maybe a Tao te ching MMORPG. The unfulfilled potential is the ultimate. Best to be a level 1 with the starter sword and no-drop no-trade quilt jerkin. The goal is to start uber and finish a newborn.
Posted Aug 30, 2006 11:31:28 PM | link
Mike Sellers wrote: "If a player has become bored with the by now well-trodden traditional MMOFRPG gameplay, how will another game bring them a new sort of experience, and not just present old dwarves in new clothing? (For example, the nifty dwarf shown above comes from Warhammer Online, but would be right at home in any of a number of existing and upcoming MMOs.) IMO this is the question to which Vanguard, Warhammer, Conan, LOTRO, Hero's Journey, and any other contenders must have a clear and ready answer."
Shhh... You're giving away the secrets! Cloning/perfecting Diku/EQ/WoW is the only way that anyone will ever make money. If large developers think otherwise, they might actually start innovating and provide competition for us small developers trying to creative innovative products on a smell of an oily rag. ;-)
In my unbiased opinion, all games should:
1) Do their best to clone Diku/EQ/WoW.
2) Be fantasy based.
3) Have elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, and other generic and over-used fantasy races.
4) Spend all their efforts on perfecting hit-point-based melee combat.
5) Call the game "XXX Online", where XXX has "war", "death", "chaos", etc. as a root, prefix, or suffix.
6) Make sure to include plenty of chainmail bikinnis to (a) offend most women, and (b) attract as many teenage males as possible.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 12:10:18 AM | link
I agree that it is an interesting question to think about--what all those millions will do when they hit the wall and lose interest in WoW. My guess, though, is that that is still some years off.
Most of these players are first time MMO gamers, and my experience is that "you never forget your first love." In other words, the first amazement you have in one of these games that all those characters running around are *actually* human beings sitting behind keyboards all over the world and you can see them run!, will never be found again in the next game or the next.
My first experience with these was in EQ1. Many got it with UO or with DAOC. Some got it with MUDs years before. Most MMO addicts I have talked to have this wistful feeling about the first one they played and no matter how many betas they get into, they can never experience that feeling again. Which is sad, but probably inevitable.
The time to figure all this out though takes longer for your first game though. EQ1 took years to get tired of. DAOC took about a year for the RvR to get repetitive and pointless. WoW took about 2 months. God help the next one I try. :-)
If this sort of curve is still indicative today, then the millions of MMO newbies still have a year or two left of their honeymoon period and their exit, as a result, will be spread out and gradual probably. It is a great opportunity for the next game after this new generation though, because the masses will probably miss the next gen, still in love with WoW.
- Keith
p.s. In my experience, yes I think guild splits of significant guilds with longevity come about out of boredome or ennui. The fights which initiate the splits seem to usually be quite petty and there is usually a feeling of "Other players won't be such %(*@#holes", when of course we know other players are identical. :-)
The pointless (and endless) splitting and reforming of the younger guilds is just people having little bond with each other.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 1:26:23 AM | link
Mike Sellers>If a player has become bored with the by now well-trodden traditional MMOFRPG gameplay, how will another game bring them a new sort of experience
The gameplay becomes boring because they no longer need what it gives. I know you're not exactly a fan of the hero's journey model when applied to virtual worlds, but this is exactly predicted by it. Gameplay only gets you as far as the end of the achiever stage ("atonement with the father" in formal terms). If you don't get told you've won, or don't decide for yourself that you've won, then you're going to keep playing the same old way and never advance beyond that to the gameplay-free existence beyond. Instead, you're stuck with the same gameplay that you needed before, but that you no longer need because it doesn't deliver what you want. You get frustrated, and eventually drift away. Then you play another game and do exactly the same thing.
What ought to happen is that when you gain nothing more from gameplay, you're told the game is over. The world isn't over, just the game - you've won. You can then spend your time playing because the world or its people are interesting, not because you want to have the biggest, baddest, orangest equipment on the block. You don't need that, you've proved what you can do, you should just be allowed to have fun (for your new, post-game definition of "fun"). They, you won't need to drift away and try all over again in another world, you can stay in this one.
Plainly, albeit paradoxically put, the best way to keep players from drifting away from a virtual world is to allow them to leave.
Richard
Posted Aug 31, 2006 4:31:41 AM | link
wow is a good game
don't make mistakes here
it has 2 millions subscribers in usa and europe and +5M regulars customers in asia for _good_ reason
(blizzard réputation, brand name recognition thanks to good previous game, good arts, good directions, and so on)
but it's only a game
of course it will bore you one day
it's FINE, it"s nice, it's SANE.
you got fun, it's was good
now you want to go somewhere else, it's good too.
well, in my case, I take _months_ to got a character on 60 level and I play only a few hours by week (and to manage a guild for the most time) so I can wait peacefully for the "extension" to the game
and maybe one day move to an other mmorpg with better things or just stop.
no game can be eternal, it's just a computer software. and it's already a great Work.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 5:35:36 AM | link
Well since 2 months im experiencing the same problem as the OP. But what killed my motivation in WOW is the end game, not about raiding or pvp but about gear grinding. I mean whats the point of playing x hours to get some gear that will become obsolete... As im someone that like changes a lot , i feel like im stuck and my character doesnt evolve at all anymore...
Wow is my first MMO , ill wait for the expansion but after that ill probably never play another MMO in my life... not that i dont like MMO but because MMO are very time consuming and need a lot of implication.
I have enough of my job for planning stuff, boosting my motivation , dealing with people.. not that i dont like my job but it takes a lot of energy...(every one who work know what i mean)
So when i get home i want a game that i enjoy, almost brainless... where i can play 10 min of 1 hours without having to wait for groups , deal with people and shit like that... So thats maybe why i have zillong of < lvl 30 alt and 1 single 60 toon in the game...
So for me the challenging point in WOW (team play, etc) is something i already do in my day to day job...
Posted Aug 31, 2006 9:15:39 AM | link
Richard: I know you're not exactly a fan of the hero's journey model when applied to virtual worlds, but this is exactly predicted by it. ... Plainly, albeit paradoxically put, the best way to keep players from drifting away from a virtual world is to allow them to leave.
And now you see one of the reasons why I'm dissatisfied with the "hero's journey" model for MMOs. It's a fine model, don't get me wrong -- it's been a central underpinning of thousands of years of western literature. But in MMOs, it's also been mined to death (perhaps much the same way in which movies first relied on tropes from plays).
Sure, you can "allow players to leave" your game, and there are good reasons for providing social and gameplay forms of closure for the players. But in a commercial sense (you knew it was coming, right?) that's not a great way to build a business. "Thanks for coming, hope you had a great time! Please never come back!" MMOs exist because they are terrifically profitable. They're profitable because they keep people coming back. Telling someone, "you've won, go away!" isn't a great basis on which to build a profitable venture.
This takes us back to the failure of imagination I mentioned earlier. Can we think no more broadly in MMO terms than the hero's journey? Are we so narrow that, as one poster said above, we see WoW as soup, Vanguard as steak, and PotBS as Thai Fusion? To my eyes these are more like tomato soup, tomato soup with garnish, and pea soup, respectively.
My interests in this are both creative and commercial. I'm tired of seeing endless derivations of the kind of game Mike Rozak so lovingly skewers above. I know I tend to be early on these things, and that many will continue to enjoy WoW and other games for the next several years at least. Nevertheless I'm left wondering where millions of new MMO players will go after they are, inevitably, done with WoW. Ten years ago, MMOs didn't exist as an industry. Ten years from now, will MMOs be even more relevant culturally than they are now, or will they be relegated to the same broom closet of history occupied by hex-based wargames, beanie babies, and David Hasselhoff? To a large degree, the choices developers make in the next 1-3 years will determine the outcome.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 12:30:18 PM | link
So, this community (here) being so brimful with social science types, what can we learn from the experience thus far, or identify to look for in the future?
I am persuaded that the "hero's journey" model lacks the substance to keep people for years. Soup is a fortuitous analogy, perhaps. What comes next may well have to be more....(forgive me) meaty.
One concern - what if a closer analogy than soup is what we find in pop music. The market seems to grind through an endless supply of songs each consecutive number one hit reflecting some new twist or turn of the tastes of the mass audience, but mostly failing to provide anything more substantive. One can look at any other form of entertainment and fail to see a general trend of increasing quality, meaning, or satisfaction.
If failure of imagination is the primary concern, are not the longer track records with these other (vehicles, markets, media) informative?
Now, one must certainly acknowledge the qualitative differences here. Nobody has worried much about "immersion" in pop music, nor had to make quite as much a deal about identity in console games or movies, etc. But to take WoW to task for losing its charm after hundreds of hours may be expecting too much.
That said, (and to again plug EVE) I think there is alot to learn from the paths over time of subscriptions, time spent per logon, time spent per month etc. explained by game characteristics.
If somebody has the numbers, will they please crunch them? We social science types should be able to do this sort of thing.
-Aeco
Posted Aug 31, 2006 2:37:13 PM | link
Tadhg Kelly had an interesting Letter to the Editor at Gamasutra:
"As I've blogged before, one of the fundamental differences between video games and roleplaying games is that in RPGs the player becomes the character, but in video games the character becomes the player.
...
Simply put, in video games the player rarely if ever needs a structured reason to do the next level or mission. It is implicit in the game already that tasks must be accomplished. The narrative elements largely act as baubles and rewards for the most part, rather than an integral part of the playing experience."
Isn't that last paragraph the problem with WoW and its clones -- that they're trying to be videogames instead of RPGs? That the whole idea of storytelling and narrative and worldy-ness has been abandoned as too hard to do in addition to all the gameplay that "has to be there"?
Maybe that's the real failure of imagination.
--Bart
Posted Aug 31, 2006 3:10:34 PM | link
Chad said: Mike says "my 37 warlock was almost incomprehensible".
I don't think it's impossible to design games to avoid this.
I really love this one. It is basically a UI problem. The human brain can efficiently cope with a maximum of about 7 options. If I meet a troll on a path in real life, I don't have to scroll through every action possible. I make a hierarchy of options in my mind: Level one is, 1) be nice to troll, 2) run away from troll, 3) kill troll. If I decide to "kill troll", I go down a level in the chain of command and consider what weapons I have, etc.
A quarterback who directed each individual player on each play would be called brilliant, but his brain would disintegrate, and he would certainly not claim he was having fun.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 5:08:53 PM | link
Bart said: "Isn't that last paragraph the problem with WoW and its clones -- that they're trying to be videogames instead of RPGs?"
Indeed.
I think of the reasons I've given for playing videogames vs. playing various RPGs, including MMOs and pen-and-papers. And I look at Fogel's excellent comment, above, about how much "work" is involved in playing WoW at the higher levels, in terms of actually getting your gear in gear.
I have, max, an hour or two a day to game. Often much less. Sometimes weeks will go by when I can't game. Now, playing WoW single-player? Sure... I can do that a half-hour here, or a 5-hour stretch on a Friday night. Until I get to around Level 30. And while I found a number of "casual pals" that I kept in contact with... the guild I was a part of fell apart when the one guy who did all the coordination work had to stop to take an out-of-town contract with no high-speed Web access. Whoops! So much for virtuality.
My point being that the costs for these kinds of games and experiences aren't always just in dollars, though I know I was harping on that, too.
When I GMed big, weekend-long live RPGs with players who had characters that had been around for 10+ years, one of the great joys was to either, A) Have them do something truly great that could then be rewarded very specifically, or; B) Have them do something truly stupid, that could then be punished very specifically. In-character behavior + success gets you XP, loot, good pointers towards the next stage of the journey, etc. Out-of-charchter stuff (or failure) gets you loss of XP (or less), loss of items and wild good chases. Ha! But that was the fun for me when I was playing a character, too... to impress the GM and get the love... or, if I screwed up, feel the righteous wrath.
At low levels of WoW, the game was brilliant in terms of "time put in" and "love got out" for me. Whether it was solo, group or PvP. Although few people took real RPing very seriously, even on RP servers (humph!). The higher I got, though, the more it felt like the rewards were "bigger piles of tiny things" for play that was increasingly less fun. And play that required that I spend more and more of my scant gaming time with folks who were less interested in the rewards I wanted (RP, characterization, socialization, long-term fun), than in bigger piles of tiny things.
As a friend of mine once put it, "WoW gives you more of the same at higher levels, yeah. But it's a LOT more." Well, "a lot" is still the same at some point.
I don't mind when soup comes out when I put in tomatoes and celery and water... but when soup comes out when I put in steak and potatoes... hmmm...
Posted Aug 31, 2006 5:13:57 PM | link
Richard wrote:
> What ought to happen is that when you gain nothing
> more from gameplay, you're told the game is over.
> The world isn't over, just the game - you've won.
In essence, isn't this what WoW does with the level 60 cap? If you get that far, the goals of the game change. Whereas the levelling was the goal of the game, now it's more about the instances or PVP. MUD2 was the same in that regard: you level to get to Wiz, and now your interests go in a difference direction (making mortals' lives miserable or creating your own content.) Where both games fail(ed) is that there's currently nothing to strive for beyond that secondary goal.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 5:21:17 PM | link
And in defense of "The Hero's Journey..."
Modeling the entire Hero' Journey in one medium -- an MMO in this instance, though we could as easily be talking about books or theatre or sports or business -- is not the same as experiencing even any one tiny part of one. I can read -- or game -- the story of hero that goes through the entire journey from start to finish, and in no way advance my own journey. As a refresher, here's the journey in a nutshell:
* * * * *
Ordinary World – Limited Awareness
Call to Adventure – Increased Awareness
Refusal of the Call – Reluctance to Change
Meeting the Mentor – Overcoming Reluctance
Crossing the First Threshold – Committing to Change
Tests – Experimenting with First Change
Approaching the Cave – Preparing for Change
Ordeal – Attempting Change
Reward – Consequences Attempts
Road Back – Rededication to Changes
Resurrection – Final Attempts at Changes
Return with the Elixir – Final Mastery of the Problem
* * * * *
You can play through (or read through) a minimalist, shallow, goofy, unfulfilling version of that journey in an 85-minute film. You can play it through in a bad solo video game that takes only 8 hours to complete. You can see the same tired tropes repeated again and again and still enjoy them, because they're burned into our cultural retinas, they're fun, they're easy and they work.
But playing or reading *about* the Hero's Journey does not mean that you have, in any way, *progressed* in your own journey, or even *learned* from your journey. A really cheap retelling of the Arthurian tales, f'rinstance, will do nothing to advance my journey... nor will reading several good versions, if I don't apply myself to their study.
In my own journey, as a person, I may be at a point -- as so many kids I encountered in WoW were -- where working together in a guild was the first significant team activity they'd undertaken. It was also, for many of them, the first real roleplaying they'd ever done. Both of those are significant skill sets for life. Both are intriguing ways to "play," in that you can experiment with approaches to problem solving and behavior that may not be easily appropriate in real life. Super!
Let's take the roleplaying factor. I had several younger gamers ask me, literally, "How can I roleplay better?" as they had never done any RL RP. We spent some time talking about how to create a character, about backstory, motivation, staying in character, etc. About how it improves play to have an experience of the mind beyond the grind. I like to teach, they liked to learn. It was fun.
That one instance, for a moment, was a tiny little piece of, "Meeting the Mentor – Overcoming Reluctance," in their own journey. If I had not been receptive -- or if the UI had not allowed for ways to communicate that way -- we would not have been able to have anything approaching a true "heroic journey" moment.
I'm not saying it was a big deal, but it was a much bigger deal than mining fake gold by clicking a button for 2 hours and trading in a level 3 leather hoozis for a level 4 chainmail whatsis.
By the time a young person, one who had never played an MMO before, finished a Level 60 character in WoW, my guess is that there would have been a number of chances for them to have "journey experiences."
All of them? Their whole "Hero's Journey" for their life? In one MMO? Of course not. Your whole journey never takes place in one place, on one platform, with one mentor or in one setting. But the point is that the less like Tetris an MMO is and the more like Camelot, the more "journey moments" will be possible.
I think.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 5:31:22 PM | link
Mike Sellers wrote: "Thanks for coming, hope you had a great time! Please never come back!" MMOs exist because they are terrifically profitable. They're profitable because they keep people coming back. Telling someone, "you've won, go away!" isn't a great basis on which to build a profitable venture.
It works for TV... in a sense:
1) Many shows (aka: movies) are one-offs. There is always a "You've won!" (Happy ending) at the end.
2) TV series are "Come back in a week!". The same might work for MMORPGs, but with "You've won for now. Come back in a month!" instead. (Aka: GuildWars, which is attempting this.)
3) Cable-TV and TV-networks get around the "Don't come back!" issues by bundling a continual stream of (1) and (2). (Aka: SOE's MMORPG bundle.)
I suspect you're working on a MMORPG which is targeting more of a niche market, but for a mass-market Mc-MMORPG: I don't see how they'll be able to keep a player for more than 25-50 hours (over a few months), let alone 250-500 hours (over 6-9 months) like WoW.
Even the most popular TV series only runs 10 years x 22(?) expisodes x 30-60 min = max 220 hrs. Most have lifespans in the 20-40 hour range.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 6:43:48 PM | link
So how to have people keep playing, without having them 'finish', or wander away from boredom?
I was thinking, even Odysseus came home after 10 years, had a badass fight, and the story ended.
The typical MMO hero/player has no third act worthy of being called a finale. Act I- New character is made. Act II-The grind to the top, and perhaps the PvP to be had there. Act III- The very, very, very long, and increasingly monotonous ride into ennui-dom.
There was this game I really loved when I was younger. It was Sword of the Samurai, by Microprose. There were RTS battles. There were 1 on 1 sword duels. There were 2-D fights as you ran around villages vs. multiple enemy, trying to rescue people, defend villages from bandits, etc.
But the real kicker for me was...you could get married, have a kid, and play on as the kid when your current character grew too old.
So what if you could do that in an MMORPG without rolling an alt and call it a kid? What if you had to do that to get more than a couple of characters?
At age 60% of top level you could
1) pay a priest a metric buttload of money and get a clone (stat-wise)
2) go to an adoption house and choose a war orphan based on a limited knowledge of his or her traits
3) have a kid with another player and let the biological dice roll
Once you reach top level, after a certain period of time, you would become vulnerable to relative permadeath.
If you reproduce early, your kid would be higher level when the parent dies and the kid is available to be played, but you pass on less money and items. Wait till top level, and you can pass on more loot and money to the kid but the kid starts at very low level.
Once the parent 'dies', it could then be played in some sort of Elysium or Valhalla or Hell, starting at a mid-low level, with a small fraction of what he/she had at the time of death.
Anyway, I have a ton of top level toons on MMO's that I will never sell because I'm attached to them. Not so attached that I wouldn't like to see them go out once and for all trying to solo a dragon.
But in this way, each character would be a chapter in the overall experience in a game, and with each ending you would have a new beginning. I'd love to look at some of my long term MMO experiences and see: Fred the Paladin, fought at the Black Keep Battle June 05, helped hold the Bridge at River Kwai October 05, adopted Nooby the Sorceror at age 49, died fighting the Dragon at age 50. Nooby the Sorceror, fought again at the Black Keep, this time to take it, February of 2006, got the great Flying Spaghetti Monster to clone Noobus who became a Mystic, went to the other kingdom, where he was an outcast because his forbears fought for the other kingdom, etc....
Posted Aug 31, 2006 7:19:38 PM | link
Mike Rozak,
You forgot spinoffs, sequels, daytime soaps, and reality shows.
The best analog is probably daytime soaps. We are hooked on to them once in a while and then ennui sets in. We come a bit later and we have no clue what all of these same people are doing now, which takes some effort to learn.
So, for other shows like Battlestar Galactica, they make the "The Story so Far" special to get people back in the loop and get excited about the equivalent of an MMO "expansion", the 3rd season.
I think MMO innovations can be found in other industries. What's no longer innovative in on industry can still be innovative when applied in a new industry.
For example, Guild Wars is following the "expansion" model. The only thing I'll say about that is that they gotta speed up their expansion to cycle to fit in with the current media cycle. Blizzard is now getting in-line with the cycle with expansions each year. People with WOW-nnui will just have to wait for the next expansion, the next season of packaged entertainment.
Frank
Posted Aug 31, 2006 9:18:20 PM | link
The best analog is probably daytime soaps.
Doh! Forgot about those. One of the game-storytelling books I read, written by an ex-soap writer, said that soaps' target-audiences are housekeepers, college students, and (yes)prisoners... I suppose there is a market for a time-consuming entertainment, but I'd still maintain it's not very mass market. Daytime soaps exist because daytime airtime is cheap and soaps are cheap to produce.
Here's a theorem, based on two hypothesis:
1) The time someone spends in their 2nd MMORPG/MUD is less (50% less?) than the time they spent in their first MMORPG/MUD. Their 3d is even less, but this probably asymtotes out by the 5th MMORPG.
2) A mass-market audience will be willing to commit less time. Only so many people are willing to devote 20 hrs/week to one game/entertainment, and there are only so many willing to stick with it for 6+ months at 20 hrs/week.
The theorem: As the market expands, new players won't want to play such long games, hypothesis (2). Furthermore, as the market expands, old players won't want to play as much due to hypothesis (1).
Extra hypothesis:
3) While the cost of content may be increasing, the cost of bandwidth is dropping. This means that more and more MMORPGs are willing to go with the "Pay once, play the SAME content as much as you like" model, like GuildWars. (Many are even willing to use "Free, with payment for extras.")
Games based on marketing model (3) have an incentive to reduce their content, but are more likely to attract more casual players since they aren't willing to pay a monthly fee because they won't play for 20 hrs/week over many months.
(1) + (2) + (3) => Games will get shorter. Players will hop from game to game. While there will still be games that are enormous and take 250-500 hours to complete, they will be targeted at housekeepers, college students, and prisoners. :-P
Guild Wars is following the "expansion" model. The only thing I'll say about that is that they gotta speed up their expansion to cycle to fit in with the current media cycle.
Completely agree with that one. I would have thought a release every 6 months, maybe 4.
Posted Aug 31, 2006 11:13:13 PM | link
Mike Sellers>in MMOs, it's also been mined to death (perhaps much the same way in which movies first relied on tropes from plays).
When people first put the hero's journey into virtual worlds, it was as a narrative plan. Your character went through all the stages of the hero's journey. This was in no way satisfactory and rightly died the death.
However, what wasn't recognised was that the hero's journey was always part of virtual worlds. It's not your character that goes on the journey, it's you. There's no way of getting out of this except by removing the game element from virtual worlds. You can change the gameplay as much as you like and make it as radically different from current games as you like, and you'll still have a hero's journey. People go from the real world to the virtual world, they get to be who they really are, and they reconcile their two existences (real and virtual) into one.
>Sure, you can "allow players to leave" your game, and there are good reasons for providing social and gameplay forms of closure for the players. But in a commercial sense (you knew it was coming, right?) that's not a great way to build a business.
On the contrary: it's a great way. You have to time it right, but it's not that difficult to do so even by accident.
It would be a bad business decision if you told people that they'd won, and then they left. I agree. However, this isn't what happens. Instead, if you tell people that they've won and they stay; if you don't tell them they've won, they eventually drift away (as you indicate in the starting post of this thread).
The problem is that this is counter-intuitive to a good many business people and almost all designers. You get money from people who play, so why would you tell them not to play? Surely they'd leave, and then you wouldn't get their money! Well no: if they really have followed a hero's journey, then they don't leave, because their journey isn't over. They stay. They may not play as much, but they don't cancel their account and try their luck with the next big shiny.
Of course, some players will leave. They'll reach the end of the game without having reached the end of their hero's journey - a timing issue. On the whole, though, the fact that you've told them they've won is enough to carry them through into the long-term. By setting them free, you've made staying with the virtual world be their choice; if they decide to stay, then you have them indefinitely.
I can say this with some confidence because I've seen it happen with the early textual worlds.
>"Thanks for coming, hope you had a great time! Please never come back!"
No, no, it's "That's it, grind over, world here, have fun!".
>MMOs exist because they are terrifically profitable.
No, they exist because they're fun.
>They're profitable because they keep people coming back. Telling someone, "you've won, go away!" isn't a great basis on which to build a profitable venture.
You're not saying, "you've won, go away", you're saying "you've won, stay".
>Can we think no more broadly in MMO terms than the hero's journey?
You don't get a choice. The player's personal reason for playing is the hero's journey. It's nothing to do with characters or narrative or gameplay. When a typical player embarks on a virtual world, they are entering the "world of adventure" of the hero's joruney. This is whether you like or loathe the hero's journey as a concept.
>I'm tired of seeing endless derivations of the kind of game Mike Rozak so lovingly skewers above.
Me too. Yet you could change every single one of those aspects and you'd still have a hero's journey. It's a pattern that any virtual world with gameplay will follow. The only decisions you get to make is whether you want a fragment of a journey (because you made it last too short or too long) or a whole journey.
>Ten years ago, MMOs didn't exist as an industry.
The graphical ones didn't. We did have textual ones.
>Ten years from now, will MMOs be even more relevant culturally than they are now
If we have "MMOs". Someone may have come up with the next generation and you might suddenly find that the new designers are dismissing what we currently have in terms of being some old, defunct relic with no relevance to what's going on (in much the same way as the lessons learned from textual worlds are often ignored because, hey, what possible relevance could they have in virtual worlds that are less complicated but have more players?).
>To a large degree, the choices developers make in the next 1-3 years will determine the outcome.
Even if we screw up, there's still an opening. Once the tools are there for people to make their own virtual worlds, we'll see the same flowering of creativity in them that we saw when the WWW released us from the confines of "online systems" such as CompuServe.
I share your cynicism over the lack of vision in virtual world design, and dearly want to see something new. Whatever new we get, though, so long as it has game elements, will still map onto the hero's journey.
Richard
Posted Sep 1, 2006 5:04:14 AM | link
WoW has the easiest leveling curve of any MMO yet. Anyone who is not level 60 has no right to critisice the game, you haven't experienced it.
Posted Sep 1, 2006 9:04:31 AM | link
Jerry Sands said:
>>I was thinking, even Odysseus came home after
>>10 years, had a badass fight, and the story
>> ended.
Erm, actually, Odysseus, no doubt to his long-suffering wife's eternal delight, is hardly home at all by the time he decides to set off again, clearly having bought some expansion pack that opened up Thrace for L70+ adventuring or something similar.
Plus, the Odyssey is a crap example, since the PvP is hugely imbalanced towards spears: the suitors are killed - turned into a suitor kebab - in one almighty throw. Within two weeks, everyone would have been running around with spears and medium armour. Just like in the Iliad where clubs are gimped and chariots are short-lived FOTM pwnage.
Posted Sep 1, 2006 9:40:55 AM | link
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Posted Sep 1, 2006 9:46:10 AM | link
Redwolf made a fool of himself:
>> WoW has the easiest leveling curve of any MMO
>> yet. Anyone who is not level 60 has no right
>> to critisice the game, you haven't experienced
>> it.
Next week, Redwolf explains why all criminologists should STFU until they have actually murdered someone, and why critiques of early modern economic systems are bang out of order if you don't have a time machine.
Posted Sep 1, 2006 9:46:41 AM | link
Richard said:When people first put the hero's journey into virtual worlds, it was as a narrative plan. Your character went through all the stages of the hero's journey. This was in no way satisfactory and rightly died the death.
That seems to be a strangely skewed view. When was there a narrative plan in virtual worlds and when did your character go through all the stages of the hero's journey? I can't think of a MUD or MMO where this applies. Perhaps in some of the very earliest MUDs? I don't know, but I've never seen it. You could possibly say that some of the early single-player RPGs had some of the trappings of the hero's journey (they sure used the word "hero" a lot, and often had princesses to save), but that's a long way from saying they led you through all the stages of the hero's journey.
However, what wasn't recognised was that the hero's journey was always part of virtual worlds. It's not your character that goes on the journey, it's you. There's no way of getting out of this except by removing the game element from virtual worlds. ....
You don't get a choice. The player's personal reason for playing is the hero's journey. It's nothing to do with characters or narrative or gameplay. When a typical player embarks on a virtual world, they are entering the "world of adventure" of the hero's joruney. This is whether you like or loathe the hero's journey as a concept. ...
Whatever new we get, so long as it has game elements, will still map onto the hero's journey.
That's nonsense. You've drawn a circle in chalk around you and declared that nothing else exists.
I can't think of any examples of the player going on anything remotely resembling a hero's journey as part of playing in a virtual world. The first parts, perhaps, in typical games where the player moves unevenly from neophyte to adept, but even this is a vague hand-wave in the direction of becoming a hero. After that in most MMOs there's the broad featureless plain of the endless grind, perhaps with the possibility (in old-style MUDs, and if you played your cards right with the in-clique) of becoming an imp/wiz... but that's nothing resembling the hero's journey.
You have axiomatically tied this one narrative form to all virtual world gameplay. This is like saying all movies must be musical comedies, and there's no way around this unless you remove the illusion of people moving on the screen. It's an incredibly narrow and confining view, and in the case of online games one not supported by history, psychology, or the necessities of game design.
In terms of game history, we have been telling MMO players that their characters would become heroes, but that was a marketing myth. It never happened. The world doesn't change, and your character doesn't change beyond getting more phat lewt and pre-determined abilities. There is no self-discovery for the character or the player beyond what could have been learned by reading the game manual. Your character gains "stuff" -- abilities and possessions -- but in fact these bear none of the hallmarks of the hero's journey. Heroism doesn't come on a treadmill, and a treadmill is the only mechanism virtually all past and current MMOs have had to offer. Telling players that they would experience even moments of (much less the journey of) heroism in an online game has an even more tenuous relationship to reality. Still, many developers, marketers, gamers, and some academics have apparently bought into the faux-myth that the hero's journey is not merely descriptive of one possible ideal, but actually operative as a primary aspect of online games.
In terms of psychology, the motivation you ascribe to all players, that of wanting to engage in the hero's journey, is just one possible -- one out of a possible palette of thousands. Not everyone is motivated to be a classical hero; in fact I'd say that this is a predominantly male view, particularly an adolescent one in our culture. If you refer to Caillois there are at least four kinds of games most of which have nothing to do with heroism -- his agon, or competition, probably does, or could, but what about games of chance, or simulation, or sensation? Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek, as I'm fond of citing, define eight kinds of fun (and there are probably more). These map to but extend beyond Caillois' work, and certainly are a superset of the hero's journey. "Fellowship" for example may be a component in some forms of the hero's (more typically almost solitary) journey, but it need not be subservient to any other motivation. Many males may seek fellowship within the context of competition, but others including many women may seek fellowship for itself, (including fellowship-as-gameplay, not just as incidental to it). Such motivations and interactivity to support them may be entirely divorced from any version of the hero's journey.
Finally, in terms of game design I see no compelling reason to limit the universe of online or virtual world gameplay to derivations of the hero's journey. Is Kart Rider based on this? The Sims Online? How about Shot Online? Spore? When you say "hero's journey" do you really just mean "achievement and fiero" or some similarly dilute version of heroism? Even this hardly circumscribes the universe of possible online gameplay. Saying otherwise, stating that this is the way things are you just don't get a choice, only limits your horizons and what you consider possible. It doesn't change the much larger reality beyond this one venerable but now tired mythological and narrative structure.
Posted Sep 1, 2006 11:06:15 AM | link
Hmm, the above is from me, as you probably figured out.
Posted Sep 1, 2006 11:07:31 AM | link
The MMORPGs I've played (WoW, EVE, D&D online and Guild Wars) discourage players from playing anything except fantasy Counter Strike. The games actively oppose someone trying to suspend disbelief and enter the world as a character.
The first time I stepped into WoW (my first MMORPG) I was completely and utterly enchanted. I spent hours just marveling at the world before I figured out that the point of the game was to level. Nothing I did affected anything -- it was like my character didn't even exist. Everybody does the same heroic things with no impact on the world. It completely ruins the RPG and immersive aspects of the game.
If the level 37 Warlock wasn't totally incomprehensible to a novice, there would be no pleasure at all in playing these games. Do you expect a person to pick up a tennis racket and start playing? It is absolutely not a UI problem. Anybody can hold a tennis racket. Anybody can push a mouse button. The only appeal is that I can (after a lot of practice) swing the tennis racket better than you. I can push the mouse button better than you.
It's the metagame, stupid. ;)
I wish it weren't this way. I wish the virtual world could immerse me in its physics and respond to my actions. That would be a totally different kind of entertainment. Everybody's first couple hours in a virtual world are golden: nobody does anything but gawk and run from monsters. Perfect immersion.
Until the technology catches up to our imaginations, maybe designers should build worlds where players are ethereal voyeurs. At least it would explain why the shopkeeper ignores me dancing on his table. It also fits nicely with the idea that the Internet is for porn.
Posted Sep 1, 2006 3:37:35 PM | link
I am truly enjoying this string (thanks T). I just wanted to throw in a couple of points that struck me after reading these delightful comments. The questions recur in two areas: first; what can be done to improve upon/build on WoW into the next gen. of gaming systems? And, second, what is the problem with the mythic hero design (at least at the surface) driving WoW into a less than heroic death? Although seemingly tangential, the two queries that have been so well addressed here could come together to enlighten each.
One contributor (Jerry sands) really enjoyed an early concept for gaming in which the player played family members and heroes, experienced aging and death. Another wrote that the notion that we failed to have an effect (to leave a trace as Riccoeur would suggest) was an eventual downer in the game. Clearly then persistence in the next-great gaming environment needs to be coupled with decay (as well as just growth), both r/l concerns missing from the wow format. Not to mention a mechanism that springs from both: a sense of creating history and being an embedded participant.
Then, turning to the hero quest ideal that was viewed by one contributor as essential in all game environs, and by another as: merely one of ‘thousands,’ might I suggest a compromise? The hero’s journey is not merely a trope from which to insist gaming is always concerned, but also a perspective through which we can view all games. It may be the dominant trope for young males precisely as it has male romanticism in its very construction (this really reminds me of the season tropes of Frye). I would disagree with the notion that there are thousands of possibilities, but gaming does deserve options to shift into other modes. Such as:
Realistic-mode (strategic, materialist and Civ-like) and ,
Romantic (heroic and first person oriented)
Ironic(social, cultural, tribal and Simm like but also relaint on group dynamics) and
Mystical (deeper meaning quests, mysticism wrapped into and underlying reality “Myst” CoC). Oh yes and don’t forget the all important
Porn-mode.
Posted Sep 1, 2006 9:12:32 PM | link
>> first; what can be done to improve upon/build on WoW into the next gen. of gaming systems? <<
Anyone who thi