Trust, the Future, and VR

March 15, 2006 on 10:30 am | In General Gaming, Technology, Playstyles, Innovation

Raph has been building a series on Trust. I find the meandering through all things real and virtual, personal and sociological, to be a great springboard for one of the potential themes throughout: the relationship between MMOG developers/publishers and the players.

So, of course, I have my own thoughts. And they sort of meander.

First I wanted to talk about the proverbial "power switch", the ability for a developer to turn off the game as the single biggest tool of authority they have.

I sort of see it differently.

The larger these games get, the greater their need to generate revenue. With all the rules surrounding that, I can’t see any fiscally-responsible decision being made to shut down a successful game (as in, one that generates more money than it costs). As stupid as the analogy may sound, I gotta go with the lines in Matrix: Revolutions, where the President/Ruler of Zion talks about how while they could shut off the machines that give Zion life (air, potable water, etc.), doing so would kill them all.

Everyone has someone to report to, whether it’s a parent company or stockholders. As such, the true power to me isn’t the ability to shut things down. I don’t really see a “true power” here, but more, an abstract/complex relationship between players and developers and publishers and venture capitalists and stock holders. Developers could shut down the servers, but they can't do so without taking into account a large number of variables, in which the players themselves are only a part.

The funny thing is that everything in an MMOG is replaceable, from the code to the teams to the company to the players. Some are more easily replaced than others of course, and some replace themselves over time through natural progression. Therefore, assessing who actually has the authority is not just a question about who powers the world itself.

That, of course, is semantics.

In general, l do agree that authority and the masses generally work best when there's a mutually beneficial arrangement to them. Of course, history has proven there are many ways to control the perception of such benefit (protection, insular superiority, etc.). But in general, truly mutual benefits can be self-sustaining. This isn't the minimize the effort to make it so though, and the required presence of a continually self-aware society that willingly learns and accepts all variables and a purposely self-aware authority that forces itself open to periodic trimming.

MMOGs I think are a bit like this. There's a core group of purposely self-aware members who think they're the voice for the masses, a self-aware authority that only sometimes recognizes the breadth of their full powerbase, and the mutually beneficial element that ties both together in the actual game itself. Faith is a huge bond here. Faith in the world being there, faith in the teams that manage it and, importantly, faith in those teams to manage others.

And that's where I think an authority relationship in one MMOG is very different from another. For the most part, I think it breaks down between PvE and PvP:

• PvE- Player vs game, a contrived cooperative experience players play at their own defined pace. Everyone's a guaranteed hero if they can manage their own expectations. Other people are in the way often though, so GMs are seen as both ombudsman and dispute resolvers.
• PvP- Players are their own government after a fashion. The devs are seen as people to make the world work and to continue to chase the paper tiger of pure balance in the face of ongoing game changes and emergent behavior. However, players otherwise expect to make their own rules.

Finally, in Part III, Raph talks of the LambdaMOO story. This story has fascinated me for awhile, in a way that Habitat always has as well, for two reasons:

1. It is an example of something I've long believed in, that anarchy comes from large groups trying to collectively manage themselves without any designed authority.
2. Both happened so long ago. This is always insightful these lessons from history. Here I am in the 21st century, seven years into an obsession with a gaming genre I knew nothing about seven and a half years ago. All this writing, all this reading, all the learning I've had and watched others get is relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Stuff we note today was part of common discourse decades ago.

That's a future blog entry for me. How all this new found knowledge isn't really so new, a wonderful example of human history and how few people actually understand the patterns it presents.

It's as my old Sifu used to say: the more he learns, the less he knows. Every year I know less.

Every year I learn more about who knew what and when. Sometimes it makes me sad that these lessons, these experiences, are all buried in forgotten titles on forgotten platforms, or relegated to what has become niche gaming pursuits as newer generation gamers chase iterative titles for very different reasons. But then I stumble upon the blogs of these veteran developers, the timeless visionaries, see what they're discussing, see where they're going, and I realize that it's not entirely unlike any society's elders watching the next generation.

Every new generation should be afforded the opportunity to learn certain things on their own. Creativity can come from this. But there's also life-spanning common anchors, a point where the new generation must understand that what they think is new and unique is not actually such. Shown too early and this leads to embarassing complacency in the young. Shown too late and they can't value from the information. So identifying when the new generation is able to learn from the old is, well, tricky. And something that's been happening forever.

MMOGs won't change that immediately. However, unlike MUDs and MUSHes, unlike Space Wars or Captain Midnight or Ultima II, MMOGs seem timeless. By virtue of only a handful having ever been closed, these graphics versions of concepts decades old perpetuate simply because nobody's been able to monetize a reasons to arbitrarily close them up.

Is it possible that these games can be lesson generators in themselves? Could Everquest or Ultima Online survive another ten years, with people who've been playing since launch becoming something like a governing body for the games such that their abilities get hardcoded into the experience? Is it possible for MMOGs to not only compel the sort of instant communication the Internet should be, but that it does so in such an entertaining and therefore approachable that people flock to it for all benefits?

I don't know. But I do know that the relationship between MMOGs and players is not simply one of "games" and "entertained". I've long held that MMOGs far more so than the sciences or the military would be the root of future full-sensory virtual reality. Few would be so compelled to live in a database visually, as seen in Disclosure (Michael Crichton book, not a bad movie either). However, imagine you could be anything you wanted and do so as a full body/mind experience, as seen in NetForce (ok book, bad TV show).

That's the endgame to me. It may be 10 years or 20 or whatever, but it's coming. Technology is too often evolved through the limits of existing examples, and nothing limits interaction like a keyboard, mouse, voicechat, and inaccessible creation tools. All of those will be improved in time to answer the needs of a new generation not interested in the constraints of the old one.

Will it be good or bad for society? I don't know that either. But I hope to see it.