I have seen the future

March 7, 2006 on 10:31 am | In MMO (Live), Innovation

And it is not WoW.

The Background

When I'm not slogging through mud to kill the latest Skeleton/Orc/Gnoll/Giant in a AAA MMO title with a AAA budget, I can be found trowling the diversional entertainment arenas offered by such places as MiniClips, Real Arcade, Cartoon Network Powerplay, Xbox Live Arcade and other game aggregators.

I mostly like the action-based puzzler games, though some of the general skill and action titles are also fun. These titles periodically pop up in discussions at various sites where MMOG discussions also happen. But for the most part, they're come-and-go fun. You play, maybe you paid the $9.95-19.95 to buy it after the free trial ran out, but eventually you've moved on to something else.

Every so often though, a title rises above to become memorable and repeatedly played. Obvious references here would be everything from Tetris to Zuma, and the countless iterations that have followed. These become perennial favorites, independent of platform (I play Bejeweled as much on my cellphone as I do Zuma on the Xbox 360, though my first exposure to both was on my PC).

But then there are those titles that I find truly inspired, or at least, a vision of a future I've been promoting.

The Issues

World of Warcraft "blew the lid" off of the MMOG genre, effectively doubling, by some estimates, the total number of people playing in this genre, in both the U.S. and Europe. That it also is a success in Korea, China, and other territories speaks volumes about how somtimes games can be universally fun.

At the same time though, WoW exposed another truth. Basically, it doubled the number of people playing MMOGs from just over 1 million, in the U.S. That really isn't a lot of people here, particularly when that 1 million was spread over dozens of titles. A few hundred thousand here, scores of thousands there, a few thousand elsewhere.

In the grand scheme of things, these are not significant numbers. Oh, 1 million is pretty big for someone who's been playing since the choice was Ultima Online, Everquest or Asherons Call (among other lesser-known ones). But in the total video game industry, the one that recently topped 10.5 billion in sales, MMORPGs were small time. For all the press WoW has received, it's still small time.

Why it that?

Because these games are niche. Yes. Niche. Why they are and have been niche has been covered in great detail since the dawn of, well, MUDs maybe. But to me, they continue to be niche because the core model has not significantly changed. They have too high a barrier for entry and have too high a barrier for play.

The more gobs of cash are dropped into games that perpetuate this model, the narrower the competitive field can be. Who's going to top WoW? Someone who wants a better WoW like Blizzard made a better EQ1 to answer the question of who was going to top EQ1? Who's got that sort of cash?

WoW didn't change the rules of the game. They set a barrier so high nobody can directly compete with them. So smart companies need to avoid that barrier. And they need to stop looking at the history of MMOGs for inspiration. The future of MMOGs does not reside in different death penalties and faster leveling speeds in my opinion.

It resides in penguins.

The Inspiration

Beyond comments I made in this blog entry by Raph and this conversation with schild at F13, I have not summarized my vision of the future. But based on some interesting points raised in Zonk's most recent entry (relating to Raph's Peering into China), now's as good a time as any.

And for inspiration, I look at Club Penguin.

Club Penguin has all of the trappings of a basic MMOG: instancing, personalization, virtual space customization, a micro economy in which to purchase stuff to decorate with, and activities one can play to win money in that economy.

But it also differs in four very significant ways:

1. Client: It is played in a browser window. I prefer a full-screen experience, but nothing lowers the barrier of initial entry like a game that can be played in a client everyone has by default.
2. Graphics: This game did not cost EQ2's $25mil nor WoW's rumoured $75mil to create. This wasn't a weekend job either, but it does force a question about immersion. Purists may argue that immersion requires crazy photoreal graphics or a full screen display. Yet, a few million people are out playing low tech graphics around the world and having as much fun anyway.
3. Activities: This is a game with many different activities. WoW is one activity experienced from nine different points of view, with a single side game available to everyone (resource collection, since "crafting" is a foregone conclusion). SWG attempted to be a lot more than that, but because it's been such a fiasco, it cannot be referenced as a huge success by companies looking for inspiration (or validation). And even still, the activities were mostly shades on the same stat managed button mashing anyway. Very little was about player skill, something used in Club Penguin (and other titles of this ilk) quite liberally.
4. Target Age: This game both appeals to, and is entirely playable by, kids. What MMOG title can claim that? Maybe CoH, but it wasn't intended to appeal to 9 year olds. While the MMO genre is off chasing the 18+ player with shades of similar games, other companies are actively recruiting new players, with completely different experiences. These kids will be 18+ gamers someday, yet with completely different preferences.

Most important of all, this is a diversionary game. Immersion is an option. Minutes or hours are an option. Zillions of RMT'd dollars are an option. Obsessive/compulsive behavior is, yep, an option. All of the hallmarks of MMOGs are options.

The Vision

No, the future is not Club Penguin, any more than it is Runescape, Dofus, or Habbo Hotel. Fact is, no matter the inspiration I gain from Club Penguin, this is a forgettable title, one even the target audience may not remember in a few months.

But that's the point, where I completely agree with Zonk:

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With more churn of games themselves, players would experience new gametypes and try out new modes of play. They’d be exposed to new people more often

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Churn means forgettable titles delivered in a hit-driven formula. I have changed my mind on hits. Over the last year, I realized they can promote churn. And handled the right way, churn is good.

Churn promotes evolutionary thinking, because it requires constant improvement for companies to remain competitive. This isn't about adding Paladins or Samurai to UO, nor about ripping out a poor combat system in SWG. This is about actively pursuing new thinking in gaming, through an iterative, derivative and evolutionary process.

WoW is not new, nor appreciably innovative. It's EQ1 with lower barriers for veterans. But, it promotes the same issues those very same veterans were complaining about six years ago. Meanwhile, it's still as alienating as EQ1 was, only to far more gamers nowadays because of how many are here now. And EQ1 is going to be celebrating its tenth anniversary relatively soon.

A genre dominated by the same game model for 10 solid years is a genre not evolving. It's stagnant.

The way to grow the genre is to change it. Here's why I am inspired by the aggregation approach to online games:

They are all unique. Whether it's different mechanically or metaphorically, each game is generally worth playing. The entire business of delivering them requires constant improvement and change. It's a bit like the early days of gaming where everything was fair game, but improved because the Internet is a limitless distribution channel.

What's the next step?

Make a world and populate it with mini-games. Effectively wrap a public chat and commerce space around hundreds of truly different activities (raiding instances in WoW is not playing different games. Molten Core and Zul'Gurrub are shades of the same experience). Allow people to come together with their winnings to do other things like buy and decorate houses while continually feeding the economy with new experiences and new overall features. Have so many activities that players decide to solo or group based on that activity, and some some arbitrary rule designed years before launch.

There's already dozens of titles that do this after a fashion. Everything from the world of Second Life to the environment of Club Penguin could be a good basis from which to grow a truly next generation MMOG. And I truly think these are the activities companies need to look at, given that the Diku-inspired games are again at a cap so few can even think of topping.

In the end, companies do not need to get bigger to offer MMOGs. They need to get different. And that means looking outside for new thoughts, as some already are.