Another Reference in the Living World Discussion
by jachilli
Okay, I know I owe you all a new article (and a new Belluna installment, etc.), but this just turned up along the same lines as the conversation we’re having (at least partially). The point most relevant to our current discussion is:
[In EVE, ] A pilot with close to 7 years of experience is not about to ‘finish’ the games content, he is not about to ‘max out’ or finally acquire the ‘best in slot’ in everything. He is not waiting for the next content patch to have something to do. He is not taking a break until more ‘stuff’ is added. He is, in the purest sense, going about his business…
The rest of the article is available here, and it’s a good read.
An interesting article, and spot on, as far as I’m concerned. Reading it got me thinking about the concept of “planned obsolescence,” or the line of thinking in production that is along the lines of “build something to fail, so that it needs to be replaced.” Once upon a time, the thought was that something should be built to last, and the way to make money was customer fidelity to a quality product that could be trusted to function for decades. In the middle of the 20th century, planned obsolescence launched its revolution, took over the manufacturing world, and changed the landscape into the consumer culture we have today. That’s the reason the old Hoover vacuum cleaner your Grandma had kept going and going for 40 years, while it seems the ones you buy today have to be replaced every 5 to 10 years or so (functional obsolescence). Another iteration of it is the drive to have the “newest thing,” whether that’s this year’s popular sneaker, or the latest iphone (psychological obsolescence). Now, I believe direct parallels can be drawn here between an MMO like EVE, which clearly subscribes to the “older” model, that of quality and longevity, and “theme parks” like WoW, which are “built to fail” at some point. For all the hoopla about how much you get for the money you pay for every expansion pack, it’d be disingenuous to deny that the whole idea is to keep people paying for the next big installment. A related microcosm of this is the famed “loot treadmill” model of operation, in which you absolutely must have the newest and best “epics” to even advance, let alone “keep up with the Joneses,” so to speak.What effect, then, does this have on the game world? It’s no wonder Old Blanchy and company sit there, forever in stasis, waiting for Alt #23452 to come through and gather oats for them. There is no financial incentive for their story to be advanced (let alone resolved) because all the production time is dedicated to making the “next big thing.” But wait! All you have to do is shell out $50 for the world to change; the story to advance (albeit in a completely unbelievable one-step fashion, where it will again stuck in time for the better part of another decade. . .).But I suppose it could be posited that this is the only tried and true model for massive success. While many admire in passing EVE’s tenacity, a good number of those label it dismissively as a “niche” game. “It is a thinking man’s game,” they might say, “inaccessible to the masses, and therefore the money.” But I think that misses the point: EVE is the only non-derivative “MMO” that has ever truly tried in some fashion “worldbuilding as endgame” that I’m aware of (please inform me of others if I misspeak); most of the others have tried some iteration of never ending massive (i.e. guild+) pvp, to varying degrees of commercial success. That way of operating is all well and good, but it isn’t truly being able to intimately change the world around your character.I wonder what would happen if a conglomerate such as Blizzard chose to back a game that has true worldbuilding/storytelling as its endgame instead of making the players keep paying for more and more. Would there be story arcs that finally evolve in ways that are much more granular than “buy the expansion” or “download the next patch? Is the “niche” of worldbuilding really a niche because it’s inaccessible and cost prohibitive, or simply because it isn’t as nice for the bottom line? It makes me wonder, sometimes. I’d love to see the era of “carrot/stick” come to an end and a return to the roots of “quality equals longevity equals success.” Maybe then we’d see mmoRPGs more often than MMOrpgs.
Strangely enough, there was something exhilirating about playing in oWoD MUSH’s back in the 90′s. They were chat/text games, but I felt liek I participated in the world, and game. The GMs had tools to create story effects. when there wasn’t all this “character sheet” a la graphics and talents trees and gear, all you had was role-playing. All the systems in MMOs are for non sopcial situations: either combat or commerce. If you don’t have tools to effect the social outcome of the world (and the world isn’t actually effected by any of your actions) what is there left but combat and trading?