Life After Metaplace: Somewhere Near Farmville

Despite all the posts dissecting Raph’s opera comparison, I still don’t know what to make of it. What I know is that it bothers me. Why exactly? Because we know Raph’s pedigree and legacy, and it’s as though he grabbed all of it and dropped it in the trash can. Not a bad thing in itself; it takes quite a fair amount of cojones to finally admit, after years of work on one subject, that your time might have been better spent elsewhere, and it’s folly to cling to, say, a theory, model, etc. that has clearly been disproved purely because you happened to formulate it. But what bothers me here is how casually Raph places it in the trash, only to embrace something else that promises to be the next big thing — which may or may not be true.

If anything, Raph is a pioneer of MMO’s, back when it was cool and niche, and when developers were still sailing on uncharted oceans without really knowing what they were unleashing. But something seems to have happened in that decade or so that saw the evolution of MMO’s from the niche to the stultifyingly mainstream: the sense of exploration, discovery, and tinkering has vanished. You’re just copying what the other guy is doing because he is successful, and rising budgets for games means you can’t risk being innovative.

And the problem with pioneers is that they are looked at with suspicion when they are too successful in remaining in the industry they started. Pioneers are expected to be “rolling over in their grave” over what they have started, or if they happen to still be alive, they must look upon it with a mix of horror and regret, better still if they express their guilt publicly. If they try to remain a major player in an industry that has succeeded financially but otherwise gone downhill, poetic justice dictates that their failure must provide the industry at large with a proper cautionary tale about the loss of its roots (that is to be promptly forgotten by all concerned anyway).

Raph’s eagerness to forgo the niche period of his industry to which he contributed, only to pursue ventures where the lowest common denominator can be found nowadays (not even that of WoW, which can’t be beaten on its own terms) is what makes it difficult for me to accept his dismissal of AAA titles as “snobbery” — he had no qualms with being in this industry when MMO’s were niche and for the tech version of snobs, but now he derides their direct descendents as still catering to a snob niche. It’s like MMO’s with subscriptions, WoW notwithstanding, never entered the mainstream, and somehow I’d agree, considering WoW got its popularity from the Blizzard fanboys and the rest are pretty much niche, but nowhere near the levels of snobbery involved when internet games were new (all these years, I have kept a news clipping of a poll from 1996, where 85% of respondents said they had never been on the internet). But it’s somehow not right to work in a genuinely snobbish industry before 2000 only to denounce it as such a decade later, especially when you’re moving closer to where the masses are to be found.

Geldon is right, by the way: AAA game titles aren’t opera, they’re Hollywood blockbusters; however, unlike blockbusters, they are still niche in a way, as they require you to have all the trappings of the gamer, beginning with a proper computer, to play them.

Raph, I think this desire to reach out to “ordinary people” is short-sighted, especially if the way to reach out to “ordinary people” is through Facebook and such.

Caveat: Perhaps that is because I don’t use Facebook myself, but I never saw the appeal of it, so I suspect there are people out there with computers who never bothered with Myspace, and now won’t have anything to do with Facebook. People like me whom your game will never reach, and who will express bewilderment at the success of all those online networking sites. Presumably, they’re people who will never play online games, and maybe I’m in a minority.

I can understand why some people who played UO or SWG now feel betrayed by your latest foray into the casual market; we’ve seen the same thing when Nintendo went after the family market instead of the dyed-in-the-wool gamer demographic, which in Nintendo’s case was pretty ironic, considering they had a considerable role in the creation of this gamer market they were now abandoning. Nintendo just refused to age with the demographic that made it the success it was. Will that turn out to have been a smart thing to do? I don’t know, but it seems to be serving them well now.

But in your case, I think you’re too eager to abandon the line where you made your most significant contributions, for something that is unproven and may yet prove to be fool’s gold. I’m definitely not one of those “old schoolers” who still dream of those glorious pre-Trammel UO days, but I share some of their preoccupations: that the sandbox model is out, except for small projects without the imprimatur of a major studio (A Tale in the Desert, Wurm Online, Haven & Hearth, etc), that the mainstream is turning into a WoW-styled theme park in which skill or intelligence is out, and which is really a single player game with a chatbox. It’s probably pointless to try to compete with Blizzard (never mind that it ruined fantasy as a genre, because even games with more cohesive and serious worlds — Age of Conan especially — will never able to compete with 11 million zombies), but the real problem is that you’re going for something even more superficial than WoW, a genre that caters to housewives on break, where things are never meant to be challenging, where time investment in the game is shunned, because you spurn the uber-hardcore for the uber-casual, and the collective effort for a single player run in parallel with a chatbox even worse than WoW. That is why your decision is particularly unpalatable: because you’re going in a direction that will kill MMO’s while actually saying that’s the way to go since 1999.

Your article from 1999 brings up so many red flags ten years later that I’m wondering why you should think it still matters today. That reference to “Blair Witch Project”, for example; you say it was a masterpiece of viral marketing, not a movie, but “an experience”. It was also crap. By the time the sequel came out just a year later, nobody was taking it seriously, and by then the franchise had outstayed its welcome. It was all fine when it seemed to be “the little indie production that could”, but when there was a $25 million budget for the marketing alone, it wasn’t exactly indie anymore, nor was it genuine word of mouth that made it. Instead, it was just the beginning of every viral marketing trend involving the internet; as such, Blair Witch Project has a place in history books, but not for the quality of the film. Interestingly, they’re trying to hawk a remake/sequel of it, but I don’t think there are enough people who don’t feel ashamed at having seen/liked the first film a decade ago to make any such venture successful.

If that’s the parallel with where you’re heading, then I guess you will be successful, but players will be sick of it in very short order, then they’ll despise it and, in the long term, hold your game as an example of all that was wrong with the era in which it came out.

That “folks in Ohio” barometer is also difficult to palate because, while I obviously don’t know the specific people you mention, they sound exactly like those who would shortly foist eight years of Bush upon the rest of the world. I’m not an Obama fan, but I’d be wary of asking them for anything at this point.

Also this part of your text: But folks, Johnny can’t read. Certainly not Johnny the console player. Not the Johnny I run into daily at work, the fourteen-year-old who thinks that the latest expression of hip-hop gangsta rap rage is just the coolest thing going down. I find it wonderful that there are muds out there that I can go to that give me areas based on Foucault. But Johnny doesn’t care. And I am in this to make money, after all. (Crass, I know). So if that’s to be an early indicator of your current pursuit of the lowest common denominator, so be it. Nothing to brag about, though.

@Cymbaline

For some reason, I seem to have struck a nerve, but I can’t really say why. I will, however, try to answer your points.

First, you seem to make a number of assumptions about me, especially about my gaming history and style. I would have been old enough to play UO when it launched in 1997, except that it would be two full years before I got a computer that could run it, not to mention internet access. My first computer dated back to c. 1996, but it was a secondhand 486DX running Win 3.1, without a modem. That was just before university, so I was using it mostly for text formatting, and I never bought any games for it.

So, you see, I was not one of those nerd types who started playing MUD’s while in school before moving on to MMO’s, nor did I own a new console after my teenage years. For that matter, I don’t think I’ve ever owned more than a dozen cartridges for any console.

The first time I heard of UO was on one of those late-nineties TV shows that were eagerly discussing everything about that newfangled thing called the internet with wonder and excitement, but it was before I had internet access. I finally tried UO in the late Second Age period, but I did not stay beyond the trial month. My internet connection was too unstable, and my experiences in the game did not convince me it was worth giving my credit card information.

After that, it took me until 2006 – that’s seven years, if you bother with such things – to return to MMO’s, and then only to stuff I could play for free. Runescape, Puzzle Pirates, etc. The first MMO I actually paid a subscription for was Pirates of the Burning Sea, January 2008. In other words, for the time MMO’s “were underground and not played by the unwashed”, and for a long time afterwards, I was not playing them. I’m not of the “old school”, because I don’t have the pedigree for it.

I’m also not that much of a “hardcore gamer”, as in always seeking out new games, because I can’t afford to change/upgrade computers, so my own history of buying computers has been in waves of 4 years on average. The last one dates back to 2007, so I’m way past the crest. It’s one of the reasons I’m not expecting to play any of the major releases of 2010.

Why does this “casual” discussion bother me? Because, incapable of playing most new games as I am, I fear I might be pigeonholed into those “casuals” while the term (as Geldon said) just seems to be a label for something that doesn’t really exist, but was created in a boardroom somewhere. When I’m talking about “housewives”, I’m not doing it in derision of housewives, but because it seems to be what boardroom types have in mind when they mention the “casual” demographic – that and legions of Uncle Rays who have yet to be exposed to the wonders of the internet, in 1999 or today.

I am talking in clichés because the very notion of “casual” (or hardcore, etc) is based on a string of clichés, with one aim, and the lowest of all: to sell. Left to the marketing consultants, all those housewives and Uncle Rays stop being independent-minded people with their own individual tastes and preferences to become “casual”, and I object to this just as I objected to much of the way traditional gamers are thought of, based on game advertising: Koster’s “Johnny”, more or less, 14 and dumb.

Same thing with that “folks in Ohio” thing. Maybe they would like traditional gaming, but can’t afford it. Maybe they want nothing to do with gaming at all. Maybe, like me, they don’t see a point in Facebook and therefore can’t play Farmville (red flag here: can’t play Farmville without logging in to Facebook; games should stand alone, not be a third-party appendix). But underneath it, I sense again the salesman’s pitch: they don’t know they want to play games, so we must sell the idea to them, like we did by selling a cell phone to every last person on the planet, even those who didn’t need one. Like selling refrigerators to Eskimos. And since they don’t know they want to play games, and because their time is limited, we must make it easy on them. Easy, familiar, and safe. Zero innovation, like summer comedies or romance novels.

What bothers me especially is that this discussion isn’t about gamecraft, and while the idea of games-as-art makes me suspicious, I want to hear about a loftier ideal than “whatever sells”. Because it’s the discussion of gamecraft which draws me here, not the marketing of games.

Oh, and it was only after posting that I noticed Cymbaline had posted again. You seem to make much of those “zombies”, in the context of WoW. If someone likes WoW, I have no problem with it. But I have a problem with those who are bored of the game, say so every chance they get, but keep on paying Actiblizzard its $15. If they want to stop playing but can’t, it’s called addiction, but I’ve seen too many WoW fanboys – who are no worse than other fanboys in themselves, except that they can muster a much larger crowd – treat the matter lightly while throwing the 11 million figure around every time they get. I see plenty I don’t like about WoW, and I’d gladly shrug it off, but I can’t do it if everyone else starts copying it every chance they get. My real problem with WoW isn’t with the game itself – which is rather well done for what it is – but with what it has come to represent: a model for the entire mainstream industry.

On the other hand, I’m not one of those elitists you decry. I tend to be a purist in some things – I still yearn for roleplaying in MMO’s, and I won’t use voice chat, both of which make me a pariah with hardcore elitists (but I’m hardly a roleplaying elitist). Sandboxes bother me when they’re used for griefing at the expense of everything else (I despised EVE), but I welcome the opportunities they offer to players. Come to think of it, I don’t really belong in any main category of players; if that makes me an elitist, I guess I’ll have to live with it.