Author: Vaga

   Ah, yes, yes! salaam, and good evening to you, my friend! Today we shall talk of MMOGs - massively multiplayer online games. Perhaps you would like to hear the tale? These are no ordinary games! They once changed the course of a young boy's life - he played Everquest for three days straight, collapsed of exhaustion and died. Now what the bloody f@#$ were his parents doing during this time, you may be so daring as to inquire? I mean how do you not check on your f@#$ing kid in three f#$%ing days?!!!

   But I digress from our story.

   It all began on a dark night, many, many moons ago, when some dude thought up the idea of having thousands of people crowd around in a single interactive game world. They'd use their untrusty modems and noisy phone lines, reasoned the dude, and they would log in, and play beautiful games together, and everyone would be happy. At the time, he definitely sounded like one dumb son of a gun, or a considerable loon, at the least.

   In actuality, however, the dude was quite astute. He was, if you will, an out of the box thinker: he looked at problems plaguing video games of the day (which have largely remained unsolved) and decided to try a different solution. What were these things of dumb that bothered him? One was AI. The dude was sick of the dumb computer. He didn't like the fact that playing a game for a few sessions meant being able to exactly foretell what the computer was going to do and how it was going to do it, whether that meant figuring out a pattern of attacks or exhausting the dialog tree of a computer-controlled character. The vast majority of gamers of the day pretty much learned to accept the problem, and only complained when the intelligence quotient of their game AI dropped especially far below that of a brass doorknob. But here came the dude (let's make him English and call him Roy, just for kicks), and said, look, rather than hope that smart AI technology will solve the problem one day (at this point Roy's friend Dick fell on the floor laughing, cuz, yeah, he heard of neural nets and knew THAT was going nowhere fast as far as games where concerned), let's try this on for size: a computer just isn't going to be as smart as a human being, even if that human being is just some snot-nosed kid staying up way past his bedtime. So why don't we just put people in games and forget this whole AI business?

   And then Dick and Roy though of some more ways in which multiplayer games would take gaming into the brave new world, programmed circles around their vacuum cleaner, and voila.

   Of course that's a very perverted and extremely freely interpreted view of history, and Roy wasn't quite thinking all that in as much as he was just basically tinkering with a university computer; but for the purposes of this article we'll just go ahead and accept all this as stone hard absolute truth anyway, because the fact remains: the invention of the MMOG was, in addition to sheer coolness value, a smart way to get around many of the problems plaguing video games. Besides bad AI and stagnant environments, MMOGs also offered potential solutions to all sorts of problems like static storylines, limited character interaction, software piracy, too much free time, and that especially big one, games that end. A text-based solution, at first, of course, but that was just a question of a little time. The future seemed so bright. To check whether it was really all it was cracked up to be, Roy arranged for a short term rental of a time machine from a benevolent alien civilization and...

   Fast-forward to the present...

   ...After the hum of our well-oiled time machine subsides, we look out the window. The year is 2005. With trembling hands we open up our almanac in which a bunch of new pages just appeared, flip right over wars, baseball series results, presidential elections and the rather thin section entitled "world news" (this is the red-white-and-blue edition after all) and right to the gold-rimmed pages entitled "MMOGs".

   It's a fine mess we find ourselves in.

   We are in the third (by some counts) generation of MMOGs; there was Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, then some of these got a shiny "2" tacked on after the name; and there was also Dark Age of Camelot, and Lineage, and Star Wars Galaxies, and some smaller contenders had even had time to get cancelled (and some after actually going live for a few years). And, in fact, practically every publisher of respectable ego and wallet size has announced a MMOG at one time or another.

   You'd think things had some time to improve and evolve. Poor Roy.

   Let's kiss the ugly truth straight on the lips: for the most part, the only things that have really improved from the time Roy sent his first multi-player commands over them old vacuum tubes are lag time and graphics. Hack-and-slash game cores still run the show, decades old magic systems differentiate themselves largely by the color of fireballs and acid blasts, and many noble, yet feeble attempts at online communities centered around something other than monster mashing have ended up in the dust.

   But how can that be, ponders Roy in utter bewilderment. What seems to be the problem?

   In many ways, the things plaguing the MMOGs of today are the same things that plague regular games: a bad lack of original design. What's worse, what's driving that lack of originality is not, contrary to the popular belief, a lack of original thinking on behalf of game designers and developers. What's driving it is the fact that games have become a business (which in itself is an oxymoron by some measure) - a business that enjoys a very high growth market. And businesses in very high growth markets tend to fall under the spell of that evil, foul-breathing monster - Darth Good Enough.

   When Darth Good Enough was a little boy, he created games for fun, and played them himself, and with his friends, and he wasn't so worried about 3D acceleration, and he certainly wasn't very worried about development costs and profit margins. He wanted to create games that did what other games couldn't do - not games that leveraged (disgusting word isn't it?!) somebody else's previously used ideas to save money and accelerate time to market. Even when he was in his teens, and had already learned the value of money, the future Darth Good Enough still (for the most part) knew where his priorities lay. But just then he had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting Darth Big Publisher, a master of the dark side of the Force, who didn't know how to make games, but knew how to sell them. And it was then that the name Darth Good Enough was bestowed upon the young apprentice, and thus began the Era of the Unoriginal Game.

   And MMOG? Oh poor MMOG! He was the most unfortunate, the most scarred, the most bastard child of the dark times! Sure, it seemed at first like he stood a chance of evading his dark fate. Sure, the Force was strong with him, but so much darkness was around, and so heavy was the temptation. For, if he fell to the Dark Side, young MMOG had the power to really raise profit margins, and there was nothing more important to Darth Big Publisher than fat, juicy profit margins. And so Darth Big Publisher tracked down young MMOG and, under the guise of friendship, introduced him to the now old and rather wrinkly Darth Good Enough in a bid to win him over to the Dark Side.

   Is all that is good in MMOG soon to be subsumed by the evil shadow of his powerful oppressor? Perhaps. Certainly, MMOG has already succumbed to a few monstrous creations, and the world has already had to fight off many Attacks of the Clones. But a few stalwart fighters still remain, and day in and day out they do battle to save the light of Originality in MMOG. Their names are silly, and their sales are few. But maybe, just maybe, not all is yet lost for our young hero...

   ...to be continued...



Episode II >>