New Tricks

As I was tabbed out, recovering from a bad pull where my Hunter's pet died twice, while the Hunter himself barely escaped with a sliver of life after two Feign Deaths and a long run to break aggro, I came across this interesting little item on Gamesindustry.biz.

There is, perhaps, nothing so very new in Raph Koster starting yet another MMO-focused project, although he's been rather quiet on that front of late. Metaplace, which closed its doors on 70,000 virtual worlds in 2009, seems to have been his last big MMO adventure. I confess I'd forgotten all about it.

It had also slipped my mind that Raph was Chief Creative Officer at Sony Online Entertainment until  2006 and that he worked on (or at least would have had oversight of) the first and second expansions for EverQuest II, Desert of Flames and Kingdom of Sky

All of which is very interesting as far as it goes but it's not what first came to mind when I read the names of the people Raph will be working alongside at Playable Worlds. Several sounded rather familiar but Greg Kostikyan's name really stuck out.

Didn't I remember him from the 1980s? What was it he did? Oh yes, looking him up he turns out to have been the guy behind several of the more unusual tabletop RPGs of the 1970s and '80s. For example, the notorious Paranoia and the much-hyped and well-reviewed Toon.

I played sessions of both and they were, shall we say, not a great success. It was very hard to get anyone to take them seriously enough for any actual gameplay to emerge. And, to be fair to Greg, that was kind of the point, particularly in Toon.

That's by the by. It wasn't the quality or pragmatic value of his work that struck me so forcefully so much as his age. I found myself thinking "surely this guy must be older than I am" and I'll be sixty-one in in November.

So I checked and no, he isn't older than me. He's all of nine months younger. Greg Costikyan was born in July 1959, making him sixty this year.

What about the other people mentioned in the article? How about Raph?

Raph's birthdate as given by Wikipedia is September 7, 1971. That makes him just shy of fifty years old. Eric Goldberg, co-founder (with Raph) of Playable Games, has a short Wiki entry that doesn't give his exact age, but earlier this year VentureBeat described thim as "a 35-year veteran of the game, consumer internet, mobile, monetization, and edtech industries", which means he has to be in his mid-fifties at least.

I though his name rang a bell, too. Turns out he was behind one of my favortite 1980s pen and paper RPGs, SPI's Dragonquest. That game had a class which I believe might have been called "Beastmaster". I could go downstairs and dig out my ancient, boxed copy to check but it really doesn't matter what the class was called so much as the way it provided the archetype for all the MMORPG pet classes I've played over the years.

DragonQuest was published in 1980. Unless Eric was in his teens when he wrote it (which I guess he could have been) that pushes him up to around sixty.

Mat Broome, comics artist and games designer (and ex of Ashes of Creation, it seems), would appear to be the baby of the bunch. He began his comics career in 1993 so he's most likely in his mid-to-late 40s now. The only other Playable Games staffer mentioned by name in the article is Brian Crowder, "an SOE veteran with stints at Electronic Arts and Zynga". His role is "lead server engineer" and, not surprisingly, he doesn't have a presence on Wikipedia so I have no idea how old he is. He is "a veteran" though, so let's assume he's at least in his 40s.

And where, you may well ask, am I going with all this? Well, somewhere quite awkward. I probaly wouldn't be saying it if I wasn't ancient myself.

I think it's still very easy to imagine the people behind the MMORPGs we play as being "young". Aren't video games made by young people for young people?

No. No, they're not. Not the big ones for sure and not most of the little ones, not in the MMORPG field, anyway. They're made by people in mid-life and now, as evidenced by Raph's latest venture, by those in, or about to enter, their senior years.

Does that matter? The same is true of movies and music and books, isn't it? Creative artists mature, don't they? Isn't some of the best work in the field often produced by writers and artists and musicians in the later phases of their career?

Yes, yes and yes again. But...

Those maturing and mature creators are rarely innovators. They perfect and polish and sometimes produce exquisite examples of their style... but that style is set. Occasional geniuses confound expectations by carrying their ability to surprsise and shock into later life but geniuses are rare.

There's a feeling that surfaces frequently among MMORPG fans; the genre is stale, flat, treading water before it goes under, perhaps for the final time. It's not a feeling I share but it's one I understand.

If the success of WoW Classic and the lesser but still significant successes of the EverQuest Nostalgia Train and Old School Runescape prove anything it's that a lot of people don't want innovation. They want, and quite reasonably so, well-made, familiar games that play the way they understand MMORPGs ought to play.

All new buildings above ten storeys high to be fitted with zeppelin mooring masts. It's the future of transport.

It's a fine and respectable market and it deserves to be well-served. It won't, however, push the genre forward. It won't innovate.

That was what the overhyped and underprepared EQNext proposed to do. It's what EQNext's would-be spiritual successor, Ashes of Creation would like us to believe it will do. It's what any number of smaller-scale projects wish or claim or believe they can do.

And all of them are being built and designed by "industry veterans", people with a proven track record in the industry. People who know what can and can't be done. Or think they do.

Raph Koster is a genuine thinker in the genre. He does know what he's about. Even so, I find it hard to imagine a team of people around my age creating "a completely new experience that will push the boundaries of persistent game worlds and social competitive play".

I rather think that will come, if it comes at all, from some twenty-somethings who don't know what can and can't be done. People with the deep conviction and confidence of inexperience. They won't have wikipedia entries or names that ring bells. They'll have energy and ideas and uncynical self-belief. That's how we got Ultima Online and EverQuest and Asheron's Call and EVE Online and...

When they appear we'll know them by their works, not by their reputation.

Meanwhile, best of luck to Playable Games. Dad Rock has been a huge commercial success. No reason Dad Gaming can't be, too.