Don't Give Up

Earlier this week, over at Massively OP, Eliot Lefebvre posted a deeply nihilistic piece on the mortality of MMOs. The truism that "every... MMO is going to shut down" doesn't get us very much further than "everyone living is going to die" or "the sun is going to burn out"so I'm not sure quite what demons he was trying to exorcise but he sure sounded angry about something.

Yes, nothing lasts forever. We get that. The world will burn. What we want to know, we never can - until it happens: when?

There's an obvious flaw in the argument that says because "no MMOs...last forever" we must compose ourselves immediately for the inevitable day when the last server closes. The flaw in that line of thinking is that, while our favorite MMO will indeed not last forever, it may very well last longer than we do.

If we revert to observable fact rather than emotional grandstanding, the history of the genre to date suggests that MMOs, by and large, are rarely in imminent danger of closure. Meridian 59 is already in its third decade.  Ultima Online and Lineage will soon follow it, with EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot and the rest of the pack not far behind.

Without question, all of those games have outlived many who once played them. More than fifteen years ago I met people in both EQ and DAOC who were then in their sixties. They may still be playing now, in their seventies and eighties. I know I hope I will be. Whether they, or I, make it that far, it's a certainty not everyone will.

When it comes to fears of mortality it seems to me that a more appropriate concern isn't whether what you love will last long enough for you to enjoy it to the full but at what point you may have to concede that it has more fullness than you'll ever get to experience. You will end, it will go on. You'll never know what happens next.

I had a conversation with someone I work with yesterday about Dr. Who. I'm not a Whovian but I have watched the show for almost all my life. I was five years old when it began and I'm told I saw the first show when it was broadcast in 1963 although I can't remember it.

Dr. Who was cancelled, apparently for good, in 1989, by which time I had been following it, on and off, mostly on, for more than a quarter of a century. At that point I thought, if I thought about it at all, that I'd had all the Dr. Who I was going to get.

I was, of course, entirely mistaken. First there were the legacies. Old shows existed, in fragmented part, on video. There had been novels, audiobooks, movies: fragments a devoted follower might shore against their ruin.

More than a past, though, the show had a present. The rights owners may have deemed it unprofitable or, more likely, a poor fit for their current portfolio, but there were still creatives who felt it could be a good vehicle for their talents and there was, always, an audience willing to encourage them to prove it.

In the decade and a half between the last transmission of the original run and the first episode of the reboot there was a perpetual stream of new content, everything from radio shows to comics. Interest never abated. Eventually the series returned to television, where it has prospered for almost as long as it was absent and shows every sign of continuing to do so.

As Conan Doyle discovered to his irritation, popular creations are hard to kill. What's more, despite the best efforts of lawyers, intellectual property cannot readily be ring-fenced. If a creation is popular enough it will outlive not only its creator but the statute of limitations on its exclusivity.

Many of the great successes of the 18th and 19th Century, all now in the public domain, continue to live a vibrant afterlife, often one more vivid and certainly more varied than they enjoyed while their creators survived. Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Mr Darcy,  Dorian Grey, they all stride confidently onward into the 21st century.

Video-gaming is a younger medium than the novel, movies or even comic books but I see absolutely no reason to believe it won't follow exactly the same trajectory. There will be reboots and remakes and re-imaginings as each generation seeks to rediscover, revisit or re-invent its own past.

The process is self-reflexive, self-perpetuating. Millennials who grew up watching Next Generation or Deep Space 9 take the torch from the Late-Boomers/GenXers who grew up with original Trek. Once momentum builds the train is hard to stop.

Video games in general and MMOs in particular tend to identify less with characters, more with settings or styles. There are relatively few Marios or Lara Crofts and fewer of those seem to make the transition across the generations that we see so often in older media.

When it comes to franchises, though, there seems to be no such reluctance. Eliot chides "Do you like Final Fantasy XIV? It’s going to shut down" but I notice he doesn't make any such claims for the Final Fantasy franchise itself, even though its ultimate demise is as assured as that of all things.

There was much wailing and rending of garments when Daybreak Games cut the rope on EQNext but it would be a brave and most likely foolish commentator who'd take that commercial decision to signal the end of EverQuest as a commercial entity. Franchises measure their lifespans not in decades but in centuries; myths in millennia.

Commerciality is anyway only a part of it. Yes, when MMOs cease to make money for their owners they will be ended. As NCSoft so inelegantly demonstrated with City of Heroes, even making a profit isn't always enough to keep the lights on.

Life isn't all about making money, though, and neither is running an MMO. Sometimes MMOs carry on even though you can't imagine how they could. Alganon is still running. So is The Hammers End. Sometimes they become community projects and grow.

Even if there's no official afterlife, when the money stops coming in it doesn't mean the games just disappear. Leaving aside the ever-growing hinterland of Let's Plays and other love-letters from the past to the future, from the sanctioned to the forbidden to the apparently overlooked there's a whole shadow world out there, where lost MMOs live on in more than just memory.

It may be orders of magnitude more difficult to create fan-made MMOs than fan fiction but it's not so hard there aren't people doing it. And just as tribute bands can not only pull a crowd but eventually become legitimized by osmosis so the emulator may eventually become the new original.

It's true, as Eliot says, that "your favorite MMO is going to die". It dies every day. The World of Warcraft you play tonight isn't the WoW you played last month, last year, last decade. If what you seek is stasis then you're ever out of luck and, really, what were you doing looking here in the first place?

It's also very sadly true that not all MMOs attain the critical mass required to sustain a life beyond their immediate commercial end... or so I was about to suggest.

I lack faith. The universe chides me.

Searching my memory for a long-forgotten MMO to use as an example I hit on Crowns of Power. I googled it to be sure I'd remembered the name correctly. I had. Almost unbelievably it's back.

Read the MMORPG.com story explaining how this supposedly unloved, unlamented, scarcely noticed MMO failed to go quietly into the night. It exemplifies everything I've been struggling to express. I thought I had more to say but after that I don't think there's anything I can add.