(Another) Another World

Tobold has a post up which touches on something that doesn't get mentioned often enough in most discussions of mmorpgs that I've read over the years. He's writing about the founding of Lightforge Games, a new games development studio started by a bunch of people you may or may not have heard of from a bunch of studios you very definitely will - Epic, BioWare, Zenimax, Blizzard. 

As expressed in the PCGamer interview Tobold links to, the pitch is vague in the extreme: "a new cross-platform, social videogame where players have the power to create worlds and tell stories in unprecedented freedom" combining "elements from Minecraft or Roblox with tabletop RPGs to form a new way to play roleplaying games". 

They go on to talk about how they intend to "revolutionize RPGs", which is pretty much the standard new company boilerplate these days. PCGamer sounds unconvinced: ""Revolutionize RPGs" is bold and vague... Roblox is more of a platform for making and playing games than a game in itself. So, are we looking at a creation tool and client for digital tabletop adventures? Or will it be more like a player-driven MMO with custom building? Something in between?"

It's probably wise to be suspicious if not outright cynical about claims of this nature. We've heard them so many times. Everyone plans on getting right all the things they see being done wrong. You'd hope so, too. No-one intends to repeat the maistakes of the past.

The "About" page on the official website is positively angelic in its positivism. I'm not knocking it. Far better to articulate aspirations and risk being called to book when you fail to justify them than not to have them in the first place. 

No, I'm not going to criticize or even critique Lightforge's intentions, nor speculate on their prospects. At this stage my only interest in the new company is as a catalyst, spurring Tobold into saying out loud something I've been thinking for a while: "The fundamental reason why virtual worlds in MMORPGs never really felt like living, breathing worlds is that most of the inhabitants aren't there most of the time. We live in the real world 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, for up to a hundred years or so. We live in virtual worlds for the few hours per day that we have the time for them, maybe not every day, and a lot of players inhabit a virtual world just for a few months before moving on to the next game."

It ties in with a reply I made to Everwake's comment on my Bless Unleashed first impressions post. I said, quite brutally, "I think we tend to expect far too much of games... Why we think every new mmorpg has to be worth dropping everything else to play for years beats me. It's more than enough for a game to be serviceable and entertaining". 

So often we allocate all the blame to execution when expectation is the real problem. It's not just that everything can't be perfect. Everything can't even be great. Some things have to be mediocre and some things have to be bad or how will we even be able to tell the difference?

It reminds me of that joke Garrison Keillor was so proud of he used it at the start of every episode of The Prairie Home Companion: "Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." And that's what we do all the time. Expect every new game to be above average.

It's bad enough when we're talking about single-player, standalone games with a beginning, a middle and an end but when it comes to mmorpgs the whole thing gets so much worse. Now every new game doesn't just have to be better than all the games that came before it, revolutionary, mould-breaking, innovative and original. 

No, because it's an mmorpg, or even a virtual world, it has to be capable of fulfilling all our gaming needs indefinitely. It has to be that One Game we'll play forever, a world so fascinating, so compelling, so satisfying, we'll have no choice, no desire to be anywhere else, ever again.

The "virtual world" concept, which seems to be coming back into vogue after a long time out of fashion, incorporates in its very name the idea that these are places where we can live. Not visit, not play, not goof around when we're bored until something better turns up: live.

Really? Even if that was possible, is that what we want? Is that what we ought to want?

When these discussions happen someone always brings up Star Trek. The Holodeck, that simulator where they go so the production team or the writers or the stars can get a break from space opera for a week or two, wear normal clothes, or at least different clothes. If mmorpgs were like that, someone always says, then I'd be happy. I'd never want to leave.

Star Trek is an outlier. In almost all the science fiction stories I've read, where there's a device that allows people to send their mind into a virtual, fantasy environment and "live" there indefinitely, that's the pivot of a plot about the dangers it entails. It's never fluffy bunny funtime in there. Or, if it is, it sure as hell isn't outside and that's going to be the moral.

Where is it we get these ideas, that a single mmoprg should be able to fulfill all our entertainment needs for years and years? From experience, some of us. From folk memory, the rest.

We all, or most of us, remember that feeling when we first discovered online fantasy gaming. Or mmorpgs. Or virtual worlds. When it was so overwhelmingly new, different, intense and strange we couldn't think of anything we'd rather be doing. 

Many of us timed it so that we didn't actually have an awful lot else we did have to be doing. School and college allow for an awful lot of free time. We were able to spend long enough in our virtual worlds that they started to feel more real than the mundane lives we returned to for those unhappy moments when the servers briefly went offline.

Do we go on playing those same games, our first mmorpg loves, year in, year out, thirty, forty, fifty hours a week? Thankfully, no. Most of us, anyway. We wind down, we cut back, we move on. 

Not all of us turn our backs on our old homes, delete all our characters, give away our stuff. Many of us keep popping in to see how the old place is getting on. Sometimes we stay for a while. Some of us never entirely leave. But we don't spend all our time there. We don't live there forever. 

And I don't see the people at Lightforge expecting that we should. We're the ones doing that. It's something many of us expect of ourselves and of the developers who design our games. We assess the success of each new mmorpg by how able it is to hold players indefinitely, while at the same time we complain about the methods they employ to make it happen.

What else are they supposed to do, though? Mmorpgs take five years or more to make. They cost millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. If one doesn't catch the attention of the critical, demanding audience, that's it. Game over. Can't just knock out another.

Or can you? Isn't that what we see with the inexhaustible flow of identical games from the East? Bless being replaced by Bless Unleashed just the latest example. The annual announcements of the slates of new mmos. Games that don't intend to be anyone's forever game. Just some fun for now, enjoy it then move on. There'll be another along shortly.

If the games are filled with tricks to make us keep playing, why is that? Because we want to stay and they don't want us to leave. Is it mutual self-interest or co-dependency? 

For a couple of months this year all I wanted to do almost every day was play Valheim. It worried me at the time. I mentioned it once or twice. I knew, though, that Valheim had an endpoint. I got there and my interest dimmed and I stopped. I'm glad about that. 

I also said at the time that playing Valheim was very close to the feeling I remembered of playing EverQuest twenty years ago. It's a great feeling. Of course I want it back. I also want to know it won't last forever.

I wish Lightforge well in their quest to revolutionize the way we play rpgs online. Raph Koster, too, and all the other teams working on projects they hope will literally make our dreams come true. I wish them well but I hope they're not quite as successful as they tell us they're going to be.

I'm not sure we're ready for a true virtual world quite yet.