The Gallery Is Closing. Please Take All Your Memories With You.

This is going to be a bit of a sad one. Also quite short, possibly, because I don't think I have whole lot to say about it. Sometimes you just have to make the effort, anyway.

So, I read yesterday that Occupy White Walls is closing down. For those who don't remember, which I'm going to guess is nearly everyone reading this, OWW was one of the oddest, most idiosyncratic of all MMORPGs. There was and still is nothing like it and most likely never will be, which may explain why it's going away.

The game, if we're going to call it that, which we probably shouldn't because if there was a game in there, I never found it, will shut down for good almost exactly a month from now, on 16 March. It hasn't had a bad run. It first became available to the public eight years ago although the exact date is a little hard to pin down. 

I can say when I started playing. I first downloaded the client in May of 2018, when it was in open alpha, although as I mentioned in the post I wrote about it at the time I'd seen the name floating around before then. 

OWW was all about art but one of the exciting features of the project was the way it claimed to use AI. Thatit was something everyone seemed both proud to be associated and excited to engage with then. How times have changed. 

Of course, AI back then didn't mean what it does now. The AI in OWW was called DAISY and all she wanted to do was learn what kind of art you liked and show you more of it. Who could be scared about that?

Well, maybe not scared but uneasy? Sure. 

I included a video, still available on YouTube, in which Fevir, the video-maker, describes the process of interacting with DAISY as "uncomfortable". He said it made him "uneasy" and put him "on edge". He specifically didn't like the way the machine not only seemed to learn about him but then was able to prove to him that it was possible to "like things you don't think you like". If only he'd know what was coming!

Forget about the AI, though, which in any case back in 2018 would have been a plain old algorithm given a cute name and gussied up to look smarter than it was. What was OWW like as an MMORPG?

As far as the RPG aspect went, it did have progression of a kind. There were no levels or skills per se but you could open up more features and extend the scope of your existing abilities by displaying more art and attracting more visitors. 

All your abilities related either to acquiring more pictures or expanding your building options. Both were essential. The be-all and end-all of the game was building art galleries and as MMO housing goes, OWW was right up there with the best.

As for the Massively Multiple part, I was never entirely sure how that fitted in. There was always the option to visit other players' galleries, but I can't recall there being any shared spaces where players actually met and hung out together. The visitors who came to look at the art in my gallery and paid me in-game currency for the experience were all NPCs. 

Or I thought they were. Honestly, I'm not sure how I would have known. Players and NPCs used the same abstract avatars. It was all a bit confusing... 

I didn't want to interact with others, anyway. I spent almost all my time building my one gallery and I was pretty happy with both the process and the result. As in all games with building systems, though, anything I was ever going to build was always going to look primitive compared to what others were able to put together. 

It was possible even in alpha to make some very impressive structures and spaces and after the game went into Early Access those options expanded enormously. People were able to replicate real-world galleries with considerable precision as well as to create their own spectacular display spaces that breached the laws of physics.

I did not do any of that. I went for a clean, minimalist look that felt fresh and open. I enjoyed being in that space a lot.

Even so, I didn't really spend that much time in the game. Steam tells me I racked up just short of eighteen hours, which would be a very decent run for a single-player game but wouldn't normally be enough to get you out of the starter zone in an old school MMORPG. And the last time I played was June 2022.

There were two reasons I stopped. The first was that I'd finished my gallery and although by then they'd added the option of building others, I didn't want to start a new one. As I said, I was satisfied with what I'd made. It felt finished.

The second and more significant reason I lost interest was the shift in emphasis by the developers from promoting what felt like an educational tool for discovering and learning abut fine art to creating a free-for-all in which nothing had cultural weight or value. I did not like the new direction.

The closure notice sums up the change of philosophy well, when it describes DAISY as "the AI that treats everyone's taste as equally valid" and talks about "connecting artists with audiences" and making art "accessible, democratic and personal". All very laudable ambitions, I'm sure, but the effect was to turn a guided tour through the history of art into a chaotic jumble of unfiltered images of indeterminate interest, quality or technique.

As the scope of the project expanded, I found it harder and harder to get DAISY to show me anything I wanted to see. Whereas at the beginning it had felt like being given a personalized lecture on great art, now it felt like being button-holed at a convention by a bunch of would-be artists, all intent on showing you their portfolios. 

That very much seems to have been the intention. OWW may be closing down but the company behind it, StikiPixels, is very keen to assure everyone the project will continue. At some point in the life of the MMORPG they span DAISY off into a side-project called Kultura, which gives you much the same experience, only on a website instead of in a game. Kultura carries on undaunted after OWW ends.

I'm guessing it must be a lot cheaper to keep a website up than to host an MMORPG because cost is the sole reason OWW is going away. The game has always been truly free-to-play, bringing in no income at all. Keeping the servers up costs $3,000 a month and the developers have been funding the servers out of their own pockets since 2022. Unsurprisingly, they've decided they just can't afford it any longer. (And if you look at the Steam Charts it's hard to see why they've kept going this long...)

It's a shame because, as I said, they had a great building game going there for a while. I imagine that was the aspect that interested them the least but leaning into it harder might have been the only way they'd ever have made some money.

They aren't giving up on the idea of melding art with gaming entirely, all the same. They say the original motivation to make OWW was a realization that there were no video games about art (Not true at all but it's what they said...) and eight years later "the idea that started all this hasn't stopped being exciting to us."

They're not promising anything but they might be back, one day. I hope so. Whatever OWW might not have been, it was original, ambitious and for nearly eighteen hours of my life, fun. They say, "if it happens, it might be a very long time from now, and it might look nothing like what you remember" and that's as it should be. Let's not go back over the same old ground for once.

In that spirit, I won't be revisiting my gallery to, as they suggest, "Take screenshots. Record videos. Stream it. Capture the spaces you built". I'd have to re-install the client for one thing and anyway I have plenty of screenshots and several blog posts to remember my gallery by already. 

And I know from experience that all those videos I take when a game is about to sunset just sit there, taking up hard drive space and gathering virtual dust. What's lost when an MMORPG sunsets can't be regained by watching a moving image. You have to be there.

I'm glad I was.