The MMORPG I want to be playing
Oct. 2nd, 2005 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bnewmanapparently still doesn't exist. Bummer. Well...
I'm not interested in paying an exorbitant amount of money up front, which rules out most commercial offerings. Also, I'm not interested in spending hours just leveling up before things get interesting — and I'm not interested in spending hours making friends and building contacts before things get interesting. Of course I would want to make in-game friends as part of playing a MMORPG. I would just hope that the game isn't pointless and boring before that. And, I want the opportunity to participate in building the world.
I've tried two MMORPGs, both very atypical — Second Life and Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. I found both enjoyable but unable to hold my attention, for different reasons.
Second Life is very simply a shared world. There is developer-created content, but it's not privileged over user-created content — the primary feature of the game is that the content-creation toolkit is exposed to the user. As a basic user (basic accounts are free), I can create objects in certain "sandbox" areas, and carry them on my person. Premium users (premium accounts start at $10/month plus property taxes) can own land in the game world, and can create permanent structures on their land.
All this means that, while there's plenty to do, there's nothing in particular to do. I can fly or teleport anywhere in the world, sightseeing through the three-dimensional digital dreams of various random people, but unless and until I master (not just learn) the toolkit, there's not much to accomplish. A plotless world means no hooks for role-playing, which means that my online identity is just me behind whatever mask I choose to wear, just like any other chat environment. I have no sense of the value of the in-world currency, so I'm reluctant to spend any of my modest weekly allowance. Maybe I'll drop by from time to time — it's a pretty world, and sightseeing is fun — but I don't see myself getting really involved.
What all this points to is this: In the real world, if I have a neat idea, and I want other people to notice or care, I have an uphill battle ahead of me. If I'm going to participate in an online community building a shared world, I want it to solve this problem for me. I'll discuss the implications of this when I get around to talking about the MMORPG I want to design.
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is a cute-cartoon-pirate-themed world in which skill tasks are simulated as puzzle games — which is, if you think about it, a pretty good solution to the problem of "How do we get smart kids with internet connections to spend time pretending to pump out the bilge of a wooden ship?" The puzzles are fun, and mostly bear a sensible thematic relationship to the task in question. So far, that'll hold my attention about as well as... a nice collection of puzzle games — and so it did.
But then what? Unless I find a crew to join that's actually a group of people I would want to hang out with, or until I save up enough in-game money (and in-game tokens that cost real money) to buy my own ship, there's not much to do but playing the same handful of fun but ultimately repetitive puzzle games over and over. Any tips on getting more out of YPP,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ultranurd?
If you know me, and you've been paying attention so far, you probably figured out by now that the upshot of all this is that I have an (outlandish, idealistic, and hopelessly vague) idea for an MMORPG. (Actually, even if you don't know me, if you've been paying attention you probably figured that out when I explicitly said so.) But, this entry is getting pretty long, and I have to go to the laundromat, so I'll reveal my nefarious plans in a later post...
I'm not interested in paying an exorbitant amount of money up front, which rules out most commercial offerings. Also, I'm not interested in spending hours just leveling up before things get interesting — and I'm not interested in spending hours making friends and building contacts before things get interesting. Of course I would want to make in-game friends as part of playing a MMORPG. I would just hope that the game isn't pointless and boring before that. And, I want the opportunity to participate in building the world.
I've tried two MMORPGs, both very atypical — Second Life and Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. I found both enjoyable but unable to hold my attention, for different reasons.
Second Life is very simply a shared world. There is developer-created content, but it's not privileged over user-created content — the primary feature of the game is that the content-creation toolkit is exposed to the user. As a basic user (basic accounts are free), I can create objects in certain "sandbox" areas, and carry them on my person. Premium users (premium accounts start at $10/month plus property taxes) can own land in the game world, and can create permanent structures on their land.
All this means that, while there's plenty to do, there's nothing in particular to do. I can fly or teleport anywhere in the world, sightseeing through the three-dimensional digital dreams of various random people, but unless and until I master (not just learn) the toolkit, there's not much to accomplish. A plotless world means no hooks for role-playing, which means that my online identity is just me behind whatever mask I choose to wear, just like any other chat environment. I have no sense of the value of the in-world currency, so I'm reluctant to spend any of my modest weekly allowance. Maybe I'll drop by from time to time — it's a pretty world, and sightseeing is fun — but I don't see myself getting really involved.
What all this points to is this: In the real world, if I have a neat idea, and I want other people to notice or care, I have an uphill battle ahead of me. If I'm going to participate in an online community building a shared world, I want it to solve this problem for me. I'll discuss the implications of this when I get around to talking about the MMORPG I want to design.
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is a cute-cartoon-pirate-themed world in which skill tasks are simulated as puzzle games — which is, if you think about it, a pretty good solution to the problem of "How do we get smart kids with internet connections to spend time pretending to pump out the bilge of a wooden ship?" The puzzles are fun, and mostly bear a sensible thematic relationship to the task in question. So far, that'll hold my attention about as well as... a nice collection of puzzle games — and so it did.
But then what? Unless I find a crew to join that's actually a group of people I would want to hang out with, or until I save up enough in-game money (and in-game tokens that cost real money) to buy my own ship, there's not much to do but playing the same handful of fun but ultimately repetitive puzzle games over and over. Any tips on getting more out of YPP,
ultranurd?If you know me, and you've been paying attention so far, you probably figured out by now that the upshot of all this is that I have an (outlandish, idealistic, and hopelessly vague) idea for an MMORPG. (Actually, even if you don't know me, if you've been paying attention you probably figured that out when I explicitly said so.) But, this entry is getting pretty long, and I have to go to the laundromat, so I'll reveal my nefarious plans in a later post...
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-06 04:50 am (UTC)One problem with the MUD and IF-standard text-based interface to a room-based world for what I have in mind is that it doesn't do vistas very well. Sure, you can write descriptions of vast, spreading vistas and distant landscapes — but if you can see for miles from here, that makes dozens of square miles of virtual world where, if anyone creates something that should be visible from a distance, they have to update your view description. Not really maintainable.
I want players to be able to see nifty things on the horizon (or the edge of the screen) and decide to go there, and that means graphics. Can you tell I'm a visual thinker?