MMO, What Are You Good For?

It's in everybody's mind, lately. What exactly do we want out of these games? What would make us all line up across the block to purchase a game, makes us antsy at work to play it, make us laugh manically to see happen? Ok, maybe that last one is just me.

I've been thinking about and discussing this a lot (I care about this alot *snicker*). You can blame this fellow. It's been a common topic at the dinner table and that's where my mind wanders on the daily commute.

I've spent a lot of time playing Bioware RPGs lately and I've enjoyed them. A lot of what they did there is what I needed to spend my time with. The battle and progression systems are just challenging enough to keep me playing but not so easy that I just don't care. But what really makes me play them is the story. And not the story in itself but the protagonists of such story. It's the connection I've made with them.

I was watching Mike finish up DA:O during the weekend. 'I can't believe you just told that poor woman to kill her own baby!' I said all flustered. He sneered and, without turning to meet my gaze, he answered: 'You do realize that there is no baby. There is no woman. There's just code.' Of course, he would say that. He's a software developer by trade. But, to me, there was a woman and she did have a baby and he had just killed it by proxy. Ultimately, I know it's just code but what they did with it made me love and hate, happy and sad.

Humans are drama whores by design. We crave emotional connections to things. It is how we find our mates and subsequently reproduce. We need to feel something. And this feeling thing releases endorphins that make us giddy. It is what we live for. Ok, it might not be the meaning of life itself but it's a pretty good thing. It is, if nothing else, a driving force.

I was in the shower thinking "how can I feel this emotional connection with an MMO?" Although I do not doubt that one day the entire spectrum and complexity of human emotion can be expressed in a coding language to then be reproduced by any common household computer, we're still a bit of a ways to go yet. So how can a setting that is massive by definition and must cater to the needs and desires of a multitude of players make me feel connected to it?

I then started thinking what could be taken out of a single-player RPG and be applied to an MMO. Like the concept of party. Although there usually is a main character in a s-p, they usually throw a few more controlable characters in the mix. 'What if you could control a whole bunch of characters and you went out like a mercenary bunch?' I said, jumping out the shower. 'The koreans did it,' was the answer I got. 'Ok but, what if you could, you know, start a business, like a gambling house! And then you could take your mercenary bunch and hunt down people who didn't pay!' Oh, I was on a roll! 'I did it,' he said. 'In Ultima Online. It was called Head Hunting. There was a player run gambling hall callled Salty Dog and they'd post bounties on people who didn't pay.' I then got lectured on how UO was the best game ever, with the possible exception of DAOC. 'If they revamped DAOC,' he went on to say, 'as in, gave it a complete makeover, that's what I'd be playing right now'.

As for me, I don't know. I never played either of those two games when they were hip, I can't see myself playing them now. Anyways, my idea with the mercenary bunch was along the lines of having characters you got to know and love/hate that didn't necessarily have to be other players. Lord knows there must've been many marriages concocted and ruined over MMOs and even in roleplaying servers it must be kind of awkward for, say, two straight men, one playing a girl char the other a boy char, to be all lovey-dovey to each other.

There once was this JRPG called Suikoden, the main focus of which was to gather 108 possible party members. Yes, that's right. You went around the world recruiting people to put in your castle to build your army. Each of them had a story (even if not a very deep one) as each of them was a "Star of Destiny". What if you could do something like that? And then you could pit your forces agains other people's recruits and friends and maybe even kill their love interest Oh, the drama. Nowadays, nothing in an MMO is lasting. No end-game redefines the game itself. And what's the point of getting to the end of the game if your efforts are worth jack shit? I wish we could change these worlds.

Or maybe not, I don't know. Sometimes I think I'm not very good at making things up. But the fact remains that I don't feel a connection with that guy that tells me to go kill five Goblins and then return to him with their trinkets. I feel, at best, annoyed. Get your own fucking trinkets. Why would anyone need creepy Goblin trinkets anyway? What sick dark rituals are you trying to make me an accomplice of?? Maybe I would know if I deigned to read the quests but I don't because I don't like you. I don't even know you. Why do I "grow as a person" (read gain experience) by collecting Goblin body parts and accessories for you? The more I think about it, the more all of this seems weird to me. I don't yet know what I really want from an MMO but what they are today is not it.