It's the Games that Got Small, Part One

MMORPG.com author Jon Wood recently published an article addressing the prevalent negativity surrounding new MMO's from what is by no means a new perspective, but, coming from that site, a refreshing one: age. The author, who will turn thirty this year, related a personal anecdote which, I suspect, carried painful psychological undertones:

"I actually sat down recently with friends and discussed things that "kids today" would never know, or have never known. That, I fear, is the first sign that you're getting older. When you start to really notice (and worse start talking about) how different the world is today from "when I grew up," you just know that what "it" is has changed. You're just not in the demographic the world revolves around anymore."

Being approximately of the same age, I can attest that most of this rings true. There is, indeed, a major difference between my generation and the next, as mine is the last to have come of age, by and large, without the omnipresence of electronic communication. But that last sentence is jarring, for the simple reason that the world never revolved around our demographic -- at least, the world which matters, and computer games are not part of it.

Wood argues that what we liked in the games of our time no longer passes muster in game design boardrooms. This is quite a reasonable assessment; Nintendo's pursuit of the casual market is evidence enough of that. But I don't believe this explains everything.

The first reason for doubting this is my gaming pedigree. Despite my age, I never was much of a gamer, at least as far as MMO's are concerned, until 2007. This means I skipped the entire era over which I should now, like Wood, be waxing nostalgic. Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Star Wars: Galaxies and Dark Age of Camelot, to name just a few, are merely names to me, and as I never played them, my own conclusions on current games are not based on a comparison of the new with the old. I must add that, in spite of the disconcertingly rose-tinted transparency of "old school" nostalgia, when I look at games today, the flaws I find -- the solo focus, the heavy instancing, the "theme park" approach which prevents players from leaving any imprint on the game world, the instant gratification -- are mainstays of old schoolers' list of grievances. But why?

Wood's own explanation is a disappointment: "In "the old days," there was a much smaller audience of people looking to play MMOs. That smaller audience created an average gamer who was more "hardcore," wanted a challenging, open concept world in which to play and make their own adventures. As the market has widened, the average shifted to a more casual style of gamer that was more inclined toward a theme park experience than a sandbox." This will definitely resonate with those who blame all the current ills of MMO gaming on World of Warcraft's proverbial opening of the floodgates, but it's a little too pat to my liking.

The second reason stems from Wood's foisting the responsibility for MMO games' switch in focus on the players, not the developers and the publishers, while rightly skewering the myth that game development in the late nineties was a primarily philanthropic venture. When Wood writes that "it used to be that the way to make money making an MMO was to create a sandbox-style experience, the kind of game that today's "complainers" are clamoring for. That just isn't the case anymore. The generation that has come up behind us, as a whole, is looking for a different kind of gaming experience and unfortunately, catering to their whims and wants is more profitable than catering to ours", what is his evidence?

Put the two together, and you get the impression that it was the sacrosanct pursuit of better graphics at all costs, and the corresponding increase in budget, that led to the pursuit of the lowest common denominator -- or, rather, a lowest common denominator that is different from what it was a decade ago. At that time, today's lowest common denominator was still finding MMO's a little too nerdy to buy into the idea (especially with a credit card, online, through a company they probably did not know). Hence, it is probably the development of the industry, not generational conflict, which provides the key to any differences in gaming focus. If MMO's were still nerdish today, perhaps a World of Warcraft would not exist (heresy, I know), while EVE Online and Darkfall undoubtedly would.

On a similar note, Scott Jennings' blog Broken Toys recently hosted a debate around Metaplace's embrace of the Facebook-application gaming market, less than a month after its failure as a standalone virtual world. Behind Metaplace stands Raph Koster, formerly of Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies (in other words, as "old school" as it gets), and in some of the comments, there was a palpable sense of betrayal -- including, to be honest, from me, but not for the same reasons. Having played Ultima Online for less than a month, and never having played Star Wars: Galaxies, no stab wound was to be found between my ribs; but Koster's new-found dedication to the "casuals", after a few years of having the "hardcore" provide him with his bread and butter, seemed like a leisurely trek towards a dead end, abandoning one (admittedly small) demographic for another that might never materialize, so artificial and, yes, condescending, its construct appears to be.

More importantly, this sense of betrayal had nothing to do with age -- at least, not in the way Wood was describing it. The pursuit of the casual, in the Broken Toys thread, definitely had an eye on the middle-aged and perhaps even older people who, to paraphrase an essay of Koster's from 1999, had never been exposed to video games, but it is a party to which everyone is invited. Perhaps even thirty-somethings who, for the time being, still refuse to come to terms, not so much with the fact that youth has abandoned them, but that they are expected, with age, to develop enough of a sense of their social obligations to turn away from wasting every waking hour on what should never be more than a hobby (that is, unless you work in that industry).

But such considerations will be for another post.

Addition, October 2010: After posting this, the author of this blog boarded a vintage 1930's airplane and set off from Florida to explore the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. He was never heard from again. Or he may have been too lazy to continue an article he posted over six months ago, and about which he forgot all of what was meant to have been in its sequel, so he is coming up with a plausible reason to justify the abrupt conclusion of this piece.