Last week Raph Koster posted a controversial article entitled Are Virtual Worlds Over? It was a reply to a more readable article by Cnet’s Dan Terdiman. In order to even try to decipher Koster’s insightful article which is loaded with lofty academic language, first you need to read Terdiman’s piece.
I’ve long been a huge fan of virtual world visionary Raph Koster. His A Theory of Fun For Game Design is a classic book on game design and being well versed in it probably helped me land my first job as a game designer.
However, I have to respectfully disagree with the implications of his article that somehow the developers of virtual worlds and MMOs have to admit defeat and realign their thinking to the mindset of companies like Zynga who produce extremely profitable social networking games like Farmville and Farm Town.
While there are some valuable lessons developers can learn from Farmville (which I hope to cover in a future article) one of them isn’t that we should give up on the importance of realizing the dream of creating robust, exciting, living and breathing virtual worlds/MMOs.
Where’s the Innovation?
One of Raph’s opening statements in his recent article troubles me and it’s his reply to Terdiman’s lament of where’s the innovation?:
The innovation lies in making something that matters to ordinary people.
Maybe I’m wrong but what he seems to be saying here is that virtual world developers need to appeal to the lowest common denominator out there. So instead of having ordinary people rise to the occasion and get involved in something that challenges and uplifts them, the developer is the one that needs to move toward the consumer.
While that may be a good strategy if you are in the service industry or selling toilet paper, it’s inappropriate for new entertainment product development. It is that kind of follow the trend thinking that is the reason why there is so much uninspired copy cat swill being produced in most segments of the entertainment industry.
By applying Raph Koster’s current theory of innovation Ultima Online, EverQuest and surely World of Warcraft would never have existed. We’d still be playing primitive games on GEnie, CompServe and MSN because that is what ordinary people at the time were doing online.
Regarding Raph’s quote, I would add one word to improve it :
Innovation lies in making something extraordinary that matters to ordinary people.
Now that is something I who aspires to build a virtual world could believe in and might even make an excellent company slogan. It puts the emphasis properly back on the creation rather than potential consumers of said creation. Instead of the developer moving toward the consumer, the consumer gravitates toward the product.
So Much for Learning
As many know, Raph is the leading proponent of learning is fun as a theory of game design. But there is precious little emphasis on learning and mastery in this new virtual world order because this kind of product is created expressly to satiate the needs of ordinary people — the consumer. A virtual world should not be conceived and concocted like a time limited Burger King sandwich.
I figured out Farmville in about 60 seconds. What is there to grasp beyond the simplistic mechanics of plant vegetables, wait, harvest crops, purchase credits from Zynga, and buy more vegetables routine? Where is the sense of challenge when every obstacle or problem can be solved by purchasing a “solution” from Zynga?
My conclusion is that a pick up and p(l)ay game such as Farmville has no semblance of authentic learning and “a ha” moments that you would find in a serious virtual world or MMO.
Imagine if this unambitious approach was taken for a child about to enter Grade One in primary school. All of the materials would be created to appeal to their current level and there would be no challenges and learning for the student. It would be like being stuck in a perpetual Sesame Street kind of hell. The child would never develop and grow under this kind of system and would remain developmentally arrested.
Part of the mystique and wonder about previous virtual worlds and MMOs was that you had to figure them out. There were new lands and new monsters to discover and game mechanics, class mechanics, social and economic complexities to learn and master. What are the comparable challenges about figuring out social networking services like Twitter and Facebook? Get as many followers and friends as possible by being witty, funny and cool in the process?
I remember when I first started playing EverQuest. It was a new world full of mystery. There was nothing like it on the market. I had no clue about how the inner mechanics of the game worked or *how* I should play it. I was pretty much in the dark about everything but it challenged me at every level but you know what? I loved being challenged and immersed in that strange fantasy world and so did hundreds of thousands of other people and we happily paid SOE for that unique privilege.
How True Innovation Happens
It’s a fool’s errand to try to look at social trends and then to devise a virtual world solution to fill the needs of that demographic. Innovative art and entertainment is never created by sampling public opinion or focus groups. Revolutionary products such as the iPod and iPhone were not conceptualized this way either, rather they were conceived from the leadership and drive of one person Steve Jobs.
Innovation is never driven by the consumer; the consumer always follows and never leads. The reality is that people don’t know what they want until they see it. Who would have ever imagined that before the advent of Starbucks that people would have paid $4 for a cup of coffee? People will pay for quality but they can’t pay if the product doesn’t yet exist.
While necessity is considered the mother of invention, it’s often the fearless dreams of rugged individuals who are its true parents. One such example for me personally is in the MMO realm. Did I have a *need* for EverQuest before it existed? No, as I was happy enough playing single-player games. It was the existence of EverQuest itself that created that hitherto unanticipated need within me.
Admittedly, innovation is not common and is more like a perfect storm. It comes from the belief and passion of bold individuals who have a dream, want to see it realized and are in positions of power to make it happen. Rarely does it come by putting your finger in the air to detect which way the wind is blowing and jumping on board the current bandwagon du jour.
Build it and They Will Come
That popular line from the baseball movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner says it all. Instead of abandoning the dream of a compelling and meaningful virtual world we need to create one worth being a part of, something that contains enough dramatic premises that ordinary people *want* to be a part of. Virtual worlds cannot be sterile sandboxes and expect to be viable. Instead they must be compelling destinations with shared challenges where people can escape to and live out their fantasies.
We need a virtual world paradigm shift equivalent to the impact that iPhone has made on our culture. We need a MMO so magnetic that people will be irresistibly drawn to it. (Who knows, Blizzard may be crafting this new MMO as we speak.)
As I said in my comment to Raph’s article:
The problem as I see it that nobody has really tried to make a proper virtual world with modern day technology and current AAA+ production standards. Virtual worlds as a concept has not actually failed. Rather it’s just been in hibernation because it has not really been seriously attempted by anyone.
One of the reasons it has not been attempted is because of the high cost of production compared to the low cost of Flash games like Farmville. Here’s a great quote from the Terdiman article:
The cost of building 3D worlds and “the return on investment is simply not there,” Sherman said. “It’s cheaper to build a Flash game or cheaper to build an iPhone app…If you have an existing audience that you can tap into and know you can pour a lot of eyeballs [into] quickly, then it makes sense to build a [low-fi] virtual world” like Webkinz.
Yet Blizzard spent $50 million creating the MMO WoW and has since earned billions as a result of that initial investment and is basically the only thing keeping Bobby Kotick’s Activision profitable right now. Still, skittish investors want a fast return for their dollars and a 4 year development time cycle may be too long to wait leaving the MMO realm in the clutches of companies that can self-publish like Blizzard and SOE.
Conclusion
Whether you agree with Raph or not, his article has been a catalyst for a lot of soul searching and subsequent good discussion.
If you had told me that 11 years after the introduction of EverQuest that the future of virtual worlds was in a low budget, mindless game about planting vegetables I would have had laughed at you. Even harder to believe is seeing the notion of virtual worlds being marginalized by one of its pioneers and being reduced to marketing gimmick in order to help sell a cheesy game on Facebook designed to suck you dry of your hard earned money.
Interestingly enough, one of the more reasoned voices on this debate has been 38 Studio’s Steve Danuser who’s actually making a real MMO put it all in good perspective. People who have been promoting social worlds like Raph Koster might have an axe to grind and are using the success of Farmville and Farm Town to make their own theories and projects look viable in the process.
The sky is not falling at least for those of us that believe in game based virtual worlds such as MMOs.
We need not worry about Farmville and social networking services because they will never be a serious substitute for AAA+ virtual worlds like WoW and those yet to come. Games like Farmville are outliers off on their own trendy bizarre tangent; they will never threaten traditional MMOs.
Think of Farmville as the Blair Witch Project of the video game industry: produced on a low budget and very successful. But, did that movie have a long-term impact on the film industry? No, it was a flash in the pan that at the time it was all the rage just as Farmville is now.
Besides, even if phony virtual worlds like Farmville continue to thrive, I see no reason why both genres can’t exist independently of each other. And there’s every reason to believe that perhaps once people tire of the juvenile mechanics of growing your own virtual Chia Pet they may be ready to grow up and graduate to a serious virtual world.
-Wolfshead
Good post.
As a clarification, though, my post didn’t say that developers should all be making social games. My post wasn’t telling anyone to “jump on the bandwagon”. The goal of it was to tell devs to at least open their eyes and PAY ATTENTION. Particularly when we have traditional MMO developers trying to make free to play games (like Free Realms for example) by using developers that hate social games/Facebook games. It is just a shame seeing great game developers dismissing an entire genre of games, yet trying to make their games “more social” or “more accessible.” There is proof in pudding just waiting, but because game devs are so dismissive of the Facebook/casual game genre, they’re taking shots in the dark when their bosses want them to make games and features that target that audience.
That’s all. I’m a huge fan of market research.
Thanks for the clarification Cuppycake. I agree with you, I think MMO devs to have much to learn from social networking games. I also believe that part of the problem is that most of the devs are male and intent on producing content for other males while ignoring what females like. Still I don’t want to stereotype males either because not all males can subsist on a steady diet of killing things — some of us like to craft and do other things as well 🙂
While I think combat is probably here to stay in most game based MMOs I think there is plenty of room for a broader range of activities, pursuits and challenges within virtual worlds. Hey if Farmville can bring in millions of dollars based on the simple act of planting a garden then I think that MMO should take notice.
I feel like you are reading more into the first statement there than I intended. The innovation response was more to point out that accessibility IS a valid axis on which to innovate.
I actually think that what we are going to see is convergence. The farming in Farmville is not that different from the resource harvesting in SWG. If the social games continue to pick up MMO-like elements, they will end up as rather “worldy” MMOs.
Fair point Raph. I was afraid that I may have read a bit too much into that quote. However, this emerging trend has raised some serious issues that a virtual world apologist like myself feel compelled to raise. If anything your article has provoked some spirited defenses of virtual worlds and forced many of us to re-examine what we believe and why.
Point of curiosity: education today is already a lowest-common-denominator fascist No Child Left Behind hell. Jes’ sayin’…
Great article, Wolfshead. I think the crux is the line:
“Innovation is never driven by the consumer; the consumer always follows and never leads.”
To which I can only offer a hearty “abso-bloomin’-lutely”! There’s certainly a place for “me too” design inasmuch as it fosters iterative improvement, but the biggest leaps of progress are made by those who aren’t afraid to fail, and who go out and change things, rather than following the herd.
Tangentially, I saw “The 5000 Year Leap” in your reading list lately. What did you make of that? I can’t help but think that said book has a few innovations listed within. (I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to.)
I highly recommend the 5000 Year Leap! As someone who migrated here from a socialist country, I can tell you from firsthand experience America really is an amazing country full of opportunity. Read this book and you’ll find out that “America” was no accident and the result of careful planning by some rare and insightful men.
One problem is that innovation isn’t binary. Let’s take the iPhone as an example: it was built off the concept of cell phones. It didn’t innovate the core concept of a mobile telephone, it improved upon it in several ways that was pleasing to customers. (There’s also a large amount of influence given the status of owning Apple products based on the history of Mac computers, the iPod, etc. , but we’ll ignore that for this discussion.)
Looking at WoW (and most Blizzard products), they very rarely innovate. As I said in a previous comment, I think Blizzard’s strength is in recognizing what works well then pulling elements into a game and polishing them to a fine shine. While there were a few usability improvements in WoW, it was obviously heavily influenced by previous games. You see this pattern with many Blizzard products, and they are one of the most successful developers today.
I wrote about the dilemma between innovation and polish before so I won’t rehash those arguments here.
I certainly do agree that true innovation comes from giving the customer what they didn’t know they wanted. The problem is that it’s much easier said than done. You have to go through a lot of flops before you find that magical bit of innovation that works. Even then, someone with bigger guns like a Blizzard might just come along and polish you into second place.
My thoughts.
I just wondered if before the year 200 [~when Ultima Online and EverQuest were created) money was plentiful. For some reason it seems to become more and more expensive to create a MMO, even if the core design follows well known schemes.
I do not think there was any guarantee besides the belief of the makers that their games would rock and sell well. Today studios are either timid (are the stakes/money involved higher?) or simply don’t have/dare to bring anything really new to the table. And then wonder when people go back to WoW or their other favorite MMO after a month.
Guild Wars was VERY rough at release. Respeccing was a pain, people did not all become pvp players in the endgame as the devs apparently expected and so on. But it was really something new, cool and different. It is still very popular, just check the charts which games people play (XFire e.g.).
Today I see more experimentation how to milk more money from the customer than new kinds of games. There is the old subscription model, the never (?) copied Guild Wars model, F2P with micro-transactions and the “Cryptic” model, box sale+subscription+micro transactions…^^
Maybe SoE gets bold and tries a completely new kind of EverQuest based on the Free Realms browser-engine?
Tangent:
By the way, if you want to see how trying to figure out what the customer wants can ruin a game, see Cryptic and Star Trek Online. The game is not a “classic” MMO and they really did not figure out how to make their ground missions a bit more fun so far. But they already copied the daily quest and badges idea. I think you can do that if you have people who love(d) your game and just play on like automatons for badges (WoW). The usual demotivated go-go PUG in the dungeon finder that just wants to get stuff done to get some badges – till they have every badge gear to … well raid what they could already raid before.
I think Cryptic’s Star Trek Online will become a fine example of devs asking their players and trying to find out what they want in surveys, copying more elements from other games even if they don’t fit that well and reacting to the *supposed* wishes of the playerbase.
To be told in the end that it all sucks… 😛
By the way …. http://bit.ly/a1IxjL is this the kind of casual social game of the future? I would rather say a completely different genre/audience.
But this apparently is where money can be made. Dung is fertile.
I think there’s a lot of similarities between MMORPGs and the film industry. Just because a film of genre X does well and films from genre Y haven’t done so well, it doesn’t mean that all films ever made in Y are going to fail and X are going to succeed.
I can point out numerous examples from Hollywood franchises. For instance, by the mid 90’s everyone thought comic book films would never be successful but, low and behold, along came some really well-made, good films like Blade, X-Men and Spiderman and they smashed the box office. We then saw a whole spate of successful comic book based films…. but they weren’t successful because of their genre, they were successful because they were *good* films.
I think the exact same thing applies to MMOs. Developers/publishers think that because WoW was successful, every game must be like WoW. They think because Farmville is popular, every game must be like Farmville. I think that’s nonsense. I think if a game is GOOD, then it will do well. Genre or media or whatever has nothing to do with it, it only matters if the product is well-made and enjoyable.