The Sandbox

The fervor behind the emergence of the first-person shooter ("FPS") game genre, began by Wolfenstein 3D and cemented by its successor, Doom, was in part because of the implicit promise: soon, I will be living in a virtual world. Heck, I'm already pretty much there, looking out through the eyes of a person as they have complete freedom of movement in a 3D world. Soon, I'll be in the cyberspace of Snow Crash. W00T.

That was 1993. Yeah, fourteen years ago. What happened? Why has the most significant interaction innovation in the genre been "jumping"? Why are "cyber-cafes" depressingly non-virtual places, where my consciousness manifestly does not exist in a luminiferous ether of an endless datastream? What went wrong?

In my previous post, I was talking about why games aren't "progressing" the way players imagine they would, why games seem to make only modest progress, when there's a clearly obvious "destination" that everyone can see. Why aren't we running full-tilt to that virtual universe, where everyone can do anything?

The first reason is that, well, worlds are expensive: worlds have a lot of stuff, and people need to make that stuff. The next has to do with the technology available to create those worlds. Moore's Law is fine and all, because it means polygons get shinier and bumpier as computers get faster. But why aren't the programmers of these games using this tech to its fullest advantage in the game design? They get most things right, but somehow every coder at every company is somehow too dumb to realize what players have been expecting for years.

The final post in my rant about why virtual worlds are only creeping along, instead of already being the total freedom universes we thoroughly expect them to be. Frankly, I'll be glad to be done with this topic: I should know better than to start things off with a multi-episode blogging saga.

To review: worlds are expensive to make, and the horsepower to run worlds of great sophistication is limited. Finally, and what I believe to be the most important – and interesting – reason why virtual worlds are slow to progress is that of interface and input devices.

No, it's not a wireless guitar for playing the most excellent Guitar Hero. It's the Messenger Kit for XBox360. Thirty bucks, and if Microsoft is smart, they'll quickly make it standard in all XBox360s.

Why standard? Because then developers will actually develop for it. Whole genres of multiplayer games open up when you have a keyboard to chat: games where lots of people want to talk, and network performance makes voice a non-starter. Now please excuse me while I go get a contract to put the Infocom adventures on XBox Live...

EA Mythic is reporting that over 300,000 people have signed up for the closed beta of their imminent 2008 Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG, MMO) release, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Yep, that's over a quarter of a million people. Forums of the current leading MMO's reveals numerous references to "jumping ship" once WAR (the accepted acronym for warhammer online) hits the shelves early next year.

Everquest 2 (EQ2) became tired two weeks after its release when World of Warcraft (WoW) hit the shelves. Are people tiring of WoW now too?

So, AOL owns the domain name "wow.com", which I'm sure was intended for different purposes. But now, according to TechCrunch, they plan to bend the domain from an exploration of exclamations of wonder (j/k), to a social networking site for World of Warcraft.

It's official, then. World of Warcraft is the brand name for wonder; and every time you catch your breath at the sight of something sublime or horrifying, you will ineluctably begin chanting the name of the most successful massively multiplayer role-playing game in history.

Apparently even reporters for NPR are playing World of Warcraft. Check out this piece that aired last week. The narrator discusses her "mature" guild in WoW, composed of Doctors, Lawyers, High School Students, etc.... She reports on a woman who changed states to live "nearer to her guild". There are a number of clips of guild members talking on ventrilo as they raid.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

"Gold farming", for those that don't know, is the sweatshop business of this new century. It is the selling of virtual assets, usually virtual gold, in MMOs for real money. As an MMO developer, I know how pernicious it is: sellers are hard to track down, because they create disposable accounts faster than you ban them. Ban one, and they already have a lineup of other accounts ready to go. They spam chat channels, they spam players with the in-game mail system, they farm resources with a ruthless efficiency, which makes legitimate players angry.

And now Blizzard has won an injunction against one company, in what one hope is the first blow that kills the whole gold farming industry.

Edward Castranova, author of Synthetic Worlds and virtual world scholarship community builder, spearheads a project at Indiana University called Arden.

Arden is the first in what the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at IU hopes will prove many efforts to bring controlled research methodologies to full societal scope. Essentially, Arden is a massively multiplayer online "game" set in Shakespearean England. It is named after the famous Forest of Arden from Shakespeare's play As You Like It where characters from a "mundane" town find themselves plunged into a fantasy realm that initially disorients them yet eventually proves to mirror the so-called real world in a social sense, bringing them a deeper understanding of themselves. The parallels to virtual world building were a little too charged for the developers to ignore, I guess.

[via Wired Game | Life] Someone I know went down to Texas to work on DC Universe, and finally there is some public sign of art on the game, by way of their MySpace page. Unfortunately, it's concept art by Jim Lee, nothing from the game itself. Despite the "it's still early" line you will read in press coverage, there has been at least a year of solid game asset development, you can be sure, so I'd love to see some screenshots soon, thanks.

[via Raph's blog] Dmitri Williams has just published his mammoth study of MMO players, specifically EQ2 players, by analyzing terabytes of data provided by SOE. Some of the results aren't what I would have expected.