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The Divorce of MMO and RPG
Jeff wrote to mention a new article up on Gamergod.com discussing the divorce of MMO and RPG. From the article: "At close inspection, their marriage reveals what is sadly becoming the new American love tragedy. Two people with little in common, more in lust than anything resembling love, decide to tie the knot. The rest is a classic example of what happens when two people leave the idea stage of marriage and enter the reality of marriage, and find out they don't like, let alone love, each other."
Most geeks don't understand what marriage is, let alone divorce.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
What makes a good RPG? To the author of the article, it seems to be a game ritch in depth; meaty dialogue, engaging story, the need to live more completely in another world. As he points out, this may not be a good game to pair with the MMO crowd (or most humans, for that matter). Excellent games I've played that contain all of what the author values most have been single player: (spanning across my own lifetime) Quest for Glory all the way up through Morrowind.
There are, however, more aspects that define the genre of RPG. Leveling system is probably the main thing. Also included are the ability to explore, kill things, and acquire items/gold. The authors mention latter two only disdainfully, but one man's trash is another man's treasure. Lots of people playing online like leveling and getting new items. To them that's what the game is all about, and it gives them a fun context within which to socialize with other people in a not necessarily role playing manner.
Based on the title of the article, I thought the auther would give real world examples of the two genres splitting, but it's really just his opinion. As far as I'm aware, most MMO games are still RPGs, and also, as far as I know, their popularity isn't exactly declining. So, when you look at sales as well as user base, is this supposed divorce fiction or reality?
...since the site runs like a dog with no legs!
The Divorce of MMO and RPG by Jeff on 07/22/2005
The divorce of MMO and RPG has been a very public and extremely messy one, unfortunately. The sordid details can be found in any trashy, gossip message board across the internet, but the real question is why they ever got married in the first place, and what happened after.
It is hard to nail down a precise date of when MMO and RPG met. Some say they started dating back during the MUD days; others contend it was slightly after. The relationship certainly bloomed during Meridian 59, and we all know the marriage was consummated with Ultima Online. Not long after Ultima Online launched however, problems began to crop up. Some claim they could not agree on how to raise the children. Others declare that they never had anything in common in the first place. Whichever it was, the marriage was officially on the rocks by the time of EverQuest. Now that the marriage is over, GamerGod will take a look at what was.
At close inspection, their marriage reveals what is sadly becoming the new American love tragedy. Two people with little in common, more in lust than anything resembling love, decide to tie the knot. The rest is a classic example of what happens when two people leave the idea stage of marriage and enter the reality of marriage, and find out they don't like, let alone love, each other.
RPG was often in her own world, a writer by profession living in a land of old dialects and wonderful stories. She found MMO to be awfully crude, intolerant of her stories and her world, continuously interrupted by his sports scores and a "me first" material acquisition agenda. MMO saw what he once thought of as cute become annoying, and her insistence that he not disrupt her stories was more than a little incommodious. RPG tried to save the marriage by spending more her time in her own room, the RP server she called it, but MMO too often followed her there anyway with blatant disregard for her rules. As if all of that was not bad enough, MMO started speaking a whole different language that RPG could barely understand. She started calling him a l33t speaker; he retorted that she was a Nazi. Clearly the acrimony was rising.
The relationship never truly recovered, since there was nothing to recover. They had little in common in the first place, so there was little in their relationship to renew except for the idea togetherness. The idealism of their marriage was fun; the reality was a living hell for both sides.
The end result is the aforementioned messy and public divorce. RPG has a lot of fun on her own again, hanging out with groups of friends, leaving MMO far behind. MMO lives his selfish and unimaginative lifestyle, as he had all along. Some claim the two will eventually get together again under the right circumstances, but I highly doubt it. It seems that they are a lot happier apart than they ever were together, thus the chance of the two reuniting is slim. Besides, last we heard, MMO was getting pretty hot and heavy with FPS: more news on that later.
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The massive influx of new players into MMORPGs have changed this though. Indictative of the whole problem is the whole cultureclash between veterans and newcomers concerning grouping problem. Old-timers find invites to groups without being asked first extremely offensive and are thus often constantly annoyed in WoW. Personally, I just view them as "we're grouped now because we're in the same area and we'll ungroup as soon as we're not" and don't mind them at all.
RP'ers are, naturally, fairly "extreme" in what they'll accept of player-behaviour. As far as WOW goes atleast, their servers are also filled with nitwits, although the in far less numbers. However, only one asshole is needed to break the immersion, and there are a whole lot of assholes out there. Thus, I think ultimatly the entire RP'ing branch of MMO's are going to be relegated to their own games.
Oh. and while we're on the subject, to the people here mentioning single-player games:
There are very, very few single-player games requiring any sort of being in-character and offering any kind of immerson. Just because something is fantasy doesn't make it actualy roleplaying! Roleplaying requires a modicrum of immersion and character choice beyond Good/Evil. As such, the only games I've played which I'm willing to classify as RPG's, atleast to some extent, are Vampire: Bloodlines and Planescape: Torment.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
In a fantasy RPG, you generally want your character to be important to the world, doing things noone else can, etc. etc.
when 2000+ people are like that in the same world, you lose your virtual uniquiness.
...needs to remember that tabletop AD&D was never mainstream to begin with. So with an MMORPG, you're basically trying to sell an extremely non-mainstream concept (RPG) to a mainstream (MMO) audience. Unless the definition of an RPG is changed somewhat for the mainstream audience, it isn't going to happen.
MUDs (AFAIK, anyway) were never truly popular outside the intellectual crowd either, just like tabletop AD&D. Part of this group represented the original people playing Ultima Online, from what I saw, and when you have this group *alone* playing an MMORPG, you'll generally get a positive, relatively peaceful (albeit eclectic) experience. The crowd that are known as PvP players, "griefers" or "power gamers" in MMORPGs are the same 14 year old adrenaline/testosterone crazed idiots who you find either playing Quake 2 or CounterStrike (or collaborating with other such types to write the next big Windows virus on IRC) the rest of the time, AKA a particularly undesirable segment of the broader FPS crowd. (This is also the exact stereotypical group which the media tried to blame for the Columbine massacre.)
These people are nothing remotely close to genuine roleplayers, and on close inspection, don't really intend to be. They log into a game like UO for four main reasons:-
a) To kill people/things in a new environment.
b) To deliberately upset and antagonise (true to their adolescent sociopath roots) genuine roleplayers. (who they view with contempt) 80%-90% of the PvP crowd fall into this category, despite their protests to the contrary.
c) To attempt to gratify their ego by climbing to the top of the char level heap, and thus prove how "leet" they supposedly are.
d) (Even more) to attempt to find some bug/exploit within the game mechanics in order to illegitimately climb to the top of the char level heap more quickly than would otherwise be possible, again for the same reason as c).
In an ideal world, the primary solution to this problem would be to keep the archetypical FPS gamer from ever migrating to an MMORPG, but tragically, such is not possible. I am not at all surprised to hear that MUDs are currently enjoying a rennaisance; the reason for this would be so that genuine roleplayers can do what they've desired to do all along, i.e., roleplay, without the interruption of the aforementioned morons. My guess is that for a while at least, MMORPG operators are eventually going to find that their playerbase consists primarily of very casual players who also engage in RMT, (real money trading of in-game items) and the aforementioned FPS immigrants. As such, I'm also guessing that most fantasy-oriented MMORPGs are also going to become extremely mundane, chaotic places centred primarily around killing mobs, gold farming, and RMT. Storytelling or people playing for more conventional reasons are probably both going to largely move back into the MUD environment.
it's the marriage's children (i.e. us) who are left to suffer the most.
MORTAR COMBAT!