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MMORPGs Will Change the Future
Franz Ferdinand writes "An article at PointlessWasteofTime discusses all the unexpected directions MMORPG technology will change the future. From the same gentleman who brought us the Gamer's Manifesto." From the article: "There are 10 million MMORPG users in the world and their population is doubling every two years. Hold your hand about three feet above your monitor. That's where the graph will be in 2010. It's an infection, it's a tsunami, it's a volcanic eruption. All at the same time, waiting, like a nest of plague-infested rats next to a ticking hydrogen bomb in an underwater volcano. Or something. What I'm trying to say is, it's The Next Big Thing. "
Well, if the World Of Warcraft players I know are anything to go by, the freeways will be a helluva' lot less crowded. Those dudes never leave that damned game. They say it's the new crack.
Put this story in the time machine and send it to 5 years ago when it would've been news.
"10 million users"
Or
"10 million scripts"
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
1. You must have your own forum to dispense the bullshit.
2. Once you have the forum setup, pick something that is really popular right now. Lets say, "eating".
3. Expand on this popular activity and project how popular it will be in the future. Use an exponential scale, and then scale that up by a few orders of magnitude. Example: "5 years from now EVERYONE will be eating! They'll be eating all the time, everywhere! Eating is changing the world!"
4. Sit back and enjoy the accolades from people who think you have some kind of future-predicing ability.
"My dog was six inches tall last year."
"My dog is two feet tall this year."
"Based on this trend, my dog will be taller than my house in a few years."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
So will we reach a point when games will be able to interconnect with each other? Sort of Trans-Atlantic cabling built right into the game, possibly even allowing some type of interworld commerce?
Having been an EverCrack addict, I can attest to the staying power these games and environments have. With in-game advertising becoming a more popular option, will this genre become the new WWW, so to speak? It would be interesting to see.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
...will keep growing the same way. That's why all dot-coms have been so insanely, wildly successful since the late 90s.
Will be most of humanity. By that time, the happening new MMORPG will have been created by machines. The remaining humans not in the MMORPG will consist purely of hundreds of thousands of hackers who will attack the servers and free the minds of the billions of players trapped in the game.
I'd say the biggest question is: from what?
to question the 'logic' of a comedy piece. PWOT is a comedy website. Admittedly some of it's stuff can be serious, but this article is clearly a joke. The charts are jokes. The headlines are jokes.
I think that as long as prices continue to rise for pay-to-play, I don't know if MMORPGs can be considered that huge. I'd love to play an MMORPG, but with my work schedule I don't get to put the hours in that would make the game worth the initial purchase and the continued cost of playing.
Not to put down the article much (I do like the way it was written, with some fresh data), but he's just using new data to re-re-reconfirm what many other people have many times. MMOs were decidedly going to get increasingly more important. We've got that ever since EverQuest came out. Cool. Now, if there was something more interesting, like, well, "Based on such-and-such, we should have 3D MMOs in 10 years, where people are completley immersed in the game", then I would be more impressed. Cool data, old news.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
The most entertaining aspect of games is multiplayer. It has been since the beginning of games. Pong. Competition, and more recently cooperation, are the core of gaming. More specifically, social interaction is what all humans crave on an instinctual level.
Gaming is just the new avenue for those of us who despise mall-walkers and the like.
That being said, anything Massively Multiplayer is the wave of the future. However, RPGs are simply the first step. MMOFPS games like PlanetSide and the upcoming Huxley are another member of the MMOG club. As hardware capabilities increase, software will follow suit, and more complex games will be able to enter the realm of Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
Here's to countless hours to be spent online with friends that I don't even know!
Stop complaining, get off your ass, and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
puff..pass
if you expect anyone to believe that bullshit you better pass that bong around.
Sentient machines will not need to put us into sensory cocoons that recreate a world for us to interact in. I think we will end up doing that ourselves.
We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.
Exactly.
Users
Not to say that everyone who plays an MMORPG is addicted, but I have seen people get kicked out of college because they stopped going to classes in favor of EQ.
Those who arent addicted still get trapped -the need to level up and stay caught up with everyone else makes it more time-consuming than any other kind of game.
At this rate, there will be more MMORPG players than there are humans in no time! Yet more proof of the existence of aliens!
- Incorruptable bodies
- Mansions
- Streets of Gold
- No Taking of Wives (Husbands)
- No Money
- No Poverty
There are probably more, but that's enough to really kind of unnerve me....There are 10 million MMORPG users in the world and their population is doubling every two years. Hold your hand about three feet above your monitor. That's where the graph will be in 2010.
Yeah. Just like how we have over 20 billion people in the world now , and the DJA is climbing above 20,000.
You can't just take a current trend, and extrapolate it into infinity. It is total bollocks. For one, many *many* of those "10 million users" are the same people with accounts on more than one game. For another, the number of MMORPG gamers will reach a critical mass, once it reaches the number of people who don't like to spend over 10 hours a week on their home computer - you know, people who GO OUTSIDE.
Exactly.
Users
And don't forget - 5 million of them are in Korea!
That's no joke. Growth rates in the rest of the world have been pretty low. Of course, cup-half-fullers will say that just means there's more growth potential in other countries. Half-empties like me will say it shows that not everybody is really interested in online gaming, even in advanced, internet-saturated nations.
I thought that this artical was interesting in spite of the stats that may or may not be acurate. Point two where all games merge together seems a bit unfeasable, except maybe as proposed by the gamerZunion project.
A friend of mine has logged over *85 Days* (over 2000 hours) of playtime in WOW. The game has been out for approximately 250 days. That averages out to about 8 hours per day, every day, for the last 250 days. Or, put another way: my friend has spent HALF his time (16 non-sleep hours in the day) playing WOW since release. That's 56 hours a week, more than a "full-time" job and in the same ballpark as many technology jobs.
Am I the only one who finished reading TFA? It looks like virtually everyone dropped the ball before going through section 1.
Wong is a comedian, and this is not a serious analysis. This is a very fun read. If you go past section 1, he will tell you why the growth chart matters and how MMORP will become the new reality. It actually gets better all the way until the end, when he starts comparing economies (he notes that our "real" money is largely fictional and electronic already!), he also talks about porn (he's got a great taste there), sex, relationships, and in the fvery end about philosophy of politics. As far as David Wong goes, this is one of the best things I've seen.
I saw people drop out of college because of substance abuse.
I saw people drop out of college because they didn't like it.
Obviously, MMORPGs, substance abuse, and not liking college are major plagues upon our society.
Moo
As I read the article, deep inside a part of me was chanting (in very poor Cantonese) ho gang ah, ho gang ah, ho gang ah, which means very afraid. The very idea of essentially replacing the real world with a virtual one made to pacify even those in abject physical poverty borders on horrific. And while others have already posted criticisms of the growth predictions made by the author, there are not any technical reasons I can think of that would prevent such a future from taking place. What authoritarian government would not like to placate the masses with a fake world while continuing to deny them rights and freedom in the real one? It'll be interesting to see how the evolution of MMORPGs continues in China where they are already wildly popular.
That said, I personally love the escape provided by these games, but I have no desire to live there all of the time. Still given the very addictive nature of these games, if a way is found to suck in casual gamers on consoles, MMORPGs could see explosive growth. I think that a good voice to text system is the only thing standing in the way because it would eliminate or at least minimize the need of a keyboard without bringing on the chaotic din that a voice chat system would result in. Communications would still be via text, but you would merely speak the words rather than type them in. Until that comes about, perhaps the world is safe...for now...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Yeah, but think of it this way, if that happens, he'll be out a nickel but can still have the sex. If you're wrong, however, he still gets a nickel. Damn, interest probably! Maybe I should bet nickels on hot Hollywood VR...
This is one hell of a funny article, even funnier that everyone is taking it at face value (or more likely, commenting based on only reading the summary). Go on, read it - you'll laugh.
Somebody already mentioned the infinite exponential growth problem, so let me run the rest of them down really quick:
3. One big problem: It's not John's Bonebiter. Everything in your standard MMORPG is owned by the developer, and stealing anything within it would be impossible because all you're doing is transferring bits from one part of the server to another. Then there's the fact that anyone who would take an MMORPG weapon that seriously needs to rethink his priorities.
4. The difference between MMORPG money and real money is that people who value MMORPG money are idiots. Idiocy is not a good basis for an economy.
7. OK, now it's just getting silly, though I'm sure that there will probably be a scant few people that disconnected from reality (and it's really just Darwin in action in that case).
9. How do you know that these jobs will "pay a fortune in virtual gold"? How do you know that the situation in the virtual world will not be just the same as the one in the real world?
Some have said that this is totally tongue-in-cheek, which is probably true. That doesn't make it particularly funny, and there are surely a number of MMORPG addicts out there who actually believe that these arguments are valid.
Rob
If we look at a dog in the first year of his life, we see fast growth. That's what we have here. Using the same math, you'll have a 50 foot dog in about 10 years, depending on breeds.
:P)
I look at my 10 year old "puppy" (shih Tzu) and I see while the growth continued though decreasing in speed, for the second year, it plateaued there, That's the same as every single real dog (they reach full height in 2 years which is why some rules for dog's age call them 25 after 2 years (15 after the first because they are sexually ready to make babies) and then add 5 years for every year after the second year)
Now this is the type of math that reality uses, however every time I hear a "study" I hear someone studying something for X years,and using that data for two times the study length. THat'd work if we lived in a test tube but if anyone notices stuff is NOT in a vacuum, fads change, there's been a plethora of MMORPGs recently. I believe we'll see at least a slow down in growth soon.
I just wanted to meantion the fact that "predictions" such as these, don't have any basis in fact most of the time. I'm sure this guy might be knowledgable but there's a limit to growth and a limit to trends.
So class: I watched my soda recently, and noticed I drank half of the can in 10 minutes, and another half in 10 more minutes. By this trend how much will I have drank in 1 hour? (Answer: I already drank the rest of my soda while asking this
Its a JOKE the whole site is made of articles with the "sarcasm" tag on the beginning, get it? none of it is to be taken seriously.
Of course as my wife explained to me once jokes are based on subconscient thought so there is a lot of truth (or wishful thinking) hidden in there.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
I'd be curious to see how we're gonna power this virtual world. Saudi Arabian invasion... or should we start investing in radiation suits?