The Wikification of Games

This week's Escapist has an article discussing the future imperfect, which touches on some of the same issues (seriously, this time) that the farcical Pointless WasteofTime did this past weekend. From the article: "What is the future of the massively multiplayer game? And I think: More importantly, how long before that future gets here? I've been waiting for ages. Surely with all that soul searching and 'post-mortem analysis' the developers can't be far from that elusive next-gen ideal? Surely someone will spot all the best bits and make a game to end all games? Won't they? Ach, maybe it's hopeless. How can I really know? How can I predict what games are going to do in a year, let alone a couple of decades? Who could have predicted the rise in professional gaming, or the importance of mods, or the black-market virtual cash cultures, or the thronging game cafés of the Far East, where people can lose their lives in arguments over virtual items?" His ending argument is that gaming will tend towards the wiki mentality: Everyone participates.

Comments

Hm

[Knara]

I dunno if will develop any large new concepts until the endgame-plateau phenomenon is addressed in some way. I mean, granted, the companies' interest is in making money, and a straight level-based game is an easy way to do that. But, the problem as I see it is that MMO's attempt to create a persistant world with a build-in dead-end. Not only that, but the worlds are, admittedly to varying degrees, almost Calvinist in their construction. You will have to do such and such, eventually (well okay, not for sure, but if you're not gonna you basically sit at a very low level and it makes one wonder why you ever bought the game at all). In the real world (which of course is the model for persistant online worlds), the only thing assured is that you have to die (unless you really are a Calvinist...)

I also think part of the problem is that in most MMO's these days, the only real goal is resource accumulation, be it currency or something that leads to currency. In Real Life that currency allows you to do other things, but in most games it just lets you buy better stuff.

And then beyond that (and perhaps most significantly), MMORPGs (aside from things like Joint Operations which obviously is just a very large combat sim), which are obviously the most popular of the current MMOs, place you in the role of attempting to live a seperate life from your own, without spending as much time as you do living a real life. So, the question remains, is there some sort of gaming paradigm that would facilitate that. I don't know if there is, beyond the sci-fi concept of "jacking in" to some massively complex digital system and leaving meatspace behind.