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The Laws of Online World Design
Next Gen has an article up republishing Raph Koster's seminal laws of Online World Design. The piece is one of the basic texts used to think about the way to put a MMOG together. From the article: "Design Rules - The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online game of wide appeal : have multiple paths of advancement (individual features are nice, but making them ladders is better), make it easy to switch between paths of advancement (ideally, without having to start over), make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are clear and visible and significant (having 600 meaningless milestones doesn't help), ideally, make your game not have a sense of running out of significant milestones (try to make your ladder not feel finite) "
FTA (emphasis theirs):
Is it a game?
It's a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD. Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, "it's just a game" is missing the point.
I think this is exactly the WRONG point of view to be promoting among devs. Heh, I guess I miss the author's point, but to me he describes exactly the mindset that has lead to all these so-called games that are really just FIFO inventory models.
MMORPG's exhibit no required skill, they just present a time-sink that anyone with enough life-energy to click a mouse can participate in. Some make it to lvl 60 (or 100, or whatever the max is) quickly, others more slowly, and some never, but there is never any real test of gaming ability other than, "I'm more persistent at putting up with this repetative crap than you are, that's why I'm higher level."
Pen and paper D&D at least had an element of outsmarting the other players and/or GM. To succeed you had to think, act, strategize, out-intellegence, and talk your way to a victory. This type of experience is sorely lacking from modern MMORPGS, in my experience. It's more an excercise in collecting the sparkly eq that the giant glowing snail drops and selling it to noobs. MMORPGs as we know them are not games, in the traditional sense of video games, or role-playing games. I would suggest that they are barely even games.
I have to admit, the article is quite enlightening. I am most interested in the object and economic systems. Fortunately, Mr. Koster was a little shy on the macro-scale things, instead focusing on software design issues like: usability, maintainability, and scalability.
My own thoughts on the matter are entitled Virtual World Bylaws and are my own.
Persistence means it never goes away was a very pertinent topic and one that I address in much more detail. Problems here include: trusting the system owners to do good backups, proving proper transfer of world objects between owners, and avoiding client-side corruption. The Never trust the client problem has a potential solution in my paper. It's not completely solved, but corruption of in-world objects is at least trivialized.
He touches on in-game community, but has neglected the larger interoperability problem between games and vendors. Too many clients and connection methods. Game persistence lasts only as long as the operating system or game console are in use, which is absurd.
The idea that really tickled me was the economy theorem that was so obvious I missed it. "Players will hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall rise in the "standard of living" and capabilities of the average player." This methedology really need connected with the Attention is the currency of the future and you will see the solution to the small-time MMORPG player and the 30+hours a week gamer. Us small-timers walk in and get creamed because these full-timers are super heroes.
Perchance, we ought to tie increased skill with increased responsibility, just like in real life. Level 30+ character, you must now lead larger missions. Short term players can now join the group, like showing up at the gym and playing a game of basketball with strangers. A couple of guys are there all the time and are either friendly or they aren't. Not friendly means no squads to go on more complex missions.