The Barbarians At The MMOG Gates

Posted by Zonk on Friday October 19, 2007 @12:36PM from the don't-forget-to-loot-and-pillage-before-you-burn dept.

simoniker writes "Areae president Raph Koster is perhaps best known as a designer of Ultima Online and the previous CCO of Sony Online Entertainment, and in an in-depth Gamasutra interview, he discusses his views on 'game grammar', the uniting of MMOs and online worlds, and the software patent problem. In particular, he's been talking about the 'barbarians at the gates' for hardcore MMO makers: 'Even the creation of the MUD in the first place was that. It was the Internet-based reaction to the stuff that had existed on the microcomputers and the Plato network and all of that. All of a sudden, "Oh, wait! We can put a text MUD on Arpanet!" And it was like, "Whoa!" and it spread like wildfire, and all of a sudden, all of that other stuff went away. So it's really possible for that stuff to be happening now with microtransactions, with portals versus traditional publishers, with digital distribution publishers versus traditional publishers, and with MMOs from MTV versus MMOs from Sony or EA or NCSoft.'"

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Re:Future of Single-Player by RaphKoster · 2007-10-19 16:12 · Score: 3, Interesting

So, empirically, a lot of people ARE (btw, EEDAR just did an interesting study on achievements, if you haven't seen the articles). Heck, the silly Burger King games turned into hits in large part thanks to achievements. Note, the fact that I think the industry is going this way doesn't mean that I necessarily LIKE it. It's just the trend that I see.