Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
If online role-playing games are ever going to break out of the hardcore gamer ghetto, they'll have to do more than please the geeks.
Jul 9, 2002 | What if they gave a world and nobody came?
That's the dilemma facing dozens of companies and hundreds of developers this year, as they gamble tens of millions of dollars in the volatile realm of online games.
To be more precise, they're wagering on the growth of MMORPGs and MMOGs -- the unwieldy acronyms for "massively multiplayer online role-playing game." It's a genre with enormous commercial potential, as demonstrated by the success of fantasy titles like Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call and Dark Age of Camelot, each with paying subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. (Everquest is the ranking colossus, with around 400,000 players.)
Many industry analysts anticipate that those numbers will grow in the coming years, and grow mightily. "I expect there will be 2 to 3 million more people in the U.S. that come on board in the next two years," says David Cole, president of the multimedia research firm DFC Intelligence. "Humans are a social species," says game designer Brad McQuaid, formerly the prime creative force behind Everquest, "which is what makes me believe MMOGs will rival the movie industry in the next five to 10 years."
If they don't, it won't be for lack of trying. Virtual worlds expected to go online this year or next include (by no means a complete list): 3rd World, Ages of Athiria, Asheron's Call 2, A Tale in the Desert, Black Moon Chronicles, Caeron 3000, Charr: The Grimm Fate, Citizen Zero, City of Heroes, Darkfall, Dragon Empires, Earth and Beyond, El Kardian, Endless Ages, Eve Online: The Second Genesis, Horizons, Lineage II: The Chaotic Chronicle, Myarta, Myth of Soma, PlanetSide, Quest of Ages, Realms of Torment, The Rubies of Eventide, Shadowbane, The Sims Online, Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft.
Almost all of them are fantasy, with a smattering of sci-fi. Even if you're a gamer, chances are you've never heard of most of them.
And in all likelihood, this is the last time you ever will.
Most of these games will fail for several prosaic reasons -- not the least of which is an unavoidable fact of life: The hardcore gamers who make these games successful can usually obsess over only one game at a time. There are only so many hours in a week, after all, and MMORPGs are nothing if not massively time-consuming. (For this very reason, says Cole, "I think there is room for only a handful of these games in each genre.") And because many gamers have long since established a social network on established MMORPGs, it's unclear how these new titles can lure them away.
"I play Everquest currently and have for three years," says Jennifer Powell, an online community consultant and freelance writer based in Colorado. "The only thing that would make me switch would be if all my friends did, since my friends, including my husband, are the main reason I continue to play."
But the main limitations on the MMORPG market really seem to be self-imposed: Most developers can't shake the fantasy/sci-fi mindset or conceive of an alternative way of playing. Very few role-playing games have deviated far from the world imagined by that somewhat dotty, Hobbit-fixated Oxford professor 50 years ago, or strayed much from the central conceit of "leveling up" -- that is, improving the traits and abilities of your persona in gradual steps -- originally invented by Gary Gygax for Dungeons & Dragons more than 25 years ago.
The genre restrictions create a kind of hardcore role-playing gamer ghetto. "I think they're all kind of mining the same hardcore group," says Will Wright, chief designer at Maxis Studios, speaking of the current roster of MMORPGs. "I don't think they're bringing a lot of new players in."
Are too many game companies chasing too few hardcore gamers? If so, we could be set for a disastrous year of reckoning, as the game industry's fixation on its own cultural inclinations sends it into a downward spiral of failure. With so many entrants fighting for air, companies will fold, game worlds will evaporate, investments of time and capital will dissolve into ether -- all lost in a narrowness of imagination and an unwillingness to build a space that accommodates the rest of the world. In the short term, the real battle for an online audience will most likely come down to two games in a clash of true titans: Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online.
But there's some hope. Because while Star Wars Galaxies may seem at first glance an exclusively geek nirvana, the developers have taken an effort to make it something more. Even more intriguingly, The Sims Online hints at a different future and could promise a true breakthrough: a world of online role-playing where everyone feels at home -- and everyone has a home.
