- MMO: Massively Multiplayer Online…
- MMOG: Massively Multiplayer Online
Game
- MMOPW: Massively Multiplayer Online
Persistent World
- MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer
Role-playing Game
What sets MMOs apart from other games are their social structures and
communities. 
If you just want to kill things and level up a character, you can play Diablo.
If you just want to wander in a 3D world, you can play Morrowind. If you're
simply interested in fantasy or sci-fi, there are accomplished narratives
like the Baldur's Gate series or Knights of the Old Republic. But what those
games can't offer is a role in the complex and evolving set of living social
structures. In MMOs, you’ll find guilds, role-playing servers, warring factions,
economic classes, crime rings, griefers, political groups, and even entire
cities and nations.
These are the bricks that form a new type of society, distinct partly due
to the nature of the internet, partly because of how role-playing games
have evolved, and partly just a matter of what happens when you throw together
people with a shared interest. This is a society of unique communities built
into, around, and sometimes even independent of massively multiplayer online
role-playing games.
New Global Culture
"These kinds of groups aren't new," says Rod Humble, VP of Product Development
at Sony Online Entertainment, where EverQuest and Star Wars: Galaxies were
developed. He cites chess clubs, sewing circles, and amateur sports teams
as examples of friends that build up around an activity. "What is new is
the root of these groups -- computer games -- and the international nature
of them. My guild has members from all over the world, even a guy who is
on a round-the-world cruise ship. What's exciting is how there's a new global
culture which transcends countries."
This "new global culture" merits a closer look. Dr. Aaron Delwiche, an assistant
professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University in Texas,
teaches a class on the ethnography of online games. His class examines the
social structures and unique culture practices found in MMOs.
"In all MMOs, players will come together and take some sort of collective
action. Within the confines of the virtual world, they will try to create
something bigger than themselves," Delwiche says. "The shape that those
structures take depends largely on the context in which they emerge. For
example, environments such as Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron's Call, and EverQuest
share an emphasis on combat, leveling, and skills acquisition. Text-based
[games] tend to be more focused on role-playing and imagination.
The Sims Online and Second Life are complex MMOs with virtual economies,
but they have completely different goals and objectives than other MMOs."
The Shape of Things
The basic shape of an MMO society isn't
too different from the basic shape of any society: it's a sort of aggregation
of clusters that takes on a life of its own. You have individuals banding
together in small groups, small groups connected to form larger groups,
which combine to form even larger groups.
The largest social groups are often analogous to nations. In many games,
your character can choose to belong to one of a variety of factions that
are part of the backstory. "This is like the relationship you have to your
country in real life," says Anarchy Online's game director, Gaute Godager.
"Some players would never dream of having characters on their account with
more than one side. It would feel like a betrayal. Others feel that swapping
side or having characters that each have a different allegiance would benefit
the longevity of their gaming experience. From a sociological perspective,
it's very interesting that players can have this 'multi-belonging' national
structure. My hope is that we can learn something from being a bit more
casual and playful with this sense of belonging, perhaps learn that nationality
and identity can also be seen like coats. You tend to wage less war for
your coat."
Show Me the Money
As with any real world society, money is an important foundation for social
groupings. As in the real world, online economies can be frail. Developers
have taken different approaches, ranging from Eve Online's laissez-faire
player-driven economy to Dark Age of Camelot's tightly controlled monetary
system.
Meridian 59 is probably the oldest graphical MMO. With its long history,
it's seen it all. "Duping, exploits, bugs, et cetera. They've all had a
hand in attempting to ruin the economy," notes Brian Green, co-founder of
Near Death Studios, the group that resurrected Meridian 59 a year after
3DO shut down the servers. Green recalls an NPC gem merchant who bought
gems at a fixed price. However, players who were members of a faction that
gave them purchasing bonuses were able to actually able to buy gems from
him at a discount and immediately sell them back for a profit. "This is
warning for people who think that a dynamic economy is the solution for
all the ills of an economy in an online game," Green says. "Just one flaw
and you could do huge damage to the game."
With its attempt at an emergent system -- meaning a set of rules would be
coded into the game and the specifics would emerge dynamically from the
interaction of those rules -- Ultima Online blazed an ambitious trail but
eventually turned back. It tried an elaborate 'desire-based' economy/ecology,
in which each entity had a desire it tried to fulfill. Rabbits wanted plants,
wolves wanted rabbits, shopkeepers wanted wolves' pelts. "It was very difficult
to balance for a fun experience," recalls Ultima Online producer Anthony
Castoro, "and very taxing on the servers. As a result, UO changed its ecology
system to be more developer specified."
Most MMOs have 'developer specified' economies, which are carefully controlled.
"I think all our challenges have been relatively trivial and fixed by a
quick patch," says Sony's Humble. "We're able to put money sinks fairly
quickly into EverQuest and, of course, our NPC vendors always buy and sell
infinite goods at prices that we can set anytime we wish, so it's been fairly
easy so far."
Matt Firor, an executive producer at Mythic Entertainment where Dark Age
of Camelot was created, notes a common fear among MMO developers. "The great
dread of online RPGs is that the economy will get inflated, resulting in
a glut of money. It's better for long-term game stability to err toward
the side of cash poor. It creates an urgency for players to want to go out
and find money. It makes hard-to-get and expensive items all the more attractive."
Funcom's Anarchy Online has interesting take on how inflation leads to high
prices (there are items in AO with costs in the millions) and a culture
of haves and have-nots. "You created a social inequality in the game. On
one side you had the experienced players who were well connected and rich.
On the other, new players who could not access expensive items. You got
classes, in the Marxist sense of the word. Naturally, starting a game where
you're lower-lower class is not very inspiring. What we tried to do was
offer luxury goods that were so overpriced that they drained money from
the game. This has only a fair amount of success," he complains. "The rich
keep getting richer." Funcom responded by seeding the game with items that
could only be found randomly, giving everyone a chance to ‘win the jackpot’
by finding something like the storied Grid Armor IV nano crystal, worth
up to 200 million credits. "I know several players who struck is rich finding
one of these," he says.
According to creative director Raph Koster, Star Wars: Galaxies has so far
enjoyed a successful player driven economy where the developers take a laissez
faire approach, letting players buy and sell goods at whatever prices the
market will allow. Koster notes that the only fixed prices in the game are
incidentals like cloning frees, maintenance costs, and travel rates. "In
a more typical MMORPG, we'd be tweaking the sale price of things and the
buy price of things and worrying about exploits where people could generate
cash by buying at one shop and selling at another. Of course, it hasn't
stopped us from having the currency become devalued, like in every other
MMO. But the nice thing is that player prices have just adapted."
Fight Clubs
"Nothing galvanizes a community like an
external threat," says Near Death Studio's Green. It's no surprise that
combat forms the basis for a lot of the social structures in an MMO (one
MMO, Sony's Planetside, is built around nothing but combat). Green recalls
the balancing act required to work player vs. player combat, or PvP, into
the game. At first, there were only two factions, but as one faction started
to attract more and more powerful characters, there was a snowballing effect.
3DO essentially bailed out the underdog by creating a third faction, which
balanced things out.
Dark Age of Camelot also has three factions, called Realms. The developers
at Mythic Entertainment have encouraged fighting among the Realms by allowing
raids to steal relics that confer bonuses to whomever controls them. This
has resulted in epic collaborative battles in which guilds band together
to mount raids for another Realm's relics. Anarchy Online released an expansion
pack called Notum Wars that built into the game rules for controlling property
and capturing other players' bases. And of course Star Wars: Galaxies take
place around the conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire.
 However,
some MMOs, such as The Sims Online and A Tale in the Desert, are entirely
devoid of any kind of combat, focusing instead on collaborative efforts
like trying to form a band or build a pyramid. However, Sims Online designer
Andrew V. Boyd is quick to point out that just because there's no combat
doesn't mean there's no conflict. "People are really entertained by interpersonal
conflict," he says, referencing the popularity of reality based TV shows.
"The Sims Online and
A Tale in the Desert offer some interesting social structures, but without
a guy coming through the door with a gun, you lose a dramatic device that
has driven almost every great bit of entertainment," says a Star Wars: Galaxies
player who goes by the name Mandash Grim.
Putting the RP into MMORPGs
Grim is a character on Galaxies' Starsider server. He's a member of Vagabond's
Rest and the avatar for a veteran role-player who notes he's been playing
pen and paper RPGs "since Carter was president". With MMOs, characters like
Grim have a unique opportunity. However, in an ironic twist, they have to
deal with a fundamental disconnect between role-playing and the core gameplay.
"Non-role player guilds and organizations tend to be more focused on leveling
characters and attaining material goals," says Firor of Mythic Entertainment,
"while role players tend to be there to just enjoy the game and simply role
play". Funcom's Godager says, "The challenge is that they exist in a world
that for the most part doesn't understand or really respect them."
One solution is to offer servers specifically for role-playing. Another
solution is to create social structures to help further the fantasy, building
up around a shared fiction. Vagabond's Rest, a player-created city on Star
Wars: Galaxies' Starsider server, is a classic example of this. Randy Varnell,
aka Davyn Gabriel, is one of the founders of Vagabond’s Rest. "Our primary
goal is community role-playing," Varnell says. "We want people who are going
to play characters both big and small that add flavor to our environment.
A side benefit of all that role-play is usually an increase in maturity
among the players. Typically, a high concentration of those who role-play
means a lower concentration of griefers [who try to ruin the experience
for other players]."
Ultima Online has a role-playing community that subverts the intention of
the game designers. UO only allows for human characters, but there are a
group of orc clans who use masks and costumes to role-play orc communities
that were never intended to be in the game.
Developer Cop
Subverting developer intentions is a significant part of an MMO, whether
for good or ill. An important part of the social structure of an MMO is
the role of the creators. What do the developers do in situations like The
Sims Online Mafia, a group that extorted money from other players under
the threat of its members clogging a victim's foe list? Sometimes developers
are police, sometimes they're social engineers, and sometimes they're like
the deist model of God as a clockmaker who sets the gears in motion and
then sits back to lets it operate on its own.
This was also a significant part of Ultima Online's growing pains. Some
guilds would blockade quest locations and demand protection money for anyone
wanting to enter. There was a group known as the Dread Lords who went around
attacking other players, decimating the population of entire towns and forcing
the developers to change the rules for PvP, which ultimately minimized its
role in the game. "Over the course of the first three years of its life,
the player killing mechanics were reduced until they became entirely consensual,
at which point most people opted out," says Ultima Online's Castoro.
"You need to make sure a certain level of decency is maintained," Meridian
59's Green says, "It can be very damaging to let a small group of people
ruin the experience for other people." Anarchy Online's Godager notes that
this is rarely organized. "This type of behavior is almost never seen as
a communal activity, though. These are things usually done by individuals,"
he says, adding that Funcom never tries to limit behavior unless it's bigoted
or exploitative.
The Hand That Guides
This leads to another important question in the interaction of developers
with the societies they've created. How much should developers encourage
social interaction as opposed to just letting it happen naturally?
"Forcing people to group with each other certainly helps cultivate
friendships and new communities," says Sony's Humble. "Our challenge is
to balance [individual] player empowerment with enough forced interactions
to spark communities." In EverQuest you used to have to get another player
to set your respawn point in case you died (a process called 'binding'),
but Sony changed the rules so that NPCs could perform the service. "On one
hand, if you have ever been looking for a bind at 3am, you can appreciate
the new feature. On the other hand, it cut down on the player-to-player
interaction."
Star Wars: Galaxies is at the other end of the spectrum. It's built around
a core design that forces social interdependence among players. "A lot of
decisions that seem odd were based on this core premise," says Sony's Koster.
For instance, the size of the maps means there's a lot of empty space between
towns, which require prohibitively long trips on foot. This is an intentional
decision so that people will stick to particular locations and form communities.
Similarly, some of the game's classes, such as healers and entertainers,
are designed to reward players who enjoy just hanging out and chatting.
Galaxies' model for healing damage and battle fatigue are a conscious design
ploy to drive characters to the kinds of players they would otherwise ignore.
"It was social architecture to create a traffic flow so that different types
of players end up in the same place talking to each other," he confesses.
Reality Bites
There are some intriguing social dynamics when the real world bleeds into
the online world of an MMO. For instance, there are tricky issues of property
ownership when players buy and sell online assets like characters and items
using real world money. Many games prohibit the auctioning of ingame assets
on eBay, although these sorts of rules are difficult to enforce.
Anarchy Online and The Sims Online have players who run internet radio stations
and promote them within the game, playing music and sending out dedications
for other players. Boyd says that The Sims Online players routinely blend
real life and Sim life. "Many of our fan sites feature areas where players
post their photos and personal information, which is very different from
what you see in other MMOs. In a sense, it feels a bit more like a masquerade
party than an RPG."
Anarchy Online's Outzone is a sort of meta-organization that exists somewhere
in between real life and MMO life. It's basically a message board and chat
program aimed at alternative lifestyle players. Founder Dan Howe says he
came up with the idea while he was playing. "Me and two other players were
chatting about the difficulty of finding people to socialize/mission/quest
with in the game where we can feel comfortable being ourselves." He created
a message board that has since expanded into a chat program with a list
of members. "Most of the people who contribute are gay friendly," says Howe,
"although we've received some good input from people I'd consider hostile.
I'd guess roughly 75% of [Outzone] are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or
transgendrered in real life."
Many organizations in a game will host a website, often with an active message
board. This can result in a group taking on a life of its own outside the
confines of whatever game brought them together. In many instances, groups
can migrate from one game to another, or even stay together after they've
stopped playing the game. "This suggests players are making connections
with one another at a real world level," muses Dr. Delwiche. "Players are
interacting via complex game environments, and they are engaged in multiple
levels of role-play, but there is a mutual acknowledgement that the 'minds'
controlling the characters are interested in one another in a way that transcends
the shared hallucination of virtual reality." Red pill, anyone?
The aforementioned Vagabond's Rest had migrated from EverQuest to Anarchy
Online before settling on Star Wars: Galaxies. "I wouldn't be at all surprised
to see the formation of vary large nomadic bands of likeminded players developing,"
says Vagabond's Rest member Grim Mandash, "These could well act as lobbying
groups to shape design discussions."
In fact, they already have. "I think the next big challenge to online games
is figuring out how to anchor these people to their game," says Sony's Humble,
who mentions one option being explored is how to offer new online gaming
genres that appeal to pre-existing communities who are not interested in
long term commitments.
Future Societies
As for what to expect in the ongoing evolution of MMO social structures,
there are different opinions. The Sims Online's Boyd sees control of social
structures being increasingly passed on to players. "I think users will
become more empowered to moderate themselves. If any game company handed
down a form of government and said, 'This is it -- blammo -- you’re a plutocracy',
or something to that effect, they would be in for a world of hurt." Many
developers anticipate increasingly powerful and easy-to-use tools passed
down to players to facilitate management of online communities.
Sony's Koster sums up the core lesson as 'community happens'. "You're making
a mold," he says, "but the players fill it. They'll shape their community
to fit the rule sets you have, but you never really get to control it. And
odds are pretty good they'll leak out of the mold and do something you never
expected." |
