Second Skin

In the "it's a small world" vein...

There's a documentary out there on MMO gaming called Second Skin. 

As it so happens, one of the producers, the Peter Brauer being interviewed here, is a guy I went to high school with.  Facebook brought us back in touch and revealed this common interest.

One of the things Peter said in the interview actually really resonated with me:

As for personal reactions, we have encountered just about every response.  Gamers have approached us to thank us for portraying them so honestly.  Other gamers have railed against us for showing too much addictive play.  Parents of gamers have thanked me profusely for helping them understand their children.  The diversity of responses to our film is one of the things I am proudest of.

This is kind of what happens any time any serious discussion about gaming shows up: some people shout "just a hobby," others shout, "waste of time," then you start hearing "addiction" and "violence" and "art" and it gets really messy.

But it's consistently amazing to me how deep and how visceral the opinions go.  How does this one choice of hobby end up creating a whole world of people and "other?"  Parents have been complaining about their kids' taste in music and fashion since the invention of recording and of clothes, respectively, but this "I don't live in their world" thing is such a disconnect...

Just more various musing about the nature of "the gamer."

All together, now...

There are two major trends happening in connectivity, it seems.  One is for reducing the actual "multiplayer" part of the MMO.  There are a lot of very single-player online worlds out there right now; the amount of solo linearity in a number of MMOs chased up with systems that actually reduce the number of humans needed to play (as in Star Trek Online's ability to populate your away team with AI individuals) is starting to add up into a confusing trend.

Confusing, but not necessarily of concern.  Unlike EA essentially saying that all games should and will be online multiplayer games.

Obviously, I'm big on single-player gaming.  The tags over there on the right alone show that I've put more time into Bioshock and the Fallout games this year than is probably healthy, in addition to the pile of DS and adventure games I've gone through (and obsessed over).  I do not particularly think that the introduction of other people into my favorite titles would improve the experience.  Actually, a commenter at Kotaku summed it up beautifully:

Invite a friend to comment

This just in: Random House are changing their focus to books you can only read while some idiot reads over your shoulder, whilst swearing, pointing out obvious plot developments and occasionally teabagging the user.

Their spokesperson was quoted as saying "Communal interaction is where the innovation, and action, is at."

Rumours abound the firm are also researching the development of a proprietary e-reader device that will only function whilst connected to a headset, through which a thirteen year-old American will continually, aggressively question your sexuality.

Realistically, I don't think single-player narrative gaming is ever completely going away.  But the introduction of massive online, networked gaming has created a definite casualty.  I've started to write before about the home co-op multiplayer experience recently.  I have noticed that I am hardly the only gamer lamenting the lack of decent single-sofa co-op titles these days.  There are many that are appropriate for younger children, and many that are appropriate for groups or parties, but very few that suit a pair of people who don't want to compete with each other directly (as in the case of married gamer couples, for starters).  And I've also mentioned my personal views on competitive games.

But after we finished the Uncharted games, the wave of Christmas sales and deals came upon us, and we ended up with a copy of the LittleBigPlanet Game of the Year edition for about $16.  Now this is true co-op gaming!

I don't think either of us have the patience and dedication right now to go about creating levels, but between the ones in the game and the sheer number available from the community, it's got plenty to entertain us.  It's accessible and non-competitive.  And it's cute.

In fact, all of the co-op multiplayer offline games I've played in many years have been "cute."  There's the Lego franchise -- Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, take your pick -- and there's LittleBigPlanet, and there's... well, I don't know.  In time (Valve Time) there will be an element of Portal 2, but that's online and involves multiple Steam accounts.

So I guess my non-competitive self will keep handing off the controller with my husband and other gaming partners for quite some time to come, every time I get tired of cute and kid-friendly titles.

Unpopular Opinions

I know I have a contrarian streak, but I never go in to a game thinking on purpose, "I plan to hate this because everyone else likes it."  Indeed, I like a number of obscenely popular games (Bioshock, Portal, and the Fallout titles among them).

But then a day comes when everyone is writing about World of Warcraft.

Yeah, people.  You go and enjoy that, I guess.  I'll be over here with games that didn't piss me off in every possible dimension.  Seriously: I disliked the art, the camera motion, the controls, the UI, and the community.  That right there is a pretty big set of turn-offs.  I'll never be sitting around saying that just because I don't like something, it must suck -- but it sure sucked for me.

In fact, other than a smattering of Diablo II back in the day, I don't think I've ever particularly enjoyed a Blizzard title.  Blasphemy, right?  It gets worse.

I've written before about me and party-based games.  So also in the Annals of Unpopular Opinions, I didn't enjoy Dragon Age, and really I'm not that big on playing sci-fi environments either, so the Mass Effect titles didn't do it for me.  And while I'm going all Andy Rooney and crapping on everyone's parade, I'll mention that exactly two -- 2 -- Japanese RPGs in all of gaming history have really appealed to me, and both were titles I was able to play on the DS: The World Ends With You and the re-release of Chrono Trigger.  I have yet to be able to make it through more than an hour or two of any other JRPG, including each and every Final Fantasy game.  I was unable to avoid observing FF13 being played in our home (only one living room, after all, and it doubles as my office / PC gaming location), and I was also unable to avoid mocking it.  Constantly.  That thing is beyond ridiculous.

While I'm ranting, I may as well point out that due to time / money / parental restrictions back in the day, I never played a Metroid or Mega Man title.  And that I suck at racing games and loathe PvP titles.

*phew*

This has been Your Critic's adventure as a Cantankerous Old Coot.  On deck after the holidays: thoughts about the Uncharted series, thoughts on the Syberia series, and an episode in which I realize partway through The Longest Journey that *this* is the game I remember playing but was unable to identify.  Happy Thanksgiving y'all. :)

How an MMO lost its fan

I never got into WoW.  Never liked it: hated the art, hated the controls (felt like I was steering a cow through water), hated the camera, really hated the UI, and didn't particularly enjoy the community.  Such is life.

But for me, there was EQ2.

A guy I dated for a couple of years (still a good friend) sat me down at his PC one day very late in 2004, when I was visiting (long-distance relationship) and he had to go to work.  "This is EQ2," he said. "Roll a character.  I think you'll like it."

When he came home from work nearly 9 hours later, I was still at the PC.  I'd gotten up once to use the bathroom but had forgotten to eat or get dressed.  But what I did have was Freeport citizenship.

For my birthday, two months later, he bought me a high-end video card and I bought myself the game.  Thus my main and I came to share a birth date.  I jumped in, feet first, and level by painful level eventually ended up at 50 -- then the cap -- with a guild and a horse and some low-level skill at raiding.

He played on Test and so I, too, played on Test.  I loved the small community, the low server population, the deep sense of all being in it together, and especially the direct interaction with the QA and Dev teams.  We could make suggestions directly to the people who changed the game, and see our thoughts appear in later patches.  We were the ones trying out the new zones and the new quests, the ones who had to figure out everything for ourselves because the walkthroughs hadn't been written yet.

18 months later, he and I split up.  EQ2 and I did not.  By then I was the leader of my small guild, after it had been through some serious drama.  (The guild's founder got hired by SOE as a GM, and so couldn't play with us any more, though we did sometimes still chat.)  I played in several apartments, in several cities, and into my next serious relationship.  I leveled to 60, to 70, to 80, lost friends, made new friends, found my old friends again.  I took a few months off, came back, felt like I had never left.  Patches always changed mechanics, of course, and sometimes very significantly (tradeskilling March 2005 vs. tradeskilling March 2009? no comparison!).  Some changes were for the better, some for the worse, but I was willing to ride them out.  Something, after a few weeks or a month or two, always made me want to go back to Norrath, back to my 5 -- now 6 -- room house in Freeport, back to wearing Assassin blacks and stealthing around and hoping Cheap Shot would take.  (Even after discovering with my Fury and Shadowknight that Assassin was EQ2 on Hard Mode, I always went back to my main.)

Until recently.

Each expansion has been more linear than the last.  The most recent, Sentinel's Fate, is 100% linear.  There's a specific A-B-C solo progression, an A-B-C group progression, and an A-B-C raid progression.  I leveled my Fury on totally different content than my Assassin from 1-80, but from 81-90, that wasn't going to be an option.  Then, on adding free-to-play, they changed the look and function of the interface rather significantly, and suddenly five years' worth of muscle memory was out the window.

I know, now, why I miss EQ2 the same way I miss college.  Because they each were significant for years of my life, and they each don't want me any more.  College is great when you're in it: you start as a freshman and the school tells you it's all about you and they love you.  Then you're a senior, and you're graduating, and it's all about you and they love you, until you realize on your way off of campus for the last time, that they're already cleaning up after you and hanging the banners to welcome next year's freshmen.  You loved the experience, but going back five years later won't be the same.

So I don't know.  I hate leaving everything I have there -- the people, the history, the character -- and walking away.  I've let my subscription lapse a number of times in the last 6 years but I always knew I'd re-up eventually.  But I took the $4.99 3-day re-up option last weekend, logged in for under an hour, and fruitlessly logged back out.  The game changed, and I think it may have lost me for real this time.  Maybe I'll go back a month or two after the 8th expansion comes out, as if for Homecoming weekend.  But SOE has decided that a different population -- a newer, fresher population -- is their target demo.  And that's cool.  Really.  I'm not one of those gamers who thinks a publisher should be in any business other than the one of making money.  I'm just sad that it regressed while I grew.

So, for the first time in many years, I'm installing other MMOs on my PC.  (I did beta-test or 30-day-trial several in the last few years, but never ended up subbing to any long-term.)  There are other shores for me to explore, and my guild and two sister-guilds are all cross-game groups.  So perhaps I shall find my friends again.  Perhaps I'll start by looking in Middle-Earth.

"The Book would not be destroyed as I had planned..."

I played Myst as soon as I had a computer with a CD-ROM drive: late 1994 into early- and mid-1995.  Over the years, the world of Atrus and the D'ni grew, and I loved it.  Enormously.  In fact, I enjoyed the books and their world even more than the game series, probably because I could follow the books but Riven left me in the dust. 

And thus, we come to the importance of accessible game design.

I actually don't have any quibbles with how Myst was handled.  Sure, there are a few things you could do better now, but the game itself was pretty groundbreaking in both form and content, and the first of a kind is almost never the best example of its kind.  But the Miller brothers had come up with a really extraordinary world.  It was true, as an observer, that sufficiently advanced technology looked like magic, but it wasn't actually, and that mattered.  The world was one of ancient civilizations, politics, human emotion, arrogance, pride... it just worked.  And along came Uru, which promised at long last to show us all that ancient, great, terrible ruined civilization.

And Uru, as it turned out... was a hot mess.  Scuttled by poor design choices, by problematic funding sources, and by a fandom that was so devoted and zealous that it drove away valid criticism and potential new fans, Uru didn't really stand a chance.  The internet is full of post-mortems, impassioned condemnations, and even more impassioned defenses, but I think my favorite quick comment comes from a post on GOG.com (read the whole thing, it's short): 

Uru is ... a broken game; divorced both from the safety of conventional design and from the massively multiplayer online play that was to be its centerpiece, Uru exists today only as the ruins of a grand, unrealized vision. But what spectacular ruins! You don't so much "play" Uru as wander its massive halls, gaping at the fantastical colors and textures and shapes, and pondering what it must have looked like in its own time... what it might have looked like if history had been different. Uru is beauty tinged with sadness.  ...

To be sure, I don't believe Uru's online side was ever going to or will ever succeed in this form. It was given a fair chance and failed on its own terms. While it's loaded with authenticity and emotional power, it never managed a satisfying storyline, or even totally coherent gameplay. Uru gets something wrong for everything it gets right, and, while I hope it is reborn in the future, it will need to rethink its core design ideas to be reborn successfully. That said, perhaps the best thing about Uru is its design creativity. People often say they'd prefer a game that tries new things and fails than a game that plays it safe, and this is that game. Even when Uru falls flat on its face (a couple puzzles have even risen above the original's maze puzzle in adventure game infamy), it always manages to fail in totally unique and interesting ways - ways that spark conversations about how game design works and what it might be capable of in the future. 

That, right there, is what I would like to have written.  By the time Uru was getting a second wind, game design had advanced far and away beyond the 2004-tech it languished with.  By the time GameTap tried to run with Uru Live in 2007, people were thinking of "MMOG" as synonymous with "World of Warcraft" (or at least "City of Heroes" or "EverQuest (2)") and the clunky, awkward, problematic UI wasn't going to fly.  (An MMO where it's almost impossible to carry on a coherent personal or local conversation?  Not so much.)

Is it impossible to create a massively multiplayer co-operative adventure game?  I really don't know.  I know Uru wasn't it, and although I'm sorry that Cyan failed, ultimately Uru deserved to fail, for the reasons described above and a few more as well.  But yes, I would love to see someone try again.  Games and gamers desperately need failed projects, almost (though not quite) as badly as we need successful ones.  I've argued a hundred times that gaming is finally starting to come into its own thanks to the indie, experimental, and avant-garde scene, and this is still true.  

But will we see such an experimental MMOG again?  Not anytime soon, I suspect.  Servers and development staff are a huge cost and a business is going to need -- and properly so -- to see a return on their investment.

In the meantime, though, the fan community -- at once such a tremendous asset and yet sometimes such a liability to the game -- is doing what fan communities do best.  Myst Online is now an open source, free project accessible to any who want in.  It's amazing what a community can create when they have the time, energy, and resources, so I wish them godspeed and hope to see more D'ni history revealed in my life.

After all... the ending has not yet been written.