Can your MMO really be an RPG?

I've recently rediscovered Oblivion on my Xbox 360.

Over the past few years I've spent some time playing a number of MMOs, and the experience varies somewhat between one and the next but consistently, they don't contain much roleplay.

This doesn't seem initially to be a critical aspect but it does hilight fundamental difference: MMOs seem to take a role more akin to team sports / social environment for the people that I know who play them ... kind of like an online pub, with orc slaying / raid dungeons thrown in. People play as themselves, disassociated from the characters that they play and with the advent of VOIP communications chatting as they do so.

This is no bad thing, the ability to socialise freely in an online environment, but it does show the marked difference between the MMO experience and the traditional RPG experince, where suspension of disbelief is maintained, and the players immersion in the story seems to be greater.

My open question about this: is it can you actually have an MMORPG that includes immersive roleplay, or is it the very nature of people that they bring their lives with them into the game and dilute the narrative?

Second Life ... the things we need to fix next

I'm an advocate of Second Life for a number of reasons: it's adaptability to a range of uses, the completeness of it's model and workable DRM, the friendliness and creativity of its population, and the richness of its experience.

Having said that, there are a couple of things about it that are becoming (in my opinion) a serious issue.

The first is the mature content. Now, I know everything has its place, but Second Life doesn't have enforced zoning to manage the spread of locations that include mature content or a content filtering solution implemented in the client viewer to allow you to filter what you see ... much life the safe search filtering you find in the image search tools on Google.

Second Life needs to learn some of the lessons that the internet as a whole, and the search engines especially learned a while back - people will keep on putting sex on the web, but you need to offer some workable tools that allow users to choose what they see before it arrives.

The next thing on my wishlist is some search integration outside the SL client - I'd like to see the content from within SL presented on a search tool that can be accessed directly from the SL website, and more than that, I'd like to see it done in a way that Google can index. My aim with this is that,for example, whenI search for 'IBM Training' on Google, included in the returned results are the locations of IBMs SL training facilities, and not because they took the time to add the SLURLs on their website, but because the small-ads associated with the locations are accurately indexed by the search engines.

My last wish? Proper web-page-on-a-prim. I want to effectively see the output of the browser rendered onto the surface of an object and that includes all the mime types my browser supports (flash, pdf,video etc). The one media / web page limit per parcel is too limiting. There is a huge volume of traditional web content and tools that would work very well if they could be displayed on an in-world object and have the functionality preserved ... scrollbars too.

But what I would like to maintain is that SL is very much a viable platform for us to take VWs forward - we all know it isn't perfect, but taken as a whole it is a viable, robust, well tooled and documented solution that has the buy-in of it's steadily expanding population.

Limited Editions For All

I'm old enough to remeber numbered, limited edition vinyl EPs and boxed-sets of singles. These things had a huge value in a niche way, because the were exactly that: limited editions. They were usually lavishly packaged compared to the regular edition, included extra tracks often unreleased anywhere else and other items such as postcards.

Things are changing as internet technology and online personalisation reaches out into the consumer products market. For a long time now, you've been able to purchase your iPod direct from Apple and have a message laser etched into the back of the case. More recently Timberland have added a feature to their website where you can customise your boots as you order them, including an embroidered monogram. Moon Pig are now offering to custom print greetings cards with the message of your choice. Bob Books will print and bind a hardback book of your choice from images you upload via their website.

It strikes me that this is then end of the limited edition as we know it - or possibly a proliferation of the range of limited editions.

Either the mass accessibility of personalisation with consumer products will reduce the interest in 'designed' limited editions *OR* the easy access to the new design tools for this new generation of personalised products will lead to an increase in the number of amateur designers using these new tools to produce their own limited runs of pre-personalised products. I'm watching closely to for which way it goes, but I hope the latter, not the former.

WoW, Celebrity Sponsorship and being the ipod of the MMO world

I've moaned about WoW and it's stifling effect on the MMO genre. It strikes me that we are seeing the new ipod of the mmo world here. How many of the competitors for either product run TV advertising (let alone use celebrity endorsement when doing so - WoW and Ozzy Osbourne being the most recent).

The simple fact is that with this scale of product, with this level of marketing behind it, with this size of established user-base, how can the next big thing get its message through and survive in the face of the inevitable WoW2, in the same way that I doubt there will be a serious contender for the ipod for quite some time (or until Apple messes up)?