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?

The Curse of WoW

I was just nosing through one of the MMO news feeds. It's a dire state if you ask me. It's either WoW or nothing. There seem to be so many MMOs failing at the moment and the feedback seems to fall into two categories, either a) why play this when WoW is so much better, or b) this is just copying WoW, so we might as well just play WoW. Sheesh. Time for something new please!

The narrative of now

Whilst a colleague and I spent 3 hours on a tube journey to and from a client meeting that never was (that's a whole other story on why you should virtualise project meetings...), we got into a discussion about car based games, and specifically about licensed vehicles.

It's fairly standard practice that if you make a car based computer or console game, and want to use a real-world car you must pay a significant (tens of thousands of pounds) licensing cost to be able to reproduce the shape and detail of the car and the brand identity of it and it's maker. This practice is understandable from a brand control point of view – you don't want your car brand associated with a game that's going to give you negative publicity. It's common practice for the can manufacturers to insist that no damage is shown on their vehicles, regardless of how they are driven , so that they always appear in pristine showroom condition.

A side effect of this is that it effectively shuts the smaller developers out of a this sector of the market for one simple reason: games that don't have licensed real-world cars just don't sell anywhere near as well. There are a few notable examples of this, the Burnout series being one.
This led the conversation to the obvious next question: Why does it matter is the cars are copies of real world ones?

My opinion is that society and the media does a very successful job of fostering materialistic desire for unobtainable things in most people. For example, I would dearly love to own a Ford GT. I know this will never happen – they only made a hand-full of them and even if I did have the money, I know there is a long list of more rational and immediate things that the money would be spent on.

As I've mentioned, I play games. One of them being Test Drive Unlimited by Atari. It's a driving game with some really unique elements, but the relevant fact it that one of the cars that a player can save hard-won in-game cash for is the Ford GT. When I eventually had enough cash I bought the car and it was a great pleasure to own and drive.

The question again is: Why?

My theory is that this all comes back to something that is innate to all of us, since a large amount of our communication is based upon it: stories.

From the way I describe to you now, what happened on the tube train yesterday, to how I might explain the fall of the Roman Empire or how an alpha channel on the surface of a nerve cell contributes to that nerve firing, each is encapsulated in its own story, described from the 3rd person.

This brings me to immersion and player emotional investment in games and social environments like Second Life. I'm invested in my virtual Ford GT, on it's virtual island of Hawaii. I worked hard to earn the cash, it's a wonderful design and it out performs a lot of the other virtual cars in it's class. It satisfies the desire for the unobtainable, and is a significant milestone on the story of my experience in an environment that, lets face it, isn't real. But I do have to say when talking to someone who plays the same game, the discussion about what's in our virtual garages is exactly the same as if everything where real. We project ourselves into the virtual, willingly adopting the parts we play in the game, comparing our progress, our status in an imaginary world.
I find it very interesting how easily people settle into a text based social environment. Just looking round at the people I see working, tools like Skype have gone from being relatively rare a couple of years ago to be on the majority of desktops now. Then there's SMS.

When conversing in these types of environments, we begin to insert narrative elements where they are missing to complete the experience. LOL is a prefect example. I may have laughed out loud, or just thought it, but in the shared narrative of the conversation, from your point of view, I laughed. This evolved from early text chat users adding in descriptive elements to replace the missing visual and tonal cues about their emotional state whilst chatting. These then where reduced to acronyms for ease of typing.

This becomes more apparent in visually represented worlds like Second Life or MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. People having conversations in it find that the conversation becomes more and more embellished with narrative detail, echoed by the animated gestures of the avatars. This isn't just the stuff to provide the missing social cues, but additional narrative. This all leads towards better immersion, more emotional investment, a better conversation and the people in that conversation retaining more of it for longer.

These are the stories of now. Narratives communally written about what is being discussed right now. Adapting to changes of focus and projecting the emotional state of the co-authors.

I think that these stories exist and work because they are presented in textual form. The medium naturally encourages the reader to use their imagination as they read each line. But here comes VOIP – Voice over IP ... a relatively new technology being deployed to allow users to chat using microphone and speakers to hear the voices of the people they are conversing with.
This has two effects. Firstly, making it harder to break the bond with reality and become immersed in the world with which you art interacting (finding out that the eight foot tall Orc you have been adventuring with has the voice of a twelve year old American kid, doesn't help the suspension of disbelief). Secondly it adds back in all the social cues that have been missing in the typed conversations, making for a more genuine social experience.

There are other considerations in this that I won't explore here ... one is the ability of people using text based chat to hold a number of parallel conversations, often with a number of people in each conversation. The fact that the communication is typed text allows this to happen. I also read a something on a blog recently that was saying that people using a virtual environment like Second Life, and VOIP so that they could hear each other talking, found that they got a better sense of being somewhere together than using web cams with VOIP to have a video conference.

Text chat will I think continue for quite some time alongside technologies like VOIP – it offers too many features that are not available with spoken communication. Just as it suffers from the things that are missing, but I think we are very good at finding ways to fill the gaps and immerse ourselves in the virtual environments we use.

Pale

The magic first half-hour

Over the years I have spent quite a bit of time (probably a little too much) playing computer games of one type or another. The experiences from them vary widely, but there is one common element that in my view either makes or breaks that experience and will set a lot of the tone for the next 100 hours.

'The magic first hour' is the experience of how a new game – a new world – caters for your arrival, manages the suspension of disbelief at the same time as explaining to you exactly what it is you are supposed to be doing.... and does this in a way that makes you want to continue.
Car race games don't need to make a great fuss about mechanics and controls at this point and have the freedom to focus on backstory and plot. Fantasy games and MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games) in particular have a much more complex player interaction as well as (usually) a deeper and more convoluted story. It is this type of game that offers us some of the best examples of how to bring a new user to an environment that can be difficult to master.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a great example of a good strategy for doing this. They player starts and makes as few permanent choices as possible and well placed in-game pointers and pop-up help continually adds new information and help for the player. As the player progresses, in-game characters reveal more information, choices and instructions. This ensures that the player starts with a relatively small amount information that they need to retain, and that this is expanded in line with their growing experience of the game. Both the plot and the geographical area that the player is exposed to grow in the same manner.

It's the start of this learning period that I'm calling the magic first half-hour.

Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion of the number of free-to-play MMORPGs that are available, and I have played a number of them. Some follow a model similar to WoW an lead the player in, carefully expanding their knowledge and experience, helping at every stage. Some however don't. It's all to common a sensation to be dropped into game, with little clue how to use the game or what to do first. It's these games that I don't go back to and are right on the top of my 'things to un-install' list.

The message I think is true beyond just games - either progressively help the new user or risk losing them very quickly, regardless of how good your product actually is. If they don't feel supported and don't engage with it, they won't use it.

I also think that the actual duration and format of this exchange varies. For a web site, the duration is down to below a minute. The exchange is subliminal – a good, well presented design makes it apparent which elements of the site are navigational, or projects the right air of intrigue that the user will feel encouraged to explore the interface to find the content and navigation for themselves.
When first starting to use a new application or device such as mobile phone or mp3 player, the interface is critical to your comprehension of how to use it. For the majority of users of this type of technology (ones that have used something similar before) a well designed product should be intuitive. And these days it's pretty well true – use one mobile phone you can use them all, some fairly minor trial-and-error. But think back 10 years to how easy it wasn't to set the timer on your VHS recorder.

I'd also apply this to things like Second Life, which does a reasonable job of starting you on the path to learning how to use the interface, how to interact with the world itself and your avatar and how to communicate. Having introduced this technology 20 or so people in the last couple of months, they almost all agree that what happens next is the problem. You complete your training, know how to go places and chat with people and are dropped off in-world with little guidance of what to do next. It's an experience a bit like showing someone who has never seen the World Wide Web before and and sitting them in front of a web browser and saying “here you are .... go explore”.Providing starting points would be a great idea.

The same is true for visiting some new locations in Second Life. Bad design leaves me feeling unsure as to where I'm supposed to go, where my introduction is, what I should expect and what this place is all about. The next thing that usually happens is I move on and explore somewhere else – the poor arrival negates my desire to explore: if the start is uninspiring will the rest be any different?
Don't forget the new user experience. I've worked on a lot of projects where the induction for new users is one of the last elements to be added in – often because it relies on the finalisation of all the other elements. The key is not to rush this, to think about the range of your target audience and how to lead them into the experience you have crafted for them, in a way that they will readily understand.

Pale