Stop Whining!

So I bellyached a little about City of Heroes the other day and immediately felt conflicted and guilty about it. I mean, I wasn’t complaining all last month, when I was playing it all the time. My inner Arnold tells me to stop whining and honestly appraise my investment in CoH.

I think CoH is a fairly compelling challenge to some of the assumptions many developers and academics have made about how MMOGs and virtual worlds do or should work. The topics that draw us to MMOGs — virtual economies, narratable experiences, guilds and social networks, multimodal use of virtual space — rely on a degree of complexity. They focus on the more sophisticated components and performances in MMOGs and look to more complexity in the future: a maturation of the form in which these theories will really bear fruit.

And then CoH comes along: it has the barest of economies, teaming is casual and fleeting, supergroups are pretty much just a chat channel, narratable experiences dwindle rapidly after character creation, and activity is fairly exclusively directed toward blowing stuff up. And it’s a very successful game — and by “successful” I don’t just mean “popular.” I don’t think that players of the game are being duped into playing something uninteresting.

The game is succeeding because it does key things very well: it generates engaging, stimulating play. It delivers immediate pleasures and does not require undue investment. It presents satisfying casual socialization somewhere between beginner alienation and the ties-that-(can)-bind of a guild. The play is not widely varied, but what is there is solid and smooth. It’s an amalgam of a shooter and an RPG, really, with more emphasis on the shooter genre — and as a shooter it’s quite pleasant.

So we, as proponents of immersive and sophisticated virtual worlds, have to digest what the success of CoH means, and it might be difficult at points. Surely it’s got to diminish social interaction as we know it in virtual worlds? Surely it can’t keep growing without more robust imaginary engagement?

I would still say “yes” to both these questions. But I would also posit that complex experiences, so rich with potential for research and design, aren’t always the magic formula for a successful MMOG. There’s also marketing: the timing of a release, the timing of expansions, the making distinct of a product to a consumer. There’s also the appeal of the simpler experiences and good meat-and-potatoes gameplay; sometimes we just want combat and spectacle, and that’s very OK.

Or, maybe City of Heroes can’t just be situated as a success driven by external variables, or as the exception that proves the rule, the “beer and pretzels” that makes the nouvelle cuisine of Second Life even more delicious. Maybe City of Heroes presents something new that needs to be accounted for, something that forces us to revise our paradigms a little.