The Trouble with MMORPGs

Nick McCrea writes about the trouble with MMORPGs, which I’m firmly convinced can be read as a narrative problem. These are radically different sort of fictions, but they are fictions — they have to have enough internal consistency to make sense, but you don’t have to do that by replicating the banality of life. You aren’t restricted to a flatly capitalist “real world” story with acquisition as a goal. Anyone who’s spent more than an hour in EQ killing rats for hides knows where I’m coming from.

Which provokes the question: what other economies can be imagined or generated? Because these games do operate on economies. It seems like crafting interesting new ones would be the fun part.

Still, you can’t be too harsh… I can visualize the meeting where some marketing guy from Sony says all he requires is that the bastard is released in 18 months, forcing the team to say, “Well, crap, guess we should just go with the rat-killing economy, then.” It’s tough to resist that. The marketing guy doesn’t realize extra time spent on something new and engaging will pay off in the long run.

I think Second Life is an exception — an different kind of online economy that has a lot of potential. It’s also an exception in other ways, as well: it’s a borderline case between a coordinated, digital fiction and a coordinated, digital, stylized version of reality. I know, I know, six of one, but I think there’s a distinction that needs to be studied.

Slashdot discussion of the article.