 MMORPGs are anything but. Now, MMO is kind of a word or mormorca, which is an acronym, as opposed to MMO RPG, which is an initialism, and you better not ever mess that up. But mormorca's are sort of a genre. You think of MMO, what do you think of? You think of like World of Warcraft, Eve Online. You think of certain specific things. You expect these games to have stateful progression, to have, you know, a world where you're going, maybe kill things, or somehow level up. There's all these expectations we have. Well, I'm going to argue that World of Warcraft, in particular, is not actually an MMORPG. Well, I mean, it is. If you take the word MMO RPG to mean the genre of games like World of Warcraft, then yeah, it's in the same genre that everybody calls MMORPG. But if you take, you know, if you actually break down the words, massive, multiplayer, online, role-playing game, it is none of those, or very few of them. Now, we have to pause. This is very important because we often hate on stuff. We had conventions and in panels, we did a famous Beyond Dungeons and Dragons panel many times. So, we are not going to say that World of Warcraft is a bad game. Well, I mean, we do believe that, but we're just not going to say it now. In this panel! So, don't argue with us about it now, save it for when we make the game. I mean, I'm not going to say that you're just leveling up and it's a time investment rather than a skill investment. I'm not going to say any of those things. I'm not arguing that it's a bad game. We would, just not today. I'm only arguing that it isn't what it says it is, that the word MMO is not really a useful term anymore. So, massively multiplayer online role-playing game. We call this a genre yet, isn't it just a list of mechanics? I mean, we say things like first-person shooter, third-person platformer, RPG. We have everything we use to describe games. It's usually a list of mechanics that the games involve. Sometimes they're fundamental mechanics. But yet, if we really look at this, why was more of a massively parallel multiplayer graphical proprietary flat-circle-state role character-progressing space with instantiated stateless real-time action-management gameplay and statically-interactive linear world narrative? Doesn't quite roll off the top. So clearly we're not actually listing all the core mechanics of a game like this. We're just calling it MMO and not really thinking about it. So what does massively multiplayer really mean? You know what I mean? How massive does it have to be, right? If I get, you know, a whole, you know, we add up every one of my encounters strike on all these separate servers. It adds up to tens of thousands. Let's talk about that. I mean, I'm a world of Warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons online. They're instantiated. They have instances. The world kind of shards off. So when you're going on a raid, you're in combat, you're doing all these sorts of things, you're kind of in your own universe, not really interacting with the whole world. You're interacting with everyone in that one raid. You could argue that most of World of Warcraft, while there's some gameplay in there, is kind of like a giant ready room for the raids. A giant chat room. You can walk around with avatars and everything. What's interesting is that the first MMOs didn't have this. The Realm, the first graphical, massively multiplayer online role-playing game in the world, it predated certain other games by a few months. It was put out by Sierra. It's still going. There's scary people in there. It was completely massive. If you walk around, everywhere you go, if someone else is walking, you just run into them. No matter what you do, the whole world is present at the exact same time. It was pretty much exactly like a mud. If anyone ever played a mud, mugs are truly massive. There's no instancing, there's no separating. Everyone can go anywhere as long as you don't die from some horrible monsters or something, right? Now, of course, this led to problems. If I was on a quest, let's say, you'd see this conga line of a thousand people all walking in the same direction, getting them a guffin, walking all the way back. It really broke the illusion of the game, but it was truly massive. Now, meanwhile, World of Warcraft, or Dungeons and Dragons and Online is actually a very good example of this. We were trying that game out because we hate most MMOs, but we have to play games before we can legitimately say we hate them. And I said, I'm in the main town. I'm in the town square and meet me. And Scott says, all right, where are you? I don't see you. We argue for like 20 minutes on Skype. We look online. It turns out there are like four of the same city. And they're just called one, two, three, four, and you click on which one you wanna go into. It's so parallel that the madness is completely ruined. What about Borderlands? Borderlands is in many ways the same game as World of Warcraft. I mean, I've got a character, Scott's got a character. I level up independently of Scott. We join together and go on raids. Those levels are stateful when we come back out. When we're not on raids, we're hanging out in the shared space for Rechette. I can take my character, join your game. We'll play a game now. All the core mechanics of my character progression are the same in Borderlands as they are in World of Warcraft. Yet no one calls this a massive game by any stretch. And the only thing that World of Warcraft has that Borderlands doesn't is the fact that when you're trying to get a game together, you know, trying to go on a raid or build a quest, right? For Borderlands, you have to call someone on Skype. Whereas World of Warcraft sort of has this chat room which is the town, right? And you happen to have your avatar available to you in the chat room. And you've still got to call people on Skype because they never actually sign in. Right, of course. So what about tribes? Tribes was an FPS. You'd have 20 on 20, 30 on 30 games. You could have 40 on 40, 60 on 60. You got big. And also we say massively multiplayer. Does that mean in terms of the number of players or does it mean in terms of the scale of the map? Tribes maps were massive. If you're trying to hoof it as a heavy to the enemy base, that's like a 10 minute run. That's why you got to ski like a real man. Scott brought up the example of Counter-Strike. To this day, the number one game on Steam is Counter-Strike Source. The number two game is Counter-Strike 1.6. It's pretty close. They both have about 60 to 70,000 players at any given time. So is this not massive? I mean, they're just having all these individual servers which are kind of like individual raids that get replayed over and over and over again. But you can go to the Steam lobby. You can talk to people, form a new game, go back and forth. But yet it doesn't have any of the statefulness. I don't level up by killing, you know, Skaggs and Skagg Gulch with my TMP. What the fuck does online even mean? I mean, Farmville is online. Farmville is massive. It has billions of players. Is that a massively multiplayer online game? Is anyone actually going to argue that it is? Or if it is, is that actually a meaningful term anymore? We also have to think about what kind of online that it is. For example, Minecraft is online. So is World of Warcraft. I can't just, unless I'm a dirty pirate, make my own World of Warcraft server and play on it, unless I'm a dirty pirate, you can actually do that. But Minecraft, we for Geek Nights, actually one of our friends runs a server and we all hang out on it. If I control the server, that's a very different experience from if Val or Blizzard or someone else controls the server. I mean, I can just make everybody level 100 or whatever level it is that you kids are shooting for these days. Even though it's not necessary, these games, Minecraft and WoW and such, the online player actually interacts in with other players in the same space, the same game space when you're online, connected by the internet. But how about, oh, my favorite game of 2010, Pac-Man CDX. You never actually play Pac-Man at the same time as anyone else. It's a single player game, but there's a leaderboard with everyone's score online. So does that make it online? Is it now an online game, even though it doesn't even have multiplayer, it's just a single player game? Role playing game, a very contentious subject. Now, I mean, those are role playing games by some definitions. That's a role playing game, it's not really online. That's a role playing game. At what point is World of Warcraft a role playing game? Now, you are playing a role. I have my avatar, I walk around, I do my stuff. I'm playing this role. But I mean, how many character decisions am I making that are mechanically backed up by the game, that are mechanically enforced? I mean, plenty of people go to RP servers and they role play, but none of that role playing has anything to do with the game. They could do that exact same role playing in a chat room. The only difference is that it happens to be a chat room where their avatar is above it. Well, now I'm actually really doing World of Warcraft a disservice. World of Warcraft is more like that. Because you are playing a role, but if I play a Taran and Scout plays a Taran and we go through all the stuff, we're both kind of playing the same story in parallel and then we might bump into each other into a raid, but I'm not enriching the world. I'm not changing anything in the world of Warcraft. I'm changing everything in my world of Warcraft. I'm the goddamn hero and you're all just in the background. You're not even there when I'm actually fighting the Lich King, unless you're in my guild. So role playing, I mean, shouldn't a role playing game be judged by what it actually mechanically brings to the table? I mean, what if you're out at MMO, a massive game of some kind that actually mechanically enforced role playing? Say you become infamous and it does things to you that increase over time. You have stats, you have traits, you have maybe, I don't know, verbal combat as opposed to sword combat, some way to make a role playing intrinsic to the system. If it's not intrinsic to the system, I can't say that it's a role playing game because I can play Monopoly and role play the Everliving crap out of it. It doesn't make it a role playing game. Oh, you evil bastard. You have taken Mediterranean. I will have it from you. So it seems like what's going on here is that we're really confusing mechanics and genres in games in general. And the MMOs are just one example. I mean, look at first person shooters. For a long time when someone said FPS, they meant quake or doom. No one thought of making a game, say, that just had melee combat or a game like Minecraft, which is a first person game. And there's shooting. There is shooting, but yet would you call it a first person shooter? Tie fighter, it's first person and the shooting. I can add shooting to like Gran Turismo and use the first person driving the camera. It would be first person with shooting. More importantly, this really messes up the game design world in the game industry. Because if you go to a company and say, I'm making an MMO, a massive game, they're just gonna think, oh, he's making a World of Warcraft clone and they're gonna ignore you. Or they're gonna think it's gonna print money and you're gonna fail. But they're really restricting ourselves with genres that are just mechanics and we're constricting the kind of games that we make. Why don't we have truly massive games? Why do we have to tie all this baggage of stateful character progression, of leveling up, of the grind, of the guilds? What if we had a massive game that was just Star Wars and you play the Battle of Yalvin? That is the only game. And once a week it happens. 10,000 people, every single tie fighter, every single X-Wing, every single class of the state. Every single person on the Death Star, somebody's shooting it. And this is where I think the Star Wars Galaxies MMO had so many problems. They tried to make World of Warcraft set in a Star Wars universe and they didn't really do a lot to differentiate it that worked. Because what do we care about in Star Wars? We want to be Luke Skywalker and save the day. Why can't we just have a game where everybody saves the day every time? It doesn't have to be stateful. We don't have to be leveling up. Let's just have these massive spaces and interact in them. Why don't we try World of Richmond? What if in World of Warcraft, instead of just when you die, oh, I lose some crap or whatever, you know. Wait, do people understand like why this is, right? So if you played Oregon Trail way back in the day, right? On an old Apple II, when you died, you got to type in your message for your tombstone and then anyone who took that floppy disk and played Oregon Trail on that same floppy from there on out, when they got to that point where you died, they would see your tombstone that you left and usually little kids would leave all kinds of bad words on the tombstone, you know, pee-pee. So, you know, here lies pee-pee. She boops, something like that, right? But think about what has happened here. We have enriched the world. My progress through the game, I've played, I've died. I've left a permanent mark on the game. The world is now different. What if in World of Warcraft, when you failed a raid, you could never do that raid again and the world itself was different? You didn't save the city. That city's gone for everybody. Now, we're not quite there yet with technology because World of Warcraft, the only reason it has such a rich story is that they write the entire story. It's not like I can make the story substantially different or really different at all in most cases. I'm just going through the same pace as everyone else is going through. There is a game called Dwarf Fortress. The most important thing about Dwarf Fortress, I think, is not the procedural content generation because we're not quite there yet. It is really good. It's the fact that this is a game where I play out my whole fortress and the point is to lose. The point is that my fortress will eventually fall. Someday those dwarves will live too damn deep. Something will come up and kill us all. You never know. But when that last dwarf dies, weeping bitterly and alone, having barricaded himself into the last bastion of safety surrounded by his dead cats. And then he finally starts to death and you start the game over, you walk into that exact same fortress. You can take that game and give it to someone else and they will live in the world that you created. Imagine MMOs like that. Old MMOs were like that. Muds, if you were playing a mod, you would write the story for the rooms you were going through. Your body was there forever until something ate it and your stuff was still there. You write something on the wall. It is there for anyone to see and very few MMOs do anything like that and I think it's really a shame. So in conclusion on this first short panel, MMORPG is an absolutely useless term and you should never use it to describe a game. It is so generic. It is so pointless. It doesn't mean anything. At best it's gonna mean wow to most people or you'll be a pedant and you'll actually mean I have a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. I know what all those words mean and I am totally serious. My game is that no one else is going to in any way understand what you just said to them. Genrification is probably not just restricting creativity. It is one of the biggest problems in the game industry today. Indie games are the few areas where we're seeing people break away from that and why don't I just make an FPS where instead of shooting people, I'd build giant penises into the sky. If you look at gaming history, the old arcade games, like you'll see in the classic arcade upstairs, what genre, there were some genres like space invaders, the shoot-em-ups, but most of the games defied genre. It was like, what genre is Zookeeper? Zookeeper? It's like it's like, you know, what genre is Group Air Taffer? Ah, Group Air Taffer, you know? They didn't have genres. Everyone just made a video game. Then there were no rules, no restrictions. The early PC games were like that up until the 90s. You know, what genre was Mule? Mule? Now I couldn't make up a genre. I could list all the mechanics in the game like we started to with World of Warcraft until we got all the mechanics wrong and we skipped all the ones that actually mattered. And finally, there could be awesome MMORPGs. The term I just said we shouldn't use. We could have these massive interactive spaces. We could have entire worlds online and we don't. MMOs need to grow up and be what they were truly born to be. Thank you.