🚀 go-pugleaf

What do you think the future of online games is, in terms of style? This 
article:

http://www.gamespy.com/gdc2002/mmog/

Some good ideas and questions:

"Are these products games or are they services? Should they be complex or
simple? Should they cater to niches or mainstream audiences? How should people
access them?"

"Everyone at the conference was intimately familiar with the Disneyland analogy:
the school of thought that says a massively multiplayer, online world should be
just like Disneyland, a "controlled environment," built for the entertainment of
guests and with all unsavory elements removed. Others referred to this as "a
fascist state," and not always in jest."

"A major part of establishing a controlled environment revolves around managing
user expectations, a phrase that came up again and again in several sessions.
Most designers agreed that to date many games have done a poor job of letting
the user know up front what kind of world they were stepping into and how
conflicts were to be handled. Laws, and the enforcement of them, would have to
be clearly outlined in order to maintain strict control of the game without a
bunch of upset or confused players."

"While most developers seemed to agree that a theoretical Œonline Disneyland¹
was a good way to create a world enjoyable to most players, a tightly controlled
world unfortunately comes in direct conflict with an even stronger sentiment
shared among the next-gen game designers. They wanted more dynamic worlds, not
less, and more power for the users to shape those worlds. We can do what Lego
did and give them [the players] the blocks."

"Our corporations are terrified of this. Intellectual property, ownership, and
copyright issues are just the beginning of the uncharted territory. More
importantly, how can a game design rationalize the desire to give players
creative power with the need for a controlled environment? Are the two mutually
exclusive? Solving this problem seemed to be the top agenda in the next
generation of games."

"Are developers worried that empowering users to create things will just result
in massive worlds packed with low-quality (read: crap) content? Of all the
people I spoke with, this didn't seem to be a concern. Most consider it
imperative to allow users to create lasting things in the game world, and the
only issue was how to do it elegantly while maintaining the integrity of the
world."

"Is It a 'Game?'  Of course, the current crop of products can hardly be called
anything but; players still 'play the spreadsheet' and try to gain points and
items."

"The root of the issue is that players will do whatever they're rewarded for
doing. And it's easy to reward monster-bashing; it's a simple, elegant system
that's worked in games for decades. It's much more difficult to reward other
kinds of activities without players abusing the system. An example that someone
brought up: they tinkered with the idea of a 'chivalry' system, where players
could give 'tokens' to other players who helped them out in the game. The
problem is, how do you prevent players from hoarding tokens with a hundred of
their friends?"

"...most people wanted to broaden the pool of potential players. And that meant
a lot of things. It meant simpler game mechanics that don't take a doctoral
degree to demystify. But it also meant different ways to access the game."

"How do you make a player who spends five hours a month [playing] still feel
relevant to the game world?"

"They [players] have unexpected, unplanned events happen to them that aren't
part of the game mechanics. It needs to be more like the phone company, wherein
only an act of God will shut down your service and take away your dial tone."
"Most companies are going to strive to make gameplay more basic. They'll try to
find simpler game mechanics that combine together in interesting ways. Think of
The Sims: there's only a limited set of character actions and items available,
yet they combine for all sorts of interesting effects."