MMO’s around the next curve

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

This post is a reac­tion of sorts to some­thing Brent asked in the fant­astic show 100 of Vir­gin Worlds. If you haven’t listened to it yet then you are miss­ing out and should sign up through iTunes today, now, go, I will wait…

…right.

Basic­ally Brent spent some­time ask­ing his pod­cast­ing col­lect­ive a very good ques­tion and I wanted to run with it a little to give some of my ideas and see if this is spot­ting a trend. The ques­tion was, “What do you see as the future of (Game) pod­cast­ing?” My answer to this is to say that the future of game pod­cast­ing is tied up with the future of MMO gam­ing itself. MMO’s the next generation.

So where is that going and how does pod­cast­ing fit in?

We are all tired of MMO’s as they stand. Sure people play WOW, but a lot, a sig­ni­fic­ant lot have quit and we all know the state of the recent releases. Van­guard tried to break my heart, but it was already broken by SWG. My friends and I all wanted Van­guard to work. Why was this? It was because of The Curve. The Curve is a way of describ­ing the future. Around the curve is the next gen­er­a­tion and before the curve, back down the road, is the past gen­er­a­tions. All games exist some­where on the curve itself, like a set of racing cars all vying to round the bend of the curve first.

The fur­ther they go for­wards the more of the future comes around the curve and the more of the past gen­er­a­tions you can no longer see as they drop off and fade away into nos­tal­gia. Many MMO games are already back there, way back there, and prob­ably start with Nethack then all the way through Mud’s, early uni­ver­sity MMO’s, Ultima online, Ever­quest, DAOC, and up into the curve itself.

Nethack owned

Cur­rently the head of the curve, the one to beat is of course WOW. There have been attempts to try and do this: for example Van­guard, which tried to be more hard­core and build up from a play­erbase of fan­at­ics and by pop­u­lar acclaim over­take WOW.

It failed dismally.

The truth is this, WOW is so far up the curve that in order to over­take it you need to pro­duce a game that is actu­ally around the corner. That is; a game that is the next gen­er­a­tional leap.

So what would such a game look like and what does it have to do with podcasting?

I don’t think that the tra­di­tional MMO genres of rip­ping off AD&D are going to cut it going for­wards. And I don’t mean just the EQ2’s or Tabula’s, I mean the fact that the way you play AD&D; the dice roles, is still at the heart of all cur­rent MMO’s. As I have blogged before, I don’t see this trend being core to the games around the curve.

So what is going to be the core?

We all are.

I have seen the trend com­ing on…

I have been watch­ing the media interest in Second Life and won­der­ing at it for quite a while. Second Life is a ter­rible MMO’s, because it isn’t really an MMO at all. It is the front end to an MMO. Second Life is like those wait­ing rooms between maps in an online shooter. The prob­lem is that the shooter never starts.

But an idea occurs to me.

Sony have been work­ing this idea for while with Home; the inter­face for the PS3 that is like a social meet­ing room before you go off and play a game with your bud­dies. A kind of 3d ver­sion of Xfire, mixed with social tools to inter­act with your gam­ing comrade’s.

When I saw the Inter­net buzz around Home (from Penny Arcade, Edge Magazine, etc)…

Will Home ever get here?

You too can have hair this bad!

…I was reminded of the greatest MMO you have not played; The Meta­verse in the novel Snow Crash.

You should all read this book NOW!

In Snow Crash the book is based around a kind of social MMO that people con­nect into and hang out. It is from inside the Meta­verse that they then go on to play a game. It could be any­thing, rid­ing bikes at high speed, shoot­ing at each other, sword fights, etc, etc. The Meta­verse is the gate­way to the online exist­ence and it is through that gate­way that all games are played.

Every­one con­nects to the Meta­verse and hangs out first.

I loved this vis­ion of the future and I remem­ber Brent men­tion­ing in his show 100 that game design­ers are inter­ested in such things as Gax­on­line, Vir­gin Worlds and all the self cre­ated social spaces gen­er­ated by the games band­ing together. Look­ing at how fast Gax has grown I can see why.

It cant be long before you are able to launch your MMO of choice dir­ectly from Gax Chat. It won’t be long after, that social sites such as Gax will become a front end to MMO’s. Ima­gine, if you will a 3d ver­sion of Gax, where all the users could hang out, social­ise and blog to their hearts con­tent. Ima­gine being able to use Gax as a hub to go to whatever game you wanted and to bring along all you Gax friends with you. It cant be long until a self organ­ising col­lect­ive of gamers use the tech­no­logy of the web not only to talk about games but to cre­ate a true portal to actu­ally play them too.

So what of the podcast?

Meta­verse Media such as Radio or even 3d TV casting.

In the Meta­verse shown in Snow Crash there would have been tons of cool radio sta­tions pump­ing out info on the latest gam­ing. With radio, pod­casters get the oppor­tun­ity to put out inform­a­tion that is much more up to the minute and reaches a much lar­ger audi­ence. If the coolest way to get into a game was to meet up in GAX3d first, ima­gine how many people such a radiocast could reach? It could be mil­lions. No longer would you have to fuck around with the crap inter­face of iTunes, you could catch the latest news right as you log in.

So ima­gine if you will the next stage bey­ond that.

Games that down­load in GAX3d.

your mates play­ing the latest game and you don’t have it? No bother! Simply log into GAX3d, walk your avatar down this par­tic­u­lar cor­ridor and by the time you get to the door at the end the game will have down­loaded, installed, cre­ated your account and be ready to play, so simply open the door and walk in!

So, for me, the next gen­er­a­tion of gam­ing is not about mak­ing a bet­ter WOW, it is about har­ness­ing all these player built social spaces to bet­ter com­mu­nic­ate to gamers and allow them to exper­i­ence their friends and make new ones in a more vis­ceral way. And while they are wait­ing for more to join their upcom­ing raid­ing party, pumped over the digital air­waves is the smooth and sooth­ing voice of Brent…

…although he is prob­ably telling them the game they have down­loaded is shit

Basho

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