"In scattered groups upon the golden sand,
They game—carouse—converse—or whet the brand;
Select the arms—to each his blade assign,
And careless eye the blood that dims its shine:
Repair the boat—replace the helm or oar,
While others straggling muse along the shore;
For the wild bird the busy springes set,
Or spread beneath the sun the dripping net:
Gaze where some distant sail a speck supplies,
With all the thirsting eye of Enterprize—
Tell o'er the tales of many a night of toil,
And marvel where they next shall seize a spoil"
Lord Byron - The Corsair
LEVEL UP!
What do pirates do? They pirate, right? We all know what that looks like.
Shoot a cannon, wave a sabre, drop a plank from one ship to the other - then walk it. Lub-landers get avast-ye'd and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Then there's another ship right behind it, right?
So you shoot the cannon again, wave the sabre, drop that same plank, lubber some more landers and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Luckily there's yet another ship right behind that one, so you shoot the cannon again, wave your sabre, drop the creaking plank, land ye some more avasts and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Good parrot.
Hey, look, there was another ship sitting right behind that one! What're the odds?
So you shoot the cannon again, wave that sabre like it's going out of style, drop the now splintering plank, avast lub some more landyes and the parrot goes *squawk*!
But wait, there's another fiscal year behind that!
So you reskin the same skeletons and goblins again, use the money you could've spent for development to fund an ad blitz instead, raise the level cap another ten levels, shuffle the overpowered cannons into overpowered sabres to give the illusion of activity, toss the plank overboard because customers complained such an advanced piece of equipment convoluted the ship-boarding experience into inaccessibility, and Blizzard Entertainment pockets another seven million of the rabble's dollars -
- and the parrot goes *squawk*!
LEVEL UP!
The more I think about it, this comparison of games to Romantic Age escapist tales of high seas adventure seems increasingly apt because only with mounting industrialization from 1800 onwards did escapist fiction as we now know it begin to take shape. In industrial society, one's effort is bought or sold as an ephemeral, inchoate abstraction, and vanishes into an incomprehensible maelstrom of parts and labor, services and products, digested and excreted by the untouchable pantheons of corporate profiteering and speculation. While I'm obviously maintaining a narrow focus here within much broader issues, one thing virtual worlds can offer (paradoxically enough) is tangibility. Your high score, your latest set of enchanted spaulders, your custom-painted spaceship, they're all <yours> by direct personal causality, in a way your grudgingly bestowed paycheck, mass-produced t-shirt or cookie-cutter house can't hope to match. Just as comfortably literate Londoners in Byron's time might envisage themselves setting the "busy springes" to catch their supper, games provide us with measurable results for our efforts, and persistent worlds can go a step beyond that, fabricating an interconnected community matching our instincts' demands for membership in roving packs or scores-strong villages - an opportunity to be THE butcher or THE baker or THE candlestick maker all engaged toward a common goal, instead of data entry drone #34729.
One (of the many) area(s) where MMOs in their dumbed-down WoW-clone interpretation have fallen short is in trying to distill our instinctive expectation of pack / tribe / village life to nominal, symbolic victory messages. There's more to pirate life than buckling one's swash; if Lord Byron could figure that out in 1814, lesser minds might reasonably be expected to catch up to him given a two century handicap. At some point someone has to restock the cannonballs, sharpen that sabre and net some actual food for everyone since you can't eat dubloons.
Note, this is not an argument for absurd, fiddling "realism" but for allowing players to differentiate themselves, to put the RPG back into MMOs, by being the pirate who sets the fishing nets or the pirate who spots new ships from the crow's nest. It feels good to have one's own identity, to fulfill a necessary role instead of simply being data entry pirate #34729. One can easily observe that in any class-based game everyone wants to play the damage dealer, the goal-getter racking up the highest kill count... but that's ignoring all us nobodies who happily consigned ourselves to the roles of back-row support casters or crafters or resource gatherers in multiplayer games other than WoW-clones. Despite the game industry ignoring us, we nonetheless, shockingly enough, continue to exist. The MMO genre's fixation on copycatting Diablo is as much a fabrication of developers eager to cut corners as it is a result of the majority of customers' idiocy and lack of imagination.
Nor is this a question of whether or not such games will still be centered on combat, on victory, on conquest - but of acknowledging that making a kill involves more than killing. Conrad had a whole crew behind him, and it's long past they got their due. Any MMO worth the title would include both a final goal and the miles of careful planning, deliberation and coordination beforehand to ensure success: supply chains, scouting, siege engineering, the works. You don't need to expand your customer base by attracting more wannabe pirate captains; they're a dime a dozen anyway. What the genre needs is capable underlings, villagers plying their crafts: Alfred the butler, the pirates who can look beyond mere brawling to eye a prize on the distant horizon.
For an MMO to build up that network of interdependence that would make it a virtual world, it needs to appeal not only to the portion of the playerbase which wants to charge across a plank to the enemy ship, but to those who take pride in crafting sturdy planks. Designers should be asking themselves: how does this product appeal to fans of city simulators, of grand strategy or survival or base building. That this will result in watering down said genres is inevitable, but then again it's not like MMO classes are anywhere near as complex as single-player role-playing games in the first place, and we're more than willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of convergence.
The parrot... can still go *squawk!* I've got nothing against that parrot - but we need to give it something to squawk about.
No comments:
Post a Comment