The Corsair Demographic, Part 2: No Dread of Death

"No dread of death—if with us die our foes
Save that it seems even duller than repose 
[...]
Ours are the tears, though few, sincerely shed,
When Ocean shrouds and sepulchres our dead"

Lord Byron - The Corsair


What do pirates do? They pirate, right?
For what? For booty!
Ah, but how to pinch said booty? One must needs muster a needful ship!
One must cooperate with the rest of the crew to crew said communal tub.
One must accept the inherent risk of the enterpri[z]e.
In other words, a crew, a vessel greater than oneself, teamwork.

Teamwork is dead.
Back around the late '90s and Y2K the biggest news in online games was the shift away from 1v1 or deathmatch toward coordination. Even Starcraft, poster-child of twitch-gaming, encouraged 3v3 matches and spawned the Aeon of Strife cooperative mode which would eventually balloon in popularity in Warcraft 3. The likes of Starsiege: Tribes and Team Fortress Classic brought to the forefront a 'capture the flag' match mode which had barely been a sideshow in the glory days of Quake and Goldeneye deathmatches, just a couple of years earlier. The Infinity Engine games offered a single-player perspective of class-based RPG mechanics which would largely shape the expectation of online teamwork as well. At the same time, the first graphic MMOs pursued the culmination of what appeared a logical trend to any informed customer: ever greater, more protracted conflicts in ever more complex, persistent virtual worlds.

As companies shifted to capturing disinterested, casual customers instead, mass-market deadheads looking only for instant gratification and lacking the brainpower to view themselves as part of a larger system, the trend toward complexity was reversed. Pettiness became a virtue. Strategy games were redefined into "actions per minute" clickfests, team RPGs all but exterminated by Diablo-clone A"R"PGs, AoS got rebranded as MOBAs (cheap knock-offs of Mortal Kombat with ever smaller teams and ever smaller maps) simulations shifted from grandiose city-building to micromanaging a couple of Sims' bodily functions, and two decades later the biggest name in multiplayer is... Fortnite, a deathmatch game.

On to the wider issue: teamwork is dead. Unfortunately, modern online titles claiming to offer interaction motivate their customers entirely via individual rewards, be they high scores, funny hats or the almighty +1 sword (you can always +1 a sword, no matter the number of +1s already in play... I think WoW's up to +1111111111111111111 by now.) While such gimmicks certainly have their place, they don't justify a multiplayer label. Getting The Loot cannot be the point of the game - because the next logical step is to get The Loot via the quickest, simplest, least demanding method possible; this is largely how WoW-clone MMOs have continually shrunk. A game should define specific means by which the reward is acquired (otherwise I could simply buy myself a golden cup) and multiplayer games should imply multiplayer means. It's inherently dishonest to advertise a majestic triple-masted pirate ship when 95% of the action flows in and out of each pirate's individual dinghy. Easily observed with the shrinking of content from realm vs. realm raids to 40-man raids to 20 to 12 to 6 to 3 to "bring your own friend" to single-player. Every time you let players advance toward The Loot in a simpler, more egocentric fashion, that is exactly what they will do. They will always take the easy way out. Every single time. Do not even call it a slippery slope. It's a dive off a cliff with no air resistance. Do not give the simpleminded a simpler option - or, obviously, they'll take it.

The solution is of course to refocus multiplayer games on communal objectives, in both constructive and destructive aspects. I addressed the need to proliferate interconnected constructive roles in the previous Corsair Demographic post, and I do think it can be done so long as players are given the ability to build an identity or brand image, to hang up a shingle around their niche role within an in-game economy and village life. It may be significantly more difficult to enroll players in the destructive side of multiplayer, given that it necessarily entails self-destruction as well. Let's remember PvP in MMOs died out even before crafting did. By the way, I use the term teamwork deliberately in contrast to the overused and over-abused "community" because a team is dedicated to an objective goal (football pun intended) a gesselschaft system, not a cozy gemeinschaft where you just sit around telling each other what you had for lunch. The goal of the team over-rides individual grandstanding. Teams need cannon fodder, or at the very least support players. A team of degenerate petty narcissists, of prima donnas who declare "I don't play support" * from the get-go, is a non-starter.

If you want to be the only one that matters, play a single-player game.

So what would be the correct mentality? Well, I hear that "losing is fun" and Dwarf Fortress is about the fortress, not the individual dwarves. But have any MMOs in recent memory even tried getting players invested in in-game locations? Sacrificing themselves for a common objective?

Darkfall, from what I remember of it during beta (and the nasty rumors confirming this for years afterwards) failed by excessively incorporating The Loot into castle-building, which resulted in self-perpetuating mob rule. Holding a prominent position in the world gave the guild in question massive amounts of free resources, instead of requiring resources to sustain. Meaning that mindless zerg guilds didn't have to coordinate much or attract worthy players - you don't have to be better than your opponents if you're sitting on mountains of free support.

Planetside 2 came close, though it failed by promising players exactly what they had no right to expect: a constant string of easy, unopposed victories. Worse yet, it delivered in its early years, with factions avoiding fighting each other in order to constantly circle around re-capturing bases. It's hard to give a shit about any particular base in PS2. Though it has made some effort toward fixing this later (base construction and alerts with fixed victory conditions) it also serves as object lesson in misaimed advertising via an early batch of loading screens showing groups of players trampling helpless opposition.

If you want to recruit corsairs, recruit them by promising victory via personal risk and loss. Show them bullet-riddled soldiers planting a flag, a tank sacrificing itself by physically blocking an enemy advance, a tempest-tossed ship lost amidst the waves, a lone guard on the parapet sounding a horn as the dragon swoops down upon him, a peasant facing an entire squad of orcs with naught but a pitchfork and the shirt on his back, an elf shooting an arrow with a missive wrapped around it as the forest burns down from under him, a starfighter among hundreds burning up in the atmosphere with its engines shot out but letting loose one last laser-shot at the enemy mothership. You should never advertise narcissism and grandstanding and personal gain when trying to build an entire virtual world, because it is, quite simply, false advertising. If you truly populate a world with ten thousand interconnected players, then no single player should ever expect to feel like more than one ten-thousandth's worth.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a good virtual world makes you feel small.

We want to escape into a fantasy of being corsairs. Fine. But don't advertise it as the captain, swimming in dubloons, giving orders. If you want to address the right audience, a lasting audience, advertise from the viewpoint of a lowly scurvy dog, barefoot, filthy and gap-toothed, swinging madly, suicidally away at the king's men with his notched cutlass - because if you truly intend to deliver on your promise of MMOs as persistent worlds, this is what most of us should expect to be. Just as importantly in the background somewhere, instead of The Loot show us The Ship, the focus and goal of our communal effort, the subject of the struggle for which we are mere objects, its masts looming proudly against the night.

________________________________________________

* For anyone who doesn't play so-called MOBAs, I haven't indulged much in them lately, but yes, that used to be an actual catchphrase you'd hear in every pre-match lobby in League of Legends, Smite and the like: subhuman retards declaring themselves too important to support others. In a team game. Sign of the times.