"But who that Chief? his name on every shore
Is famed and fear'd—they ask and know no more.
With these he mingles not but to command—
Few are his words, but keen his eye and hand.
[...]
What is that spell, that thus his lawless train
Confess and envy—yet oppose in vain?
What should it be, that thus their faith can bind?
The power of Thought—the magic of the Mind!
Linked with success—assumed and kept with skill,
That moulds another's weakness to its will—
[...]
Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt
From all affection and from all contempt"
Lord Byron - The Corsair
I wholeheartedly applaud modern advances in instant quasi-randomized matchmaking for multiplayer games. Whether in a MOBA, FPS, RTS, card games in their online incarnations, this lazy old dog shouldn't need to yap about in chat boxes or sniff through lobby lists to pick a fight. I should be able to simply fire up a game, hit the "play" button and... play.
Unfortunately, the idea was quickly picked up by MMOs as well, the genre least amenable to random player concatenations, and for the past fifteen years WoW-clone MMOs have been struggling to cram their customers into randomly matchmade instance runs and randomly matchmade PvP teams. Remarkably, not even the dullwited hordes comprising MMOs current audience will fall for it. Automated matchmaking has routinely gone unused and the most reliable way of getting a team remains the trusty old elleffgee channel.
Algorithmically slapping players together and labeling them a "team" precludes any activities more complicated or with longer repercussions than Pokemon or Mortal Kombat. In a persistent world pervaded by individuals' myriad divergent choices, having one's teammates randomly selected will inevitably prove either pointless or suicidal - just as you don't randomly hire people off the street for qualified work in the real world. If you'd like a quick confirmation, log in to Planetside 2, join a platoon with high cohesion and listen to the contempt in your squadmates' voices at mentioning "blueberries" - PS2 jargon for the uncoordinated bulk of blue-colored ally markers on the minimap, playing solo or wandering about shooting at the first thing they see, who albeit useful for catching bullets will never, ever, ever get anything done. Keep in mind PS2 offers a bare minimum of the options or long-term interaction which would make a true MMO.
For any alternate online dimension to rise above WoW-clones' "kill ten rats" routine, it must depend on intelligent player leadership. A grander persistent world requires grander activities which require coordination, therefore coordinators. Note the paradox. A persistent virtual world would be the greatest escapist fantasy of all: an entire world at one's fingertips. Our modern idea of escapism spread in the wake of industrialization during the 19th and 20th centuries, heralded by romantic adventure stories like The Corsair. We're motivated in this to a larger extent than we'd like to admit by a laughably romanticized notion of lawless freedom; we escape into role-playing games to imagine ourselves as pirates yet to our frustration, in order to play a pirate among other pirates one must accept a captain.
Taken to its logical extreme, this reminds me of the Pinky and the Brain episode It's Only a Paper World, where Brain lures the entire human species onto an artificial "Chia Earth"* so he's left ruler of the original planet... only for a meteor strike to strand him on Chia Earth as well. No good creating a separate world if you're stuck on it with all the same idiots, right back where you started from, every night, like a laboratory mouse whose genes have been loused. Back in WoW's first year while getting kicked out of or quitting a guild (as is my Byronic wont) I was having a... let's say heated argument with my guild leader about her and her real-life friends hogging all the loot. She at one point spouted what must have seemed to her an irrefutable condemnation:
"If I was your boss in real life you wouldn't dare talk to me like this!"
Well, yes, true. But how does your personality look through the lens of your inability to interact with anyone you can't threaten with homelessness and starvation? If this is what passes for leadership, one can't fault gamers for wanting to escape it into pirate fantasies.
True communal escape requires a niche audience (addressed in #1 of these posts) who want to play a role, to cobble together a personal ethos and narrative, instead of merely chasing cake. It also requires redefining leadership within a fully voluntary activity. More than enterprises or sports and games in the physical world, leadership in an online game can be isolated from contaminants like personal charisma or pre-existing social rank, distilled to its fundamental property of coordination. The power of Thought secures resource deposits, builds bases and upgrades everyone's parrots to +2 squawk damage. FPS/RTS hybrids like Natural Selection or Savage made a good early show of it, in which the team's commander played in a top-down view, issuing context-sensitive orders by selecting other players and right-clicking just as one commands units in an RTS. Chatting up and fluffing individual players' egos was superfluous as long as you gave timely prompts and got shit done.
MMOs need to provide interface functionality for guild leaders and officers to manage property and goods, set underlings' attributions and issue fluid battlefield commands on the go, without the need for lengthy explanations. They must attract not only role-players, but would-be game masters and strategists... and then must hobble those would-be master strategists' impact upon others, ensuring that the rank-and-file can weigh both the risks and potential rewards of an activity before they accept anyone's leadership in it. Loot distribution, chain of command, duration of engagement and designated enemies must not only be assigned through the game interface but with sufficient forewarning to allow ordinary players to formally accept or opt out of anyone's leadership for any short or long-term engagement. Clan/guild/squad/team leadership must become a part of the game itself, and not a function of the chat box.
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* Chia Pets were a '90s thing, look it up.
Also, any blog post I can source by watching Animaniacs counts as a win.
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