Obsolete development processes, obsolete games

I think shit happened after the deployment of an hotfix in WoW for an exploit. Not that I care much, but there was an interesting comment on the forums that resurrects another of my pet peeves. The fact that game companies come to the MMO genre with the “single-player” mentality.

I’ve always said that MMOs are creatures on their own. They aren’t just “complex”, they require that a company is built around them to work properly. They require their own processes, ongoing development. They require a completely different attitude because the product is like a living being. Its quality is in what it can become. Its quality is in the potential and the potential is the result of the basis you put.

You see, there’s an EXACT IDENTITY between the obsolete single-player processes and the kind of games we are getting. Linear level progression, why? Because we have linear product development. Finished products. Commodified worlds.

Use and throw.

But if instead we look at these “creatures” as “systems”, then we have a set of elements all connected and all important. And we also need a development process where things are connected, where things develop on multiple levels and where EVERY part is carefully maintained because it is ESSENTIAL to the life and health of that system.

That’s also the contraposition between level-based systems and skills. Skills are more systemic, they work each as one element and where each can go interact with the other.

(and, hey, go read Nicklas Luhmann. Because he is a pure, absolute genius and writes a lot about society = complex system, ecology and a whole lot of problems that apply wonderfully to online worlds)

Anyway, the comment was:

Brendan: Your traditional game development mentality is that you don’t care about your code as long as it runs by the release date and your maintenance period is about 15% of the product life cycle so a lot of corners get cut. If there are problems they release two or three patches and that is it. I think the MMO companies still have this mentality even though their software life cycle is more akin to traditional blue collar software in which 75% of your development time is spent in the maintenance phase.

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