This article didn’t come out easily. Now I’m happy that it’s done, good or bad. More then once I was on the point to delete everything.
Since it’s long enough you’ll have to follow the link on the right and “read more” ->

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I have a few points to underline. It all started with the article that Richard Bartle wrote to explain why the mmorpg genre doesn’t seem to improve over its (self-imposed) limits. The fact that there’s a dissatisfaction seems widely accepted, both between the players and the intellectual elitists. Instead there’s some controversy about what this dissatisfaction is about. The players find MMOGs, for various reasons, not appealing, not involving, not fun. The developers, from the other side, are splitted between those trying to figure out how to reach the mass market and exploit it (and why it didn’t happen already) and those, like Big Bartle in this case, arguing about the quality standards.

More or less Big Bartle starts from this perspective to analyze the negative reaction that is being produced. The mix of the players as a “blind” group, with needs but without ways to express clearly these needs, and the developers that have to try hard to figure out “how to please” and satisfy two unrelated layers: the economic needs and the artistic “quality”. Knowing that the first definitely owns the second. This rationally and logically. We know we live in this situation. But we can also add to this logic possibility, because we have also the diachronic dimension. The time. Or the actual shape of time in this context: the wisdom.

The logic tells us that we need money and that the artistic quality we want to address is still a subordinate. But the Bartle-wisdom and our experience also tell us that, in the long term, the king is naked. Naked because the money isn’t there on its own. The money, even in its super virtuality, still depends on something concrete. And this is our quality. Without quality, in the long term (again), we won’t even have the money. Because we can fool ourselves all we want but we still need to accept that, at the end, a mmorpg will sell only if it has a value to offer. An artistic, emotional or social value. Somewhere. Somehow. The type doesn’t matter, same for the genre, but there must be definitely something “solid” in there so that we can hope to tansform into “money”.

Bartle’s theory is that MMOGs are being designed by the players. This because the devs, in the desperate attempt to please their customers, are forced to second all they ask. But the customers don’t know what they are really looking for, their “needs” aren’t that obvious and easy to get. So what they search for? According to Big Bartle they search for what they know already because their previous experiences are the frame to measure and judge all they’ll encounter as they go on. In order to fulfill their desires the developers need to shape their world after models that are broken but that are able at least to quickly put the experienced players “at ease” with groups of features that they feel “theirs”. Like a way to reassure the players, to make them comfy. Now I believe that Big Bartle doesn’t like this because he feels the process as a menace. If the developers second every request of the players they’ll mostly provide solutions that are qualitatively mediocre. And not just for an abstract quality standard, but both for the developers and the players themselves. Why? Because, again, the players don’t know exactly what they like, in particular they don’t know what they could like, and their only resort is to ask what they know already. But what they know already is nowhere near an “improvement”. This like a recursive circle with no exit.

I don’t share this point of view. I believe that the real problem Big Bartle is observing here has nothing to share with design. This is exquisitely a problem about the communication level. Something that I discussed a lot. The developers aren’t captured in the process he described but I agree that they easily fall there. This because what is really in a very bad shape is the relationship between the developers (system) and the community (ambient). A sociologic problem that generates, as a consequence, all the “symptoms” that Bartle sees and points out. But even if I believe that this is the key to solve the whole issue, I also want to discuss the design directly. So…

One of the biggest errors, I think, is about considering this genre “new”. This is why there are peoples like Raph Koster feeling like pioneers. This is why there is a place like MUD-dev shaped into a brainstorming group about a new media and all its implications. A new horizon, a “far west”. But the truth is that there’s nothing new. This genre is everything but a “discovery”. It’s its opposite. A melting-pot. This genre is the result of an hibridization. It’s derivative, syncretic. It’s an amass of junk collected from everywhere, in particular the very essence of the culture: the myth. This is the reason why fantasy themed games are so common: they are a common and shared form of modern myth. What are designers here? Not gods. They are storytellers. “Nothing else”. They do not create. They shape. They observe and fix (focus) things into a point of view, then they offer this elaboration to others. It’s “art” in its purest form. Yes, the art has the originality as one of its basic traits, but the art is simply defined as: “discovering an hidden aspect of the world”. A discovery that starts from an observation and this observation produces a stimulation and the stimulation is then elaborated into art. And offered. But at the beginning there isn’t a blank page or a space to define and discover from zero. At the beginning there’s what I define “a symbolic shared system“.

What should be done, after these considerations and after accepting this level, is about observing and recognize what is new from what is coming from the past, inherited. This is where I think Big Bartle “falls”, like his love for for ideas that are still surely valid but also tied to a precise context. And with a value directly consequent to that context. A value that derivates and depends on that context. Here starts the old debate between a textual and a visual space. On one of the spawned threads on a message board, Raph says that MUDs definitely share aspects with MMORPG. Just to give an idea he says that they are 80% the same. I agree, they are both about the same stuff but the *form* completely changes and we are in a (virtual) genre where the form is basically everything. It is not “fluff”. These theories are new? No. This is the same when we moved from the press to the photography and cinema. Then we moved from the mute movie to the sound. Then the color. Then the TV. Each of these “jumps” produced both “losses” and new possibilities. There are a good numbers of high profile intellectuals theorizing that these jumps actually modified the structures of our brain. Something relevant enough, I guess. Marshall McLuhan rings a bell? One of his most famous quotes is:

In Jesus Christ, there is no separation or distance between the medium and the message; it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

Moving from a textual interface to a graphical one isn’t fluff. It isn’t a new “dress” for the same model. It’s a whole new level of the expression. The graphic isn’t just graphic but it is a COMPLETE revolution of the approach. Exactly mimicking what happened when we moved from the press to the movies and the TV. A strictly logic approach is being replaced by an emotional-driven one. This is completely different and if we fail to perceive this big change we also fail to focus what is the real potential of the medium we are going to use. We diminish the real essence of the change and all the consequent results.

This is why it’s surely indispensable to observe what the MUDs did and are doing. But we still need to observe the medium that we are going to use or we do the same mistake of directors making a movie for the TV like a movie for the cinema. They will fail because the medium they use is relevant and each has different possibilities and rules to understand. It is AFTER we are conscious of this that we can toy with hybridizations, perhaps bringing the style of the TV into the cinema (someone has seen “Bambaloozed” of Spike Lee?).

Now lets go back in topic. I said that the genre is nothing new, that what we need to do is to observe more than “design” because there’s the need to re-read more than create. This is an important point. There are two layers: the perceptive structure and the symbolic-social space. The first depends a lot on the medium we use. A different medium is a whole new dimension with new rules to consider. It’s a level about the form and, again, I have to underline how the form is important when we are dealing with something already “virtual”. Then we have the symbolyc-social space. I defined this above as a “modern myth”. This concept is easy to understand if we take an example like Star Wars and its “translation” as a mmorpg. One of the things I criticized about it is the approach. It’s not possible to build a generic mmorpg infrastructure coming from well thought but high-level theories and *then* paste the game, the setting elements specific of Star Wars. Like a plug & play content. We cannot pretend to codify something, because “Star Wars” even if a movie, a book or a game, is already strongly codified. This is why I wrote that this genre need way more to be (re-)read and experienced instead of invented. I don’t agree when Raph Koster says that the genre is new and we are only starting to build and understand the theories on which it can and will be built. I do not accept that the design can be detached so easily from the object of what we are creating (and here I’m doing a crossover to what Jeff Freeman wrote).

I believe that what needs to be done is to rethink the approach. Look back and focus again to what is really relevant:

1- The medium, or the shape of what we doing. In this case the visual approach, the image, the interface, the sound. The cinema here is able to teach a lot. Bring in directors of photography and let them work with the artists on the game. Or at least remember to study attentively these perspectives.
2- The myth, or the symbolic shared system(s). If we are working on a fantasy setting we should go back, read a book. Trying to capture what is the *real* essence of that myth. Capture *why* it became so relevant in our imaginary.

If we do that, everything will change. The design of the interface, the sound and the overall visual experience will transform completely. And I’m sure that also the design will completely change direction (and the mass of players with it), focusing on the “adventure” as a feeling, discovering again how to produce content to offer *emotions* and system to let the players themselves recreate those emotions. Going back at the *roots* of a myth, trying to discover where its real value lies.

I’m absolutely certain that the symbolic shared system that we call “fantasy” is way more than a grind of monsters to gain more experience.
The mission of a new game and a new genre is an “exploration” of what made this myth so important. And capture its essence.

Looking backwards more than looking ahead.