This (hopefully) small entry is to save a few comments of F13 boards. The topic is the one I directly brought up when I commented Richard Bartle’s article and recently wrote how I’d like to see the genre improve and evolve.

It seems that this industry forgot all the basic lessons.

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Margalis:
I really don’t understand how people don’t get this. Do you also see TV as another form of radio, which is another form of books, which are another form of sign language?

MMORPGS = Mud + graphics is as true as
TV = book + image & sound

It’s a foolish comparison that totally relegates sound, graphics and user input to mere window dressing.

Raph Koster:
It comes down to whether the graphics are significant in your moment to moment play of the game. If you could successfully play the game solely by reading the text putput, then yeah, the graphics ARE window dressing.

In MMORPGs, the main things that graphics have added are

– scenery
– discrete movement (which led to some behaviors like pulling and kiting, and greater awareness of proximity of enemies)
– ranged attacks

To this I added my comment:

I’d like to know your opinion because for me the evidence is how obsolete is the development of this genre.

This is the evidence of a glaring mistake, not an argument to confirm that the graphic is just a dress.

I hope you know who’s Marshall McLuhan, also.

Margalis was able to underline the same point I wrote here and on the previous long comments I linked at the top:

Margalis:
OK, but as long as you keep saying “MMORPGS are just MUDS” that will always be the case. As long as the nomenclature is MUD nomenclature and the “thoughtful” papers are all MUD-centric, that will always be the case.

Most of the writings that focus on MMORPG theory immediately boil down to talking about MUDs, so it’s no surprise that many of todays games are basically MUDs + graphics.

Then again, it’s also no surprise that people will say things like “I will never play a game without a Z-axis again” or “man, movement in COH is cool!”

You aren’t doing the world any favors by interchanging “MUD” and “MMORPG”, and I don’t see any attempt to actually differentiate them in the games you make.

If you think of a MMORPG as just a MUD, and you go about creating it as “hey I’ll make a MUD with graphics” that’s what you’ll end up with, and that seems to be your approach.

You get what you want, if the genre is obsolete and not improving it’s because this is what the current developers want.
They have the full responsibility of what’s good and bad. The overall judgement is a subjective point of view, the result is a direct choice.