Jeff Freeman

Now we know, it is WoW, and that it is the only MMO there has ever been.

I remember when people used to think it was EQ, and even before that, UO. There were rumors it had been Meridian 59 (though none of its 58 predecessors).

People used to think the Earth was flat, too. Now we know it is round, and we know that it has always been round.

Archaeologists have found evidence that ancient people use to communicate with writing, rather than pictures and sound. Ancient people from long ago, before the wolves turned themselves into dogs, tamed a primate and conquered the planet (and indeed, even space, which they reached ahead of all other species).

They might have had an MMO in their day - the people, not the dogs - perhaps built by citizens whose godking demanded a year of labor from each of them (barbaric, and not to be compared to how we essentially work for the state through the month of May every year, since we get to pick a new godking without killing the old one, and somehow consider that to be better for us even than it is for the godkings).

The only sure thing is that if they did have such a thing, it was the one and only MMO that had ever existed, in its day, just as all the ones before and after it were.

These do not merely become “the latest” to assume their position, as though they were mere monarchs assuming a throne.

When an MMO becomes the MMO, it becomes the one and only MMO, and the one and only MMO that ever did exist.

All others before it were merely misunderstood to be it, but were actually failed attempts to build it.

Some MMO’s were failures on their own, but others only became failures later.

Even ones that had already failed long before that: Now suddenly even their unrealized dreams were failures. If they’d accomplished success in their day rather than failing, now they’d still be failures. No sense kicking them by pointing out how they had failed even to be the failures they were trying to be.

Pretty sure a lot of the failures were real profitable, though… but more profitable than taking that money used to develop them and opening a nationwide chain of topless car washes?

I don’t see how.

If we can rule out as counting your occasional NWN server with perhaps as many as twelve concurrent users at peak, or for that matter any non-profit affair regardless of its population, and also rule-out any text MUD as a left-over from the 80’s “cyberspace” (and so not actually part of the modern internet), then why not further disregard the MMOs with not one of WoW’s millions among them (and in North America, not two of its millions between them?)?

And web games. Psh. How hard is it to make a web page?

WoW has a SouthPark episode, a Mr T commercial, and it’s successful in Asia where it has been said the West’s freedom-loving, gun-toting, boob exposing, individualism-loving and fear-induced individualism-hating would never be welcome, let alone while the Imperial Legions were still engaged in a terrified panicky freak-out against the potential for uprisings and rumors of considerations to weigh the pros and cons of rising-up among some residents of the - we assume - easternmost provinces (still referred to as being in the middle-east so as not to imply the Empire diminished in size relative to the world upon locating another half of it).

Or as they refer to it in Asia, right there.

It even runs on a Mac!

So really, what other MMO is there? What other MMO ever existed?

None.

At least figuratively… unless you have a Mac, I guess, in which case literally, but really more by definition of the word MMO.

Because it changes, that definition.

Regardless how profitable how many of the also-rans may be: they aren’t WoW, and MMO means that now.

It’s like when the giant redwood sequoias were first discovered. Suddenly people realized that those little things back home they’d been calling sequoias, weren’t actually sequoias at all, so they started calling them trees.

Wikipedia speculates the word sequoia comes from an Injun’s name, which itself derived from the word for hog, and that that usage was a sort of Injun-slang for nerd.

That’s so obviously bunkum, you have to wonder if they just let anyone write on that, or what?

It’s a certainty the word meant tree right up until Injuns discovered giant redwood sequoias, at which time a new word for all other trees was required.

It happens.

There’s a word for things, then something comes along which is the quintessential that thing.

If then every time a person hears that word, there is a lotto sort of chance it is specifically in reference to the one quintessential something, then pretty soon the word which used to mean things like it is just going to mean it.

For another example, think of Hitler’s occupations.

I didn’t say which Hitler!

But I’ll bet Agitator, Activist, Writer, and Politician - the occupations Wikipedia lists for the Adolf Hitler, are the ones that came to mind! ‘Cause Hitler means freakin’ Hitler, now.

Remember how we used to say “virtual world” in such a context as to exclude text MUDs? It’s like that.

Ours is a living language, wot r u gonna do?

Finally, look at MMO developers. What’s being made?

Isn’t everyone trying to make a WoW, even if their previous and current “failures” are still profitable, less risky to repeat, and wouldn’t have to compete with WoW?

If all MMO developers are making WoW, then that must be what an MMO is… and this is even more true if any MMO developers not making WoW are said to have “left the game industry”.

Next-Gen Announcements sent me an email with this bit, last year:

Major game developers like Raph Koster formerly of SOE and Rick Giolito, President, Trilogy Studios are leaving the game industry for virtual worlds.

Otherwise, a company could make some MMOs (in the old sense of the word), designed to succeed on a smaller scale, and in fact several of them for the price of a single MMO (in the WoW sense of the word), most especially if they weren’t all starting from scratch on every new project toward the goal of delivering a single product to the people of the future, which frankly we can’t even be certain actually exist.

A business model could be to run an online game portal, capturing players with varied and unsatisfied niche interests.

Perhaps a set of online games with concurrent populations comparable on a per-server basis to the MMO would seem much like an MMO itself, to a player, despite there being fewer servers for any one-game.

Perhaps a fan of some quirky game play that only existed within some of those online games would be willing to accept the trade-off. That is, of all the games to which he had access not being the MMO.

Perhaps that quirky game play could actually be provided if the target number of users were some number in the thousands or tens of thousands, however many fans of a given quirky thing there were - rather than the desired number of subscribers being everybody, among which nothing is enjoyed.

Perhaps churn in one game wouldn’t necessarily equate to customer-churn, at the company level.

Of course the problem with running an online game portal of this sort is that there aren’t enough online games to portal to, for most companies.

Then the problem for those companies is they’re really trying to make the MMO, figuring that if they can’t do it then no one can. They’re big, and they know online gaming, as you can see from how many of them they’ve got.

Solution one is to go the route of turning online-game creation into one of the games, so with that start a portal could take a user to that game or to any of the games created by it. Areaeaou(y) is going there, I think.

Solution two is to go the route of turning online-game creation into a production pipeline for white-color factory workers, floor supervisors, executive suits, union reps, health inspectors, and consultants with an expertise in team-building or sexual harassment employee education. They might just demonstrate what blue-color factory workers are forced to do now that the jobs making actual things have gone to robots built by factory workers in China.

No one is going for solution number two.

It’s weird to me that more people would think unexperienced, unsupervised, untrained amateurs a potential for success than would think the same thing possible from employees (whom are the same people, but paid to do in their work-time what they’d otherwise being trying not to get caught doing in their work-time).

I calculated this by counting one company as attempting the first solution, zero as attempting the second, and then comparing the two numbers to find that one is more than zero. Even after dividing the one by the zero in order to find the ratio of one attempt versus the other, I only found that someone’s idiotic decision to make division by zero an error in the universe - rather than resulting in the zero we all finally make our pre-division check for zero return after the bug goes live - still irritates me.

Employees would at least have supervision and an institutionalized process for acquiring experience and training, even if they began work with little more of that stuff than the amateurs.

Plus you could fire the bad ones and keep the good ones, along with owning anything they make which somehow manages to become a hit, and so could even fire the good ones from time to time, when the stock prices needed a kick.

Henry Ford thought that regular folk earning a decent wage and having enough free-time to enjoy it was critical to his company’s profitability, and indeed the nation’s prosperity, to hear him tell it.

Well for MMOs, what’s more akin to that than the need for a sufficient number of unemployed, to maintain the game social infrastructure which enables the employed to play, but which they haven’t the time otherwise to dick with?

With the amateur-approach, how can you be certain the players aren’t too employed?

Likewise, how do you ensure they aren’t overall just too young, white, and male (a demographic widely understood as incapable of creating video games anyone else would enjoy)?

You want diversity? Who even knows what the multi-generational unemployed are these days? Forced desegregation and the injustice of affirmative action has resulted in Americans of numerous skin-colors acquiring gainful employment, while exposing two or three generations of crackers to the idea that white kids acting like black kids are not completely ridiculous.

Meanwhile, even if you were to hire a diverse workforce, who knows what they’d make! Would we recognize it as an MMO? Would Mozart consider techno or hip-hop to be music? What would the MMO equivalent of pop even be? ‘Cause surely today’s games are square-dancing tunes, and popular-music is what non-white-male developers would make, unsupervised.

Even if that were an acceptable outcome, it’d have to be better with some supervision, mentoring, the reward of income, and the threat of unemployment looming as the punishment for failure, than whatever a guy would make just to kill the mind-numbing depression brought on by his lengthy period of unemployment.

Otherwise why even have that stuff? Is it all just so an employer can own everything the people produce, and keep most of the value they create for himself?

Well that might be, too.

But haven’t most industries also actually out-performed competition from amateur enthusiasts?

Shouldn’t someone at least give it a shot?

I’m talking about industrial revolution stuff, here. I’m talking about a company manufacturing many, many cars rather than a person making one single car at a time.

Even hand-made wooden toy trains are assembled on a line these days, and the above represents the entire annual market demand for all crappy toys.

To get back to the point, the point:

There’s only ever been one MMO because we only ever make one MMO.

ALTERNATE ENDING

WoW is so much in a league of its own, we shouldn’t even consider it an MMO.

Don’t set it aside, and there’s no MMO industry at all. Just WoW.

Set it aside, and the MMO market has still increased in the past few years (but not at a stupidly huge rate), and there are many MMOs all competing - and all competitve -for the number one spot.

Unfortunately, WoW is taking the term “MMO” even if we do set it aside, so we have to come up with some new term for “MMOs except WoW”.

“Second Lives“, how about?

DIRECTOR’S CUT ENDING

The studios with the resources to pursue a business model based on offering many small games (rather than one massive thing, i.e. WoW), don’t want to do such a thing because it isn’t glamorous.

Even if it proved to be more profitable than the most likely outcome of their current model - failing to make WoW - no one really wants to be the Wal-Mart jewelery-counter amidst a sea of upscale jewelry stores.

Not even if all of the going out of business signs are completely legit.