Anatomy of an MMORPG

An MMORPG is like a large piece of enterprise software: they consists of databases, specialized servers, client software and a huge amount of content. To begin our journey through the world of an MMORPG, let’s begin with the part that seems most familiar: the content.

Content and 3D Progamming

When people use the term “content” in an MMORPG, they are referring to all of the places, creatures and things you can visit within the virtual world. It includes the actual landscapes, buildings and dungeons you explore; the monsters and players you can see; the graphics for items. Even things like music, sound effects and the special effects used for things like explosions and spells are a type of content.

Very few individuals possess all of the skills necessary to create the large variety of visual effects that are present in an MMORPG. Just as in the film business, where there are graphics programmers, costume designers, makeup artists and miniature modelers (to name just a few), the game business employs a large number of specialized artists who are capable of working on the various sensory components of the game. By the time you see an animated monster inside a game, it is likely that it is the product of several peoples’ work.

Concept Art

The first step in creating a 3D image is to develop what is called the “concept art.” Depending on the game company, this could be as simple as a pencil sketch of the intended creature or building—or could be a sophisticated piece of art, crafted with either traditional media or inside a paint program (Photoshop is popular). The purpose of the concept art is to give the 3D artists a blueprint to follow; it also provides the art director with an opportunity to establish consistent themes across the various art.

3D Modeling

Once the concept art is created, the job of creating a 3D animation begins. The first step is to create a 3D model of the images. There are a large number of 3D modeling programs on the market, but most game companies use either Maya or 3D Studio Max. There are also some specialized products, such as Poser, for designing things such as human figures.

Creating a new model from scratch requires one to build a model from a set of “primitives,” which include objects such as spheres, cylinders, cubes, and so forth. The designer has the ability to attach these objects together, or perform a variety of transformations such as stretching vertices, twisting objects, and so forth. In many cases, a designer will tap into a library of existing models and modify them as appropriate, since creating new models entirely from scratch would take far too long for a project that may easily include hundreds of similar images. Finally, the designer might use another type of product called a “3D sculpting” program (such as Zbrush) to add natural looking features to the model, such as wrinkles or cracks.

The final surface of a 3D image is a set of polygons. The total number polygons in a model is called the “polygon count.” Models with larger number of polygons take longer for your computer to render, because each individual surface has its own texturing and shading. Because a computer game needs to render these models in real-time, the number of polygons is limited to what current computers are able to handle. As of 2007, some of the more advanced computer games in development have 10,000 or more polygons, whereas a model for a Hollywood movie (which has the luxury of rendering all of the images in advance) might have hundreds of thousands or even over a million polygons. Thus, game designers not only have to make models that look good—they have to make models that look good within fairly strict technical limitations.

Texture Mapping

The 3D model might have the shape of the image, but it is still a far cry from the vision laid out by the concept artist. The 3D model needs to be painted, or else it would look like little more than a sculpture.

Often, the people who do the painting of a 3D model are separate from the 3D modelers. These “texture artists” are responsible for creating images that are wrapped onto the 3D model, making them look like they’re supposed to.

In theory, a texture map is just a 2D image that is wrapped onto the geometry of a 3D model—they could be created in any paint program, be it Photoshop or even the paint program that ships with Windows. For textures of reasonably flat surfaces (such as the side of a building, or the bark on a tree), that’s usually adequate. When you need to create a texture map for a more complex object—like an orc or a racecar—artists these days will turn again to products like Zbrush, which allows them to paint directly onto the surface of a 3D solid, rotating and turning the object as if it were a figurine.

Bump Maps

There’s one problem with traditional texture maps: they can look “flat,” especially when applied to flat surfaces. If you remember older video games (or poorly funded current ones), you might have noticed that the cracks on walls look flat, more like decals pasted onto the sides of the surface. That’s because your brain expects things like cracks and creases to be lit differently depending on where you stand, and simply coloring a surface isn’t enough. Modern games use a technology called bump maps.

A bump map is a special type of texture that assigns a height to each pixel, which impacts the way light is received by the surface. For example, a pixel which has a negative height could act like a depression in the surface, swallowing up some of the light that is cast on it. Using bump maps, it is possible to create realistic-looking cracks or bumps in the surface, allowing much greater detail to a surface. This is just one of the ways that modern MMORPGs (and videogames in general) can add detail to an image without resorting to prohibitively complex 3D models. Thus far, very few MMORPG titles are using bump maps, although they’ve become common in modern FPS titles.

Physics and Kinematics

In addition to the visual depiction of a model, the designer also needs to define how the model interacts physically—the kinematics of a model. This includes things like how an arm might move through a sword swing, how a particular weapon is gripped, how an unconscious body might flop onto the ground, how different parts of a skeleton move when you tug on a particular bone, and so forth. The process of defining the skeletal connections in a model and how different objects attach and move each other is called “rigging” the model. Usually, the model designers are the same people who develop the kinematics—but often, the job of animating the complete models within a scene is done by other content creators.

Beyond the individual models, 3D worlds are simulations of physical reality: objects have acceleration and movement. Have you ever had a butterflies-in-the-stomach sensation while watching your character drop off a cliff? That’s because the velocity is accelerating based on Newton’s Law of Gravity, which our brains have evolved to interpret even when we only have visual cues. Many MMORPGs use basic physical rules such as gravity and friction through a fluid (for example, reduced movement while swimming). Some games may offer physics for special environments: Vanguard includes directional water currents in rivers, and Guild Wars has floors with varying coefficients of friction, such as icy surfaces that are hard to gain or lose momentum on. Few MMORPGs as of 2007 have implemented some of the complex physics models that have begun to appear in FPS games: destructible environments, parabolic artillery trajectories, debris that clatters around realistically and objects with realistic weight and density—but these are likely become part of a future generation of MMORPGs.

Animation & Composition

At some point, the content designers will have a rich set of models, objects, buildings, textures and environments to choose from. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done: someone needs to composite it into complete scenes. This means placing objects on the map, creating terrain elevation maps, defining scripts to determine how creatures and players interact with them, etc. In the world of FPS games, this is referred to as “level design,” (there’s no consistent term within MMORPG companies, so I’ll call them the “world designers.”) These people are usually a separate team from the model and texture artists. They’ll work closely with those who have designed the lore and concepts for the world (often, they’ll do much of this definition as well) and integrate the content created by individual artists into the world that players will explore.

A certain amount of animation can be done “by hand,” but nowadays most of the animation that you see characters performing comes from motion capture libraries (called “Mocap” for short). During Mocap, a person wears a suit that is covered with various sensors, lights or markers; they then perform real actions, such as fencing movements, dancing, or everyday activities such as sitting down in a chair. The location of these sensors is tracked, and recorded as a set of coordinates within a computer. These coordinates can then be mapped to the rigging of a model, and used to create a realistic 3D model of a person. Using various animations, combined with transition poses (for example, standing up and doing nothing; or an aggressive combat stance) allows a character to express a wide range of behaviors. Content designers can string these together as part of scenes, define patrol patterns for a creature, or respond emotionally to a conversation. Today, motion capture libraries are available from a number of sources that allows game designers to avoid recreating the same movements over and over—but certain motion capture (for example, a distinctive dance within a game) may still need to be recorded anew.

Particle Effects

Another important area of animation in an MMORPG is called “particle effects.” This includes all the explosions, flashes of light, swirls of color and magic when a spell is cast, smoke plumes, fires, and so forth. These are called “particle effects” because the animation consists of a large number of discrete particles, all of which follow predefined functions that define their trajectory, propagation, noise, color transformations, etc. An MMORPG will need particle effects for many combat actions and spells. Most 3D modeling programs include a particle system, and there are now specialized plug-ins available for things such as fire and liquid effects.

Pixel Art

Beyond all of the 3D art, an MMORPG includes a large amount of 2D art: this runs the gamut from the user interface itself, to things such as all the inventory icons for every item in the game. In the industry, the people who create the 2D art are usually called “pixel artists” because they paint these objects pixel-by-pixel, using a zoom-in tool within a paint program. Sometimes, a 3D program might be used to do an initial rendering of these icons—and some artists may even draw or paint them using traditional media prior to creating a finished version within something like Photoshop. Getting icons and miniature objects to look right is a challenge in that they not only have to look good—but also look memorable and recognizable at a small size. It is a specialized skill, and good pixel artists are usually a different set of people from the model designers and texture artists.

Shaders

Another area of modern graphics programming is what’s called a shader. Video cards now include specialized, programmable hardware that allows a graphics programmer to write custom programs that alter how lighting and color transformations occur on various objects. Originally, these were written in specialized assembly language—but now, programmers can utilize High Level Shader Language (HLSL) to define these operations. What can game developers do with shader programming? One example would be a scintillating color that is mapped to the surface of a magical weapon, complete with a lighting effect that causes the color to radiate onto other nearby objects. Special effects like this are made possible because it is a lot faster for your video card to compute these effects in hardware (within the GPU itself) rather than in the software running in your PC.

When developers talk about shaders, there are generally two types: vertex and pixel shaders. Pixel shaders can do things such as modify the lighting or color properties of an individual pixel, whereas a vertex shader can modify the geometry of an object. Vertex shaders can do effects, such as deforming an object in strange ways, or giving new ways of viewing a scene such as haze or rippling-water effects.

Differences Between FPS and MMORPG 3D

A lot of the what goes into designing a 3D world is the same between MMORPG and FPS games. However, one big difference is the huge number of models and texture maps that exist within an MMORPG as compared to an FPS game. Although many game computers today have more than a gigabyte of RAM, it’s still a challenge to cache the various models and texture maps that a player sees on their screen. In a given fantasy-themed MMORPG, there might be thousands of weapons and armor pieces that a character might wear, and it needs to be possible to quickly render the various appearances of characters regardless of who you might come across.

Client

All of the content ultimately needs to be displayed, and that is one of the jobs of what’s called the client. This includes a 3D engine for rendering the game’s environment, as well as a user interface that allows you to do things like cast spells, shoot guns or manipulate inventory items.

The client talks to the server through a network protocol that consists of “packets” of information such as the location of objects, chat messages, and so forth. The client is responsible for interpreting these packets and displaying the world to the player. Client programs themselves do little or no interpretation of game mechanics in an MMORPG, because doing so opens the door to hacking. Instead, clients are the hands, eyes and ears you use to interact with the servers.

Publishers now invest some effort in making it difficult to modify client programs, to prevent users from hacking them in such a way as to automate activities or grant unfair advantages over other players. However, many modern MMORPGs contain “modding features” that allow users to hook into the client and add their own alterations or extensions in an approved way. For example, World of Warcraft uses a lightweight programming language called Lua that allows players to build their own user interface extensions, but does not offer any methods for fully automating your character.

User Interfaces

The simplest aspect of the client—but often the hardest for developers to get “just right” is the windowed interfaces within a game. This is all of the dialog boxes you interact with for common activities such as moving items around your inventory, assigning hotkeys to actions, etc.

There are two aspects to the creation of the user interface. The first is programming all of the user interface components themselves, and the second is organizing the components into a framework that is easy and fun to use. Although Windows computers come with a library of software that makes it possible to created windowed, mouse-driven interfaces, many games end up writing their own user interfaces from scratch due to the fact that these libraries (a) don’t look enough like a game and (b) don’t work well when combined with a 3D game engine.

It is fairly inefficient, but many games end up rewriting similar things (including basic components, such as slider controls) over and over again. Microsoft has attempted to solve some of this by creating the Windows Presentation Foundation (a feature of the Vista operating system), which makes it possible to use all of the 3D functions available in Direct3D side-by-side with 2D windowing features—however, games that require Vista are still quite far off as of 2007. In the meantime, developing the plumbing that makes possible a game’s unique look-and-feel is an area that can consume considerable development resources.

3D Engine

With the exception of a few 2D or isomorphic MMORPGs, almost every modern game now includes what is called a 3D engine. It is the job of the engine to take the mathematical description of objects, communicate them to your video card, and provide an animated world for you to experience. Most MMORPG companies license a third-party engine, but even then they will frequently need to perform a lot of low-level modifications that can only be done by advanced graphics programmers.

Servers

The servers are the heart of any MMORPG: it is here that all of the rules are interpreted, and all the data on the location and movement of objects is maintained. All of this work must be done within the servers, and not the client, or else unethical players could hack their client software to give them advantages unavailable to others. Most MMORPGs consist of a variety of different servers for providing different parts of the game experience.

Login servers record everyone’s payment information, and act as gateways that allow players to connect to the game servers. After you give your username and password to a login server, your client is given an electronic “admission ticket” that lets your client access all of the other servers that are required during the course of your game.

Game servers control all of the actions within a particular area of the game. These servers enforce all the game rules, activate skills and attacks, and record the location and movement of objects.

The movement of objects is usually recorded as a vector, meaning that motion is recorded as a combination of magnitude and direction—in other words, the server transmits information to all the clients in an area that various objects are moving in a certain direction at a certain velocity. This works better than a system that transmits absolute coordinates (which would look choppy, and require a large increase in bandwidth to update regularly) but it does introduce other issues such as strange animations due to latency: for example, on a laggy connection, you might see a creature walk through a wall and then warp back to its original position. The reason this happens is that the server had told your client that an object would continue on that path, but lag prevented you from getting the further update about the same object stopping or changing direction.

Another job of the server is what’s called “collision detection.” In other words, you need to detect if two objects have intersected with each other: for example, you need to stop when you hit a wall (and some games might not allow creatures or players to pass through each other). The job of collision detection sounds simple in concept, but in implementation it requires a bunch of relatively complex matrix math. The reason is that these are 3D worlds, and determining whether one object in 3D space has intersected with another requires a bit of math to figure out. Precise algorithms are computationally expensive, so most games use an approximation—and even then, only detect a collision after the fact, and move objects back to compensate. Poor collision detection can result in strange problems like the ability to jump through objects that should be impassable, or getting stuck inside terrain.

Because MMORPGs are large worlds, and because it would consume massive amounts of bandwidth to report to every client what happens with every object and event within the world, techniques have been created to divide the world into discrete units (often called “zones”). In games like WoW, this is done by allocating different servers to different areas of the game (such as continents) as well as separate servers for dungeon “instances.” Vanguard, which features a “seamless” world, actually divides the continents into what are called “chunks.” When different servers are used to maintain these different zones, they are often referred to as “zone servers.”

Chat servers provide communication between players. Although players might be connected to different game servers depending on where they are in the virtual world, things such as a guild-chat or instant messaging needs to work across the entire game. To handle this, most MMORPGs are designed so that you connect to a worldwide chat server regardless of where you travel. From a technical standpoint, after you connect to a login server you are then connected to a chat server in the background, and then connected to a game server specific to your location.

Databases record all the information on your character’s statistics and items, and save them in a database so that you can come back to the game at any point in the future. This data is stored in what’s called a relational database management system (RDBMS), the same sort of technology that is used to maintain things like banking information, electronic commerce systems, retail inventory systems, and so forth. Today, software designers can choose between commercial products such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or open-source options such as MySQL. Implementing a persistence system for a game involves defining a database architecture and then creating software to “wrap” the database for doing things such as saving a character or spawning a new item. It’s critical to design this system well, or the MMORPG will be plagued by item duplication problems, vanishing items or laggy item spawning.

Website integration:

It is becoming increasingly common for MMORPGs to expose some of their content to the World Wide Web. This can be used to provide ladder and player ranking information, character profiles, guild information, and so forth. Adding these capabilities requires a whole other area of expertise. Designers will write server-side code to access the game databases (often using popular Web development frameworks such as php or Java); other developers will create the HTML and graphics used to present a crisp user interface. In addition, many games are now packaging their data so that it can be reused on other people’s websites as well, which means defining data in a language called XML (for extensible markup language).

Patchers

MMORPGs are dynamic, changing games—and software updates happen regularly. As a result, there are patching servers that contain updates to the game code. Depending on the size of a game, this might need to update hundreds of thousands or even millions of clients in a month. Patching servers are simple in concept: they contain all the code needed for a client, and are capable of delivering any of the individual files that have changed since you last updated. However, implementing them to handle the massive demand that occurs around the time of a new patch requires considerable preplanning as well as a significant investment in server infrastructure.

Server Farms

How many computers does an MMORPG require? In 2006, Vivendi reported in SEC disclosures that it maintained over 1,900 servers for WoW. Aside from the software infrastructure, the task of designing and then operating a scalable server farm—with all the security, network and maintenance issues it entails—is a huge job in itself.

Game Design

Even if you have a great 3D environment, fantastic content and animation, a robust and friendly user interface and a server infrastructure that’s ready to support all of it—you still don’t have a game. Creating a good game is well beyond the scope of this article, but to give you a sense of some of the central issues within an MMORPG, the designers need to think about things such as:

What are the objectives? What will give individual players as well as guild organizations goals to keep them interested in playing, month after month?

What are the rewards and challenges? How do you reward the player quickly enough when they first start playing so that they fall in love, but don’t overload them so that they become complacent and bored?

What about the economy? How do you make the economy for money, items or whatever else the game is organized around vital and dynamic? How do you prevent runaway inflation, adequate outlets for spending, marketplaces for exchange?

Lore: how can you make the background of the world, the characters, the plots compelling enough that people will find it interesting? Even if a person is not a traditional roleplayer, there is a certain amount of context, storytelling and emotional content that is vital to an MMORPG. Without it, even the most jaded of players would find the world hollow and difficult to escape to.

Tactics and gameplay: are there enough options so that the player can have a satisfying experience, regardless of how they approach the game? Is it simple enough to learn, but complex enough that it cannot be mastered quickly? Is there enough there that players will be able to have active discussions about strategies and approaches to play?

If you’ve read the above, you’ll be able to think about just a few of the questions that game designers ask themselves when designing an MMORPG (or almost any game).

Quality Assurance (QA) & Testing

MMORPGs are living, breathing entities. Most of them have frequent updates, be it new content or new features. At the same time, MMORPGs are complex pieces of software that rival many of the most advanced enterprise software technologies—and as such, they need significant testing to make sure that updates are ready for use.

Often, players are invited to play on “test servers” before game updates are made live. This is a good final stamp of approval, but there is quite a bit of testing that goes on even before test-server builds are released. One of the major areas of testing that occurs before a game update is released is called regression testing, which is the process that confirms that previously working code still works the way it is supposed to. Regression testing is usually performed by a combination of human testers (people who go down a checklist and confirm that specific actions work as expected) as well as automated testing software (robot-like programs that invoke different operations, and systematically verify various outputs). If you’ve ever gotten a game update, and something that worked fine is suddenly broken, it is a sure sign that the company isn’t investing in good regression-testing. QA Engineers are the people at game companies who design test suites and write test scripts—but don’t automatically blame them just because broken code gets released. These are complex programs with substantial testing needs, and it is often the game company’s decision to underfund QA (an all-too-common choice at many game studios).

Conclusion

MMORPGs are staggeringly complex ventures, involving skills that include a large variety of game designers, storytellers, 3D modelers, 2D artists, animators, user interface designers, graphics programmers, client/server experts, database architects, network gurus, QA engineers and testers.

What does the future hold? As MMORPGs get even more complex, we might start seeing even more exotic jobs. Perhaps we’ll start to see MMORPG companies recruit for “virtual economists” or “physics engine programmers” in the near future—and in an industry as complex and fast-growing as this one, we can expect new innovations to drive even more advanced requirements into the virtual worlds we’ve grown to love. It’s an exciting time to be either a player or a designer!

References

Interplay’s disclosure of MMORPG funding

Vivendi presentation to investors, June 2006

Daniel Dociu homepage and gallery

The Guild Leader: Advertising

There is word-of-mouth advertising and word of YOUR mouth advertising. The self-styled regina omnipotens of Section One explains the finer points of the latter in this article about promoting your guild with in-game recruiting.

Guild recruiters cannot be shy. Post in recruiting forums, erect a guild Web site, use in game recruiting tools, such as those in EQ2, these activities all promote your guild and you probably should avail yourself of them. However the fastest, cheapest, easiest most effective way to get new members for your guild is to simply ask in a general chat channel.

Before You Hit the Chat Channels You Need to Know…

…what benefit people will receive by joining your guild and at what cost? Do you provide help with grouping? Do you help people level? Are you a PvP guild? If so what kind of PvP guild? If you provide groups for members is joining guild groups required? If you help people level, is helping other members required? If you are an MMORPG PvP guild, does this mean you don’t do content or that you do organized battlegrounds? .

Once you know the major benefit of joining your guild, create your message around that. Know the cost however, because you’ll need new members to understand that if you want to retain them…more about that in my next article for the blog.

To construct your message take the big focus on your major benefit and combine it with one of two possible actions you want the interested party to take:

1. PST for membership info. Contact you immediately in (PST for Please Send Tell is fairly universal).
   Be prepared to answer questions and potentially talk to multiple people at the same time. I like to either use a text file to cut and paste common answers, or setup macros when available.
2. URL. Save yourself a lot of typing by sending people to a special recruiting page setup in advance. Lazy people won’t take the time to go look however, so if you are zerg recruiting, don’t use this method. Using a Web page is ideal if there is a lot of information for potential members to consider.
   • Present your guild as active and up-to-date. Do NOT send potentials to your inactive guild forums or glommed together site for info. Instead create a special page just for potential new recruits.
   • Get the easiest URL possible. Here’s mine for Section One’s Guild Wars ladder team: http://gw.rpkHQ.com (I manage my domains on Yahoo)
   • GuildCafe group pages have easy URLs http://www.guildcafe.com/group/XYZ and makes a nice recruiting pages.
   • Personal GuildCafe pages also have easy URLs that can be used for recruiting http://www.guildcafe.com/member/YourLoginName
   • Always use the http:// so that people understand it is a web site you want them to look at.

Recruiting Message Samples

Helper PvE guild:

Learn the ropes and level fast with XYZ guild. PST for membership info.

Guild with funny people:

Laugh your way to level 50 with XYZ guild. Casual players welcome. PST for membership info.

Guild with serious PvErs:

XYZ guild seeks pro-PvE members. Do dungeons right with us. Ventrilo required. PST for membership info.

End game looters:

The PvE veterans of XYZ raid guild LFM for teamwork and achieving long term goals. http://www.blahblah.com

Adult social guild:

Like to play and chat? Join the lively world of XYZ guild on Ventrilo. http://www.blahblah.com Not kid friendly.

Crafting guild:

Attention crafters: Join with other crafters in XYZ guild to build an economic powerhouse and rule the server. PST for more info.

Player-killing guild:

Join for the Rep. Stay for the people who’d rather fight than switch. RPK all the way. PST for membership info.

Advertise, but don’t spam

Some old fashioned net-etiquette should be employed while advertising in chat channels:

• Use appropriate channels. Find out what channels are acceptable for guild recruiting. It’s different in every game. For instance, in Guild Wars, one uses the “all” channel. In some MMORPGs the regional chat channels are acceptable. Some games have special recruiting channels.
• Keep it short and sweet. Don’t attempt to explain every membership detail in your message. Things scroll away fast and people don’t have time to deal with long text—heck, they don’t even read quest descriptions most of the time! More on this later.
• Don’t spam. The reason you repeat your message is to give busy people another chance to read it as well present yourself to new people who haven’t seen it. It is not to bore and aggravate people with your endless droning of e-garbage.
  • How often you repeat your message is game dependent. In games like WoW, EQ2 and Vanguard, the number of new people coming into and going out of a channel is small, so repeat sparingly. Observe how frequently others repeat and repeat less than they do. If you get complaints, reduce your frequency even more. Being perceived as spam will get you on people’s ignore-list.
  • In Guild Wars where people hop in and out of districts constantly, your best bet is to move around from place to place, repeat your message once per district then move on, repeating your cycle every five minutes or so.
• Change it up. Vary your message from time to time, test new messages, be clever, entertain. Boring messages equates to a boring guild.

Advertise eloquently…

…or at least avoid looking stupid:

• DON”T USE ALL CAPS.
• Do not load up your message with **l337** >>>symbols<<<and other #$%^& crap. Your potential recruits don’t have time or desire to decipher, so just use plain English.
• Stay away from over-used terms so ubiquitous that they are now meaningless. Ever seen anyone advertising for unfriendly, immature and inactive members? Almost all guilds are friendly, mature and active, so don’t use up precious space talking about it.
• Use goood speeling. You may not care about every day chat spelling and grammar, but nothing makes you look more like a stupid n00b than spamming the same error over and over. Check it first then store it in a macro or text file.

Impress for Success

People want to join guilds that are active. They like to be able to login and find things are happening. One of the best things to do recruiting-wise is put together PUGs, then pitch guild membership to the better players.

You can take this idea a step further by organizing server events and advertising them in spam. Depending on how much creativity the game supports you can do a lot. Character weddings, PvP king of the hill events, PvP tournaments, PvE and PvP raids, crafting fairs, scavenger hunts, races, rigattas and costume contests are all popular.

Conclusion

Don’t be shy! Speak up and use chat to let people know that you’re out there. Be wise with your messages, don’t abuse it, and you’ll be rewarded with plenty of interest.

In future columns, we’ll cover additional ways to promote your guild other than advertising, such as running events, putting together first-rate groups, and generally showing people what you stand for. Stay tuned!

The Dynamic World: MMORPG 2.0

Aaron Smith goes by the handle "Lindorn" and started his MMORPG career with a brief stint in Dark Age of Camelot before moving to his first full-time game, Shadowbane. He has since developed an indepth philosophy on game design. Lindorn embraces player versus player combat and dynamic strategic elements as the central elements behind his enjoyment of MMORPGs. He is the active guild leader of the Dark Carnival gaming community since 2004 and is currently studying film at Brooks Institute of Photography in Southern California.

With World of Warcraft smashing its way onto the MMORPG scene in 2004, the massively multiplayer online world carved itself a place in mainstream entertainment for a long time to come. In January ‘07 Blizzard reported 8 million subscribers for World of Warcraft, and new gamers continue to subscribe every month. A large number of game developers are continuing to enter the market, but few of them offer anything different, and are therefore unlikely to capture a part of a market that now claims over 15 million total subscribers.

Our greatest stories can be traced long ago to a tribal campfire. It wasn’t Homer, Shakespeare or Steven Spielberg that created the heart of these stories—it was all of us.

With Web 2.0 changing the way we think about social communities and online interaction, many a developer’s blog or gaming community forum has touched on the subject of the dynamic world and the future of MMOGs. What is a dynamic world? It builds upon the idea of the persistence of a game such as World of Warcraft, but adds the idea of an evolving environment: they are games that change and can be changed. For many the dynamic game world seems the next logical step in RPG’s. This article will capture the spirit of the dynamic world and give examples of MMORPGs that have followed this path in the past and have enjoyed the most fanatically loyal player bases of any games. It will also explore the pieces of the dynamic world puzzle in all of their digital and social forms, including their ties to human nature. The dynamic world concept holds incredible potential for both gamers and developers alike, carrying with it the promise of immersing players in a long-term and interactive setting by allowing them to both experience and create the content of the game world.

There are varying definitions of the phrase "dynamic world", but it is widely accepted that a dynamic world is a world that changes over time. Even this definition is a little sketchy though, as an instanced dungeon changes over time as well and could be considered part of its respective game world. For this article we will take a dynamic world to mean a persistent, changing game world that all players share simultaneously and continuously. We will address many intricate aspects of dynamic worlds, specifically player interaction and the viability of such interaction from a design standpoint.

The most simplest aspects of a dynamic world are those built into the world itself. A changing weather system (snow, rain, hail, fog, etc), seasons, and constellations and planetary movements are prime examples. Migrating monster spawns or camps also fall into this category. These things and more are examples of dynamism in a virtual world from an environmental standpoint (created by the developers). However, these are entirely the result of developer guidance, rather than player-driven change

We can classify player driven change in a game world in two categories: constructive (the creation of new cities, items and places) and destructive (the overthrow of a city, elimination of a threat, etc.). There have been several MMOG’s in the past that have implemented some of these ideas into their game worlds, and many more that have claimed to have a dynamic world simply to attract more attention. Some examples of virtual worlds with dynamic elements are seen below. Many of the listed games have received a comparatively minor amount of player and developer attention in the past.

Virtual worlds with some dynamic elements:

Ultima Online (Origin) — Allowed players to purchase houses or fortifications (such as towers, forts and castles) and place them on flat land in the game world. Players could create the equivalent of crude towns by placing these structures close together. This effectively created a dynamic element during game play. However players could not destroy the assets of another player, removing any possible "destructive change".

Shadowbane (Wolfpack) — Players could construct their own cities around a "spawn" point called a "tree of life". Cities could be placed nearly anywhere on the map and would be recorded onto a dynamic map of the world that would display information about the cities sphere of influence, population, etc. The tree of life protected the buildings around it from outside destruction, effectively making them immune to attack except during a declared siege. Sieges were initiated with a "bane stone" that would negate the tree of life’s power at a time of the defenders choosing. Players could also place siege engines and wall defenses. Later in Shadowbane’s development a resource system was implemented that placed many mines all over the world that could be controlled by players to collect resources for crafting. A territory control system was also implemented that allowed players to claim pieces of the map under the banner of their guild for certain distinct bonuses and titles.

Star Wars Galaxies (SOE) — The developers introduced player owned cities into the game that contained a function that allowed them to police their own territory, although the implementation changed schizophrenically over time. Initially, a /citywarning command was present that forced outside players to leave the premises under pain of attack. After complaints that these city functions were helping certain factions "choke" vital content areas, the /citywarning aspect was removed, effectively making player cities free ground for all. Instead, SWG relies on its implementation of the factional (Empire vs. Rebel) system. Most Star Wars Galaxies buildings are unassailable (such as player housing, cantinas and the like), but SWG also features factional fortifications such as turrets and bases which will defend against the opposite faction and may also be raided and destroyed by the enemy.

Eve Online (CCP Games) — In Eve online players can claim realms of space as their respective territory and construct player run space stations within the area. Players can also mine resources from asteroids to later use during starship construction.

Second Life (Linden Labs) — The application drew major attention in 2006. Although some claim it does not classify as game due to the lack of any sort of point system, win/loss factor, or "end game" it has attracted a large group of subscription based users. The world is as close to dynamic as a mainstream online application has reached up until this point. Users can add content into the game and even maintain intellectual property rights over it. They can also design and place buildings and develop art through other avenues within the program.

It must be noted that the trend in MMORPG’s has been toward instanced game worlds in recent years, as it solves a number of design snags that developers have had on their plates in previous games. Since the goal of most mainstream MMORPGs has been primarily to focus on in-depth environmental content such as intriguing storylines or epic monster encounters, the idea of a PvE based monolithic (one piece) environment has been discarded. Gaming enthusiast Mike Rozak explains the reason for this:

A monolithic reality doesn’t work well for virtual worlds (in my opinion). The problem was noticed from the very beginning of text MUDs, since in a monolithic reality, if one player changes the world, it remains changed for all players. This means that if a player kills the evil overlord, then for all players thereafter the evil overlord is dead, which is a bit of a bummer for all the other players who wanted their chance at defeating the evil overlord.^[1]

It is here that the reasoning behind the current developer trend toward instancing becomes apparent. It is logical and convenient to fracture the game world in a way that gives all players a shot at immersing themselves in the environmental content of the game. Yet gamers everywhere are crying out for something more; something that they can change and influence. Why hasn’t this been done already? In a game based solely or mostly on built-in environmental content is it possible to have a player driven dynamic from a development standpoint? Cultural historian Timothy Burke touches on the feelings regarding the purely environmental (PvE) aspect of dynamic worlds:

When I’ve ventured out before on this topic, I’ve found a reasonable degree of consensus on this point among scholars, developers and players, that dynamic, changing, responsive synthetic worlds are what we need. I’ve also heard on many occasions that they simply are not technically possible at the present time. ^[2]

Hits like World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, Guild Wars, and Anarchy Online have focused on providing content that appeal to gamers with the use of instancing. Very little of it is player driven content. Why is this? Why haven’t players already been given the ability to manipulate a dynamic world around them and create their own stories? What about player driven politics, economics, and social interaction? The answer lies in the individual psychological and social concepts that surround these ideas. Player driven social dynamics can only exist in certain environments. Some are interdependent concepts that cannot exist in worlds such as those proposed in games like World of Warcraft or Everquest 2 because certain variables are not present. For instance; gamers in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft create social groups or guilds in order to achieve higher rewards and challenges from the environmental "end-game" content Blizzard has implemented with the game. There is no inherent social necessity for players to group together, as the social dynamic within a guild does not affect the game world.

By the elimination of certain "virtual confinements" that inhibit constructive and destructive change in mainstream MMORPG’s, players can create their own content that can have a dramatically different effect on game play. These dynamic implementations create an immersive aspect as well that is different than many mainstream MMORPG’s. If players are granted a degree of authority over their environment, their virtues and vices will create conflict as they come in contact with one another. Whether this be a political, military, or social dynamic; players will experience a psychological immersion within the game because they have invested their own emotions and labors into the environment that they play in. This is an important concept for developers and gamers alike. Mathew Mihaly, president of game-developer Achaea LLC, has stated:

Politics allow you to provide players with two very important, positive feelings: a sense of attainment, and a sense of ownership and control over their environment. By giving players methods by which to advance in a political hierarchy, provided there are rewards attached, you give players the important feeling of achievement as they climb the ladder of success. Further, as players gain power in your world, they begin the transformation from guest to owner (at least in their minds, and that is what is important).^[3]

This illustrates a primary reason that dynamic worlds are so immersive and compelling. Players become committed to these designs because of the ownership they have in the game world. The concept of player ownership may seem fleeting in some regard, but it is an emotional investment by the player that has long lasting implications. It is important to understand as well that player ownership and politics in a dynamic world go hand in hand with economics. You can’t have a sense of attainment, ownership, or control without something that players can attain, own, or control. Whether it be currency, territory, fame, glory, respect, or items; the economic concept of scarcity will be the driving force behind player action in a virtual world. There will never be enough material or emotional satisfaction to go around, which will bring people together socially in order to better accomplish their goals. Clay Shirky; an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program states it simply:

How to build a Nomic [realistic] world? Start with economics.^[4]

One could argue that a socio-political dynamic exists in mainstream MMORPGs simply because within the individual guild there is a form of economic scarcity. The guild itself and its political qualities exist for the cooperative acquisition of materials and completion of activities that require a group. The guild provides access to these materials in return for a player’s participation. However, from an "extra-guild" perspective, social politics do not really exist on a community-wide level in such a world for one simple reason: the absence of scarcity on a worldwide basis. While scarcity of resources (items, respect, material) may exist within each guild, each guild has unlimited access to the resources of that world.

If any guild can enter an instance and kill an epic monster, then from an overall standpoint economic scarcity has ceased to have an impact on the social dynamic between separate guilds. Since scarcity is going to be the driving force in social interaction between individuals and guilds, there must be an overall factor of economic scarcity in order to have a dynamic and immersive political system that affects everyone within a game world. Now some might argue that material scarcity is not the only motivating social factor on this subject, but it must be noted that scarcity can exist in the form of things like glory and respect as well. Regardless, it is an easily seen fact that a large portion of the lasting appeal of most mainstream MMORPG’s lies in the acquisition of virtual materials and proverbial "tokens of achievement". Colleen Malone of Peace Magazine references the research of Dr. Homer Dixon, one of the leading authorities in the field of modern economics:

The research shows that renewable resource scarcities can produce civil conflict, instability, large and destabilizing population movements, aggravated racial, ethnic, or religious tensions, and debilitated political and social institutions. According to Homer-Dixon, the role of environmental scarcity in contributing causally to conflict is often downplayed or ignored entirely.^[5]

What does all of this babble about economics and politics really mean for our dynamic world? In order for a player-driven social dynamic to have an impact on the game world, there needs to be a persistent world with no instancing. These concepts create a kind of intrigue that is not present in MMORPG’s in the mainstream. With players having ownership over pieces of their virtual world, they will have a psychological interest in maintaining those assets. But that isn’t the only variable that creates immersion in these types of games.

In order for players to willfully interact with each other politically, diplomatically, or otherwise on a "global" scale, some form of competition will have to be present. Take two real world countries for example; you have a world population existing on scarce resources that has created a social network of international politics in order to exist in a mutually beneficial environment. When they cannot do so, war ensues. This is where we have to use a dirty phrase. That’s right… player versus player. PvP isn’t the only way to create competition in our dynamic world, but it’s the easiest. Creating a PvE world with the possibility of competition among players is possible, but requires a massive amount of content on the development end such as NPCs that can organize attacks and adapt to player politics.

Enabling an environment in which players can freely kill each other has been done to different degrees in the past. Games like Shadowbane and Lineage II both had what could be considered "open PvP" systems. However, Lineage II had tight rules on PvP that would flag a player with harsh penalties in certain situations if they got "out of hand" whereas Shadowbane had none of these restrictions. Both worlds had strong points, but it must be noted that the player versus player aspect added to these games forced the gamers to take their personal and guild politics seriously. This added meaningfulness that led to greater interest and immersion in the game world.

Along with the economic and social motivations discussed earlier, there lies another immersion factor: the threat of violence (PvP). Without the threat of violence the dynamic world’s politics and economics will seem pointless in many respects. The threat of PvP combat will cause organizations to form, people to cooperate, and player guilds to take each other seriously so that politics and economics will maintain realism. This spice causes players to want to log on every day just as the hope of attaining wealth and property within the game world will do the same on the other side of the "hedonistic spectrum" Player ownership is more important if there is a chance of loss. This doesn’t necessarily mean loss of assets or items. It can mean loss of face, loss of prestige or honor as well. This conflict creates an intriguing storyline and gives meaning to what the players do in our world. However, our dynamic world is still meant to please the player. And while many players are willing to risk their ownership in the dynamic world in exchange for more political and economic immersion, other players see the gaming world from a different perspective. Some gamers desire a world in which there is no true loss. Even if an attempt against monsters in an epic PvE encounter is lost, the players will walk away with everything they own still in tact and they’ll just have to try again later. For many players gaming is an escape from the risk that accompanies any action in real life and they would like their work in the game to be preserved indefinitely whether it be assets or items.

Past RPG Developers have often used items of great power as the main drive or attraction within their games. The removal of items as a major force in these games might draw more people to a fully dynamic world that contains an open PvP environment. "Loot" needs to be a powerful and important factor in games like World of Warcraft because it is so valuable that players will strive for long periods of time to attain it, constantly developing their avatars and keeping them interested in the game’s content—but in a player-driven dynamic world, the emphasis shifts to the evolution of the drama around the characters and organizations within the game’s story. In such a game, there is no longer need for loot of incredible value. One approach is to implement a "full-loot system". A full loot system is something rather contrary to most games on the market today. While many players would be repulsed by the sheer thought, such a system could take the focus off of the constant struggle for new items and place it on more immersive environmental and player content. In a world of governments, kingdoms, militaries, alliances, betrayals, stealth, and intrigue there is no necessity in powerful items that drastically alter the course of conflict. Many players after having experienced MMORPGs are looking to developers to usher in this new kind of content and depart from the traditional item or experience "grind" that is so common in today’s games.

The dynamic world embodies the concepts that will become the future of MMORPGs. As the Internet and gaming communities continue to grow, gamers are taking an increasing interest in plugging the community itself into the game world in such a way that everyone can experience a world that follows one rule: what you do means something. Meaning is what everyone searches for in everything they do and is exactly where the spirit of all these details becomes apparent. Meaning enthralls and grabs us. It holds us to our seats and doesn’t let go. For thousands of years mankind has used the ideas of conflict and emotional attachment in stories to move us and compel us. In more recent years, radio, movies, and television have done the same on a global scale.

The gaming industry has an advantage other venues do not: interaction. The most interesting worlds that lay before us will be the ones that respond to everything the player does and that all players and guilds can build in their own image. Our greatest stories can be traced long ago to a tribal campfire. It wasn’t Homer, Shakespeare or Steven Spielberg that created the heart of these stories—it was all of us.

References

[1] Mike Rozak. "Fractured Reality." Sept. 13, 2005

[2] Timothy Burke. "World Persistence: One In A Series of Queries." Terra Nova Feb-02 2006

[3] Matthew Mihaly. "Constructive Politics in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game." Gamasutra March 2000

[4] Clay Shirky. "Nomic World: By the players, for the players"

[5] Colleen Malone, "Scarcity and Conflict: Homer-Dixon’s Findings." Peace Magazine Jul-Aug 1996: p. 13

Charlie Stross, Life’s a Game and Then You Die: The Future of Online Games

Charlie Stross lives in Edinburg, Scotland, where he writes science fiction. He won a Hugo for his 2005 novella, "The Concrete Jungle." Readers of Locus Magazine selected his most recent book, Accelerando, as the best science fiction novel of 2006. His next novel, Halting State, will deal with the impact of future massively multiplayer games on society and is due out by the end of 2007. In this premier of GuildCafe’s PlayerVox section, Charlie shares his predictions on where MMOGs might take us over the next two decades.

March 27, 2007

A shorter history of the next 25 years

I’ve been asked by our hosts to take a stab at identifying how online games will affect our culture over the next couple of decades. That’s an interesting target because it covers a bunch of time scales. So I’m going to look at where we stand today, and where we might go at various stages along that 25 year time-line.

…some random gamers in places like the Swedish Foreign Ministry or the French Nazi Party decide they can get some free publicity by staking out some territory and figuratively mooning the straights…

That’s a tall order; technology doesn’t stand still, and it’s no good trying to guess where the gaming field is going without knowing where the tech base is taking us. So we need to look at where we are and where we’ve come from in order to plot a course ahead. [See below, The dirty tech truth]

One year out

Some time in the next year or so, I expect to wake up one morning and see a newspaper headline in my RSS reader: "TERRORIST TRAINING CELL RAIDED IN SECOND LIFE".

This doesn’t mean that Osama bin Laden is a gamer, or indeed that there are any terrorists in SL. (Au contraire, real terrorists are more interested in blowing shit up than playing games.) Worst case: some whack jobs will figure out that SL — or it could be WoW or EO — is a cheap tool for multi-user chat that isn’t currently being monitored by the feds. (Expect this window of opportunity to close about ten seconds after this article is published.) What such an article will really signify is that the mainstream press have finally discovered MMOs.

The media goes through a series of stages with any new communications tool or medium as they get to grips with it. And we’re nearly halfway through the process.

It starts with breathless memos from the cutting-edge technology underground, reported in the media niche that subsists on sniffing out new developments. Think WIRED. "A bunch of egg-heads have invented a whizzmajig … they’re predicting global revolution!" The journalists arrive like seagulls, flying over at a great height and squawking loudly as they deliver a mess of misconceptions before flying out again.

A while later, when the whizzmajig catches on and gets a loyal user community, the first columnist notices it: "hey! You strange egg-heads in your whizzamajig! Can you hear me? Do you speak … English?"

Then, some time later, the dam breaks.

The first symptom is that Reuters pay Warren Ellis or some other cutting-edge cyber-celebrity to move into SL. (And, whaddaya know, if they did the job right, they picked someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.) Warren drinks their retainer or injects it into his eyeball or something, then dashes off some febrile prose which gets syndicated. Heads turn at AP and UPI: "why don’t we have someone covering this Whizzumajig? We’re falling behind! Hire Hunter Thompson!"

At the same time, some random gamers in places like the Swedish Foreign Ministry or the French Nazi Party decide they can get some free publicity by staking out some territory and figuratively mooning the straights. Exploding pigs, flying lutefisk, and other whackiness ensues.

And then the tidal wave of mass media awareness arrives, complete with the usual foaming mess of sewage, uprooted trees, and general crap turned out by the tabloid press and cheap news channels as they try to spew one lurid scenario after another through the playground. "It encourages pedophiles! Or terrorists! Kids get into Whizzumajig and fail their college exams! Users get hair in their palms and go blind! Ban Whizzumajigs now, before it steals our precious bodily fluid!"

This is followed by the most desperately attention-hungry members of the political class picking up the stupidest articles written by the most misguided members of the fourth estate, and proposing legislation so jaw-droppingly idiotic that their sane colleagues usually strangle it in the cradle. (See also: the internet, blogs and social network software, YouTube, MP3s, and probably papyrus back in Ancient Egypt. So has it ever been …)

Today, about 0.1% of the planetary population have logged onto WoW at some time or another. Warren Ellis has indeed moved in on Second Life. We are therefore, within the next year or so, going to end up paddling for dear life to keep our heads above the tidal wave of public attention.

Five years out

Five years is an interesting time.

It takes roughly five years to develop a game. And by 2012, the 2G GSM phone networks that have been the backbone of global communication since the mid 90s will begin to shutdown. Chronically short on bandwidth, 2.5G networks couldn’t push much past 100kbps, too slow to be useful for massively multiplayer gaming. Their 3G and 4G replacements, competing with WiMAX, bring orders of magnitude more data to mobile devices. Meanwhile, GPS location services are universal — for the first time, your mobile phone or laptop knows where you are and how to connect you to the internet.

I’m going to bet on an order of magnitude increase over the next five years. That’s right: 1% of the human population of this planet will have tried MMOs by 2012.

Intermediate machines like UMPCs put power equivalent to today’s gaming machines in a pocket. Desktop or wall-hanging TV/PC hybrids will be able to fill a wide screen to 1080p or higher resolution at fifty frames a second minimum. If true head-up displays start to appear in this time frame, things will get seriously interesting, but for now I’m not betting on it (yet). On the other hand, input devices are going to change for the better. Take the Wii controller as an example: put it together with a 60" wall-filling screen and voice-over-IP chat to your guild fellows and you’ve got a rather different gaming experience. Throw in some speech filters and your voice will even match your class or species.

What we’re going to see is an explosion of new types of game. In addition to current-day MMOs, we’re going to see systems that tie into social networks: MMOs that provide social fora similar to gamerDNA as part of the experience, not necessarily directly in-game but not out of game either.

Geocaching and live-action roleplaying haven’t crossed paths with MMOs much today, but that’s going to change. With UMPCs and GPS, your MMO can track players in the real world. This is going to evolve slowly, growing out of LARP routes rather than from the MMO side — but once wearable displays show up, live-action MMOs will soon follow.

An interesting bolt-on that is lurking just over the 5-year horizon is the cheap motion capture suits. Used for developing games by digitizing actor’s movements, these suits are currently horrifyingly expensive: but they’re going to get cheaper, eventually imploding into a bunch of small boxes on velcro straps that you attach to your limbs. Once you’re wired for motion capture, the game doesn’t just know where in the world you are — it knows whether you’re parrying or picking your nose.

Given this choice of gaming paradigms, do you stay at home with your big screen and keyboard (or if you’re feeling more energetic, your motion cap sensors) and game with friends on another continent, or do you go find a muddy field and game with friends who live locally? Well, why not do both? If you’ve got head-up displays (and there’s no reason not to equip them with cheap camera chips so you can dodge real-world obstacles mapped into gamespace, as well as your view of your MMO), then there’s no reason not to mix live action games with telepresence.

But it’ll probably take a couple of generations of game before the mixture of long-range MMO and VR-assisted LARP really matures. Watch the skies.

As for the number of players … I’m going to bet on an order of magnitude increase over the next five years. That’s right: 1% of the human population of this planet will have tried MMOs by 2012. That’s about 65 million people. A large proportion of the new players will be Chinese, Russian, or South American, but this isn’t necessarily bad — there’ll be genuine players showing up, not just farmers. Expect some interesting fallout (and possibly organized large-scale griefing) as real-world cultural divides come to the fore.

There are going to be non-game side-effects, too.

One of the big new things bubbling up under the tech world is 3D printers — machines costing anything from a couple of thousand dollars up to a couple of million that take in a CAD diagram and some raw materials and spit out a finished product, be it a wood carving or a piece of molded plastic or an extruded concrete house.

This isn’t a particularly new technology, but it stayed eye-wateringly expensive until relatively recently. Now there are DIY plastic extrusion machines available for just over $1200, and the field’s waiting to take off, much as PCs were in 1975.

As and when 3D printers catch on, a lot of hobbyists are going to be very happy — as well as architects (think: models), engineers (who need odd-shaped widgets) and DIY enthusiasts (you want that shelf bracket to *really* fit, design it yourself). But most of us will be content to buy or download open source templates for objects, possibly tweaking them to fit our specific requirements before we print them. And what better environment for seeing if that shelf bracket really *is* suitable for the living room than a virtual reality environment? MMOs are the first commercially viable VR systems, and the less-game-oriented ones are going to be moved in on by bespoke retailers — as opposed to off-the-shelf vendors like Amazon or WalMart — once they, and 3D printers, become widespread.

10-15 years out

Do you remember what the internet was like in 1992? Or 1987? Those are the years that bracket the 10-15 year range, looking backwards instead of forward. At the earliest reach, in 1987, the first MMO games just about existed — the first commercial, graphical MUDs showed up in the mid 80s. Trying to predict what a 2017-2023 game will look like, from here, is a losing proposition, like trying to predict Burning Crusade from the perspective of a user of the Exeter University MIST system.

So let’s look at the development picture instead.

One of the problems with MMOs is that we want lots of lovely eyeball candy, cute tiles and interesting loot and fun scenery to gaze upon. This is getting to be a major, even dominant, aspect of the development process. As of 2006, typical games cost millions to develop — and may employ anything from dozens to hundreds of artists. If creation of new content isn’t at least partially automated by 2023, the entire gaming biz is going to be in big trouble, with production and maintenance costs skyrocketing.

Procedural content — for example, automatic dungeon design — is nothing new; Moria and Nethack and similar games were doing it in the eighties. But they didn’t have to handle graphic design. We should, by 2023, have some serious parallel processing hardware, with workstations containing up to 1024 cores per processor (and processors hopefully running at better than 10GHz by then). One possibility is to use genetic algorithms to evolve new character templates and monsters; Will Wright is exploring this idea (in a different context) in Spore and it’s not hard to see it used to run variations on a theme in a more traditional MMO.

Another likely war forward is user-created content. Looking at the user contributed content for Neverwinter Nights, it’s hard to separate the game’s success from it’s players’ enthusiasm for DMing. One thing that’s certain is that any games company that wants to make a profit is going to invest heavily in DM and content creation tools. The first game company to figure out how to recruit and reward users for contributing content and admin skills to their realm is going to win big.

Now here’s another point: how big can we make an MMO shard?

Right now, it’s hard to put more than a couple of thousand players on a single shard and maintain a coherent multi-user reality. There are bandwidth problems and server problems. But we’re seeing three tech developments in 2007 which might help with this situation: peer-to-peer networking, trusted computing with DRM (by which I mean, someone else holds the keys to some of the services on your computer), and distributed databases.

We take it for granted that players will try to hack any system they have access to, for whatever purpose. (Especially if real world money is passing hands, exchangable for in-game goods and services.) At first glance, the idea of doing away with the current model of central servers and players running a client program, and replacing it with a peer-to-peer model, looks like madness. But if you can come up with an authentication and encryption scheme that uses the DRM and trusted computing hardware built into their computers to stop them from tampering with a secure server partition, and if that server is then talking to other player’s game clients, sort of like SETI@home for MMOs, then where can we go from there?

Potentially we can get away from the scaling problem that has bedevilled MMOs — Ultima Online used to have to add a server for every hundred new players, eating into their profit margin immensely — by getting the players to subsidize the servers, and to contribute the content, and even to do some of the admin work, a game company could focus on improving its bottom line through sophisticated manipulation of the exchange rate between in-game goods and real world money. Of course, derivatives trading is risky — someone loses money if someone else makes a killing. Expect this one to appeal at first to MBAs and then to computer criminals everywhere. In fact, by 2023 some hideous financial instrument lurching out of a computer game and crashing an economy the size of Hungary will probably replace the Ponzi or pyramid scheme as the acme of web-of-trust scams.

(Random prediction: sooner or later, some enterprising crook will try running one of these scams on a bunch of hardcore LARPers. And they’ll run into a world of hurt when they realize that *these* marks expect to get up close and physical, unlike the more virtual kind.)

A less crazy business scheme might involve giving away a p2p game environment, on condition that the players sign over a chunk of computer time to the games company — who can then resell it. Can’t imagine who’d want 1% of the CPU cycles of ten million servers? Consider the usefulness of such a service to biotech startups trying to do protein folding calculations, or to organizations that wants to do parallel searching on terabytes of data — Google, for example (or the NSA).

By 2023, I wouldn’t be too surprised if 750 million people have tried MMOs — that’s 10% of the world population. But by then, growth will be slowing. Only 20% of the population have access to PCs, and even by 2023 I doubt that much more than 40% will have mobile phones. So the market is going to be pretty much saturated by then, and anyone hoping to make a killing is going to have to come up with something new to sell.

On the other hand, there’ll be a lot of business opportunities in an ecology where MMOs are ubiquitous and games companies make money by selling add-ons. The flip side of "how big can we go?" is "how small?" Odds are high that personal islands in the successors to Second Life — inaccessible without an invitation, secured by biometric dongles — will be something we all have. And we keep stuff there that we don’t need all the time but might want to drag kicking and screaming out of the virtual world and into reality. Our business avatars, for example: motion capture and VR finally answer the marketing problem that’s bedeviled video phones, "do you want your boss to see what you look like and where you are when you answer the phone at 3am?" And our business clothing: with vastly more sophisticated design tools and a plethora of bespoke retail outlets, most of your wardrobe could well be virtual, only turned into actual fabric (by robots, with courier delivery) if you decide you actually need it. Want to go on vacation for a month? Pack a change of underwear and head off — you can bounce your wardrobe contents at a local fabrication store and pick up extra stuff as and when you need it.

There’ll be more subtle legal and political changes, too. Right now, DRM — digital rights management — is a dirty word to most consumers, and Trusted Computing is seen as a euphemism for greedy software and hardware monopolists wanting to lock down our computers. But once large chunks of our actual public identity exists in virtual realms, we’re going to badly want these technologies (with biometric authentication on top) in order to keep control of our virtual selves. Our understanding of "intellectual property" is a movable feast, and once we get used to stuff inside MMO environments not only looking like "real stuff" but being exportable into the real world, it’s going to change again.

15-25 years out.

MMOs are today (2007) the first really commercially successful form of virtual reality. And the internet is something that exists inside our computers and mostly doesn’t erupt out of them at random intervals.

By 2027-32, this position could well have reversed. For starters, the display tech we’ll be using by then may well be built into our eyes, or at least into unobtrusive spectacle frames. (I’d bet on the latter — but then, I can’t stand contact lenses either.) And for another, we’ll have run down the off ramp from Moore’s Law. Game over: we’ve hit the nanoscale, our machines are the size of molecules, and the limits to computing will be more about heat dissipation and signal paths than whether we can build a higher resolution fab line for two-dimensional chips.

Our computing resources will know where we are and how to find us. It’ll be able to see us and read our expressions and sense whether we’re tightening our muscles and precisely how we’ve positioned our feet. And anything on the net that we’ve authorized to look at us will be able to see us, too. Or see our avatars. It’ll be a lot like the pre-modern concept of a spirit world, except we’ll have access to it whenever we need to and it won’t be asking for burnt offerings. The really interesting question is whether things will converge on a single overarching metaverse with games or business meetings happening in different places, or whether they’ll fracture and we’ll see even more divergent environments cropping up.

This tech isn’t just going to stay the domain of gamers. Probably in as little as five years time it’s going to be in use by other folks. Think of your local police department as playing an elaborate game in Copspace — a VR environment overlaid on a geographical map of their territory, marked up with case files and notes, with a live video evidence feed coming off the cameras on their badges. Or think of your own lifelog. Storage is so cheap that you can record everything that happens to you, using voice annotations to mark points in time so that your phone can later recall them for you.

Whether you live and play in augmented reality or virtual reality is a choice you’ll make every day. Probably the two environments will overlap so that the next generation — the folks born in 2012 — won’t necessarily be aware of it. Do you remember growing up before computers? Before CDs? Before GPS? Before the internet? They’re not going to remember growing up before MMOs, or VR, or AR. The politicians grandstanding today about the evils of computer games and the urgent need to ban Whizzumajig will look as quaint to their eyes as a Prohibition-era preacher ranting about the evils of the demon Rum.

There’ll be more subtle side-effects, too. GPS is squeezing in everywhere, not just into games. We’ve already seen the first swarming open source mapping runs, when volunteers get together with GPS and mapping software to create detailed open source maps of an area. By the 15-25 year time frame, we’re going to be forgetting what it’s like to get lost by accident. Your phone (and your avatars) will always know where you are, and more importantly, how to guide you from where you are to anywhere you might want to go. Paper maps will follow log tables and slide rules into the tar sands of definitively obsolete technology, and a whole slew of movie plots will become implausible (in the same way that the cellphone blew most teen slasher film plots out of the water). Of course, if you can corrupt someone’s map of the environment they move in, new types of crime become possible: imagine muggers who guide their victims astray into an off-camera blind spot, rather than stalking them through surveilled streets.

And of course, all of this is wrong.

Life’s a game, and then you die

Gaming is meant to be fun. What I’ve been exploring isn’t fun; it’s the consequences of new technologies for game-play erupting into the real world.

Our idea of recreation and amusement changes over time. Today’s drudgery is tomorrow’s entertainment, and vice versa: table-top wargaming was a hardcore exercise for the Prussian general staff in the 19th century, while putting in several hours of Polo on horseback was mandatory for British cavalry soldiers in India — it was excellent close-order cavalry training. A lot of today’s occupations would look like a game to an earlier generation, and vice versa.

One constant over time seems to be that each generation invents its own fun. MMOs are the current generation’s big thing; back in the 1970s it was paper-and-pencil RPGs. By 2023-2027, it’s reasonable to expect something else to come along, something that pushes the same buttons and is even more absorbing. But what will it look like?

That I can’t tell you. All I know is, it’ll be fun.

P.S.

The Dirty Tech Truth

I’m writing this in early 2007. I’m sitting in front of a laptop with a 2GHz Core Duo processor, 2Gb of RAM, and about 0.7 terabytes of storage plugged into it. My net access comes courtesy of either a 10 mbps cable modem or an early 3G mobile phone that can reach the dizzy heights of 384kbps.

This is pretty typical for early 2007. But to put it in perspective, back in 1983 the entire planet bought just

93 terabytes of storage and most cutting-edge PCs were running on 4.77MHz 8086s with maybe 128Kb of RAM and an 0.3kbps modem. Those 4.77MHz CPUs took more than one clock cycle per instruction. So they were probably running at about 1MIPS. And I’m not going to get into their graphics cards and 3D accelerators and physics coprocessors because, um, they didn’t have any. Let’s just say, you wouldn’t want to run World of Warcraft on an original IBM PC 5150.

So here’s my expectation for tech: if this goes on, in just under 25 years someone with a reasonably current computer will have the equivalent of 1% of today’s planetary data storage on tap. Their processor will be about two thousand times as powerful as today’s best, and their mobile phone (or equivalent) will have more bandwidth than today’s best cable modem providers can serve. And at least one of these predictions will turn out to be laughably wrong because some currently unforeseen development will have upset the trundling apple cart of progress that Moore’s Law has trained us to expect.

My personal favourites for those disruptive technologies? Pick any of these three:

Firstly, a year or so ago Intel finally realized that if they kept trying to burn their way through performance bottlenecks, pretty soon their processors would need asbestos underpants: so they switched from emphasizing clock speed in gigahertz to looking at how they could deliver more MIPS, more raw computing operations, per watt of power. We’ve already got pretty powerful embedded ARM chips in our mobile phones — with 80Mb of RAM and a 300MHz processor, and a 2Gb memory card, my phone has more raw power than my desktop did back in 1997 — so I think we can expect typical phones in 2017 to be as powerful as a high-end gaming PC in 2007. As for gaming PCs, they’re going to fission — you’ll have laptops, and you’ll have TV sets/home entertainment centres with 60 inch screens that just happen to also be PCs with capacities to rival today’s data centres.

Secondly, we’re getting GPS (and the European Galileo) service everywhere, and it’s getting more precise and more ubiquitous. (More on what this means when I get over my nerd-tech exposition.)

Thirdly, our communications bandwidth is going through the roof. I’ve gone from 56kbps to 10mbps in ten years — three orders of magnitude increase. It’s only going to go higher. Early tests of hardware implementing the draft 4G telephony standards managed to get that much bandwidth over the air, and as for cables, 100 gigabit ethernet is already off-the-shelf if you’ve got enough money. There are hard limits — you can only cram so much data into the radio spectrum — but it’s going to take us a long time to reach them, and then we’ll be looking at terabits per second. At which point, somewhere before 2017, it should be possible to download enough data over a cable in one minute to fill every byte of hard disk space sold in 1983. And the wireless tech will catch up maybe five years later.

But remember, these are just guesses, folks. I may be an SF writer but I’m not a prophet. The disruptive tech could be quantum computers, or AI, or magic wands. I’ll just be very, very surprised if nothing shows up at all.

The Syndicate: World Class Guild

For the premier of GuildCafe’s PlayerVox, we’re bringing you an interview with one of the oldest and largest guilds in the online gaming world. The Syndicate, established in 1996, has grown to nearly 600 members and become known around the world for various achievements including being the first guild to trademark its name, being the first guild to get a corporate sponsor, being the first guild to land a book deal about their history, partnering with Prima games to deliver more detailed, higher quality strategy guides to gamers and for being filmed for an upcoming MMORPG documentary.

    

 

 

 

 

You will find The Syndicate currently participating in Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. They also have an active beta testing team both in direct support of several developers and also as part of their guide writing efforts with Prima so you will find them scattered around other gaming worlds.

We sat down with Dragons, the guildmaster of the Syndicate to ask him about his thoughts.

PlayerVox: The Syndicate is one of the oldest MMORPG guilds in existence. How has running a guild changed over your decade history?

Dragons: Running The Syndicate has definitely evolved over the years. I would like to say it has gotten easier but overall it is probably harder than it has ever been. Certain aspects are definitely much easier but there are dimensions to The Syndicate that don’t exist in other guilds that make running it a challenge.

 
…the early years saw alot of effort expended upon managing drama. In today’s Syndicate, there is virtually no drama.

In the early years, we were fleshing out our rules and policies as well as our recruiting practices. That meant that we did recruit people that didn’t always agree with the rules or that didn’t always get along with other members. So the early years saw alot of effort expended upon managing drama. In today’s Syndicate, there is virtually no drama. We have evolved to the point that we have extremely little turnover and we only recruit like minded people. So that aspect of the guild management is almost nonexistent.

On the other side of the coin, we have added in formal relationships with several developers to help consult on games. We have a formal relationship with Prima to help write guides. We have a movie we are being filmed for. We have a book being written about us (which will be in stores in August of 2007) by Avari Press. We have an annual Conference that we host with 120+ members attending it from all over the world which takes a great deal of effort to setup. We have Trademark Enforcement. And the list goes on and on. So the amount of things going on in The Syndicate is so much larger than it ever was in those early days that running the guild is a challenge but for reasons that no other guild has to deal with.

PlayerVox: What are the most rewarding as well as the most frustrating aspects of running your guild?

Dragons: The most rewarding part of running the guild is definitely the people. The Syndicate is ALL about its members. We are not a UO guild. We are not a WoW guild. We are not an online gaming guild. We are a virtual community of friends that uses online gaming to grow our friendships.

Because of that focus, we build very strong friendships that last for many years. More than 80% of our guild has been with us from 1 to 11 years. So we have become very good friends and those friendships are the most rewarding part. Getting together for monthly dinners.. for lan parties.. for our annual conferences.. and, of course, gaming together are all ways to experience that friendship first hand. If we didn’t have that friend focus, we wouldn’t still be here today.

It is hard to nail down a frustrating aspect that most readers can relate to. The biggest issues we deal with, at a guild level, really are minor little things. You don’t find major issues here so there aren’t massive looming frustrations that I have to vent about.

PlayerVox: You mention that the best part of running a guild is the people—can you tell us more? What are the most memorable things you’ve done together as a guild?

Dragons: We have a number of very cool parts to our history. We cover many of them in our book (Legend of The Syndicate) in a very ‘fantasy story’ like way which makes for a good read. A few of the most memorable ones for me personally include:

• A time in our early UO days when we setup a massive guild raid on a PK base. There was one group of 25 or so PKs that were harassing the shard very often. It reached the point where the annoyance had to be stopped so we formed up with a massive army of 200 Syndies and gated into their town, destroyed them, took the keys to their base houses and pretty much ruined their reign of terror in UO.

• All of our conferences so far are great memories. Having 120+ members together for 4-5 days is alot of fun. We get guest speakers.. we play Paintball.. we spend alot of time getting to know each other. Those are outstanding events and hold a fond place in my memories.

• Our 10 year anniversary as a guild is also very memorable. There are only a tiny handful of guilds that have ever or will ever achieve that goal. We are not a year past that milestone but it is still a special one.

PlayerVox: What is the biggest thing you wished online game companies did differently?

Dragons: Current online content, including a bunch of the in development content, is somewhat repetitive. I am looking for the industry to have content that comes out that causes the veteran online gamers to feel like newbies again and learn and grow in that new environment. Monsters that react to a players skill level, so that everyone fighting them has a unique experience, is a good start. Dungeons that react in difficulty based on how many times the person/group has completed them would be nice. Creating the tools to let players help create content so there is new content coming out as fast as players can finish it that isn’t always adding to the top tier where only a small percentage of players get to see it when it is new and fresh.

The current "formula" works. But it is only going to work for so long before a backlash occurs. The industry needs to get more creative and more adaptive to keep players here another ten years.

PlayerVox: Do you have some words of advice for people who might be thinking about starting a new guild today?

Dragons: Guilds are a dime a dozen. They rise and fall faster than anyone takes notice of them. If you are creating a guild today, you need to pick one of two paths. Either go in with the mindset that the guild is a short term entity that will serve a specific game purpose, burn bright and then burn out—or that the guild is going to be a longer term entity. If so, then a great deal of effort needs to be put into creating the right foundation for the guild that will stand the test of time. Don’t make the mistake of tens of thousands of guilds before you by thinking because you can physically create a guild in a game and slap up a webpage that you are going to be anymore successful than the several hundred thousand guild failures that dot the landscape of online gaming. Making a long term successful guild takes a huge amount of effort and planning. Treat the process with the respect it deserves if you want to succeed. And, of course, read our book (Legend of the Syndicate by Avari Press, in stores August 2007). We go through a large amount of our early thought processes and those may be good processes for you to go through as well.