No, I don’t think it did early on.

I remember the end game as a mass of non-raiding noobs running UBRS and Strat in the hope of getting our sets and some Fire Res item for when we someday got a raid guild.

This is interesting. In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel (which is a great source of MMO design topics to ponder), the author talks about how human behavior has affected development toward characteristics, specially characteristics that would be contrary to what increases propagation in the wild. The simple example given was that humans would prefer to eat larger strawberries, so the plants that produced larger berries with seeds that survived the digestive tract would flourish. An example of contradictory characteristics is our preferences for non-poisonous almonds, which means that they would be non-toxic for other animals, if we don’t protect the tree. Or, how we prefer wheat that doesn’t scatter its seeds so quickly.

This flows well into an argument about short term vs. long term fun. It means that MMOs, which are often seen as long-term investments, do better by focusing on the short term and giving players a quick jolt of fun. This behavior works well in some media (like arcade games or traditional games with all the costs up front), but in an MMO you have to keep stringing players along with little jolts instead of building for the long term. Players tend to gravitate to the short-term wins instead of more interesting long-term gameplay. (A notable exception being EVE.)

This is one of my theories about why many newer MMOs don’t stick, because even if they get the initial short-term bit of fun right, they often have no long term plans as witnessed by empty content at high levels. Wow may have had the same problem, but by now its age and popularity allow people to ignore those sins.

If only it were that easy. I’ve played the emulators, they aren’t EQ. I’ve played EQ on the SOE servers, it isn’t even EQ anymore, not the EQ people are nostalgic for. About the only way to play that old EQ is to buy a Mac and play on the Mac server. That’s just one too many hoops to jump through.

I just wanted to address a line in Stabs’ reply:

“The analogy suffers somewhat when extended to games partly because we don’t really understand evolution fully and we don’t really understand MMO success fully.”

I don’t think that a lack of understanding impacts the analogy at all, in fact in only serves to further reinforce it. As I mention at the tail end of my own article, the MMO genre exhibits many of the traits of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). Conveniently, life-based evolution *IS* also a CAS, and one of the primary results of this understanding is that the behaviors of the two systems cannot be understood by just looking at their discrete parts in isolation because all of the behaviors are emergent (due to their inter-connectivity).

I absolutely love all of this stuff, if it wasn’t obvious.

In an earlier draft it was “changes in MMOGs are deliberate design decisions” rather than “tend to be”, but with such complex systems unintended consequences are never too far away.

Something I started considering was how players act as an environment in steering game evolution, which gets into emergent gameplay and a whole other post (or ten), so I thought it was better to focus on bling on the bum instead.

A motto to live by, I think we can all agree.

With dodos there may once have been fast agile dodos but the fat ones got all the chicks. So that’s how they bred out. Same with peacock – having a load of bling on your bum is worth being occasionally eaten by crocodiles since it gets you laid so much.

In today’s human population positive evolutionary traits are never using condoms and multiple sexual partners, which is not exactly a survival oriented approach to life.

The analogy suffers somewhat when extended to games partly because we don’t really understand evolution fully and we don’t really understand MMO success fully.

With MMOs in particular you see people jump up and down pronouncing that X must be the One True Path because WoW did it. However that’s actually backwards, WoW would probably have succeeded with any of the various approaches. It succeeded as a hardcore raider game in 2005, it succeeded as a pvp game in 2007 (the year the hardcore did arenas and the casuals farmed AV), it’s succeeding as a casual raid game now. But you see people saying you have to aim squarely at the casuals because that’s what WoW does, forgetting that WoW was just as successful when it didn’t aim at them. And as if WoW would have failed had it been a sandbox rather than a diku. As Brian says it’s kind of random.

I don’t think even WoW know quite what they do right. And it’s by no means certain that the secret MMO project will be the same kind of runaway success.

As for nostalgia that’s truly odd since almost all the games people feel nostalgic for are still going. Want to play UO or EQ? Google them, download and play then.

Although, I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that MMO evolution isn’t kind of random. ;)