As with any piece of software let us examine the problem we are trying to solve. We are trying to make software that will entertain people. It should also challenge people’s minds and reflexes and simultaneously move them emotionally in the same way a good movie does. This software should not be addicting, and it should have as small a monthly fee as possible, free is best. This software should not have a system of leveling by which the players who pay more money or play for longer hours will automatically be superior. Only skill in brains and game control should separate players.

First, the easy technical problems. Why do MMOs have monthly fees? The architecture of the software requires a centralized server which costs money to maintain. If we were to develop some sort of p2p architecture akin to BitTorrent that would act as the server, or at least alleviate some of its load, then the monthly fee could be reduced significantly. Also if all profits, if any, were made on the initial sale of the game we could reduce costs further by setting the monthly fee at cost. It would also remove incentive for developers to add addicting elements to the game which do not enhance the quality of the game itself. And distributed computing of an MMO is interesting computer science problem number one.

Next, how do we have a game in which there are multiple players that are separated only by their intelligence/wisdom and their video game control skills? There are many possible answers to this question, but the best one I’ve come up with is Metal Gear. Metal Gear is a game series in which puzzle solving and acute control skills mean everything. There is no treadmill, simply the collection and intelligent use of resources at your disposal to accomplish your goals. In my MMO idea, everyone controls an avatar just like Solid Snake, Lara Croft or the 3d Prince of Persia. Problem solving, resource management and video game button pushing are the skills required to make progress.

How can this game move people as emotionally as a movie? It needs plot, it needs music, it needs an immersing world. My suggestion is the following. The setting of the game is a post-apocalyptic hellhole similar to that portrayed in the Terminator movies. A game of survival. Every player is a person and there are deadly killer robots ruling the planet. The game will have one large persistent world, and there will be an endgame. High quality music will accompany everything to set the mood. And everything from in-game television screens to players communicating with each other to players finding things throughout the course of the game will be used to deliver the plot. The plot will be an incredibly epic and well written man vs. machine survival story. It would rock.

Now comes the hardest part. What are the specifics of the game that prevent it from making all the mistakes of MMOs in the past? This includes all the questions like player death, cheesy techniques, asshole players, etc. These ideas have not been thought out in full, but I do have some good ideas on how the game will work. More ideas are welcome.

First off, the game will work like so. The player creates their character. This includes selecting a name and a physical appearance of the character including clothing, since clothing doesn’t matter. Next, the players will spawn in a “safe” location in the persistent world. If there are many players then multiple spawn points can be set. These safe points will be somewhat protected from the enemies, but not completely. The only humans inhabiting the game will be players. The safe “city” will have resources such as food, water, weapons, radios and a shield or turrets to keep the evil at bay. It will be up to the players to collectively manage resources properly if they hope for this place to remain safe. They will be free to form their social structure in any way they see fit, and depending on how that works out will determine if they get anywhere or just all die. Free-form social structure is interesting computer science problem number 2.

The actual game-play will be as follows. Each player has equipment that does everything it should do. Guns shoot, knives cut, radios communicate, watches tell time, etc. Making equipment like walkie talkies work the same way they do in real life is the third interesting computer science problem. In order to fight for survival, and hopefully the destruction of the evil overlords players will have to leave their safe little bases to gather more resources and mount offensive strikes against the enemy. The elements of stealth, puzzle solving, exploration, aiming, maneuvering, teamwork, etc. will all come into play out in the world.

When a player dies their corpse will lie there depending on the fashion in which they died. Dying from starvation and dying in a huge explosion are very different. All their inventory will be affected as realistically as possible. The player will then be forced to make a new character. The accomplishments of the previous character will be logged and remembered. That’s it. Since there are no levels or xp the only thing you can lose is inventory. And as there are no items that are necessarily better than others, just different items, it wont be too painful. Some items might be scarce, like powered armor with rocket launchers and jet packs. But if you have that, then you aren’t very likely to die. You couldn’t realistically expect to keep something like that forever either as the enemies will come at you in full force. You will either waste them or perish at that point. People really wont care about losing their pistol, flashlight, canteen and two grenades.

That’s the whole game? Yup. But there will be some other interesting tidbits. First off, coding the ability to switch control of enemies over to the administrators. That will allow cool things to happen during special events. Also, maybe some sort of side plots involving evolving mutant monsters near a radioactive dump. This will be yet another computer science problem to make enemies with AIs that evolve depending on player equipment and combat tactics, but also in their own configurations. It will be too much work for someone to configure enemies for all situations. But it would be undeniably awesome if they automatically outfit themselves with flamethrowers for massacre missions and sniper rifles for assassination missions, etc. And mutant enemies that actually change over time would be just one more bit cooler.

The other thing about the game will be the level of interaction will be extremely deep. Radios will work like radios, video screens will work like video screens. Robots will work like robots. Players will be able to dismantle robots for parts, assemble parts to create new things. They can re-program in-game computer systems to aid the cause. Imagine a game world where someone writes a virus in the game and it infects the enemy base in the way they coded it and that gives you the opening for an assault. That is indeed the game of all time. Imagine the game having real working duct tape. Need to strap a flashlight to your assault rifle? No problem.

That’s my idea. Tons of players with the abilities of Solid Snake fighting for survival in a very large persistent game world with incredibly dangerous AI enemies roaming about. Every important video game skill and more will come into play. The plot will be deep and have a beginning middle and end. The music and immersing world will elicit strong emotions. This is but one way to make a game with many simultaneous players on the Internet without making it just another MUD with 3D graphics. I think it’s a damn good idea for a game that provides interesting and innovative new things on all fronts. For the player, developer and administrator this will surely be something special. If anyone wants to pay me enough money to quit my job, I’ll make it.

Saying that WoW is a good game because it’s funny is like saying Tetris is a good game because the blocks are pretty.

Isn’t it perfect? It expresses my feelings about the separation of theme and play in games. Play is the only thing I care about. All the theme in the world can’t save you if your game sucks. However, a good game can be helped by a good theme. This also applies to board games, just look at *opoly. I know I’ve said this a zillion times before, but many of my friends have fallen under the WoW’s spell, and its getting really bad. You know, social life destroying and money wasting bad. This analogy expresses my feelings better than ever before and I wanted to share it.

Why do people play MMO games? The answer is simple; they try a free trial, get addicted and start shelling out the cash. Why are they addicted? This is a harder question, but I think I know the answer. Back in the day we had MUDs. I used to play muds, but I realize now they are even worse than the MMOs of today. All we did was, literaly, walk around and kill monsters to make numbers go up to kill different monsters. The role playing was basically nil, especially in smaller MUDs. But we kept doing it. Why? I mean, at least in a Final Fantasy game or something I can understand the desire to progress plot. But people actually have a desire to level up with no actual goal. You might at first say that it’s fun. But that’s not enough, if you ask why is it fun it become very difficult to think of a reason someone would want to perform monotonous tasks repeatedly with no real benefit.

There are a few reasons I can come up with that this is fun for people. First, there is an imagined benefit. People feel that when they reach the max level or some incredibly high level that some new world of awesome opens to them. In MUDs there were areas you simply couldn’t get to unless you were powerful enough. Sometimes you could go to the areas, but the monsters there would attack you and kill you, and you would have no chance of recovering your stuff. Getting more levels allowed you to go to these places. The real trick was that these new places were no more exciting or different than the areas you could already go. It did however provide this meager and false sense of superiority. As long as there are lower level players about it somehow makes people feel special to have abilities that others do not have, even if these abilities hold no real meaning.

The second reason is world modification. Low level players can’t do much. They walk around and hit things. High level players can teleport, destroy things, steal things, etc. They are like superheros. They have the ability to do things that regular people do not. Of course, these are all fake things, as they only exist in an imaginary world. You could acquire the same effect by playing with some action figures and using your imagination. Since it really isn’t you with the enhanced abilities, it’s an avatar, an action figure works just as well. But the real reason these abilities make people feel good is because other people have to suffer their effects. In a world of supermen the computer guy is the superhero. All the strength and speed doesn’t make technology work. You’re only super when you have abilities beyond that of others. And because the players in an MMO are all real people these false powers to manipulate the imaginary world gain new glory, because other real people have to suffer their effects. A plain digital world in which you were god is no fun. But as soon as it is a dynamic world that changes all the time in which other people have to play, changing it is fun because whatever you change has positive or negative effects on other people. So in order to gain these world changing abilities people will spend lots of time and money making numbers go up.

The third reason people level up is because it works. Everyone who knows how to play the game knows how to get levels. You kill things, you make things, whatever the case may be. But basically you repeat some monotonous task that amounts to clicking buttons or typing commands to make numbers go up. And as long as you push the right buttons and enter the right commands the numbers will always go up. There is no chance of them going down. There is no skill determinant. It’s not like you might lose or you might win, you always win as long as you know how to play. And the longer you play the more you win. It’s not like Tetris or Puzzle Pirates where you can know all the rules of the game but still lose. In an MMO if you know the rules of the game you win. And how much you win is determined by how much you play. The first MUDs were the very definition of this concept. As time went on MMOs and MUDs try their best to cover this up. And this is how MMOs beat each other. At their heart they all are based on this one concept, but as time goes on each one covers it up more and more in order to look better than the other MMOs. They add crafting, exploring, flying, puzzles, customization, etc. But these are all cover-ups of the underlying fundamental game mechanic. And the MMOs that cover it up more are the ones that are more succesfull. But the ones that leave it out are not addicting, they are just good games which happen to have many players connected at once, and thus they do not do as well.

But why is this game mechanic addicting and fun? Because it is escapist. The same reason that people read fiction is the same reason people are addicted to MMOs. It helps them escape the reality of an imperfect world. Most people do not feel perfectly happy, I’m an exception rather than the rule in that I am unhappy very rarely. But living in an MMO is an escape from reality. In the real world if you do work, you don’t always make numbers go up. Sometimes you do work poorly and things go sour. Sometimes you do work that results in nothing. You try really hard to win the sporting event, but the other team is better, even though you practiced more. In an MMO whoever plays more wins, skill matters little. This is the ideal of people who have lots of effort and little skill, and thus MMOs make them very happy. It is also escapist for people with no social skills. People who think they are ugly, or are shy, or have no friends. These people can go onto an MMO where they are anonymous and actually talk to people without fear. If people don’t like them they can make a new character. These people who have no social interaction in the real world can be the most popular and powerful player in the fake world. All they have to do is spend more time playing the game, which works well for them since they aren’t spending time hanging out with friends.

But in the end, no matter how high level you are, the rulers of the MMO world are dictators who made or run the game. And some NPCs are more powerful than players ever can be. The job of the player is to work to get useless levels and useless money so that they can do the same thing again in a different context. It’s just like the world we live in. Everyone is supposed to get a job to get money to get stuff which they have to support with more stuff they have to work for. MMOs as a whole are a simplified and magnified image of our western society. The only difference is that everybody wins. There are no homeless people in MMOs unless you want to pretend to be homeless for fun or something. And sometimes you have to be rich to do that. At one point in Puzzle Pirates you had to spend a lot of money if you wanted rag clothing, as it was only available to greenies(newbies). And this is why people play MMOs. They can replace their shitty real lives with an imaginary one. They pretend to live in a world in which they work and win on a day to day basis. They make imaginary friends and lead imaginary lives. And not only are their real lives protected from any bad happenings in the imaginary world, but their imaginary selves are pretty much protected from bad happenings. The worst that can happen is you die. And I don’t know of any MMOs which send you back to level 0 when you die. People just wouldn’t play it. And why wouldn’t they play it? Because guaranteed winning is the reason those games are addicting.

So MMOs suck. Everquest, World of Warcraft, Asheron’s call, Ultima Online, Final Fantasy 7, Planetside and more all suck ass. The first reason, as been explored in detail by other people. Basically, most MMO games, at least those with monthly fees, are designed to addict you and keep you paying. They are not designed to be the best games they can be. Something like Zelda is designed to be the best game it can be. And that’s why the series has only faltered once. Yet something like Everquest is not designed for maximum fun and entertainment. It is designed to take a long time to achieve goals regardless of skill. It is designed to be neverending so that players will keep playing just to reach the next point, one more level, but there’s always one more. They have a goal which can never be achieved. And this is because it makes you keep playing.

The second thing about MMOs that suck is that skill in the game doesn’t really come into play that much. Sure, there’s some skill in the combat system. And it shows more in games like Planetside. But overall its usually the people who have been playing for longer amounts of time are more powerful. Especially in treadmill RPG types. Some amount of skill might allow you to get levels faster, but that’s usually because this is a new character and you’ve been here before. It’s not a game of skill like chess or checkers, or even Super Mario. Where how good you are at playing the game determines if you will achieve the goal. Its simply a matter of once you know how to play, you have to sit there until the goal is achieved. Usuallyb e repeating monotonous uninteresting tasks.

MMOs are basically glorified chat rooms in which you have a 3d avatar and a 3d world to explore. That in itself is not so bad if all you’re looking for is IRC with graphics slapped on some VRML. There’s a reason they don’t use VRML much anymore. But if you are looking for a game. A diversion of the nature of a contest, played according to rules, and displaying in the result the superiority either in skill, strength, or good fortune of the winner or winners. Then most MMOs that is not.

I could go on and on all day, but let me finish by saying why Puzzle Pirates is so far the only game that means anything as far as MMOs go. First, Puzzle Pirates is not perfect. It has many of the problems the other games have. For example, not only does it have no achivable goal, it has no goal to begin with! Once you learn how to do everything in the game, you’re only real goal can be to get more money to get more stuff to get more money. And all you can realy get with money is shops ( which require a lot of real work on your behalf, and only serve to accumulate money for you ), boats, clothing and swords. Once you have the best sword, the nicest clothes and all the boats you can ask for there’s not much more to it.

But puzzle pirates overcomes most other MMOs because of two things. The first thing is skill required. In fact, skill is most of what matters in puzzle pirates. Every person in the game does work to move the economy via playing Tetris-like puzzle games. Different tasks all have different puzzles. Sailing puzzle, carpentry puzzle, my new favorite apothecary puzzle and more. How well you do at these puzzles determines how much you contribute to what the puzzle does. A better job of sailing makes the boat move better. There is a direct correlation between your skill at a puzzle game and the effect of it on the game world. And usually, skill is all that matters. So theoretically a complete newbie (a greenie) can walk into the game and defeat the wealthiest pirate in the ocean in a sword duel. It can happen. The other thing that puzzle pirates does right is politics. There is no political system coded into puzzle pirates. The vast majority of the actual game is all economics. A highly dynamic and managed capitalist pirate society where players strive to get themselves a nice treasure. The politics occur entirely via players. Just about the only thing you can do is form a crew and combine crews to form a flag. That’s it. Everything else happens in the official game forums and chat in game. And through these freeform communications mediums players ally, quabble, make underhanded deals, make friends, make enemies, trade goods and more. This is where the game is at. Freeform social interaction is what drives the game forward. And not only is it existing, but involvement in this interaction and skillfully engaging in the politics is the only way to really get ahead. Not a line of code is written for dealing with it, but due to the excellent form of the game itself it happens and works.

People always tell me that in their MMO people role-play and that’s what its about. Sure, people role-play. But in Everquest, role-playing isn’t necessary to get ahead. It’s a MUD with grpahics. I used to play MUDS and the way to get ahead was kill monsters and find treasure. It’s the same thing in most MMORPGs. Nothing new to see here. All that role playing can get you is some friends to group with. That’s as far as it goes. In puzzle pirates if you don’t role play you have no friends. You have no friends you have no crew. You have no flag. You don’t rise up in the ranks, you have no reputation, nobody knows you. Without a large number of other physical real players working with you, you can achieve little more than amassing wealth and boats. You can’t get an island. You can’t get a fleet of ships. You can’t manage many shops without significant real world time investment. You cant move the amount of commodities you need to move to maintain your holdings. You need friends to survive in Puzzle Pirates, unless you want to have very little.

So most MMOs suck. And these are just the basic reasons. Next time I will talk about how MMO games are actually a magnification of western society. And then in part 3 I will reveal my plan for the ultimate RPG. But that will wait until me and my friends flesh the idea out as far as our minds go.