Cosmik at N3rfed challenged my off-hand assertion that Jeff Freeman is wrong about us being doomed to make fantasy games for all eternity. (Oh, and Jeff, I’m jealous that you can start a blogosphere episode with a paragraph-and-a-half-long update). One of Cosmik’s reasoning: we’re steeped in fantasy from the momma’s teat.

It all comes down to our past.

Growing up, fantasy themed stimuli is all around us. We walk amongst it. We breathe it. It is a huge part of our learning, of our fun. From the fairy tale books we are shown to the tribal and social legends we are taught, from the school plays we perform to the customs and history of our race we learn, we are constantly bombarded with fantasy themed and fantasy-esque stimuli. As a result, fantasy becomes easy to identify with. It’s a safe bet for the player, and it helps recreate the fun we experienced all those years ago when we were imagining ourselves as the knight in shining armor or the most beautiful princess in the land.

The problem with this is, of course, it doesn’t jibe with reality. The biggest geek-friendly licenses are still Star Wars and Star Trek. Until the recent LOTR movies, ‘fantasy’ was considered the kiss of death in Hollywood.

For Valentine’s Day, I went to three stores with DVD selections, and wandered into the ‘Sci-Fi’ department of each one (my fiance’s a geek– I’m a lucky guy). There was no ‘Fantasy’ section. In fact, the stores seemed confused as to where, exactly to put the LOTR DVDs.

There’s a Sci-Fi channel. There’s no Fantasy channel. In Sci-Fi TV, you’ve got your Star Trek, your Battlestar Galactica, your Babylon 5, and your Farscape. In fantasy you’ve got… Xena? Clearly, as geeky as spaceships and laser pistols are, they’ve penetrated the mainstream… or at least the geek stream… far more. But if that’s the case, why do MMOs break the rules?

The easy answer is because MMOs are based on the chainmail bikini tabletop games we know and love, and the games can’t fall far from their roots. I don’t fully agree, but it’s close. The fantasy RPG has honed a game design over time that rewards what’s needed for a highly successful MMO: A highly repeatable core activity (i.e. a grind). To avoid having to type it all again, here’s a cut-and-paste of what I commented in Jeff’s blog:

Fantasy games have been all the rage so far because only the fantasy ones have truly nailed what I call the ‘renewable experience’ – that thing that you can do over and over again, every day, that gives you enough character growth to stretch out for months (i.e. long enough to make a monthly fee worthwhile). In other words, what is their version of ‘the grind’?

Sadly, ‘the grind’ that people hate so much in Fantasy RPGs is the best we have so far (and this is helped a lot by the fact that we’ve had 10 years to refine it by now).

Most of the off-genre games have struggled because they missed the importance of this. In TSO, ‘the grind’ was making pizzas in an obtuse pizza machine puzzle that really wasn’t much fun. The sci-fi MMOs have had problems making ranged laser fights as fun to grind as up-close swordfighting. Motor City Online accidentally made it so the best way to ‘grind’ was to race the easiest racetrack over and over again — which resulted in the playerbase boring themselves to death.

And then there’s Earth and Beyond, which at least recognized the problem correctly, and tried to solve it by borrowing EQ’s grind. Unfortunately, that grind model didn’t translate over very well to ship combat.

The game that breaks your top-five rule is going to figure out one simple fundamental question: “What do people do all day?” And when they break that rule, we’re all gonna feel pretty stupid for not thinking of it sooner.

But no, I don’t think that’s all…. (continued)