Once upon a time, massively multiplayers were pretty much entirely a culture steeped in open source. This is back in the MUD days, when great worldbuilding meant concise yet interesting blocks of text, and the term ‘massively multiplayer’ was still waiting to be invented by some overzealous marketing droid.
Success was defined by reaching 100 simultaneous users. Wild success was reaching 200. The developers actually feared wild success – we were usually running on the back end of university email mainframes and whatnot, often without the IT department’s permission, and wild success meant they might notice, and pull the plug on your world. There were many, many stories of MUDs who encountered a service interruption of that sort, and who lost their entire player base in the 2 week period it took to find a new internet-connected mainframe to call home.
For all you WoW addicts, imagine WoW just… disappeared for 2 weeks. And that WoW’s entire player base, desperate for gameplay, just went to LotRO like a swarm of locusts. Now imagine that once WoW came back up, they couldn’t convince anyone to come back. MUD popularity back then was hugely dependant on the culture, and on where your friends were. Mass migration was extremely common.
Living in today’s world of ultrapowerful desktops and easily available permanent net connections seemed like a dream for those of us trying to find a home for a MUD server. We knew it was coming – it just couldn’t get there fast enough for us.
Most MUDs started from a handful of codebases, that resulted in a very strongly recognizable family tree. One branch was the TinyMUD branch, which eventually gave birth to virtually every purely social and building MUD, MUCK and MOO in the early era. The second branch was LP MUD, a combat-oriented MUD model that centered on strong scripting systems, which led to some more experimental gameplay types.
The third branch was, of course, the Diku branch. Despite what some people would say, Dikus back then played very differently than MMOs of the here and now – saying they are the same is kind of like saying that Checkers and Warcraft 3 are the same game. Even back then, the Diku gameplay was wildly disregarded for being boring, derivative, and flawed due to heavy dependance on things like class and levels. Even back then, Dikus were vastly more popular than the other trees. There were more of them, and they drew larger crowds.
There were many subflavors of Diku, which people built off of. The ones I remember the most were Circle and Merc. Of the Dikus that went live, many were ‘vanilla’ (i.e. they were exactly the same as the original downloaded codebase, with a changed title screen), others differed on content (especially world areas and creatures), whereas others had huge changes to gameplay (new advancement systems, etc). One of the reasons why Dikus were so popular was that it was more data driven – it was much easier to do a content-swapped world than with the other two code-bases, which required more code for even trivial tasks.
But I digress. At MUD’s peak, it seemed like the MUDlist that floated around the internet would have about 300 titles. My memory may be wrong, but I seem to remember that it would compose of roughly 150 Dikus, 100 MUCKs and MOOs, and 50 LP MUDs. Now of course, the days of the MUD are over, now that big companies have gotten into it, and high quality alternatives like WoW, LotRo, Habbo and Second Life are available.
The problem with that worldview is that the MudConnector currently has 1500 MUDs listed. Neverwinter Vault has 43 PAGES of ‘game worlds’.
So there’s clearly a desire to create your own online world. Which is good – it means I’m not entirely abnormal.
Now, many of these are probably dead entries, and most of them are probably ghost towns. Still, I visited 2 in MudConnectors’ top 10 MUDs. Both had more than 200 people. During my lunch break (decidedly non prime-time hours). So there’s a lot of people interested in playing custom user worlds.
For the record, of MC’s top 10, 6 are Diku family, 2 are LP, and 2 are ‘unique’. (Although, come on, Medievia, you know you’re from the Diku/Merc family. Let it go) It’s surprising that no MUCK or MOO is in the top 10, although that may be attributed to MC’s audience.
This is the world where Raph and I discovered online gaming. His start in the genre was, actually, a player on my text MUD. When Raph talks about what he believes Metaplace could be, it comes from experience. It comes from having seen it happen in the past.
Still, there are challenges. The first challenge, apparently, is that literally every person I’ve talked to so far has said that they first read the name as ‘MeatPlace’. Except for one guy who thought it was ‘MeatPalace’. Which is our de facto name for the local Brazilian Steakhouse here in Austin.
The second challenge is going to be what happens when Something Awful invades. Whatever they do will be deviant and horrible – but probably utterly entertaining. I suspect Raph is smart enough to realize there’s actually value in that.
The third challenge is going to be … loneliness. Building your own web page that no one visits is one thing – you can just tell yourself you’re writing for yourself. But if you set up a dance club on your website that no one visits – it will be a very lonely feeling. And when you have a personal MMO that feels lonely – well, the irony just slays you.
The fourth challenge is that MMO armchair designers are notorious overthinkers, and there are going to be a lot of antfarm-type experiments that don’t garner much interest, because they are more interesting to watch than play. The problem with these games is that they require a certain social critical mass to achieve, which is often hard to do. Mark my words – aside from whatever Raph is making, the most remarkable Metaplaces will be the ones that are the least like virtual worlds, and are more like Maple Story or Kart Rider – games that embrace new paradigms and core gameplay altogether.
The fifth is IP. What is known from the old MUD days is that more people are interested in borrowing from existing IPs than making their own. I remember there being MUSHes built around Transformers, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. Those IP holders didn’t care then. They might care more now, since now there’s proven gold in them thar hills.
The sixth is, surprisingly, whether or not people want to regress. I know this sounds wierd, but even though all the game players might be playing Habbo Hotel and Maple Story now, the question is whether they will still be playing casual web MMOs in five years, or whether or not they graduate to more fully-fledged ‘dinosaurs’ like WoW, LotRO, or what I’m working on. I’ve tried to play the web games and they feel so limiting and confined to me. Will this happen to the web gamer market, once they ‘graduate’ to the next level? (Clearly, there’s some pricey market research for someone to go do)
Also, I have little faith in Raph’s ‘play anywhere’ philosophy, and how it merges with player created content. Most amateur web designers are incapable of making a web site that runs well on both IE and Firefox. Most amateur game designers are not going to have the patience to make a game that runs on a blackberry as well as on a PC, and more importantly, they aren’t going to be interested in limiting their game designs to be cell phone capable. ‘Play Anywhere’ is something that will be embraced more by the corporations that choose to use it. Which might be fine. But there is a definite vision conflict there.
Does that mean I think its a waste of time? Hell, no. I’m incredibly excited about the project. I’m already planning out what my own Metaplace will be. I guess you just can’t take the MUD maker out of the designer.
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