Overstated, Ahuaeyjnkxs, but I'm just as guilty of that and I love your unique, passionate style. You care. That's enough. You express it with fervor. That's even better.
Let's cut to the core. The term, Massively Multiplayer Fantasy Role-playing Adventure Game, condensed now to MMO, is awkward because it was coined in haste and adopted by a press and public alike because it burst upon a larger audience with equal haste. Once coined and adopted, it became the restricting, imperfect definition of what online games are.
The model itself had been around a long, long time but nobody thought to call it, or any other example of client/server games that supported scores of users in the same, shared world anything other than simply online games.
Yes, there were games that enabled two or three or four people to connect to play together via a modem but none of us thought to call *them* online games. Rather, they were games you could play online. Sounds equally absurd doesn't it? Just as absurd was the slogan someone in I forget which marketing department came up with to promote the former, "Don't play games online, play online games." I laugh now thinking about it because it felt like clarity to me at the time.
Point is you had a game genre and model that had a small but cunning audience for 15 or so years, one either ignored or disparaged by the gaming press, that suddenly had an example we're all still playing that attracted initially four times the number of players than its predecessors had.
It was neither designed nor intended for this. It would be like a ventriloquist trying to perform before a packed stadium.
The games MMOs were based on were built like small towns with all that comes with them: everyone knowing everyone, natural selection of leadership based on demonstrated moral authority, and a shared sense of proper and improper behavior so strong that opposing factions would form spontaneous alliances to punish someone whose perceived transgressions exceeded shared, community tolerance.
It never has scaled well.
Millions upon millions of dollars were spent on increasing the scale of the number of players. That's a cash register ringing! Nowhere near that, however, went toward designing fresh models that could deliver the intimate power of tight community to a mass market. Nor were earlier models that lent themselves better to scaling examined. Instead - and its reasonable given the costs - everyone sought to outdo what was hot at that moment with something modeled on what was hot at the moment.
Pioneers who understood the medium well suffered from an odd form of original sin. Yes, they'd devised something truly innovative, but if they'd really been "somebody" they would have a history of conventional computer gaming success.
Thus, over and over, they were pushed aside and ignored, accused of trying to "lecture management" and most left in frustration.
Time for the adults to take over, was a phrase heard repeatedly. Problem is, these so-called adults - steeped in traditional media - had trouble grasping what this all was. I lost count of the times someone would say, with a perfectly straight face, "You want me to believe this is completely different, but I'm not buying it."
Several said, "You're not good story tellers." Well...yeah, that's the point. It's not our story to tell. How do you explain to someone who's devoted decades to force fed, pre-packaged content, a medium where the narrative is told by the audience? Where the point is to enable audiences, not script writers, to create compelling stories simply by pursuing their innate motives. Collision of motives creates conflict, and this motive friction creates a compelling experience.
You could travel all those years required to reach the nearest world populated by "sentient" life, and it could not be as different as online, shared world gaming is from the forms of entertainment preceding it.
How's THAT for overstatement?
In a world of Rocky V, Spiderman 3, Ironman 2, where sheer fear of risk created an industry that crashed the economy of the Western world, you cannot reasonably expect innovation to thrive. And ever since the tech crash of '99 - just two years after this game arrived - genuine innovation has failed to find purchase.
What has been developed with great vigor has been thought-free, evanescent stimulation....texting, "smart" phones, Facebook, twitter...so many others. It's good they're there. They bring folks together, albeit often to share rather trivial details of their lives, but they're harmless despite what their snide detractors say.
And the games....well....no wonder there is unrest ranging from pouting to red faced rage. It all has, at best, a lingering feeling of being unfinished, incomplete, a work in digress rather than progress, of trying to distract you rather than engage you. Every offering claims to be new....but just look at the ad flashing at the top of your screen
I sift through the lot of them and here sits UO - far and away the richest collection of game systems, options, and activities of any. True, I sometimes joke that it's a marvelous array of game systems in search of a game, but I'm still drawn to it. I still find it compelling and laden with possibilities.
We're where we are for a good reason. No point is getting upset at the past. There's too much here that shouldn't be lost and an uncounted number of souls out there to breathe renewed life and energy into it if they could only get off to a good start.
Ironically, for a game based on a model that defies scaleablility, it has evolved into a world where fresh possibilities for both ongoing technical development and human development among players require greater numbers in my view.
Hence, as I've concluded most of my posts, my belief that the new player experience remains the chief imperative.
-
