This post is the best thing Raph’s posted quite some time. Of course, it helps that his thoughts mirror a lot of my thoughts on online worlds, especially the new meme of ‘everyone can open their own virtual world’. The fact that Raph is aware of this problem gives me a lot of hope for what they’re working on.
Chasing after and bending the rules towards casual players for an MMO ignores an obvious issue – an online community is ultimately as interesting and compelling as its members. Casual players will not give a place its own personality. Consider, if you will, how interesting Cheers would have been without Norm, Cliff and Frasier.
Once you start building a game design based on the idea that interesting social ties MIGHT occur inside a space, the designer is basically depending on serendipity to occur. This is, as one might imagine, a pretty scary basis for a business model. As such, we start putting in game mechanics designed to make the game stickier (collecting minigames), have tactical interest (PvP), take longer (levelling curves and raiding games), and forcing more positive social interactions (multiplayer-required content). Serendipity is still the fulcrum that determines whether a game (or even a server/shard of a game) lives or dies, it’s the designers job to make that landscape as fertile as possible.
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