But there’s another reason why Fantasy games keep coming bubbling to the top. It’s the Corner Bar theory – people want to spend their time in a space that feels inviting. Sure, you want your adventures to take you to the pits of Mordor, but you want to come home to your Hobbit Hole.

A lot of this has to do with familiarity – of a different sort. PCGamer gave Alpha Centauri a 98%, tied for the best score of all time. Yet, when I want to play a game like that, I reach for one of the Civs. It just feels more satisfying to discover the Wheel than some vague NanoTechnobabble Gizmo.

So we like familiarity of concepts. And yes, in fantasy MMOs, that knowledge comes from playing endless tabletop and solo RPGs. All fantasy RPGs use chainmail and plate mail, and we know exactly what those terms mean. Yet every sci-fi game can have an entirely new set of names for their armors and guns, many of those an alphabet soup-like combination of letters and numbers. Frequently, they aren’t consistent from one to the next.

The other reason is just that many sci-fi licenses take themselves entirely too seriously. It’s very easy, if you’re not careful, to make a sci-fi world that is so harsh and sterile that it’s both uninviting and forgettable. Remember, the cornerstone of sci-fi is aliens, and ‘alien’ is the last word you want players to use to describe their online homes.

Incidentally, the success of Star Wars and Star Trek are both because they are both incredibly inviting fictional universes. Star Wars’ fiction eschews the standard technobabble and harsh environments of many sci-fi universes for the Heroic Journey set in mindblowingly beautiful backdrops. Still, one of the things that stood out when playing Galaxies was just how… alien all of the player race choices were. I had no desire to play anything other than a human or a wookiee.

Star Trek is inviting in a slightly different way – it’s appeal is in it’s philosophy of hope, of humanity reaching an age of tolerance, diplomacy, and exploration. But that same philosophy is one of the things that makes it hard to make any games, much less an MMO, based on it. What’s the grind? What do you DO all day in the Star Trek universe of diplomacy and intrigue?

Probably something related to the holodeck I don’t want to think about.

These aren’t insoluble problems. I think that someone will figure out an inviting universe with a good answer to ‘what do you do all day’. The guys that figure this out are going to be doubly-blessed, since they won’t have to compete with the other four in Jeff’s top five.