My Roundtable this year was “Moving Beyond Men In Tights”. There was a roundtable each day of the conference, and Wednesday’s question centered upon the simple question: “Why Fantasy?” The roundtable was moderated heavily by myself, with questions derived from my powerpoint presentation at AGC.

The first question I asked was “Why do we keep making fantasy games? We all want to see different things, and yet, the top 5 most talked about MMO launches in 2007 look to be more fantasy games. So what unique traits does fantasy have that make it well-suited to today’s MMO designs? ” I stressed that I wasn’t saying ‘keep making fantasy games’ – please don’t! I just wanted the participants to understand what reasons there might be beyond “we’re unimaginative bastards” and “it sells”.

The reasons the roundtable came up with include (note, not all of these are my opinions, necessary, but each were raised as possibilities by the group):

  • It’s double-coded. It has both mass market appeal as well as awareness between the hardcore that spend their Friday nights in their player’s basement.
  • Lots to feed from. There’s a lot of sources to draw from that still fits into a general ‘fantasy theme’.
  • Character driven. Science-fiction tends to be driven by ideas (see Minority Report, Total Recall or Blade Runner) whereas fantasy tends to be driven by characters — and characters is what an MMO needs in spades.
  • Inviting. Fantasy games tend to be much more pleasant places to call home and spend 10 hours a day than, say, a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
  • Familiarity/Resonance. Fantasy games resonate with us because they are familiar to us as they draw from not just years of fantasy fiction but also human history. Compare how Civilization had far more resonance than Alpha Centauri
  • No Exposition Necessary. Everyone gets how fantasy works, makes it easier to explain to players what’s going on (which is a concern considering how complicated the rest of the MMO experience and interface tends to be.
  • Strong Core Activity. Combat is a highly repeatable activity that emphasizes teamplay — this will be talked about a great deal the next day.
  • Item/Equipment Mythology. Items appeal to multiple audiences (socializers to show off, achievers to get a bit better, etc), and the fantasy mythos embraces this.
  • Heroic Arc. Player characters start slightly stronger than human, and finish with nearly godlike powers matching their skills against demons and dragons. Players want to feel that they are making progress over their character’s career.
  • Variety of Content. Remember those two MMOs that were going to be Norse-themed? Everquest had a Norse -corner-. Fantasy as a meme is broad enough to include almost anything a designer or concept artist can think of.
  • Team-based Activity. Fantasy combat (esp. the D&D mage, warrior, thief combo) is well suited to group play, where each group member has a different role.
  • Magic. God, magic is a great crutch for a designer to create great encounters or provide fictional explanations for game limitations.

At this point I asked, “What’s wrong with fantasy? How is it holding us back?” For the most part, this list was shorter than I expected – everyone wanted to jump to the third question. The responses:

  • Been done to death. Enough already!
  • Not casual enough. Fantasy is no ‘Seinfeld’ or ‘ER’ – it is still the realm of the geek. (This point raised a fair amount of debate – lots of little girls like faeries and unicorns).
  • 800 lb gorilla. If you enter the fantasy genre, you’re going to draw inevitable comparisons to WoW (and the other fantasy games that can hope to spend that much). It’s hard to compete when they’ve been able to spend so much money, and will by the time you launch, be pretty well polished and have a fair amount of expansion content (another point of debate – dissenters arguing that competing in fantasy with a completely different feature set should still be viable).

Last question was: “Based on the lists before, what licenses and genres would you like to see made into MMOs”. Once someone suggested something, I asked everyone else to point out challenges.

  • Highlander. I led off with this one to prime the pump, and got the obvious response: the one unchangable rule is permadeath.
  • Deadlands. Some muted optimism, dissenters argued that it was not double-coded (no mass market appeal).
  • Transformers. General gist: sign me up. Question posed: would players be happy generating a new Autobot, or would they only be happy playing Optimus or Starscream?
  • Firefly. Much angst and despair voiced here. Dissenters felt that the show didn’t last long enough to really describe the galaxy, and was too focused on certain characters.
  • Anime. Dissenters felt that an Asian company would need to do this one to do it justice.
  • Neuromancer/Cyberpunk. Much nodding in approval, dissenters felt the world wasn’t inviting enough.
  • White Wolf. Time was called before we had time to discuss.

In my closing statements, I noted that I was NOT saying to go make fantasy games, but rather that people should forge new paths. However, those doing so should examine fantasy games to see why they are so well suited to making an MMO, and use that information to inform new and original designs, hopefully in interesting new directions.

Original comments thread is here.